High Jinx Page 7

  He recounted, later, the whole conversation to their guide, who told him he had handled the challenge perfectly. ‘You will be hearing a great deal of that kind of thing. It is not unanticipated. Stalin is trying to change human nature! Such a challenge, such audacity, calls for great strength of will.’

  Alice Goodyear Corbett was by now, though speaking slowly, addressing Alistair in Russian. He had directed his mind to the problem of learning the language with the same intensity with which he had directed that, formidable apparatus to scientific inquiry. Scargill and one or two others had learned a few phrases, and could order a meal or a taxi—or, in the case of Jack Lively, a woman of pleasure, however unlicensed. By the time they had completed the tour, back in Leningrad, Alistair Fleetwood was speaking regularly in Russian not only with Miss Corbett but with guides, drivers, and waiters. When the tour came to an end, she had made her selection of the three students she would press. First and foremost, of course, Fleetwood. Second, Brian Scargill. And also (she permitted herself an invisible sigh) Harold Abramowitz, that tall, ungainly, dull young man with the clipped black hair and the moustache struggling to flower but still straggly even after almost thirty days of studied neglect. But Harold Abramowitz’s devotion to communism was positively fanatical, and Alice Goodyear Corbett felt she could count on success with him.

  They would have seven days on the Pushkin, the morning and afternoon seminars continuing, as on the trip out. Even so there were myriad opportunities for two people to sit down in a corner of the dining room, or in the library, or in one of the three sitting rooms, or on deck. She would approach them one at a time, of course. Everyone she approached always thought himself uniquely singled out, so the demands of security were fortified by vanity.

  Curiously, it was Alistair Fleetwood about whom she was most apprehensive. This was so, she forced herself to admit, because she was a little bit in awe of him. The speed with which he was learning Russian was merely one example. His natural air of authority extended to all matters. Normally, when recruiting someone into the Party, the seniority of the recruiter is utterly plainspoken. Her authority rested in her established status as a party member, as a graduate of the University of Moscow, as a linguist, as a longtime resident of the Soviet Union, and yet … she felt that perhaps he would be difficult for her to manage. There was that impalpable sense that he knew more than she.

  The first night out of Leningrad was festive. A century earlier a French nobleman had written that there is always the inner urge to celebrate on the day you leave the Russian frontier. There was no way, Alice Goodyear Corbett comforted herself, to blame that on the communists. But the phenomenon had certainly not changed with the advent of communism. That first night the passengers aboard the Pushkin were given Russian champagne, and vodka, and caviar, and zakuski, including a wider variety of meats and cheeses than they had tasted during the whole of their stay in Russia. During dessert, Alice Goodyear Corbett said to Alistair that she would like to have a few moments of private conversation with him, and what about after dinner?

  ‘Of course, Alice.’ The students had been asked so to refer to her, after the formal end of the Russian part of the tour. ‘Where?’

  ‘Well, we could take two deck chairs—it is quite warm. Or perhaps find a corner in the lounge where there isn’t too much noise.’

  ‘It’s going to be noisy everywhere,’ Alistair said. And then he looked up directly at her, his eyes wide open, and said, ‘Why not in your stateroom?’

  Alice Goodyear Corbett paused, but did not avoid his young, searching eyes. She felt instantly exactly what she had felt when Grigori had asked her, in her final year at the University of Moscow, to come to his room after the birthday party: the impulses she felt racing through her blood were unmistakably the same. Grigori, dear Grisha, gone now to the army … But this child! Yet such an extraordinary young man. She hesitated, and said, her voice now entirely feminine, so different from the lightly stentorian voice of Alice Goodyear Corbett, tour leader, ‘If you like.’

  ‘Fine.’ Alistair, rising from the table, was not apparently surprised. ‘I know the room number, and I will meet you there in half an hour. Maybe I will bring a surprise. No, not maybe: I will bring a surprise. A present for everything you have done for us.’

  How very much thought he had given to this present. Quite simply, the most he had to give. And Alistair Fleetwood had been aware for many years that what he had to give was more, much more, than what others of any age, let alone his young age, had to give. He felt positively ennobled by the proposed act of generosity, but also tender in the knowledge of whom he stood now to patronise with his largesse: Alice Goodyear Corbett was a very special teacher, a very special specimen of the new revolutionary. And a very beguiling … woman.

  She debated exactly how she would be dressed. She compromised by simply removing her jacket, leaving herself with skirt and blouse. And by using a quarter of her precious supply of French perfume, and brushing back her hair. The cabin, slightly larger than the ordinary cabin, was large enough for a desk on which she could do her paperwork. There was a flat couch on the porthole side, running the width of the cabin. And, opposite, the single bed with the protruding struts, so that it could be made into a double bed when there was double occupancy. She adjusted the reading light over her desk, and the light over the couch, and the single chair next to it, on which she was sitting when he rapped on the door.

  Alistair Fleetwood entered carrying a tray with a bottle of champagne, two glasses, and a small package wrapped in red ribbon. He was dressed as at dinner, in white duck trousers, white shirt, and double-breasted navy blue jacket. He looked sixteen.

  His eyes were bright as he opened the champagne, but told her she would need to wait before opening the package. It didn’t occur to Alice Goodyear Corbett that she had any voice in the matter, and when she looked at him, glass in hand, she saw that his expression was at once excited and entirely composed. She drank down half her glass, and then told him what was on her mind. She was beginning to go on—her packaged recruitment line was extensive, about opportunities to serve the people, humankind, peace: she had never known it to consume less than a full hour. But after a few moments he interrupted her.

  ‘Of course, Alice. I want to help and I will help, and I will help in every way I can. You do not need to press on me the idealistic nature of what you are talking about. I knew this early on, and I felt it in Russia.’

  She smiled, a smile lit with pleasure, surprise, and awe.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘you can open the package.’

  Alice Goodyear Corbett said, rather flirtatiously, ‘I am glad it is wrapped in red. That is an appropriate colour today.’

  Alistair Fleetwood said nothing.

  She opened the package, and bared: a condom. She looked up at first startled, but in moments flushed, submissive. She knew now that her young charge was every bit in charge of her.

  ‘Driving to Nagornski one day, Jack Lively told me that if I were to find myself in bed with a woman, I wouldn’t know what to do. Well, I have an idea what I would do, but I do need instruction. And I would like to have that instruction from someone I like and admire as much as I do you, Miss—you, Alice. And I am also aware—I am widely read in extra-scientific literature, you know, Alice. I am widely aware that the most precious present a human being can give is her—his—virginity. You shall have mine,’ he said, in a voice that cultivated gallantry.

  Alice Goodyear Corbett rose, turned off the study light, and sat down next to Alistair Fleetwood.

  10

  When on August 23, 1939, the news came, Alistair Fleetwood was for an instant unbelieving. But there it was, and later editions of the papers even featured a ceremonial picture: a smiling Nazi Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop signing the accord with Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov. Fleetwood could not know directly the reaction of the communists in Cambridge, or even in London, because by design Alistair Fleetwood had become estranged from them. His very
first instructions, on returning to university after the summer tour with Alice Goodyear Corbett five years earlier, had been to dissociate himself emphatically from the communists he had once associated with, and, gradually, even from the socialists: indeed, from the political left. So that by now it had been more than an entire college generation since he had mingled with the hard left community, either students or staff, over four years since he had mingled with the little clots of fellow travellers among the students and his colleagues (he was on the staff). Even the Russian he had learned, he was encouraged to let lie fallow. He greatly missed those fervent evenings with the select few, the brainy idealists who recognised that the Soviet revolution was the twentieth century’s way of saying ‘no’ to more world wars, to imperialism, to the class system. But he was ecstatically engaged in that experience in his underworld life, even if apparently withdrawn, no longer the exuberant first-year socialist who had gone up to Cambridge in 1933.

  On August 23 the whole of the British press descended on Harry Pollitt, the General Secretary of the British Communist Party. But he had declined to make any comment at all; and left-leaning apologists for Stalin in Parliament, most notably Denis Pritt and Harold Laski, were not physically present when the House met in an uproar over the news. Winston Churchill observed that perhaps Joseph Stalin had suddenly discovered that Adolf Hitler’s party was called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and had discerned the bond between the two ideologies. The Moscow-leaning members of the Socialist Party were in deep distress. The Communist Party was torn.

  Not so Alistair Fleetwood. After the initial shock, his mind went to work. It was, by character and training, a mind that could juggle relationships, reducing them to abstractions as required, so that what emerged was on the order of correlations of interest, rather than wrenched static relationships. And by the time his young dinner guest, Bert Heath, arrived, Fleetwood was thoroughly at peace with his own analysis.

  Obviously Hitler’s fascism was a strategic menace to the international communist movement. Clearly Stalin had acted out of prudence. This was hardly inconsistent with Marxist-Leninist theory or practice. Lenin, during the New Economic Plan period, had gone so far as to encourage isolated pockets of capitalism, among other things to attract to the Soviet Union Western scientists who would depart leaving their skills behind.

  Bertram Heath, to whom now Professor Fleetwood handed a glass of whisky, arrived in white heat. Heath swallowed his whisky with a single gulp, and Fleetwood knew it would be a long, long evening. No matter. He would prevail. In the first place he was used to prevailing over problems. In the second place, he could, with all due respect to Heath, persuade him, though he was only a single year his junior, of, well—Fleetwood faced it—anything. Not a reflection on Heath’s malleability, rather a reflection on Fleetwood’s strength of mind and on his singular capacity to satellise. And then too Heath found Fleetwood engrossing. He was, with Fleetwood, in the company of a man he could not bully and had no desire to bully. Fleetwood’s intellectual achievement was too outstanding to be thought competitive. His subtle understanding of the great and noble reasons to hate England, Great Britain, the Empire, the West, the whole imperialist-bourgeois world, was a flame they had in common. Heath would have killed for Fleetwood. To be sure, he’d have killed for a lot of people. But for Fleetwood, he would take pleasure in killing.

  Via radio, Fleetwood had been in regular communication with Alice Goodyear Corbett. Her father, two years earlier, had retired from journalism and, with what looked like a world war on its way, returned with his wife to Virginia. Their daughter elected to stay on in Moscow ‘to continue her scholarly researches,’ as she put it to them and, indeed, to her friends. In fact she had become a full-time KGB operative, and Fleetwood was one of her charges in Great Britain. It had greatly surprised her that he had never evidenced any impatience, or even restiveness, under her supervision. Whatever her orders, Alistair Fleetwood followed them with near-jubilant docility.

  Fleetwood’s career had continued on its spectacular course, and by the time he was in his twenties he was widely regarded as among the most inventive and productive scholars in the general field of electricity and electronics in the world, in constant demand at convocations of scholars pressing the frontiers of the relatively young science of electronics.

  He affected only detached interest in the worsening situation in Europe, the Sudetenland crisis, the Munich Conference, the obvious preparations Hitler was making for war. He posed as only a bystander of sorts. During this period, he had been made aware by Alice that a clandestine group of Cambridge students was ‘in very close touch with us.’ It amused him that one of these—‘The Apostles,’ they styled themselves—might actually approach him, thinking to energise him ideologically, perhaps with the view to interesting him in the common proletarian struggle. For that reason he allowed a kind of dull glaze to come over his eyes when political discussion was entered into. And, soon, though a very young man, he was treated as something of a scholarly fuddy-duddy, and more or less left out of any spirited political discussions.

  No one had ever condescended to Alistair Fleetwood, to be sure. He had long ago begun to publish, and showed an originality, a comprehensiveness of knowledge, an interest in the productively esoteric that attracted not only national and international attention but inevitably the presumptive respect of associates even much older. ‘When Alistair’s mind is engaged,’ a colleague had said of him, in the refectory of Trinity one day, ‘which is most of the time, he would not notice an explosion in the corner of the room. But he would notice a political discussion, and when that happens, before your very eyes he simply dematerialises.’ Fleetwood rather enjoyed the drama of his great imposture, because during the whole of that period he spent many hours doing his chores for his Alice: silly things, he often thought as he compiled clippings revealing the political attitudes of people he had been told to monitor—politicians, professors, newspaper reporters. Indeed sometimes he reflected that special pleasure was to be got from the relative tedium of his work for the Party. ‘A kind of mortification of the intellect,’ he once dared say to Alice, who once went so far as to reveal to him, which was not to abide by the protocols of the profession, that more often than not it was not she who dictated what Agent Caruso, as his code name had it, was supposed to do. ‘Never mind. One day one of your services will perhaps even transform the struggle!’

  ‘Take your time, my dear Alice. I am not hurrying you,’ he answered.

  Fleetwood had made it a point to cultivate scholarly connections in Stockholm. And there he would frequently go, as would Alice Goodyear Corbett, her superiors in the KGB acquiescing in the arrangement on the grounds that Fleetwood would certainly prove extremely useful to them and was evidently disposed to continue to act through the young Soviet-American. In Stockholm the two would pass each other in the lobby of the Grand Hotel as strangers. They would meet in his suite, usually beginning with dinner; or if his formal commitments made that impossible, then later. And there they released their passion. One night he told her that he thought he would turn his mind to a formula that would express with electrical symbols the energy consumed by the average act of love. ‘In our case, I would multiply that by a factor of ten.’ She smiled as she lay by him, stroking his hair, telling him how happy she was, except for the long periods they needed to spend apart. Their shared idealism was a form of communion.

  Alistair Fleetwood replied that he believed war lay ahead of them and that the single privation he could not stand was the thought of a prolonged separation. ‘What will you do if there is war?’

  ‘Whatever I am asked to do,’ she replied. ‘Perhaps they will want me in America. Perhaps they will want me to stay where I am. That will depend.’

  ‘You must never let them come between us.’ She agreed, and every time they were together they renewed their pledges to each other.

  His first nonclerical commission had been the recruitment of Bertram Heath. A
ctually, the initiative had been his. Fleet-wood had been attracted to the tall, rangy Wykehamist who devoted himself equally to physics, rugger, and politics: the quiet, determined young man with the even-featured straight face and the steady brown eyes that signalled what was coming before the laconic twenty-year-old got out what was on his mind.

  It had been well after Fleetwood himself had retreated from over left-wing activity that he noticed, from reading the daily Union Reporter, the Cambridge student newspaper, Bertram Heath’s name cropping up in the sports section as a rising star in rugby, and in the Cambridge Union as a fiery socialist speaker. During Heath’s second year, he qualified to participate in a seminar guided by Fleetwood prompting, in a matter of weeks, a fascination with the strikingly gifted young scholar by the only slightly younger student which begged for social intimacy. This came first with Heath staying after class to pursue answers to one or two questions that especially vexed him. This became, a fortnight later, an invitation to tea at a local café. Fleetwood reciprocated with an invitation to drinks on Tuesday night at the Fellows’ Lounge. A month later they were sharing an evening meal at least once every week.

  Heath, Fleetwood learned, was highly mobilised on all the requisite issues: the problems of the working class, the threat of Hitler, the hold of the New York bankers on commercial life, the insensitivity of the government of Neville Chamberlain, the class structure that was so especially evident in the public schools including the renowned school from which Heath had graduated. Fleetwood permitted himself certain hospitable resonances when the young man spoke, and very gradually permitted him to know that he was, however silently, in sympathy with his basic positions, but had been too preoccupied with his professional researches to devote the time necessary to master the whole problem of international politics, and now he was encouraging Heath in effect to instruct Heath’s brilliant mentor, an imposture he was sure would not be resented if the decision was finally taken to engage in recruitment.