Funeral in Berlin (2 page)

Players move alternately—only one at a time.

Saturday, October 5th

It was one of those artificially hot days that they used to call ‘Indian summer’. It was no time to be paying a call to Bina Gardens, in south-west London, if there was a time for it.

Outside the house I sought there was a bright card tied to the railings with green twine. On it in large exact capitals was penned ‘Lost—Siamese cat. Answers to the name Confucius.’

Answers what? I walked up the steps where the sun was warming up a pint of Jersey and a banana-flavour yoghurt. Tucked behind the bottles a
Daily Mail
peeped its headline ‘Berlin a new crisis?’ There were buttons on that door-post like on a pearly king’s hat but only one said ‘Robin J. Hallam, FRSA’ in a flowing copper-plate; that was the one I pressed.

‘You haven’t seen Confucius?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I only missed him last night.’

‘Really,’ I said, feigning warm interest.

‘The bedroom window doesn’t close properly,’ said Hallam. He was a gaunt-faced man of about forty-five well preserved years. His dark-grey flannel suit was baggy and in the lapel of it he wore three neat discs of egg yolk, like the Legion of Honour.

‘You will be one of Dawlish’s little men,’ he said.

He exposed a white palm and I walked into the cool stone hall while he closed the daylight out.

He said, ‘Could you let me have a shilling—the gas will go any moment.’

I gave him one and he galloped away with it.

Hallam’s room was tidy the way a cramped room has to be. He had a desk that was a sink and a cupboard that was a bed and under my feet a battered kettle on a gas ring was sending Indian signals to the bookcase. Flies were whining in great bed-spring spirals of sound, then going to the window to beat on it with their feet. Through the window there was a large section of grey brick wall; on it there were two perfect rectangles of white sunlight reflected from some high sunny place. I moved three Bartok LPs and sank into a mutilated chair. Hallam turned on the tap in the disguised sink and there was a chugging sound like a bronchial road-drill. He rinsed the cups and wiped them on a tea-cloth that depicted the
changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace in primary colours. There was a clink as he set the cups into their ordained saucers.

‘Don’t tell me. You’ve come about the Semitsa business’, he said to the gas meter as he poured boiling water on to the Darjeeling. ‘You like Darjeeling?’

‘Darjeeling’s OK,’ I said. ‘What I’m not so keen about is you batting that name about like that. Have you ever heard of the Official Secrets Act?’

‘My dear boy, I am trussed up with the OS Act twice a year like a very old and intractable turkey.’ He put half a dozen wrapped sugar pieces on the table and said, ‘You won’t take milk in Darjeeling’: it wasn’t a question. He sipped his unsweetened tea from an antique Meissen cup; around mine it said ‘British Railways SR’ in brown grot letters.

‘So you are the man who is going to make Semitsa defect from the Moscow Academy of Sciences and come to work in the west; no, don’t tell me.’ He waved down my protest with a limp palm. ‘I’ll tell you. In the last decade not one Soviet scientist has defected westward. Did you ever ask yourself why?’ I unwrapped one of the sugar pieces; the paper had ‘Lyons Corner House’ printed on it in small blue letters.

‘This fellow Semitsa. A member of the Academy. Not a party member because he doesn’t
need
to be; Academy boys are the top dogs—the new elite.
He probably gets about six thousand roubles
¹
a month. Tax paid. On top of that he can keep any money he gets for lecturing, writing or being on TV. The lab restaurants are fabulous—
fabulous.
He has a town house and a country cottage. He has a new Zil every year and when he feels in the mood there is a special holiday resort on the Black Sea which only the Academy people use. If he dies his wife gets a gigantic pension and his children get special educational opportunities in any case. He works in the Genetics of Molecular Biology department where they use refrigerated ultra centrifuges.’ Hallam waved his sugar cube at me.

‘They are one of the basic tools of modern biology and they cost around ten thousand pounds each.’

He waited while that sank in.

‘Semitsa has twelve of them. Electron microscopes cost around fourteen thousand pounds each, he…’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘What are you trying to do, recruit me?’

‘I’m trying to let you see this situation from Semitsa’s point of view,’ said Hallam. ‘His biggest problems at this moment are likely to be whether to give his son a Zaporozhets or a Moskvich motor car for a twenty-first birthday present, and deciding which of his servants is stealing his Scotch whisky.’

Hallam unwrapped the sugar cube and ate it with a loud crunching noise.

‘What are you offering him? Have you seen those semi-detached houses they are putting the Porton people into? And as for the labs, they are little more than hardboard shacks. He’ll think it’s the prison camp and keep asking when he gets released,’ Hallam tittered.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘That’s enough dialectical materialism for one cup of Darjeeling. Just tell me if your people at the Home Office will do your bit if we deliver him to you.’

Hallam tittered again and extended a finger like he was tapping me on the nose.

‘You get him first, that’s all I’m saying. We’d love to have him. He’s the best enzyme man in the world today, but you just get him first.’

He popped another piece of sugar in his mouth and said, ‘We’d just love him,
love
him.’

One of the flies was beating on the window trying to escape; the sound of its buzzing wings rose to a loud frantic hammering. The tiny body smashing itself against the glass made faint clicks. As the energy oozed out of it, it sank down the glass, kicking and fluttering in fury at the force that had solidified the very air. Hallam poured more tea and dug around inside one of his little cupboards. He moved a packet of Omo and a wad of travel agents’ literature. The top leaflet showed people waving out of a bus which was parked in the Alhambra and said ‘Suntraps of Spain’ in
blobby lettering. Across the side of the bus it said, ‘For as little as 31 guineas.’ He found a brightly coloured packet and gave a little yap of triumph.

‘Custard creams,’ he said.

He arranged two of them on an oval dish. ‘I don’t eat breakfast on Saturdays. Sometimes I go down the El Mokka for a sausage-and-chip lunch but quite often I manage with a biscuit.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. I took one.

‘You can’t trust the waiter there, though,’ said Hallam.

‘In what way?’ I asked.

‘They pad the bills,’ said Hallam. ‘Last week I found a shilling for bread and butter slipped in.’ He picked up the final few biscuit crumbs with a moistened finger-tip.

Outside in the hall I could hear a woman’s voice saying, ‘If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times—no bicycles.’

I couldn’t hear the man’s voice properly but the woman’s voice said, ‘Outside—that’s what we pay road taxes for.’

Hallam said, ‘I
never
have bread and butter.’

I sipped my tea and nodded while Hallam opened the window for the fly.

Hallam said, ‘And what’s more he knows it.’ Hallam gave a little laugh at the irony of life with an emphasis on the frailty of human nature.

‘He knows it,’ said Hallam again. Suddenly he said to me, ‘You aren’t sitting on my Bartoks by any chance?’

Hallam counted his records in case I had hidden a couple in my raincoat. He collected the cups and stacked them near the sink ready for washing.

He plucked back his sleeve to commune with a large wristwatch. He looked at it for a second or so before he carefully undid the grimy leather strap. The glass was scratched with a thousand tiny scratches and one or two deep ones. The green hands had come to rest at 9.15. Hallam held the watch to his ear.

‘It’s 11.20,’ I told him.

He shushed me and his eyes rolled gently to demonstrate the expertise with which he was listening to the silent mechanism.

I could take a hint. Hallam had the door open before I had even said, ‘Well I must…’

He walked behind me through the hall to make sure that I didn’t steal the lino. A fanlight over the entrance let a William Morris design in coloured sunlight fall across the stone floor. Fixed against one wall was a pay telephone with notices and old undelivered mail marked ‘Inland Revenue’ tucked behind the telephone directories. One notice said ‘Miss Mortimer is away in Spain on business.’ It was written in lipstick on the back of a used envelope.

At waist level the old brown wallpaper had suffered a series of horizontal white gashes. From the floor under them Hallam picked up a tin that had the words ‘Acme Puncture Outfit’ enmeshed in a design of scrolls, daisies and bicycle wheels. He
made a clicking noise with his tongue and put the tin on top of the A-D telephone directory.

Hallam gripped the huge street door with two hands. Another notice on it said ‘Slamming this at night disturbs early risers.’ The
Daily Mail
and the yoghurt were still in the same position and from farther down the street I could hear the clink of milk bottles.

Hallam offered me a hand like a dead animal. ‘Best enzyme man,’ he said.

I nodded. ‘In the world,’ I said, and eased sideways through the partly open door.

‘Give him this,’ said Hallam. He pushed a wrapped cube of Lyons sugar into my hand.

‘Semitsa?’ I said very quietly.

‘The milkman’s horse, you silly. There. Friendly creature. And if you do see Confucius…’

‘OK,’ I said. I walked down the steps into the hot dusty sunlight.

‘My goodness. I haven’t paid you back for the gasmeter shilling,’ said Hallam. It was a simple statement of fact; he wasn’t turning his pockets out.

‘Donate it to the RSPCA,’ I called. Hallam nodded. I looked around but there was no sign of Confucius anywhere.

ROBIN JAMES HALLAM

Saturday, October 5th

After his visitor had left Hallam looked in the mirror again. He was trying to guess his age.

‘Forty-two,’ he said to himself.

His hair was all there, that was one good thing. A man with plenty of hair looked young. It would need a little colouring of course but then colouring his hair was something he had thought of doing for years before he had this problem of finding a new job. ‘Brown,’ he thought, ‘a mousy brown.’ So that it wouldn’t be too obvious; no point in going in for one of those really bright colours because it would be spotted as phoney in two minutes. He turned his head and tried to see how much of his profile he could see in reflection. He had a lean, very aristocratic Anglo-Saxon face. The nose had sharp ridges and the cheekbones were tight under his skin. A thoroughbred. He often thought of himself as a racehorse. It was a
pleasant thought and one that was easily associated with acres of green grass, horse shows, grouseshooting, hunt balls, elegant men and bejewelled women. He liked to think of himself in that context even though his function as a thoroughbred was nearer the seat of Government. He liked that; the seat of Government. Hallam laughed at his reflection and his reflection laughed back in a friendly, dignified, handsome way. He decided to tell someone at the office but it was difficult to decide which one of them would appreciate the joke—so many of them were dullards.

Hallam walked back to the gramophone. He stroked the shiny immaculate veneer top and took pleasure in the silent way it opened; well-made—British made. He selected a record from his large collection. They were all there, all the finest composers of the twentieth century. Berg, Stravinsky, Ives. He selected a recording of a work of Schönberg. The shiny black disc was impeccable. It was as hygienic and dustfree as as as…why wasn’t there anything as clean as his records? He put it on the gramophone and applied the pick-up head to the merest brim of the record. He did this skilfully. There was a faint hissing noise, then the room was suddenly full of rich sounds: ‘Variations for wind band’. He liked it. He sat well back in his chair, fidgeting his back to find the exact position of maximum comfort like a cat. ‘Like a cat,’ he thought and he was pleased with that thought. He listened to the plaited threads of the instru
mental sounds and decided that when the music stopped he would have a cigarette. ‘After both sides,’ he thought: ‘after I’ve played both sides I will have a cigarette.’ He rested back in the chair again, pleased with the self-imposed discipline.

He thought of himself as a monk-like person. Once, in the toilet at the office, he had heard one of the junior clerks refer to him as an ‘old hermit’. He had liked that. He looked around at his cell-like room. Every item there had been carefully chosen. He was a man who understood quality in the old-fashioned sense of the word. How he despised those people who have a fancy modern oven and then only heat frozen supermarket food in it. All he had was a gas ring but it was what you cooked on it that counted. Fresh country eggs and bacon, there was nothing in the world to beat that. Cooked carefully, cooked in butter even though he wasn’t a man given to extravagance. Few women understood how to cook eggs and bacon. Or anything else. He remembered a housekeeper he had had at one time, she always broke the yolks of the eggs and had tiny black burnt specks on the whites. She didn’t clean the pan properly. It was as simple as that. She didn’t clean the pan properly. The times he had told her. He walked across to the washbasin and looked in the mirror. ‘Mrs Henderson,’ he mouthed the words, ‘you simply must clean the pan with paper—not with water—thoroughly before you fry eggs and bacon.’ He gave a pleasant smile. It wasn’t a nervous
smile, on the other hand it wasn’t the sort of smile that encouraged argument. It was in fact exactly the right sort of smile for this situation. He rather prided himself on his ability to provide the right sort of smile for every occasion.

The music was still playing but he decided to have a cigarette anyway, he certainly wasn’t going to become a slave to his own machine. What he decided to do was to compromise. He could have a cigarette but it would be one of the Bachelor brand—the cheap ones that he kept in the large cigarette box for visitors. He rather prided himself on his ability to compromise. He went across to the cigarette box. There were four in there. He decided not to take one of those. Four was about right. Yes. He got a Player’s No. 3 from a box of twenty that he kept in the cutlery drawer. ‘Thirty-nine,’ he thought suddenly. ‘That’s what I shall give as my age.’

The sound ended abruptly. Hallam took the record and washed it and dressed it and put it to bed with tender devotion. He remembered the girl who had given him the record. That red-haired girl he met at the awful Saddle Room. A pleasant girl in a way. American, volatile, rather incoherent in her speech mannerisms, but then Hallam supposed that there were no proper schooling facilities in America. He felt sorry for the girl. No he didn’t. He didn’t feel sorry for any girls, they were all…carnivorous. What’s more some of them were none too clean. He thought about this man
that Dawlish had just sent along to see him; he wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had been to school in America. Hallam picked up the Siamese cat.

‘Where is your little sister?’ he asked her. If only they could talk. They were more intelligent than many humans. The cat stretched its legs and the long claws sank into the shoulder of Hallam’s suit and dragged at it with a tearing sound.

‘Secret Service man?’ thought Hallam. He laughed out loud and the cat looked up in surprise.

‘Upstart,’ said Hallam.

He put a finger against the cat’s ear. The cat purred. An upstart from Burnley—a supercilious, anti-public-school technician who thought he was an administrator.

‘We must do our duty,’ said Hallam quietly to himself. It was the duty of men in Government; they mustn’t be too influenced by the personalities of Government servants. He preferred to think of the Secret Service man as a Government servant rather like the man with the wart who did the savings bank accounts at the Post Office. He said ‘Government servant’ aloud and thought of all the ways he could work the phrase into the next conversation he had with that man.

Hallam put the Player’s No. 3 into his real ebony cigarette holder. He lit it while watching himself in the mirror. He parted his hair a little more towards the centre. He might as well lunch
at the coffee bar. They did a very fine egg and chips there. The waiter was Italian and Hallam always ordered in Italian. Not very trustworthy the Italians, Hallam decided, it’s all a matter of breeding. He sorted out his change and put ninepence in his ticket pocket for a tip. He gave a final look round before leaving. Fang was asleep. The ashtray that his visitor had used was brimming with cigarette ends. Foreign, coarse, cheap, inferior cigarettes.

Hallam picked up the ashtray with a shudder and tipped the contents into the little bin where the tea-leaves went. He felt in many ways the type of cigarette that man smoked typified him. So did the man’s clothes, they were mass-produced, off-the-peg clothes. Hallam decided he did not like the man that Dawlish had sent to see him. He didn’t like him at all.