“He’s an agent. He’s a man to be handled, not known.”
He returned to his crossword.
“He must be loyal,” Avery said. “Why else would he accept?” “You heard what the Director said: the two vows. The first is often quite frivolously taken.”
“And the second?”
“Ah, that is different. We shall be there to help him take it.”
“But why did he accept the first time?”
“I mistrust reasons. I mistrust words like loyalty. And above all,” Haldane declared, “I mistrust motive. We’re running an agent; the arithmetic is over. You read German, didn’t you? In the beginning was the deed.”
Shortly before they arrived, Avery ventured one more question.
“Why was that passport out of date?”
Haldane had a way of inclining his head when addressed.
“The Foreign Office used to allocate a series of passport numbers to the Department for operational purposes. The arrangement ran from year to year. Six months ago the Office said they wouldn’t issue any more without reference to the Circus. It seems Leclerc had been making insufficient claims on the facility and Control cut him out of the market. Taylor’s passport was one of the old series. They revoked the whole lot three days before he left. There was no time to do anything about it. It might never have been noticed. The Circus has been very devious.” A pause. “Indeed, I find it hard to understand what Control is up to.”
They took a taxi to North Oxford and got out at the corner of the road. As they walked along the pavement Avery looked at the houses in the half-darkness, glimpsed gray-haired figures moving across lighted windows, velvet-covered chairs trimmed with lace, Chinese screens, music stands and a bridge-four sitting like bewitched courtiers in a castle. It was a world he had known about once; for a time he had almost fancied he was part of it; but that was long ago.
They spent the evening preparing the house. Haldane said Leiser should have the rear bedroom overlooking the garden, they themselves would take the rooms on the street side. He had sent some academic books in advance, a typewriter and some imposing files. These he unpacked and arranged on the dining room table for the benefit of the landlord’s housekeeper who would come each day. “We shall call this room the study,” he said. In the drawing room he installed a tape recorder.
He had some tapes which he locked in a cupboard, meticulously adding the key to his key ring. Other luggage was still waiting in the hall: a projector, Air Force issue; a screen; and a suitcase of green canvas securely fastened, with leather corners.
The house was spacious and well kept; the furniture was of mahogany, with brass inlay. The walls were filled with pictures of some unknown family: sketches in sepia, miniatures, photographs faded with age. There was a bowl of potpourri on the sideboard and a palm cross pinned to the mirror; chandeliers hung from the ceiling, clumsy, but inoffensive; in one corner, a Bible table; in another a small cupid, very ugly, its face turned to the dark. The whole house gently asserted the air of old age; it had a quality, like incense, of courteous but inconsolable sadness.
By midnight they had finished unpacking. They sat down in the drawing room. The marble fireplace was supported by blackamoors of ebony; the light of the gas fire played over the gilded rose-chains which linked their thick ankles. The fireplace came from an age, it might have been the seventeenth century, it might have been the nineteenth, when blackamoors had briefly replaced Borzois as the decorative beasts of society; they were quite naked, as a dog might be, and chained with golden roses. Avery gave himself a whisky, then went to bed, leaving Haldane sunk in his own thoughts.
His room was large and dark. Above the bed hung a light shade of blue china; there were embroidered covers on the bedside tables and a small enameled notice saying, God’s Blessing on This House; beside the window hung a picture of a child saying its prayers while her sister ate breakfast in bed.
He lay awake, wondering about Leiser; it was like waiting for a girl. From across the passage he could hear Haldane’s solitary cough, on and on. It had not ended when he fell asleep.