The Looking Glass War Read online

  Lansen strode across the empty room towards them, a tall, strong figure in a blue mackintosh and cap. He looked briefly at Taylor and spoke past him to the barman: ‘Jens, give me a beer.’ Turning to Taylor he said, ‘What’s yours?’

  Taylor smiled thinly. ‘Some of your local stuff.’

  ‘Give him whatever he wants. A double.’

  The barman briskly buttoned up his jacket, unlocked the cupboard and poured out a large Steinhäger. He gave Lansen a beer from the cooler.

  ‘Are you from Leclerc?’ Lansen inquired shortly. Anyone could have heard.

  ‘Yes.’ He added tamely, far too late, ‘Leclerc and Company, London.’

  Lansen picked up his beer and took it to the nearest table. His hand was shaking. They sat down.

  ‘Then you tell me,’ he said fiercely, ‘which damn fool gave me those instructions?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Taylor was taken aback. ‘I don’t even know what your instructions were. It’s not my fault. I was sent to collect the film, that’s all. It’s not even my job, this kind of thing. I’m on the overt side – courier.’

  Lansen leant forward, his hand on Taylor’s arm. Taylor could feel him trembling. ‘I was on the overt side too. Until today. There were kids on that plane. Twenty-five German schoolchildren on Winter holidays. A whole load of kids.’

  ‘Yes.’ Taylor forced a smile. ‘Yes, we had the reception committee in the waiting-room.’

  Lansen burst out, ‘What were we looking for, that’s what I don’t understand. What’s so exciting about Rostock?’

  ‘I tell you I’m nothing to do with it.’ He added inconsistently: ‘Leclerc said it wasn’t Rostock but the area south.’

  ‘The triangle south: Kalkstadt, Langdorn, Wolken. You don’t have to tell me the area.’

  Taylor looked anxiously towards the barman.

  ‘I don’t think we should talk so loud,’ he said. ‘That fellow’s a bit anti.’ He drank some Steinhäger.

  Lansen made a gesture with his hand as if he were brushing something from in front of his face. ‘It’s finished,’ he said. ‘I don’t want any more. It’s finished. It was OK when we just stayed on course photographing whatever there was; but this is too damn much, see? Just too damn, damn much altogether.’ His accent was thick and clumsy, like an impediment.

  ‘Did you get any pictures?’ Taylor asked. He must get the film and go.

  Lansen shrugged, put his hand in his raincoat pocket and, to Taylor’s horror, extracted a zinc container for thirty-five-millimetre film, handing it to him across the table.

  ‘What was it?’ Lansen asked again. ‘What were they after in such a place? I went under the cloud, circled the whole area. I didn’t see any atom bombs.’

  ‘Something important, that’s all they told me. Something big. It’s got to be done, don’t you see? You can’t make illegal flights over an area like that.’ Taylor was repeating what someone had said. ‘It has to be an airline, a registered airline, or nothing. There’s no other way.’

  ‘Listen. They picked us up as soon as we got into the place. Two MIGs. Where did they come from, that’s what I want to know? As soon as I saw them I turned into cloud; they followed me. I put out a signal, asking for bearings. When we came out of the cloud, there they were again. I thought they’d force me down, order me to land. I tried to jettison the camera but it was stuck. The kids were all crowding the windows, waving at the MIGs. They flew alongside for a time, then peeled off. They came close, very close. It was bloody dangerous for the kids.’ He hadn’t touched his beer. ‘What the hell did they want?’ he asked. ‘Why didn’t they order me down?’

  ‘I told you: it’s not my fault. This isn’t my kind of work. But whatever London are looking for, they know what they’re doing.’ He seemed to be convincing himself; he needed to believe in London. ‘They don’t waste their time. Or yours, old boy. They know what they’re up to.’ He frowned, to indicate conviction, but Lansen might not have heard.

  ‘They don’t believe in unnecessary risks either,’ Taylor said. ‘You’ve done a good job, Lansen. We all have to do our bit … take risks. We all do. I did in the war, you know. You’re too young to remember the war. This is the same job; we’re fighting for the same thing.’ He suddenly remembered the two questions. ‘What height were you doing when you took the pictures?’

  ‘It varied. We were down to six thousand feet over Kalkstadt.’

  ‘It was Kalkstadt they wanted most,’ Taylor said with appreciation. ‘That’s first-class, Lansen, first-class. What was your airspeed?’

  ‘Two hundred … two forty. Something like this. There was nothing there, I’m telling you, nothing.’ He lit a cigarette.

  ‘It’s the end now,’ Lansen repeated. ‘However big the target is.’ He stood up. Taylor got up too; he put his right hand in his overcoat pocket. Suddenly his throat went dry: the money, where was the money?

  ‘Try the other pocket,’ Lansen suggested.

  Taylor handed him the envelope. ‘Will there be trouble about this? About the MIGs, I mean?’

  Lansen shrugged. ‘I doubt it, it hasn’t happened to me before. They’ll believe me once; they’ll believe it was the weather. I went off course about halfway. There could have been a fault in the ground control. In the hand-over.’

  ‘What about the navigator? What about the rest of the crew? What do they think?’

  ‘That’s my business,’ said Lansen sourly. ‘You can tell London it’s the end.’

  Taylor looked at him anxiously. ‘You’re just upset,’ he said, ‘after the tension.’

  ‘Go to hell,’ said Lansen softly. ‘Go to bloody hell.’ He turned away, put a coin on the counter and strode out of the bar, stuffing carelessly into his raincoat pocket the long buff envelope which contained the money.

  After a moment Taylor followed him. The barman watched him push his way through the door and disappear down the stairs. A very distasteful man, he reflected; but then he never had liked the English.

  Taylor thought at first that he would not take a taxi to the hotel. He could walk it in ten minutes and save a bit on subsistence. The airline girl nodded to him as he passed her on his way to the main entrance. The reception hall was done in teak; blasts of warm air rose from the floor. Taylor stepped outside. Like the thrust of a sword the cold cut through his clothes; like the numbness of an encroaching poison it spread swiftly over his naked face, feeling its way into his neck and shoulders. Changing his mind, he looked round hastily for a taxi. He was drunk. He suddenly realised: the fresh air had made him drunk. The rank was empty. An old Citroën was parked fifty yards up the road, its engine running. He’s got the heater on, lucky devil, thought Taylor and hurried back through the swing doors.

  ‘I want a cab,’ he said to the girl. ‘Where can I get one, d’you know?’ He hoped to God he looked all right. He was mad to have drunk so much. He shouldn’t have accepted that drink from Lansen.

  She shook her head. ‘They have taken the children,’ she said. ‘Six in each car. That was the last flight today. We don’t have many taxis in Winter.’ She smiled. ‘It’s a very little airport.’

  ‘What’s that up the road, that old car? Not a cab, is it?’ His voice was indistinct.

  She went to the doorway and looked out. She had a careful balancing walk, artless and provocative.

  ‘I don’t see any car,’ she said.

  Taylor looked past her. ‘There was an old Citroën. Lights on. Must have gone. I just wondered.’ Christ, it went past and he’d never heard it.

  ‘The taxis are all Volvos,’ the girl remarked. ‘Perhaps one will come back after he has dropped the children. Why don’t you go and have a drink?’

  ‘Bar’s closed,’ Taylor snapped. ‘Barman’s gone home.’

  ‘Are you staying at the airport hotel?’

  ‘The Regina, yes. I’m in a hurry, as a matter of fact.’ It was easier now. ‘I’m expecting a phone call from London.’

  She looked doubtfully at hi
s coat; it was of rainproof material in a pebble weave. ‘You could walk,’ she suggested. ‘It is ten minutes, straight down the road. They can send your luggage later.’

  Taylor looked at his watch, the same wide gesture. ‘Luggage is already at the hotel. I arrived this morning.’

  He had that kind of crumpled, worried face which is only a hair’s breadth from the music halls and yet is infinitely sad; a face in which the eyes are paler than their environment, and the contours converge upon the nostrils. Aware of this, perhaps, Taylor had grown a trivial moustache, like a scrawl on a photograph, which made a muddle of his face without concealing its shortcomings. The effect was to inspire disbelief, not because he was a rogue but because he had no talent for deception. Similarly he had tricks of movement crudely copied from some lost original, such as an irritating habit which soldiers have of arching his back suddenly, as if he had discovered himself in an unseemly posture, or he would affect an agitation about the knees and elbows which feebly caricatured an association with horses. Yet the whole was dignified by pain, as if he were holding his little body stiff against a cruel wind.

  ‘If you walk quickly,’ she said, ‘it takes less than ten minutes.’

  Taylor hated waiting. He had a notion that people who waited were people of no substance: it was an affront to be seen waiting. He pursed his lips, shook his head, and with an ill-tempered ‘Goodnight, lady,’ stepped abruptly into the freezing air.

  Taylor had never seen such a sky. Limitless, it curved downward to the snowbound fields, its destiny broken here and there by films of mist which frosted the clustered stars and drew a line round the yellow half-moon. Taylor was frightened, like a landsman frightened by the sea. He hastened his uncertain step, swaying as he went.

  He had been walking about five minutes when the car caught him up. There was no footpath. He became aware of its headlights first, because the sound of its engine was deadened by the snow, and he only noticed a light ahead of him, not realizing where it came from. It traced its way languidly over the snowfields and for a time he thought it was the beacon from the airport. Then he saw his own shadow shortening on the road, the light became suddenly brighter, and he knew it must be a car. He was walking on the right, stepping briskly along the edge of the icy rubble that lined the road. He observed that the light was unusually yellow and he guessed the headlamps were masked according to the French rule. He was rather pleased with this little piece of deduction; the old brain was pretty clear after all.

  He didn’t look over his shoulder because he was a shy man in his way and did not want to give the impression of asking for a lift. But it did occur to him, a little late perhaps, that on the continent they actually drove on the right, and that therefore strictly speaking he was walking on the wrong side of the road, and ought to do something about it.

  The car hit him from behind, breaking his spine. For one dreadful moment Taylor described a classic posture of anguish, his head and shoulders flung violently backwards, fingers extended. He made no cry. It was as if his entire body and soul were concentrated in this final attitude of pain, more articulate in death than any sound the living man had made. It is quite possible that the driver was unaware of what he had done; that the impact of the body on the car was not to be distinguished from a thud of loose snow against the axle.

  The car carried him for a yard or two then threw him aside, dead on the empty road, a stiff, wrecked figure at the fringe of the wilderness. His trilby hat lay beside him. A sudden blast seized it, carrying it across the snow. The shreds of his pebble-weave coat fluttered in the wind, reaching vainly for the zinc capsule as it rolled gently with the camber to lodge for a moment against the frozen bank, then to continue wearily down the slope.

  PART TWO

  Avery’s Run

  ‘There are some things that no one has a right to ask of any white man’

  John Buchan, Mr Standfast

  2

  Prelude

  It was three in the morning.

  Avery put down the telephone, woke Sarah and said, ‘Taylor’s dead.’ He shouldn’t have told her, of course.

  ‘Who’s Taylor?’

  A bore, he thought; he only remembered him vaguely. A dreary English bore, straight off Brighton pier.

  ‘A man in courier section,’ he said. ‘He was with them in the war. He was rather good.’

  ‘That’s what you always say. They’re all good. How did he die, then? How did he die?’ She had sat up in bed.

  ‘Leclerc’s waiting to hear.’ He wished she wouldn’t watch him while he dressed.

  ‘And he wants you to help him wait?’

  ‘He wants me to go to the office. He wants me. You don’t expect me to turn over and go back to sleep, do you?’

  ‘I was only asking,’ Sarah said. ‘You’re always so considerate to Leclerc.’

  ‘Taylor was an old hand. Leclerc’s very worried.’ He could still hear the triumph in Leclerc’s voice: ‘Come at once, get a taxi; we’ll go through the files again.’

  ‘Does this often happen? Do people often die?’ There was indignation in her voice, as if no one ever told her anything; as if she alone thought it dreadful that Taylor had died.

  ‘You’re not to tell anyone,’ said Avery. It was a way of keeping her from him. ‘You’re not even to say I’ve gone out in the middle of the night. Taylor was travelling under another name.’ He added, ‘Someone will have to tell his wife.’ He was looking for his glasses.

  She got out of bed and put on a dressing-gown. ‘For God’s sake stop talking like a cowboy. The secretaries know; why can’t the wives? Or are they only told when their husbands die?’ She went to the door.

  She was of medium height and wore her hair long, a style at odds with the discipline of her face. There was a tension in her expression, an anxiety, an incipient discontent, as if tomorrow would only be worse. They had met at Oxford; she had taken a better degree than Avery. But somehow marriage had made her childish; dependence had become an attitude, as if she had given him something irredeemable, and were always asking for it back. Her son was less her projection than her excuse; a wall against the world and not a channel to it.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Avery asked. She sometimes did things to spite him, like tearing up a ticket for a concert. She said, ‘We’ve got a child, remember?’ He noticed Anthony crying. They must have woken him.

  ‘I’ll ring from the office.’

  He went to the front door. As she reached the nursery she looked back and Avery knew she was thinking they hadn’t kissed.

  ‘You should have stuck to publishing,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t like that any better.’

  ‘Why don’t they send a car?’ she asked. ‘You said they had masses of cars.’

  ‘It’s waiting at the corner.’

  ‘Why, for God’s sake?’

  ‘More secure,’ he replied.

  ‘Secure against what?’

  ‘Have you got any money? I seem to have run out.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Just money, that’s all! I can’t run around without a penny in my pocket.’ She gave him ten shillings from her bag. Closing the door quickly behind him he went down the stairs into Prince of Wales Drive.

  He passed the ground-floor window and knew without looking that Mrs Yates was watching him from behind her curtain, as she watched everybody night and day, holding her cat for comfort.

  It was terribly cold. The wind seemed to come from the river, across the park. He looked up and down the road. It was empty. He should have telephoned the rank at Clapham but he wanted to get out of the flat. Besides, he had told Sarah the car was coming. He walked a hundred yards or so towards the Power Station, changed his mind and turned back. He was sleepy. It was a curious illusion that even in the street he still heard the telephone ringing. There was a cab that hung round Albert Bridge at all hours; that was the best bet. So he passed the entrance to his part of the Mansions, glanced up at the nursery window, and
there was Sarah looking out. She must have been wondering where the car was. She had Anthony in her arms and he knew she was crying because he hadn’t kissed her. He took half an hour to find a taxi to Blackfriars Road.

  Avery watched the lamps come up the street. He was quite young, belonging to that intermediate class of contemporary Englishman which must reconcile an Arts degree with an uncertain provenance. He was tall and bookish in appearance, slow-eyed behind his spectacles, with a gently self-effacing manner which endeared him to his elders. The motion of the taxi comforted him, as rocking consoles a child.

  He reached St George’s Circus, passed the Eye Hospital and entered Blackfriars Road. Suddenly he was upon the house, but told the driver to drop him at the next corner because Leclerc had said to be careful.

  ‘Just here,’ he called. ‘This will do fine.’

  The Department was housed in a crabbed, sooty villa of a place with a fire extinguisher on the balcony. It was like a house eternally for sale. No one knew why the Ministry put a wall round it; perhaps to protect it from the gaze of the people, like the wall round a cemetery; or the people from the gaze of the dead. Certainly not for the garden’s sake, because nothing grew in it but grass which had worn away in patches like the coat of an old mongrel. The front door was painted dark green; it was never opened. By day anonymous vans of the same colour occasionally passed down the shabby drive, but they transacted their business in the back yard. The neighbours, if they referred to the place at all, spoke of the Ministry House, which was not accurate, for the Department was a separate entity, and the Ministry its master. The building had that unmistakable air of controlled dilapidation which characterises government hirings all over the world. For those who worked in it, its mystery was like the mystery of motherhood, its survival like the mystery of England. It shrouded and contained them, cradled them and, with sweet anachronism, gave them the illusion of nourishment.