Tremor of Intent

Lucy was the girl who had opened the door, unintro-duced to me perhaps because we'd already made functional contact, introductions perhaps being purely decorative or phatic. This Lucy was standing close to him and seemed to me, at that moment of being addressed, to touch him with a gentle thrust of the hip. Ah, I thought, they are friends. I looked at her with more attention, soon with something like favour – wide-mouthed (generous), gate-toothed (sensual), small-eyed (shrewd), high-browed. It was a neat figure; the voice was a decent kind of South London. An attractive girl on the whole, but breathing of no gross earth-mother like Brigitte. The house looked very tidy; Lucy had opened the front door; Lucy said to me now: 'Can I get you some beer? All we have, I'm afraid.' I noted the 'we', saying: 'In a stein, please.' Roper clouded over. 'Sorry, stupid of me,' I said. 'There aren't steins any more.' This was at once taken up by a small man in the corner, weak-and-intellectual-looking, rings under his eyes. He cried: 'The house of Stein is fallen. Ah, Gertrude, Gertrude.' The round man with the guitar, Peter or Paul or something, improvised a silly jingle to the tune of 'Chopsticks': 'Einstein and Weinstein and Kleinstein and Schweinstein and Meinstein and Deinstein and Seinstein and Rheinstein and-' Roper smirked at me: what witty and erudite friends he now had. They all seemed to be scientist's assistants, none of them under thirty, most of them adolescently content with an evening of singsong and light ale. Light ale was now given to me. 'Thank you,' I said. 'What will you have, Wi

'Wi

'That's short for Edwin,' said Roper, smiling.

'Oh, Roper, Roper, I've known your name is Edwin for the last twenty years.'

'As long as that? How time goes.'

'Have you done anything about a divorce yet?' I asked.

'Plenty of time,' he said. 'Three years for desertion. I see now it could never be the same again as it used to be. Have you ever read Heracleitus? Everything flows, he said. You can't step into the same river twice. A pity. A terrible, terrible pity. Poor little girl.' I got in quickly, forestalling the Weltschmerz, with: 'How about this little girl?'

Lucy? Oh, Lucy's been a very great help. Just a good friend, you know, nothing more. She cooks me the odd meal. Sometimes we have a meal out. A very intelligent girl.' This seemed to have something to do with her skill with a menu, but then he said: 'She works our computer for us. Don't you, Lucy?' he smiled, waterily, as he took lemon barley from her. 'Our computer.'

'That's right,' she said. I felt that perhaps she would have preferred Roper to designate their relationship not in professional terms. To me she said: 'Are you a member of the party?'

'Oh, I'm progressive. I believe in soaking the rich. But I also believe in Original Sin.'

'Poor old Hillier,' smirked Roper. 'Still not emancipated.'

'My belief,' I said, 'has nothing to do with Father Byrne. People tend to choose the worse way rather than the better.

That's something experience has taught me. I use the theological term for want of a better one.'

'It's all environment,' said Roper. 'All conditioning.' He would have said more, but Lucy told him to save it. 'Everybody wants to sing,' she said. 'Don't you think we ought to have business first?'

'Business.' The word made Roper very serious and chin-jutting. 'We have a bit of discussion,' he told me. 'Brenda there takes the main conclusions down in shorthand. You'll stay, won't you? You may have some useful ideas to contribute. A fresh mind, you see. Perhaps we in the group are growing a little too familiar with each other's. Minds, I mean. But,' he chuckled, 'don't say anything about Original Sin.'

When the discussion started (and it was a very earnest sixth-form-type discussion, full of fundamentals), I found myself switching on the professional ear. But any hammering-out of the position of science and technology in a progressive society had to be above suspicion. Britain, whatever party happened to be in power, was now committed to socialism. This group was concerned with laying down a series of articles for a Socialist scientist's creed. The pipeman Cavour was presumably to do the actual writing of the proposed pamphlet, since he tried to fix all conclusions in a ponderous literary form, going er and ar in search of the mot juste, correcting people's grammar. 'Something like this,' he said. 'We er hold that the past is dead and the future is er upon us. Meaning the Scientific Revolution. We think in world terms, not er the antique terms of nationalism. Ultimately we envisage a World State and World Science. Ar.' Brenda, her token-bracelet jangling, was getting it all down. Lucy sat in one of the two moquette-covered armchairs, Roper on the arm. He seemed happy. He seemed to have got over sin. He was safe, sir.

Of course he was safe, cuddled by a humanitarian and rational philosophy which occasionally gives Britain a government. The whole Roper case, if I may call it that at that stage, was perhaps ready to bubble with a political extremism that, during a long Tory summer, sought fulfilment in a country that wasn't merely doctrinaire about a World State and World Science. Must a man be blamed for being logical? I don't know how far Lucy, who seemed to be a very serious girl, helped. I was out of England long before Roper. What I'm trying to say, sir (or would be trying to say if I were saying it), is that you can't condemn a man because an ineluctable process carries him. If you wanted Roper's logic – and you did and still do – you have to swallow it all. That is why I can't attempt any serious moral persuasion when, the day after tomorrow, late at night, I eventually reach him. The bribes, of course, he'll, and very rightly, scorn. It will have to be the ampoule, the forcible abduction of a Soviet citizen temporarily disguised as a drunken British tourist. And I'm doing this for the money.

I'm doing this for the money, for the terminal bonus (I am most bribable now) which, in my retirement, I shall need. If it were not for the retirement I should not be proposing to play a mean trick on a friend. But, as I've already told you in a real letter – dispatched, received, ruminated, replied to -1 am retiring precisely because I'm sick and tired of having to play mean tricks. You might as well, while my hand is in, have the lot.

Lot what? Lot the next to the last in this shame's auction to bidding oblivion of the shabby contents of my long-leased spy-house. You have my report of the successful betrayal of Martinuzzi, very brief, totally factual. The lying code-message about Martinuzzi's being on the double game was, as we knew it would be, intercepted. When Martinuzzi was taken over to Rumania he expected, I suppose, praise, bonuses, promotion. We know what he got.

End of Martinuzzi. Of Signora Martinuzzi and the three bambini in Trieste also the end, but that, of course, irrelevant. The explosion of a paraffin stove in the little Casa Martinuzzi on the Via della Barriera Vecchia and the burning alive of mother and eldest child, as well as the cat and her kittens, was just an unfortunate accident. A spy should not give hostages to fortune: that's what whoever was responsible really meant. I was sick; I vomited a bellyload into the gutter. What made my shame worse was the visit of some British louts with guitars and emetic little songs; they filled the Opera House with infantile screamers. Their income, I read, amounted to something like two million lire a week; Martinuzzi was lucky to get half of that sum a year. All right, Martinuzzi was the enemy, but to whom do you think I felt closer? My very good fiend, Brigitte might have said. I spent some of my own few million lire on arranging for the adoption of the remaining two of the enemy's children; both need the most delicate plastic surgery. I don't mind games, but when they get too dirty I don't think I want to play any more.