“All right, Babs,” he said. He was afraid she might cry.
Six
Takeoff
Avery sat in the airplane remembering the day when Haldane failed to appear. It was, by coincidence, the first of the month, July it must have been, and Haldane did not come to the office. Avery knew nothing of it until Woodford rang him on the internal telephone to tell him. Haldane was probably ill, Avery had said; some personal matter had cropped up. But Woodford was adamant. He had been to Leclerc’s room, he said, and had looked at the leave roster: Haldane was not due for leave till August.
“Telephone his flat, John, telephone his flat,” he had urged. “Speak to his wife. Find out what’s become of him.” Avery was so astonished that he did not know what to say: these two had worked together for twenty years, and even he knew Haldane was a bachelor.
“Find out where he is,” Woodford had persisted. “Go on, I order you: ring his flat.”
So he did. He might have told Woodford to do it himself, but he hadn’t the heart. Haldane’s sister answered. Haldane was in bed, his chest was playing him up; he had refused to tell her the Department’s telephone number. As Avery’s eye caught the calendar, he realized why Woodford had been so agitated: it was the beginning of a quarter. Haldane might have got a new job and left the Department without telling Woodford. A day or two later, when Haldane returned, Woodford was uncommonly warm toward him, bravely ignoring his sarcasm; he was grateful to him for coming back. For some time after that, Avery had been frightened. His faith shaken, he examined more closely its object.
He noticed that they ascribed—it was a plot in which all but Haldane compounded—legendary qualities to one another. Leclerc, for instance, would seldom introduce Avery to a member of his parent Ministry without some catchword. “Avery is the brightest of our new stars”—or, to more senior men, “John is my memory. You must ask John.” For the same reason they lightly forgave one another their trespasses, because they dared not think, for their own sakes, that the Department had room for fools. He recognized that it provided shelter from the complexities of modern life, a place where frontiers still existed. For its servants, the Department had a religious quality. Like monks, they endowed it with a mystical identity far away from the hesitant, sinful band which made up its ranks. While they might be cynical of the qualities of one another, contemptuous of their own hierarchical preoccupations, their faith in the Department burned in some separate chapel and they called it patriotism.
For all that, as he glanced at the darkening sea beneath him, at the cold sunlight slanting on the waves, he felt his heart thrilling with love. Woodford with his pipe and his plain way became part of that secret elite to which Avery now belonged; Haldane, Haldane above all, with his crosswords and his eccentricities, fitted into place as the uncompromising intellectual, irritable and aloof. He was sorry he had been rude to Haldane. He saw Dennison and McCulloch as the matchless technicians, quiet men, not articulate at meetings, but tireless and in the end, right. He thanked Leclerc, thanked him warmly, for the privilege of knowing these men, for the excitement of this mission; for the opportunity to advance from the uncertainty of the past toward experience and maturity, to become a man, shoulder to shoulder with the others, tempered in the fire of war; he thanked him for the precision of command, which made order out of the anarchy of his heart. He imagined that when Anthony grew up, he too might be led into those dowdy corridors and be presented to old Pine, who with tears in his eyes would stand up in his box and warmly grasp the child’s tender hand.
It was a scene in which Sarah played no part.
Avery lightly touched a corner of the long envelope in his inside pocket. It contained his money: two hundred pounds in a blue envelope with the Government crest. He had heard of people in the war sewing such things into the lining of their clothes, and he rather wished they had done that for him. It was a childish conceit, he knew; he even smiled to discover himself given to such fancies.