“Well—just the details.”
Leclerc, coming out of his reverie, smiled. “I’ll tell you something about cover; something you’ll learn for yourself. Never volunteer information. People don’t expect you to explain yourself. After all, what is there to explain? The ground’s prepared; the Consul will have our teleprint. Show your passport and play the rest by ear.”
“I’ll try,” said Avery.
“You’ll succeed,” Leclerc rejoined with feeling, and they both grinned shyly.
“How far is it to the town?” Avery said. “From the airport.”
“About three miles. It feeds the main ski resorts. Heaven knows what the Consul does all day.”
“And to Helsinki?”
“I told you. A hundred miles. Perhaps more.”
Avery proposed they take a bus but Leclerc wouldn’t queue so they remained standing at the corner. He began talking about official cars again. “It’s utterly absurd,” he said. “In the old days we had a pool of our own, now we have two vans and the Treasury won’t let us pay the drivers overtime. How can I run the Department under those conditions?”
In the end they walked. Leclerc had the address in his head; he made a point of remembering such things. It was awkward for Avery to walk beside him for long, because Leclerc adjusted his pace to that of the taller man. Avery tried to keep himself in check, but sometimes he forgot and Leclerc would stretch uncomfortably beside him, thrusting upward with each stride. A fine rain was falling. It was still very cold.
There were times when Avery felt for Leclerc a deep, protective love. Leclerc had that indefinable quality of arousing guilt, as if his companion but poorly replaced a departed friend. Somebody had been there, and gone; perhaps a whole world, a generation; somebody had made him and disowned him, so that while at one moment Avery could hate him for his transparent manipulation, detest his prinking gestures as a child detests the affectations of a parent, at the next he ran to protect him, responsible and deeply caring. Beyond all the vicissitudes of their relationship, he was somehow grateful that Leclerc had engendered him; and thus they created that strong love which only exists between the weak; each became the stage to which the other related his actions.
“It would be a good thing,” Leclerc said suddenly, “if you shared the handling of Mayfly.”
“I’d like to.”
“When you get back.”
They had found the address on the map. Thirty-four Roxburgh Gardens; it was off Kennington High Street. The road soon became dingier, the houses more crowded. Gaslights burned yellow and flat like paper moons.
“In the war they gave us a hostel for the staff.”
“Perhaps they will again,” Avery suggested.
“It’s twenty years since I did an errand like this.”
“Did you go alone then?” Avery asked, and wished at once that he had not. It was so easy to inflict pain on Leclerc.
“It was simpler in those days. We could say they’d died for their country. We didn’t have to tell them the details; they didn’t expect that.” So it was we, thought Avery. Some other boy, one of those laughing faces on the wall.
“They died every day then, the pilots. We did reconnaissance, you know, as well as special operation. … I’m ashamed sometimes: I can’t even remember their names. They were so young, some of them.”
There passed across Avery’s mind a tragic procession of horror-struck faces: mothers and fathers, girl friends and wives, and he tried to visualize Leclerc standing among them, naive yet footsure, like a politician at the scene of a disaster.
They stood at the top of a rise. It was a wretched place. The road led downward into a line of dingy, eyeless houses; above them rose a single block of flats—Roxburgh Gardens. A string of lights shone on the glazed tiles, dividing and redividing the whole structure into cells. It was a large building, very ugly in its way, the beginning of a new world, and at its feet lay the black rubble of the old: crumbling, oily houses haunted by sad faces which moved through the rain like driftwood in a forgotten harbor.
Leclerc’s frail fists were clenched; he stood very still.