BENTINCK’S AGENT

JOHN LAWTON

BENTINCK’S AGENT

I was a dodger. I do not mean by this that I have ever played baseball for Brooklyn or LA. I mean I was a draft dodger.

I was also a jumper. ‘Jump’ adds class to what was, in fact, no more than a crawl. I had all but crawled on my belly into Canada in the autumn of 1972. Autumn? I mean fall — of course I mean fall — I have played too long the Englishman.

The matter was simplicity itself. Nixon had been elected in ’68 on a promise of getting us out of Vietnam. What he did was introduce a lottery: every male of age was given a number between 1 and 365, one for every day of the year. The lower your number, the greater your chances of being drafted, and mine were as high as my number was low — 32. Only a college deferment had kept me out and that lapsed as soon as I graduated. Hence Canada, hence England, hence London. Jack Turner, BA (Tufts), twenty-two years old and flat broke. I’d got by for a year in Toronto and blown everything I’d saved on the ticket to London.

As I said, I was lucky. I gambled on the inefficiency of any bureaucracy and applied for a Harbright scholarship. The people running the Harbright Foundation back in Washington had neither the brief nor the inclination to cross-reference their applicants list with the FBI’s wanted list. I got one. A year’s funding — fees plus an immodest living allowance. All I had to do was find a college that would accept me and the cockamamie proposal I had knocked out for the Harbrights: ‘The Use of Imagery in the Poetry of Hart Crane’. Vague as fog and not entirely original. To my amazement, Lincoln College, Oxford University, accepted me.

I had a year to write whatever it was — I honestly didn’t give a damn about getting another degree — and learn to play the Englishman.

I soon toned down my accent, and if asked I said I was Canadian — this more often than not brought ‘Ah, draft dodger, eh?’ So I stopped saying it and just let everyone assume what they liked. Anonymity was hard-won. I was aiming to be a mid-Atlantic nonentity. Never quite made it.

By 1974 I was back in London — straight after the Three-Day Week, smack between the two elections — possessor of one degree (a second looming) and a work permit. London was my oyster. Alas in the post-Heath, post-diluvian England of 1974 the oyster was rotting on the shore. It was a sour time.

Entirely to my surprise, I found I hated English hippies. Parental recrimination, personal incompetence, political shallowness, pseudo-religious gullibility . . . all wrapped up in a tie-dyed T-shirt and played out to the sound of pompous stadium rock. Please. Gimme a break.

I was living with my girlfriend, Jess, same age, same rising sense of dissatisfaction, same sense that we were doing what we always boasted we’d never do: fuck up as our parents had fucked up.

That autumn she turned out every cupboard in the flat — the English had yet to invent the closet — and I found myself staring at a heap of tie-dye shirts, flared jeans and crushed velvet jackets.

‘What a load of tat!’

I reached down to rescue my bong. She kicked it away from me.

‘Tat, Jack. A load of fucking tat.’

I saw an ideology shrivel in that heap.

If this were what we had been, what were we now?

I did what my father would have told me to do, had he the faintest idea where to find me: I got a job. I got a job without him bellowing the instruction in my ear. Jess and I burnt all the tie-dye tat in the backyard. She wanted to throw on her Incredible String Band and Pink Floyd albums as well, but I pled the stink it would make and put them out by the trash. They were gone the next morning. And so began the new game. No more playing at hippies. From now on we’d play at being grown-ups.

‘Are we straights now?’ Jess asked me.

‘Nah. We could never be straights.’

‘Then what are we?’

‘We’re . . . in disguise. We’re . . . subversives.’

‘Oh Jack, you’re so full of shit.’

Time and again Jess came back to me about that assertion.

We went into advertising . . . Y’know, selling shit and saying it’s toothpaste . . . Boogle, Biggle & Boggarty. Whatever.

I did not stay the course. After less than a year Boogle or Biggle or it may have been Boggarty (whatever) suggested in that understated English way that perhaps I might be better suited to some other profession. It might have had something to do with my slogan for a campaign to relaunch Ranger bicycles: ‘Go to work on a bike.’

Fine.

I cleared my desk.

I went into publishing. Atterbury & Sykes. At the interview Atterbury (or maybe it was Sykes) told me the firm prided itself on publishing a book on — he did not say ‘life’ or ‘biography’ — ‘Jimmy or Marilyn’ every year.

‘Who?’ was my reply.

‘James Dean and Marilyn Monroe,’ was his.

My heart, scarcely buoyant in the first place, sank beneath the banality of my new trade.

After less than a year, Atterbury (or maybe it was Sykes) suggested in that understated English way that perhaps I might be better suited to some other profession. Clearly I had not taken Jimmy and Marilyn into my sunken heart.

So I moved to Hopkins Dean, where I lasted longer, long enough to get the message. London publishing was a game of musical chairs. Scarcely worth unpacking the metaphorical briefcase.

Jess stayed in advertising. She did not stay with me. Every so often I’d get a call, ‘This is your straight speaking.’

She hated it. Opted for a policy of Take the Money and Sneer.

‘They’re idiots. Utter fucking idiots. They call themselves “creatives”. They’re about as creative as my left buttock.’

All the same, she kept up the disguise. And the subversion dwindled to gossip and drunken cynicism as we propped up bars all over London and she rubbished everyone she ever met in the cling-wrapped, plasti-coated world of the ad man.

Our habitual first clink of the glasses was ‘Fukkemall.’

Either they’d get her in the end or the bottle would.

By the mid-Eighties I was with Hamilton Hardy, a small house with a big reputation. I didn’t have a big reputation. I’d move from one job to another without any seeming promotion even if the salary went up. I was a concierge . . . the doorman of Lit Fic. I edited on autopilot while the kettle boiled.

I think my boss at that time, Sebastian Hardy, tolerated me. He would not have been heartbroken if I quit on him. All the same he was unlikely to come to me with the understatement about my suitability. Sebastian would never ‘have to let me go’. He’d fire me or I’d quit.

My indifference to my own fate was shattered one day in 1985 by a telephone call from Syd Meadows — to give the old man his full whack, the Hon. Sydney Price-Meadows, senior partner in one of London’s oldest literary agencies Hawes Greene. Syd had been there so long he’d even known Ebenezer Hawes, a man born in the 1860s and often dubbed the last Victorian in London publishing, if not in London itself. I liked Syd. I’d done business with Syd, bought half a dozen books off him and watched contentedly as he racked up boozy lunches on my expense account that would one day surely plunge Hamilton Hardy into well-deserved bankruptcy. I liked Syd. I’d not the remotest idea why he liked me.

‘You saw my ad in the Bookseller?’

Actually I’d seen it and ignored it in the Guardian.

‘The one for a new book agent.’

‘Yes. I’ve been interviewing.’

‘Aha?’

‘A shower, an absolute shower. I’ve just listened to a dozen wet-behind-the-lug’oles graduates in Eng Lit rehash their education for my benefit.’

Syd had never been to university — Sandhurst and the Guards — and degrees never impressed.

‘Not one I’d dare leave alone with Tom Maschler for two minutes.’

‘Bad as that eh?’

‘Fucking awful. They could all spot the next Byron, but they wouldn’t know the next Ian McEwan if he fell on them. The hard men of Bedford Square would skin ’em alive.’

‘Syd. Why are you telling me this?’

‘Simple. Job’s yours if you want it. I’ll pay you whatever you’re on now plus three grand.’

I said nothing. He filled my silence.

‘Don’t take too long to think about it. Your days at HH are numbered and you know it. You’ve no future with Sebastian Hardy. And if you stay I predict he will bore you to death in less than two years.’

He rang off without another word.

I typed a brief note to Sebastian: I have to quit. Can we just forego the 30 days notice?

And then I cleared my desk. I would love to have typed Fuck you or something equally ‘subversive’, equally childish, but — dammit — I was going to be an agent. I might to have sell the old bastard a book one day.

I dropped in at Hawes Greene’s office in Henrietta Street the next day, thinking I’d tell Syd I had accepted and agree a starting date.

Syd wasn’t there. Instead I got his secretary, Vera Buckett — Dagenham Vera, the prototype of Essex Girl. I’d never met Vera, talked to her frequently on the phone but never face to face.

‘Well, dearie, you look just like you sound.’

So did she — more than a little blousy, a tad to the fat, a fag glued to her lower lip and a hint that she might have been a looker fifteen or twenty years ago.

‘He ain’t ’ere, but you was expected.’

‘I was. I mean, I am?’

‘Fourth door on yer right. That’s your office.’

‘When do I start?’

‘You have started. The Hon. Syd’s in Libya. You’ll handle his clients till he gets back and until you’ve got a few of your own.’

‘Libya?’

‘Tobruk, dearie. Another of his bleedin’ army reunions. If he goes to one he goes to a dozen. There are times I think he was in every bleedin’ battle from Waterloo to Arnhem.’

All morning figures, faces would appear at my door.

‘Oh, has the photocopier been moved?’

Men in suits, mostly. Nobody asked who I was.

Vera phoned.

‘Mr Mailer, for Syd. You’d better take it.’

Oh shit. Norman Mailer. Oh shit.

‘Er . . . er . . . Mr Mailer, what an . . . er . . . ’

‘Dennis Mailer here, son. Daily Express. I was looking for a quote from Syd . . . your rivals at Curtis Brown are rumoured to have got a seven-figure sum for Francis Freeman’s new one. I mean, funny money or what?’

‘Er . . . I er . . . no comment.’

I put the phone down. It rang again at once.

‘Butterfingers,’ Vera said.

‘What?’

‘You dropped the ball. The point was to deal with him, give him something pithy, not hang up on him. Unless, of course, you declare this an FO day.’

‘Foreign Office day?’

‘Fuck Off day. A day when Syd says I can tell the Press to fuck off.’

‘In those words?’

She hung up on me, the sigh all but audible over the dialling tone.

Two minutes later she dropped a couple of dozen manila files on my desk and said, ‘Read and learn.’

I passed an hour in silence. Reading and learning. She rang through again.

‘Mr Vidal for Syd. Just deal with it, will you?’

Fred Vidal of the News the World or Bert Vidal from the Observer?

‘Hello?’

The aristocratic, Virginian voice, slightly drawly, affected and affecting. Oh shit, da man.

‘I was hoping Syd was free this evening, but I gather not. Why don’t you come over to the old boarding house at six-thirty? New blood is always interesting, for the first half hour at least.’

‘The old boarding house?’

‘The Connaught.’

The Connaught. Posh posh posh.

‘Any . . . er particular dress code?’

‘No. But Princess Margaret is a stickler for titles, so HRH her until she’s drunk and then you can call her your honeybum and she won’t care. And if you bring Vera Buckett you’d better bring your own gin, too. I’m rich . . . but not rich enough to refloat the Titanic.’

He didn’t say goodbye. I got Vera in an instant. Giggling down the line.

‘Dress code. Hahahah. You twat.’

I got a few minutes with the Great Man. It went the way most conversations with fellow Americans went . . . ending with the inevitable . . . ‘Draft dodger?’

For once I could take it as a compliment.

I chatted with the boyfriend, Howard — a short, Bronxy guy who reminded me of nothing quite so much as a gumshoe, and I watched Vera Buckett and Princess Margaret get shit-faced without addressing a word to one another. And very soon I began to see that they were almost identical, displaying the same disdain for all around, divided only by an accent. Although to be fair, I’m pretty sure Princess Margaret didn’t buy her frocks in the M&S on Oxford Street.

Then a familiar face appeared. Tony Marks of the Daily Beast. A pleasant enough hack of limited talent. I’d bought a couple of books by him for Sebastian and as far as I could remember he’d been at work for years on a life of Maurice Oldfield (the M in MI6) that I was pretty certain he’d never finish.

‘Jack boy. I hear you jumped ship.’

‘Jumped ship?’

‘Y’know. Gamekeeper turned poacher.’

‘Ah. Yes. I’m an agent now.’

‘’Scuse me if I talk shop for a bit, but there is something I’d like to ask you.’

Oh no. I did not want Tony Marks to become my first client. I didn’t ever want Tony Marks to become a client.

‘Tony, I thought you were with Curtis Brown.’

‘I am, Jack boy. Not about to ask for meself. Chap I’ve met writing a book needs an agent.’

‘So why not introduce him to your man at Curtis Brown?’

‘Are you kidding? Introduce a friend to your agent and you’ll end up losing both. No, this could be right up your alley. Chap named Roger Bentinck. Ring any bells?’

‘Should it?’

‘MI6. Dodgy business behind the Iron Curtain. Bulldog Drummond. James Bond. That sort of thing. He wants to write a memoir.’

‘Will they let him?’

‘Precisely why he needs an agent. I’ll get him to give you a bell at old Syd’s.’

He ducked out so fast I didn’t have time to say no. But I was an agent without any clients. Why would I say no?

The following day the telephone rang a couple of dozen times. Routine stuff and most of the people who wanted to talk to the Hon. Syd weren’t prepared to talk to me. He was the sorcerer. I was just Mickey Mouse.

Around five, Vera put Roger Bentinck through. I had no real idea whether I had wanted him to call or not, and expectation simply didn’t enter into it.

‘Bentinck, here.’

‘Mr Bentinck, I —’

‘Newmarket, tamorrer.’

‘What?’

‘Meet me in the Owners and Trainers Bar at Newmarket in time to study form for the 2.30. I’ll leave your name with the johnny on the door. Just ask for me.’

I did not get another word in.

Two minutes later Vera Buckett appeared in my doorway, fag adroop.

‘Just say it.’

‘Say what?’

‘Go on, ask me.’

‘Vera, for Christ’s sake!’

‘Ask me what the Hon. Syd would do.’

‘What would Syd do?’

‘What, Syd? Turn down at a day at the races? Not bloody likely.’

A Day at the Races. Wasn’t that a Marx Brothers movie?

I’d never been to a racetrack in my life. I wasn’t about to risk another burst of derision from Vera on the matter of dress code, so I went dressed in workaday sports jacket and grey pants, assuming that an ordinary summer Thursday would not be a top-hat gig and I would not be meeting royalty twice in one week.

The bowler-hatted jobsworth looked me up and down, but that’s what jobsworths do. He showed me to Bentinck’s table.

Bentinck gave me the merest glance.

‘Golden Boy.’

Who? Me?

‘My old dad would always bet on any horse with the word gold in his name.’

‘Not exactly scientific, then?’

‘No, lost more often than not.’

The eyes came off the racing pages to meet mine. They were soggy eyes, the eyes, I thought, of a deeply sad man. The face was jowly and red — a joyless red, a red that might have been acquired in good times that were long, long gone and now was merely a painful reminder, glimpsed in the mirror while shaving.

‘When were you born?’

I hadn’t even sat down yet.

‘August 29th, 1951. It was a . . .’

‘No. You’re not supposed to tell me. Ruins the bloody game. It was . . . hang on . . . it was . . . a Wednesday. Am I right?’

‘Yes. Wednesday’s child is full of woe. My mother was forever quoting that at me.’

‘And are you?’

‘No. I’m a cheerful soul.’

This made him laugh. I pulled out a chair and sat down while he sniggered.

‘American?’

‘Yes?’

‘Draft dodger, I suppose. All you blokes are draft dodgers aren’t you?’

I said nothing to this. It didn’t seem to require an answer.

‘Of course, in my day you’d have been shot.’

I tacked away. ‘How do you do that?’

‘Do what?’

‘The trick with the birth dates.’

‘Oh that would be telling. But it is just a trick . . . a simple mental . . . algorithm. Yes, that’s the word. Now who do you fancy in the 2.30?’ He shoved the racing pages across to me.

That was OK. I like a challenge. I am up for what is new.

We walked down to the members’ enclosure near to the winning post. I got a good look at him for the first time. He was a head shorter than me, stout to fat. A sheen of sweat across his face that made him look very unhealthy. I’d put him at a well-worn, lived-in sixty. A sixty looking as though it would not make sixty-five. Breathless and baggy. Gung-ho and world-weary at the same time.

‘You own a horse?’ I asked.

‘No. Why do you ask?’

‘Owners’ bar? Members’ enclosure?’

‘There’s an English notion you need to grasp, dear boy. Ligging. The noble art of bullshit. Everybody here thinks I own a racehorse because I act as if I own a racehorse. So many things in life are pretence. Nothing wrong with it. It’s not a moral issue . . . It’s just the way things are.’

I wondered about what I had just heard. The manifesto of a spy schooled in deceit or of a con man as likely to pretend to be a racehorse owner as a spy? The former was easier. A big pair of binoculars, a bespoke suit worn incongruously with a crumpled felt hat, and a racing paper folded under your arm. What were the props of a spy? Would a spy ever say he was a spy? Was anyone who did say he was a spy least likely to be one?

Any question I might have posed was drowned out.

Racing was like all sport: a bit of a thrill, followed by prolonged boredom. A kid in high school once tried to explain football to me as being like chess. Big guys in armour crashing into one another is like chess? Right. And many a London pub bore has attempted to entice me into an appreciation of soccer . . . or cricket . . . and all I can say is that both move marginally faster than baseball or glaciers.

No problem with speed at Newmarket, but it is arcane stuff requiring study or feigned interest. Having no knowledge at all I opted for the latter. Bentinck had the knowledge, Bentinck studied ‘form’ . . . firm going, soft underfoot, trained by X, ridden by Y, had won the last Z times out and so on. I bet whenever he bet and as he bet and came back £479.50p richer. And not once did we bet on a horse with ‘gold’ in its name. He hooted, he cheered, he waved his fat little arms in the air and he gabbled at me in incomprehensible fervour.

What he didn’t do was mention a book. Or the possibility of a book. And the saggy sadness in the eyes never once matched the waving arms or the throaty cheering.

I went home bookless and richer, secure in the knowledge that I would never go to the races again and that I would never hear from Roger Bentinck again.

The Hon. Syd returned from Libya.

‘Got me knees brown for the first time since 1943.’

I thought I’d have to bring him up to speed on anything and everything, only to find Vera had already done it.

‘Who’s this Bentinck character?’

I told him.

‘D’ye reckon he’s kosher?’

‘No. He’s ligging.’

‘Ligging?’

‘A word I just learnt. He’s a freeloader. I think he’s someone having fun playing a game with Fleet Street and with me. He probably spun Tony Marks a line in exchange for free drinks all evening. He acts like a spook, so people think he’s a spook. He’s the most unlikely-looking spy I’ve ever met.’

‘Not that you’ve met all that many,’ said Syd. ‘But what does he look like?’

‘Toad of Toad Hall,’ I said. ‘He looks like Mr Toad.’

‘Poop-poop!’ Syd replied.

A week passed.

Men in suits still asked me where the photocopier was.

Vera Buckett called me a twat at least twice a day.

Roger Bentinck rang.

‘Lunch, Thursday. Meet me at me club.’

Club? What fucking club?

‘Guards in Piccadilly. Did it never occur to you to look me up in Who’s Who?’

I kicked myself. It had not crossed my mind to find the fat fraud in any work of reference. It was another English notion I needed to grasp, an absurdly English notion. The antediluvian hippie in me silently subscribed to the other notion, that anyone who was really anyone would not be in Who’s fuckin’ Who.

Syd had Who’s Who (and for that matter Who Was Who) for every year going back to 1938 in his office.

He didn’t even look up from his desk.

Just said ‘Who’re you after?’

‘Bentinck.’

‘If you find him, read him out to me. The potted version.’

Who’s Who is nothing if not potted. Life reduced on the simmer plate.

‘Roger George Cholmondoley Bentinck. CMG. Born 1925. Younger son of George Bentinck and Laura née Cholmondoley elder daughter of Viscount Cholmondoley of Callow. Sherbourne, a year at Keble, Oxford, reading Geography, volunteered for the Coldstream Guards in ’43. Just caught the tail end of the war. Ended it as a captain. Discharged 1946. Bit blank on anything since. No mention of wives or children. Clubs, Guards. Hobbies, racing and Meccano. What’s Meccano?’

Syd ignored the question.

‘A Cholmondoley, eh? I don’t suppose you’ve heard of his grandfather. Mad Mike Cholmondoley, led an absolutely suicidal cavalry charge in the Boer War. If Tennyson had been around there might even have been a poem about it. Alas the old boy had gone to Poets’ Corner by then, so all Cholmondoley got was a court martial and no verse. It would have paid him not to survive the charge, but there you are. Dead heroes, living idiots. Two sides of a coin.’

‘Syd, does any of this make you think he might be, as you said, “kosher”?’

‘Perhaps. The silence after 1946 is telling. That’s when they’d have recruited him if they did recruit him. There are people I can ask.’

Syd, at that time, represented Marcus Frey, acclaimed writer of spy novels under the nom de plume James McVey. All McVeys went to number one. A good half dozen of them had been filmed. He alone would bankroll Hawes Greene if every other client dried or died. And, of course, Marcus Frey was ‘kosher’ — his real name was an open secret and the books sold as being the work of an MI6 insider. What was secret was that Syd ran every book by MI6 before even the publishers saw them. Hence no controversy, no comeback, not even a hint of censorship. All done, as Syd would have said, on the nod. A few discreet phone calls. Nothing on paper.

‘Leave it with me,’ he said.

I was . . . I was . . . antsy. That could be the word. By Thursday morning I was antsy. Once more on the whirligig with Bentinck and not a word from Syd.

Ten minutes before I was due to leave he came into my office and looked around as though despairing of the décor.

I pointed to the long Plimsoll line of dirt three feet off the ground along the side wall.

‘Used to be the photocopier room,’ I said.

‘Good Lord. Must get you something for the walls. A book or two wouldn’t go amiss. Now. Roger the Lodger. He is the real thing. Ran our chaps out of Berlin in the Forties and Vienna in the Fifties. Been on the retired list since sixty-six. Picked up his gong the year after. One hundred per cent kosher.’

Hell. I had rather hoped he wasn’t and that perhaps this would be my last outing with him.

‘So maybe there’s a book at the bottom of all this?’

‘It may well be there’s one hell of a book at the bottom of all this.’

I played the straight.

I wore the suit.

I had not asked Vera.

Another jobsworth, another fleeting moment of utter disdain. I was shown to the bar of the Guards Club on Piccadilly.

Bentinck was perched on top of a bar stool with his back to me. Not an item of furniture that favoured his particular morph. He looked like a toffee apple on a stick.

He swung around, slopping his whisky and soda, and said, ‘Y’little shit. You’ve had me vetted!’

If I had any doubts about Bentinck the spy they just flew out and splashed down as fast as his whisky. He was kosher. I knew he was kosher. He knew I knew he was kosher.

‘How d’ya do it?’

‘That would be telling.’

Hard to tell when a red man is about to explode with anger. The wheezing rising in his throat presaged something, but as seconds ticked by I wasn’t certain whether he would erupt in rage or laughter.

The wheezing rose half an octave, a tad shy of whining; he slipped from the bar stool, clapped me on the back and I realised that this was as close to laughter as Bentinck got.

‘Let’s eat. I’m fair famished.’

At lunch I learnt why Roger George Cholmondoley Bentinck was the size, shape and hue he was. He loved his grub. I come from what might be termed the muesli generation. Rabbit food my father used to call it, glaring at me across his plate of ham’n’eggs. I have eaten muesli for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Never in my life had I sat down to beef wellington. Bentinck was insistent. It was what the club did best. It would be criminal not to try it.

Have you ever seen Beef Wellington? The look alone is worth a hundred words. Suffice it to say it is the nearest thing you will ever find to Desperate Dan’s cow pie. It is beef, expensive beef, wrapped in layers of pâté and mushrooms and encased in pastry. No need to leave the horns on the side of your plate. The Guards club would never have been so vulgar as to leave the horns on.

And . . . and . . . it is disgusting.

All the same, it explained the teetering on the edge of aneurysm and apoplexy that was by now the natural condition of Roger George Cholmondoley Bentinck.

I picked, trying not to show revulsion.

‘Hippie, eh?’ Bentinck said in precisely the same tone he had said ‘draft dodger?’. ‘Give it here.’

And he speared the remains of my beef welly with his fork, hoiked it onto his plate and with his free hand beckoned to the sommelier for a second bottle of claret. Most of the first had gone down him, not me.

‘I’m wondering,’ he said. ‘Can I work with a chap like you?’

‘Why wouldn’t you?’

‘Can’t tell a three-legged nag from a Derby winner. Drinks like a girl. Eats like a bird. What more do I need to say?’

‘How about that I can turn Post-it notes into polished prose and pitch you to the best editors in London. Or I could if you ever got around to mentioning a book.’

He munched. Staring at me. Flakes of puff pastry showering down like the first delicate snow of an early winter, dusting the napkin tucked into his waistcoat like a bib. Always the mark of a serious trencherman.

‘You cheeky little bugger.’

‘My point remains. Cheeky or not.’

‘Well, I’m hardly going to blab about it here am I?’

‘I’m asking myself: is he going to blab at all?’

Silent munching ensued.

He finished his plate with dedicated elbow work, and a swift though delicate action on the fork that put me in mind of watching Mohammad Ali float like a butterfly.

‘Tell you what. We’ll have pudding and adjourn to my place. If it’s blabbing you want, it’s blabbing you’ll get.’

I had a 3.30 meeting with Graham Garside, a first novelist fresh out of Leicester Polytechnic, who had written a ‘promising’ novel depicting his life and hard times growing up in a suburb of Nottingham. My first real client. Clutching a real kitchen sink. I wasn’t going to pass that up for more Bentinck blather. I had yet to learn that ‘promising’ is one of the most unreliable terms in the English language.

‘I have to work this afternoon.’

‘O’course, wage slave. I do hope it’s worth it. Tell me, how much do you rake in? Twenty-five grand a year? Thirty?’

Thirty grand was more than twice what Syd was paying me. Yet the tone in which Bentinck uttered the word implied it was peanuts to him.

‘I get by.’

‘Well get by my house at seven thirty tonight.’

He flipped a card across the table.

A house in the Boltons. No wonder thirty grand was peanuts.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘To matters of state, to cabbages and kings . . . to pud.’

A waiter set dessert menus in front of us.

I opened mine and read nothing. I wasn’t going to eat another mouthful. Bentinck rolled his eyes down the page and muttered, ‘The things I do for England.’

And when he looked up he was smiling, a friendly light seemed to flicker in those saggy eyes.

‘Call no man unhappy with a pudding menu in front of him.’

Graham Garside was twenty-two. He’d have been about fourteen by the time punk penetrated Nottingham Profonde. And if there was one thing he hated in life it was hippies. What was it? Could he smell patchouli on me? I had washed off the last residue round about 1967. Whatever . . . his lip curled at the sight of me. A sub-Elvis sneer that conceded that he might just let me represent him, a quiz on who I read and liked (utterly irrelevant) . . . leading to undisguised contempt when I replied ‘Iris Murdoch’.

After twenty minutes with him I was almost looking forward to the sneers and contempt of Bentinck. They at least were accompanied by a modicum of curiosity.

He’d get back to me.

Of course.

I held out a hand for the kid to shake. He looked at it as if I’d presented him with a cold kipper.

‘It’s been a pleasure, Graham,’ I lied.

‘It’s Gaz.’

‘OK, it’s been a gas.’

‘No, I mean I’m known as Gaz. Only my dad calls me Graham.’

Well, that was me put in my place.

I thought at first I had misread his address, but I checked the card. I was in front of the right house, possibly the only house in the Boltons, that hugely expensive loop of Chelsea real estate, in need of paint and joinery. A three-storey house of flaking stucco and rotting window frames. God, the neighbours must hate Bentinck.

I pressed the bell. No sound of ringing. Where the Victorian knocker had once been was a deep scar in the paint. I pushed. The door drifted in and music drifted out.

At this point in my life I had long forsaken the Grateful Dead — once the LSD wore off, who didn’t? Not much had replaced them. Music was that stuff happening in the background. Happening everywhere, elevators, coffee bars . . . I could not even get a haircut without some MOR pap burbling away from tinny speakers in the ceiling. Free champagne sir? Free coffee? Free earache? Most of London’s public places left me craving silence. After Jess left I’d unplugged the record player. Nothing would induce me to turn it back on. And I could not have told you if the crackly sound coming from the back room of Bentinck’s house was Mozart or Messiaen.

I reached the end of the corridor, opened the door into a small back room aglow with western light, crammed with furniture. Bentinck was slumped in an armchair that had suffered a volcanic eruption of stuffing. There was a tumbler half full of whisky next to him, and a can of tinned custard, most of which was spattered down his waistcoat. His eyes were shut. He was humming along with the music.

‘Do you like Brahms?’ he said, eyes still closed.

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘This is the Third.’

‘Third what?’

The eyes opened.

‘Oh God, do you people know nothing?’

He got up with some difficulty. Noticed the custard dribbles down his front, muttered ‘shit’ a few times and shuffled across to the record player.

I’d never seen anything quite like it. A turntable over a foot across, a strobe read-out, an arm counterweighted with pre-decimal silver coins, a yard of wires trailing from pre-amp to amp and a 78 rpm record spinning.

‘Brahms’s Third Symphony, Berlin Sinfonia, 1946. First recording they made after the war. Among the first violins you’ll hear Klaus Boehm. Talented young chap. I ran him in ’48 to ’49, right through the airlift. Till the Russians tumbled to him, that is. Left him hanging from a lamp post in the British sector. They broke his fingers first. Bastards.’

At last . . . a fact. The merest shred of spooky-doo.

He turned the volume down a fraction. Found a second tumbler, blew off the dust and handed it to me with a nod towards the open bottle of Bells.

‘Lend an ear. On the last side. Over in a jiffy.’

I lent the ear. I looked around.

It began to dawn on me that there was more than one Roger Bentinck. The dapper if somewhat gross man who had bought me a gourmet lunch, and the slob who got shit-faced in the afternoon, ate cold custard straight from the tin and appeared to live in haze of dust and cobwebs in the back room of a huge and neglected house in one of the most prestigious streets in Chelsea.

Which one was trying to teach me about classical music? Which one has just teased me, however inadvertently, with the possibilities in his tale?

Brahms’s Third is not one of those symphonies that ends with a clash of cymbals. It dwindles to nothing through the plaintive call of woodwind. I watched dust motes, jerked to life by two colossal bass speakers, dance in sunbeams. I looked at what I was certain was the detritus of several lives, as though Bentinck had less furnished the room than simply allowed stuff to gather around him.

There is an old Tory tale . . . Fred Smith, MP, has the old blue-rinse bags in his constituency over for tea. He thinks it has gone well and that he, nouveau-riche and nouveau-Tory, regional accent dropped, suits newly tailored, past duly buried, has pulled off the stunt. As they are leaving, one dowager says to another, ‘But my dear, his furniture is bought!’

In Toryland you do not buy furniture, you inherit it.

It seemed to me that every item of furniture Bentinck had inherited was now stacked around him, leaving a small pool for his occupation in the centre.

‘Being a Yank I expect you’d like to ruin your scotch with half a pound of ice.’

‘Two cubes would do.’

Bentinck went to the kitchen. After a bit of banging and smashing he returned with a pudding basin full of ice.

Helpfully I held out my glass.

‘Not so fast, Sonny Jim.’

He took the glass off me. Set it down on the table about eighteen inches away from the basin.

Behind them at about the same distance stood a toy crane made of pressed steel in a flaky red, held together with brass screws. I’d spotted the crane way before. I just didn’t know what it was. Bentinck pointed to the battered cardboard lid of a toy box on the floor.

Meccano No. 10 Kit. 12 years and over.

Ah, the hobby listed in Who Gives a Fuck Who’s Who.

Two boys in the pre-war garb of grey shorts and sleeveless pullovers were making a crane twice the size of Bentinck’s in the dim arc of a reading lamp, all watched over with loving care from the sidelines by a benign, pipe-smoking dad.

‘Indulge me.’

He cranked levers, wound cable. The crane gently grabbed a couple of ice cubes, swung across the table and plonked them down in my scotch.

Bentinck was grinning, then he was laughing that explosive, wheezing laugh of his. Then I was laughing, too. It was so . . . so . . . so wonderfully silly.

I felt it was the first time we’d actually been on the same wavelength.

‘Down the hatch, eh?’

‘Of course,’ he said apropos of nothing. ‘We could go anywhere we liked in Berlin in ’46. International zone and all that. We could hang out in the caffs in the Russia sector, and they could simply whiz a jeep into any of the Allied sectors and kidnap who the hell they liked off the streets. If they nabbed one poor bugger that way they nabbed a thousand. People could simply vanish. They got Klaus on his own doorstep not two hundred yards from the Tiergarten Station. Tortured him in their own sector, dumped him back in ours. I doubt there was much he could have told them. Such a bloody waste.’

‘He could,’ I ventured, ‘have told them about you.’

‘Oh, they knew about me. They had a wall chart up with mugshots of every British Intelligence officer. As an Intelligence officer in Berlin you were marked. You could run a field agent. You couldn’t actually be one. Set foot in the Russian sector and you had a tail in less than a minute. I even had the buggers follow me to the gents. Come to think of it, that was a sure way to find out if you were being followed. Nip to the gents. He follows. Might just be coincidence. So next time nip to the ladies. No German male would ever dare follow me in there. And if the bugger was still outside when I came out, then I knew for certain. If I went into a bar they’d usually park their elbows a dozen blokes away. I’d pay the barman to send a beer down to whoever it was and raise my hat to him. All rather open. A waste of their time, not mine. The only mission I was on was to see how many tails I picked up in a night on the booze.’

‘Not exactly a secret, then?’

‘Oh there are secrets aplenty. Just not in Berlin in ’46. You’ll get your secrets all right. After all, it’s what you came for, isn’t it? It’s what you blokes want, isn’t it?’

Was this the moment to remind him that it was he who had come to me?

‘Us blokes?’

He ignored this.

‘I think I’ll spin the shellac again tomorrow. If you’re free, come back for Beethoven. The Seventh. Furtwängler, 1943. Recorded in Berlin while we bombed them to buggery. Not that you can hear the bombs, of course.’

Could I be surprised that he had nothing better to do on a Friday night when I had nothing better myself?

It was 3.30 p.m. again. There’s one every day. I was getting used to them. I met with Lucy Devlin, recently down from University College, Dublin, and the author of a ‘promising’ first novel depicting her life and hard times growing up in a Dublin suburb — much of the dialogue rendered in a challenging phonetic transcription.

Who was my favourite author?

I felt I was on safe ground with Iris Murdoch, a Dubliner herself, and stuck with, ‘Iris Murdoch’.

She’d be in touch.

Of course.

Two days I later I received a postcard saying she didn’t feel comfortable with a man as her agent.

Well, that was me put in my place.

It was not that Bentinck offered any explanation of music. There would have been little point if he had, and I think he subscribed to the same notion I did: either you get it or you don’t — or, as they said in my teens, ‘Can you dig it, man?’ Telling me to listen out for a cadenza in Beethoven would have made as much sense to me as pointing out the engine manifold in Mozart.

What he did — all he did — was create a space in which I was not fussing about anything else. No one was trying to talk; no one was doing anything other than sitting fairly still and listening. An all but impossible condition, unless imposed from without.

It worked. Furtwängler’s Beethoven blew me away.

‘It was different in Berlin in ’63. Different world, different players. Same game.’

‘What made the difference?’

‘The Wall. Going East became . . . I dunno. More of a risk? Hardly. It was always a risk. They’d never snatch one of us off the streets of West Berlin. But we could always meet with contrived accidents. I suppose the difference was uniforms and side arms became cloaks and daggers. Now, isn’t that just what you wanted to hear? But . . . fifteen years on, fifteen years away from Berlin, fifteen years older, a bag full of fake identities . . . they didn’t know me any more. I went East without a tail for the first time. I was Georg Feinmann from Charlottenburg, visiting his dear old auntie in Hellersdorf. I was Peter Grosz from Steglitz simply exercising my West Berliner’s right to a stroll in the East.

The last big run, the one that did for me, was in the Autumn of ’65. The Russians used to have Warsaw Pact troops rehearse taking West Berlin. Every time they did it we didn’t know whether it would stop at the dress rehearsal or carry on for a first night and a curtain call. Would have been curtains for us. We couldn’t stop ’em, after all. Jack Kennedy had stood up in Berlin and declared himself a Berliner in public. In private he’d told Willi Brandt there was no way America would go to war over Berlin. So everything we could find out about their intentions was vital.

We had blokes in the East who’d deliver full details of the battle plan as such . . . everything down to the menu in the commissars’ canteen. That October they rumbled us. We were in Bernau . . . big Russian Tank Division HQ in Bernau. I was meeting my snitches. We walked into a trap. Bit of a shoot-out. Both my blokes go down. What they know dies with ’em. I kill three of theirs and run for it. Bernau’s only just east of Berlin, but going back via Berlin looked like suicide. I went south and west. Took eight days. But I’d used up eight of my nine lives. I wasn’t a lot of use to SIS after that. I was gracefully retired. Can’t complain. They were bloody decent about it and I knew I was blown. Blown to the point where any Soviet agent probably had a mandate to shoot me on sight their side of the Iron Curtain. Hence I am as you see me now.’

As he was now was Bentinck in evening mode — and evening mode seemed to begin straight after lunch. Pissed as a fart with half a tin of Ambrosia creamed rice, cold from the tin, down his waistcoat. ‘As you see me now’ had no tinge of regret to it. A remark that was not tongue in cheek. Not a hint of irony.

‘And is this a secret?’

He snorted into his laughter mode.

‘Secret? Of course it’s a bloody secret!’

Three-thirty. I met with Izzy Cowper, recently down from Girton, who had written a ‘promising’ first novel depicting her life and hard times growing up in St John’s Wood.

I switched my answer to Muriel Spark, feeling that Iris Murdoch was jinxing me. A bare-faced lie. I’d never read a book by Muriel Spark. I’d just seen the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, with Maggie Smith.

I liked Izzy. I could represent Izzy.

Never heard from her again.

I had sat through the Brahms Clarinet Quintet in B minor. If Bentinck had said it was in Q major I would have believed him.

‘Adolf Busch and chums. Recorded in ’36, I think. Dunno where.’

I had become his amanuensis as well as his student. He spun the shellac, but I got up and turned the records over. Up and down like a jack-in-the-box. No. 78 would play longer than about five or six minutes, and even a relatively short piece of classical music would take up six sides.

I never had any idea how long Bentinck would play for. When the music finished he usually had a can of something canned and a large shot of something bottled and began his performance after a couple of dessert spoons and one large slug.

‘Radio Free Europe. Radio Free Europe. Radio Free Fucking Europe . . . was a fraud from start to finish. You lot . . .’

My lot? Ah, now I wasn’t a draft dodger any more. I was just an American. A representative of my upstart nation.

‘ . . . You lot encouraged rebellion, encouraged it in sixteen different languages. You broadcast support and reassurance to people willing to put their lives on the line and then you did nothing. Berlin: nothing. Hungary: nothing. Czechoslovakia: nothing. The promise was hollow . . . America was never going to go to war in Europe again. You could kill all the little yellow rice-munchers you liked in Laos and Vietnam, but you’d never fire a single shot at anyone wearing a Red Army uniform. People died for you.’

If I’d had a flake of patriotism it might have surfaced at this moment, bobbing on the buoyant hypocrisy that is the moral scheme of your average human being. It didn’t. Why else was I in England? So as not to have to shoot little yellow rice-munchers. C’mon Jack. Tell the truth. I was in England so as not to have little yellow rice-munchers shoot at me.

‘It’s a betrayal beyond measure. You sold a promise, you sold an idea. And even after the great betrayal they cling to the idea.’

‘Mr Bentinck, what idea?’

‘That everyone in the world can be an American. You sold them the promise of the Lone Ranger, Perry Como, fridges, air-conditioning and takeaway pizza. Who the fuck needs ideology? That is your ideology. Of the pizza, by the pizza, for the pizza.’

Can’t argue with him on that one. Indeed, I couldn’t. He’d passed out again. The custard tin slipped from his hand, the little yellow river started out across his chest on its long journey to the groin.

After Brahms several days passed without any further invitation to drop by. I took my 400-odd in winnings from Newmarket and found a used hi-fi dealer in the Edgware Road. How much would it get me?

It got me a pair of matching Quad 405 monoblocs, a 34 pre-amp, Rega turntable and a pair of rather battered Rogers BBC monitors. All British — it would pass any Bentinck test. And all gobbledegook to me, but the man in the shop helped me pile it all into a cab, assuring me I’d got a bargain. Either that or he just cleared all the crap out of his back room in one fell swoop to one fell idiot.

All wired up on top of my desk — not piled high with all the manuscripts sent in by all the clients I didn’t have — I found one failing. No records. No vinyl and most certainly no 78s. I’d used the last album, Tea for the Tillerman by Cat Stevens, as a frisbee on Primrose Hill. The golden retriever who caught it would not give it back. I should care.

In Harold Moore’s shop in Great Marlborough Street I bought Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ by the Busch Quartet that Bentinck had introduced me to. After that I was out of cash. I went home clutching a record I’d never heard to feed an addiction I’d just discovered.

It was brilliant stuff. It was miserable stuff. After two consecutive playings I was suicidal. Death and the Dodger.

Lunch with Syd. The Caprice in Arlington Street. A stone’s throw from the Guards Club.

I had not taken on a single writer. I could be apologetic. If needs be. But I knew to let Syd make the first move. And if I was due for the sack, would he have taken me to a restaurant as classy as this?

‘I’m glad you’re not rushing into this. An agent needs no more than fifty clients. More than that is unmanageable. And at minimum they should be earning ten grand a year from their work. Make that fifteen, on second thoughts. Had one young chap a few years ago who’d taken on twenty-two writers in the first six weeks . . . most of ’em no-hopers. As I say, glad you’re not rushing into things.’

The repetition told. Of course he was glad, glad and a little concerned. He knew I’d no clients. The Buckett woman would have told him that.

‘How are things moving along with Roger Bentinck?’

‘Well . . . he’s certainly kosher. Enough gung-ho tales to convince me of that.’

‘But?’

‘But he is a wreck of a man. I’m not sure he’ll ever write any of it down.’
‘But if he does?’

‘If he does . . . it’s as you said. One hell of a book. He was there . . . He appears to have been there . . . at most of the major incidents of the Cold War.’

‘Do you wonder why he wants to tell all?’

‘Yep. Can’t fault his patriotism. Thinks Margaret Thatcher is God’s representative on earth . . . takes the Telegraph every day just to see who’s died . . . and hates Americans. How patriotic can you get?’

Syd mused on this one.

‘Well I’m sure he’ll come clean eventually. Something will . . . burst. Meanwhile, it’s getting a proposal out of him . . .’

Mea culpa.

‘And when you do, and when you start pitching it. That’s when the shit will hit the fan.’

We both paused. I knew what he meant, but I wanted to hear him state what we’d both known all along.

‘They won’t want him to do it, of course. But we don’t give up that easily do we? I just wanted to warn you. It could get a bit nasty if they set the Branch onto you. I want you to be prepared.’

‘Branch?’

‘Special Branch. Military Intelligence has no powers of search or arrest. A bit like the CIA not being supposed to operate within the USA. So, they have a squad of Scotland Yard bully boys at their disposal. They kick down doors, crack skulls, arrest people . . . and so on. You won’t like it if Inspector Plodder calls. They can make quite a mess, I gather.’

‘Why me? Why not Bentinck?’

‘No. I don’t think they’d do that. It’s you they’ll come after.’

‘Do you want me to drop it?’

‘No. I just want you to be ready.’

‘How do I do that?’

‘Until you actually get a proposal out of him, keep no notes. Store it all in your head. When you get the proposal, keep it in the open where anyone can see it. Conceal nothing. Leave the folder on your desktop.’

I got it, but I had one last question.

‘Syd. Why did you hire me?’

‘As opposed to whom?’

‘As opposed to an Englishman who might have grown up sharing your values and your tailor.’

‘Well you’ve seen ’em. The chaps Larry Greene stuck me with between old Ebenezer’s death and my taking over. Perfectly capable men. No reason to fire any of them. They do their job. But they’re stuffed shirts in three-piece suits. All Oxbridge educated. PPE and Greats and all that nonsense. But if brains were flint they couldn’t light a fart. No. It was time . . . time . . . to put a cat among the pigeons.’

‘Or an old tie-dye hippie among the stuffed shirts?’

‘I’ll need a translator for that one, I’m afraid. Anyway. I must dash. Stick the bill on the company card. And keep me posted.’

‘D’ye know that chippy by the Earl’s Court Tube?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I’m sure you’ll find it. Cod, chips, mushy peas, easy on the vinegar and don’t forget the tartare sauce.’

‘What?’

‘Eight o’clock. My place. Get what you fancy for yourself, but no Coca-Cola. American muck. Disgusting smell. I’ll give you the ackers when you get here. Schumann tonight. Artur Schnabel at the joanna. Don’t be late.’

He rang off.

Thus ended ten days of silence.

I had been summoned.

Cod, chips and Schnabel.

Just as well, I was wearing through the grooves on Schubert.

As ever, Bentinck’s choice in music was impeccable. Schumann op. 44, a piano quintet. For all I knew the piano quintet. A decidedly vigorous work. We ate fish and chips with nothing more significant than his saying what a pleasant summer it had been so far. Food and music did not overlap. He listened without distraction.

And after Schnabel.

‘Good fish was it?’

‘I guess . . .’

‘Would you care to guess why?’

‘What?’

‘Why did I send you out for fish and chips like a twelve year old running an errand?’

Perhaps because you’re a fat, idle bastard?

‘Ah . . . I’m supposed to see a symbol here.’

‘Indeed you are. Ever heard of the British Baltic Fisheries Protection Service?’

‘Of course not.’

‘I was part of the team that set it up after the dust settled in Berlin in ’49.

‘Fisheries protection? Codfish in danger?’

‘Black entry. Dropping agents into the Baltic states. Dozens of them, literally dozens of them. The poor buggers were tripping over each other in the forests of Courland.’

‘Poor buggers?’

‘Well . . . they none of them lived, did they?’

This was my cue to shut up and listen. And, forbidden to write anything down, to take all the mental notes I could.

‘It was your lot came up with the idea. Fucking CIA. So happens that at the end of the war we had ships from the Reich navy intact. Everything Jerry hadn’t managed to scuttle in the Baltic. E-boats mainly, light, fast surface craft. Used to skim along at one hell of lick.

It was a Russian irritation to harass fishing in international waters in the Baltic. The CIA decided we could redeploy these boats in the pretence we were protecting local fishermen working out of the British Zone, and every so often we’d nip right up to the coast and drop off agents. I can still smell the sticky mud banks on the Latvian coast, standing up to me ankles in it in pitch darkness. All I have to do is close my eyes and I can smell the shit and seaweed stench. Ahh . . . me . . . that bit worked fine. Clockwork. In and out before old Ivan could blink.

Operation Plumduff. I called it that. It was designed to get agents into the Baltic states, gather intelligence and become . . . I dunno what to call them . . . rallying points for resistance? The spearhead of a counter-revolution? What were we thinking of? Seventy-four men to start a counter-revolution? Madness, utter madness. For a year or so I kidded myself it was working well. I suppose it’s possible they weren’t on to us from the start. But they were. They knew our every move. They set up a fake resistance group in the forests; they’d make contact with the people we dropped, nab ’em, turn ’em or shoot ’em. Worst of it is I reckon some of our chaps are still in Russian gulags to this day.

‘We used blokes we’d gathered up in the war years. Some of them had been refugees in England since the Thirties. And we used blokes who’d fled west as the Red Army took everything in its stride in ’45. And we used Germans. We used Nazis. One of them was an SS Standartenführer. Y’know what that is? Full-blown bloody colonel. Jackboots, death’s head insignia, the whole caboodle. A man with the blood of thousands on his hands. He told me he’d torched entire villages in Poland as they retreated.

‘Anyway . . . a few came back to us with cock and bull stories the KGB had hammered into them, most we never saw again. By 1951 it was obvious to me it had all gone to hell in a handcart. Our blokes were telling the KGB everything they knew once they got nabbed. But there was more than that. The KGB knew everything. They’d known everything from the start. Looking back I think the only reason they didn’t grab me is because it would have wound up the operation on the spot, and the longer we went on sending men in there the bigger fools we were making of ourselves. If I hadn’t called a halt to the op we might well have sent hundreds of agents in there. I mean, why would they shoot the goose that was laying golden eggs for them?

‘Of course, your lot played hell. I pulled the plug ten days before Burgess and Maclean packed their bags. Great timing on my part. Utterly unplanned. The CIA droned on about England leaking like a sieve. And MI6 had the perfect cover story. Two spies who were already out of the bag. No need to look further.’

A pause while he topped up his Scotch. In too serious a mode now to bother with the toy crane. He didn’t offer me one. He was totally self-absorbed and silent, sitting with both hands wrapped around the glass.

‘Mr Bentinck. Which one was it? Burgess or Maclean?’

‘Neither. Maclean didn’t know about this and Burgess didn’t know about anything. I think the silly sod saw defection as a kind of holiday. Thought he’d be back when his traveller’s cheques ran out. No, it was neither of them. And before you ask it wasn’t Philby either. And it wasn’t that tosser Blunt. I knew who it was. I just couldn’t prove it.’

Another long pause. Another gulp of Scotch.

‘He’s still alive. Not in the service any more, of course. Bit long in the tooth for that. No. He picked up his gong a few years ago. Enjoys a touch of fame. Plenty of boards to sit on. A small role in public life. Enough to make his wife the darling of the WI and keep her opening church fetes for the rest of her days. No peace for the wicked, eh?’

At last the penny dropped.

‘And you’re going to name him?’

‘Of course I’m going to fucking name him!’

‘So,’ said Syd. ‘We might have a libel problem.’

‘Not according to Bentinck. He thinks the guy will just come clean.’

‘What makes him think that?’

‘He’s been in touch, apparently.’

‘Apparently?’

‘I have only his word for that.’

‘And the book proposal?’

‘He’s working on that.’

‘Apparently?’

We met in time for the 2.30 at Sandown Park. A Thursday, early that September.

Likely Lad came in at evens. Bentinck had nagged me to put a hundred on the nose. So, I doubled my money.

Then he urged me — I needed no nagging by this time — to join him in backing an outsider. Scary Mary at 16 to 1.

‘A hot tip.’

‘From whom?’

‘That would be telling.’

‘Aha.’

‘For fuck’s sake, boy. I’m an old spy. People tell me things. Bit like being a priest when you come to think about it. Every bugger’s always bursting to tell you something. Spies don’t have to spy, they just have to listen.’

I was riffling through — counting would not be the word — a wad of notes amounting to three thousand pounds when he slapped down an envelope in the middle of my stash.

‘There you go, hippie. Your cup runneth over. Call me tonight.’

He went his way. I went mine. I found myself alone on the train back to Waterloo.

All the same the power of paranoia was overwhelming. I couldn’t take his proposal out in a public place. Could I? But the public place was empty . . . just some tweedy piss artist snoring off a racing lunch at the far end of the carriage. But what about the Official Secrets Act and all that guff? I had always assumed Bentinck and I would be breeching it. Not that I’d ever been asked to sign it. It’s an odd law that you have to sign up for. Not guilty of theft, rape, murder . . . can’t catch me. I never signed on the line. Made no sense to me.

I read it when I got home. This made no sense to me either.

Two double-sided, handwritten A4 . . . no, two foolscap pages, the old rogue was still using fucking foolscap . . . that said absolutely nothing.

I called him.

‘Mr Bentinck. What happened to all your stories . . . I mean about life in the field?’

‘Bit early for that, don’t you think?’

‘No, I don’t. We have to give them something. I mean something else.’

‘My childhood didn’t interest you?’

It did. I realised how he’d acquired his facility with languages. An English childhood cut short when his shit of a father wrapped two and a half tons of 4.9 litre Armstrong-Siddeley round a tree and his mother married her lover on the spot and whisked young Bentinck and his baby half-sister off to Zurich. But . . .

‘And Oxford?’

No. Oxford had bored me silly. My own year there, as well as his. His had been spent necking yards of ale and lobbing bread rolls at oiks. Mine had been spent scrabbling around for meaning in the syphilitic selling violets . . . whatever.

‘And banking?’

Absofuckinlutely not. Boring, boring, boring.

‘Not really.’

‘It’s a major part of my life. Or did you think I paid for a house in the Boltons by selling whelks from a stall in the Mile End Road?’

‘Mr Bentinck . . .’

‘Send it out. You have the contacts. You’ve done bugger all else but boast about your contacts. And if you haven’t got the contacts, then what fucking use are you to me?’

He hung up.

This was before the invention of the PC, and well before the invention of the laptop. I sat up that night and typed out, cleaned up, polished Bentinck’s pitch on my Olivetti manual typewriter. I could write it for him . . . Tell what he had told. I could not square the morality of that. He was my client . . . Syd had impressed upon me the duty of care. I could send out his proposal. I could decline to send out his proposal, but I couldn’t overrule him on the matter of content. Besides, one curt, snappy rejection letter and I could get him to revise and rethink.

I’d send it to Jenny Broome at Nathan Wolowitz and Parker. I’d no idea who Parker was or ever had been. Nathan was one of those Eastern Europeans who’d landed in England as refugees from Hitler and had come to dominate London publishing in the post-war years. Nathan was the kind of man to publish Bentinck, and Jenny was the kind of woman not to. I’d hear from her pretty quick. And it would be curt and snappy.

Paranoia tiptoed up to my window yet again. I delivered Bentinck’s proposal by hand. Walked over to Great Russell Street in my lunch hour and dropped it off at reception.

At seven, when I stepped through the door of my flat in Primrose Hill, a cop sucker-punched me and I went down and out. I flatter myself a smaller man might have been down for longer. But down is down. When I sat up the world was topsy-turvy. They’d thrown everything I owned on the floor and kicked in the cones of my new speakers.

The cop set a chair upright with one hand and with the other grabbed me by the shirtfront and hauled me into it. I weigh 180. I was tossed like a leaf.

‘Where is it?’

The temptation to ask ‘Where is what?’ I readily dismissed. He’d only hit me again.

‘On the desk in my office.’

‘All of it?’

‘All there is. Nothing I imagine you haven’t seen already today.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I have Mr Bentinck’s handwritten proposal and a carbon of the typed version. They differ only in so far as I cleaned up the custard stains and his punctuation.’

Another cop emerged from my bedroom. Smaller than the first, but dressed the same. Like two comic coppers in a Daily Express Giles cartoon — trench coat and trilby, regardless of the weather, and shoes I had learnt were referred to as beetle-crushers.

He was higher in rank, I guessed, but they weren’t offering any introductions.

Cop Two righted another chair and sat opposite me. I could smell pipe tobacco, Old Spice and NHS dentistry.

‘Delighted to hear you’re not trying to be a smart alec, son. Sensible of you not to be asking about warrants and such. National Security, after all. Warrants mean nowt where the defence of the realm is concerned. So happens I’ve read nowt. So, why don’t you tell me what’s on your desk?’

‘If this is business, why not make an appointment and come to my office?’

An exchange of glances between them. One of them definitely meaning ‘Shall I thump him again, boss?’ . . . the other more quizzical. He was weighing up the idea.

Then:

‘Why not? We’ve found bugger all here.’

‘I’m free at ten.’

‘Make it nine, you lazy little sod.’

He leaned in closer. Dropped his voice.

‘And don’t think you’re getting off lightly. We know all about you. Draft dodger. Fuck with us and you might find yourself on a plane to Vietnam.’

Please. This was a red rag to a bull.

I whispered back, ‘The war ended ten years ago. Carter pardoned me in ’79 and if you know of any extradition treaty between the UK and the USA that covers military service . . . then you’re way ahead of me.’

There. That was telling him.

There. That was his pal knocking me sideways with a punch that lifted me off the chair. Me and my big mouth.

I lay there, tasting blood, staring at the beetle-crushers.

‘Dearie, dearie me, just when we were getting along so nicely. Nine o’clock, son. Don’t be late.’

I was up half the night clearing up the mess. I could weep for the speakers. I could weep for the albums. One of the bastards had taken a pocket knife to ‘Death and the Maiden’.

Roger George Cholmondoley Bentinck, this had better be worth it. Don’t be late? Damn right. There was three grand in cash locked in my desk drawer. I wasn’t going to let the flatfoots get their hands on that.

I got in at eight.

Vera Buckett damn near dropped her fag when I handed her the money.

‘In the ladies, Vera. Take twenty for your trouble.’

On the dot of nine, she phoned through that two gentlemen were in reception.

They came into my office. I had the Compleat Bentinck in a brown cardboard folder on the desktop. I spun it round so they could see the title.

Unnamed Memoir by Roger Bentinck.

They sat at the back of my office. Boss read the file, Thumper scraped his nails with a pocket knife — doubtless the same one he’d taken to Schubert.

‘Is this it?’

‘Yep.’

‘School and Oxford and his dad and all that?’

‘Yep.’

‘You let us turn over your gaff over for this? You’re a twat.’

‘So people keep telling me. And I don’t recall being able to stop you trashing my flat.’

The file was slapped back on my desk. I could see the cogwheels turning. He was weighing whether or not to search my office. I put my money on ‘not’. I might be a piece of Yankee shit to him, but the Hon. Syd was known to them. He had his reputation. Not that they wouldn’t mess with him, but they’d not do it lightly.

When they’d gone the Buckett woman stood in my doorway, blew a smoke ring and moved on, just as the phone rang.

It was Jenny Broome.

‘Jack, is this some sort of joke? You’ve been hyping this to me for over a month. It’s . . . it’s bollocks.’

‘I know.’

‘Then why send it me?’

‘Jenny, would you mind putting this in writing. Give me something I can show Bentinck.’

‘What?’

‘Just a quick critique and rejection on headed paper.’

‘You bastard. You’re just using me to flush him out.’

‘Yep.’

A pause. She was seriously considering telling me to get lost. I was wondering whether I dared tell her that Bentinck knew the name of the Fifth Man. Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt and Guess Who.

‘You owe me, Jack Turner. You fucking owe me.’

‘Agreed. Jenny . . . you haven’t had any . . . visitors today or yesterday?’

‘Eh? You mean the filth? No . . . Why would they bother with this?’

‘Only because they don’t know what it is yet.’

‘I suppose you’re right. Deal with that if and when it arises. Meanwhile, you owe me lunch. Syd never has any trouble getting into The Ivy. You can damn well take me there.’

About an hour passed. Syd was never in before ten. Why not? He owned the ‘joint’, as they say in Hollywood.

He looked at my bruises.

‘Anything I should know about?’

‘Nothing you hadn’t predicted.’

Around 11.30 Syd returned with his Bart Simpson Mug full of milky coffee and a packet of McVitie’s Hobnobs, to which he was all but addicted.

‘It’s not an Official Secrets matter.’

I could not hear a question there.

‘We may take it as read. Bentinck has signed. You haven’t, and never should. But there’s this new thing . . . the Obligation of Confidentiality or some such guff. He hasn’t signed that either. Be amazed if anyone who left the service in the Sixties had. So, what have they got?’

‘The suspicion, chasing the certainty, that what Bentinck has to say will violate the Official Secrets Act. The identity of a Russian mole is a secret . . . but is it an official secret? Is it a British secret or a Russian secret, and if the latter, who gives a toss?’

‘Couldn’t have put it better myself. Do have a Hobnob.’

The following day I got Jenny’s rejection letter, raised an eyebrow and forwarded a copy to Bentinck. The day after that Bentinck rang me.

‘“Unrevealing to the point of tedium”! “The life and times of another old English bore”!’

Weeeell . . . I did feel Jenny had overdone it just a tad.

‘Who is this fucking cunt?’

‘Quite possibly the best young editor in London.’

‘Then who’s the best old editor in London?’

‘Mr Bentinck, that’s not the —’

‘You sent it out half-cock to some young twat who doesn’t know she’s born yet . . . You pass me off as an old bore with nothing to say for himself. What in God’s name do you think you’re playing at?’

‘Mr Bentinck, you asked me to send it out as it was. I told you beforehand . . .’

‘You told me fuck all. All you’ve done is boast that you know every fucking publisher in fucking London. And who do you know? Some man-hating fucking bluestocking!’

‘Mr Bentinck, that proposal needed more work. I told you that.’

‘Then why did you send it out, Sonny Jim?’

‘Because you told me to.’

‘Fuck you. Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou!’

The fuck yous would fill a page and why waste paper? I listened and when he finally paused for breath I attempted another polite interjection, but he charged in with . . .

‘You’re fired!’

A couple of minutes passed.

Vera Buckett appeared, fag adroop on lower lip, carrying an ashtray. She always carried an ashtray if she came into my office. Her one concession to a non-smoker was not not to smoke, it was not to flick ash on the carpet.

‘OK, Vera, let’s hear it.’

‘Are you glad he’s gone?’

‘Relieved might be the word.’

‘I see. But now you’ve no clients. You are, in fact, a waste of space. Literally so.’

‘You have anything else you want to share with me?’

‘Share? Share! Oh you fucking hippies. Yes, I’ll “share”’ (both hands went up to frame the word in speech marks) ‘this with you: there’s no victory in him firing you or you firing him. The only success was getting the bloody book out of him. Any less and it’s a waste of your time and a waste of Syd’s space. We might as well move the photocopier back in.’

‘What would you suggest? I already go through the slush pile every day to so little purpose.’

‘Move yer arse. You’re supposed to be the Crown Prince of Lit Fic. Take on some clients and do it quick. Stop messing around with no-hopers who don’t want to know you . . .’

‘There were only three.’

‘Stop messing about and start building your list. Forget promising and go for established.’

‘And how — from the elevated view of a secretary and receptionist — would you suggest I set about doing this?’

‘You little gobshite! Poach ’em! Get out there and nick other buggers’ clients! And you dare talk to me like that again and I’ll rip yer bollocks off!’

Well. That was me put in my place.

Poach ’em.

So I did.

Writers are fickle creatures. Most have no loyalty whatsoever. Most live in a constant state of feeling ill-served and unappreciated.

I rang half a dozen writers I’d published in my two years at Hamilton Hardy and announced that I was jumping ship. Not — note — that I had already jumped ship. That in itself might have appeared disloyal. And since all had reasons aplenty to be dissatisfied with the service they thought they weren’t getting from Bloggs and Brown or Bottle and Briggs (make up a name, it really doesn’t matter) . . . by the end of the week Hawes Greene had six new clients on the books, including a Somerset Maugham winner, a Hawthornden and two hotly tipped to win the Booker one day.

I felt free of a quagmire . . . a quagmire that was Bentinck. I don’t think I can honestly say that I liked any of these writers any better than I liked Bentinck, but they weren’t going to suck me into a bog of contradictions. Just flatter their fragile egos with soft lullabies of genius and all would be well.

I received a postcard from Toby Mornay’s agent. A postcard in an envelope. It read: Fuck you!

I received a postcard not in an envelope from Jeremy Crich’s agent: You’re welcome to him, and I hope you lose as much sleep over him as I have.

And as I’d managed to bag Crich at the point when he was ready with a new and uncontracted novel, I was in business. Or as they say back home, I wuz cookin’.

Yes. All would be well.

Two weeks or more passed.

I was in the office late. Even the Buckett had gone back to Dagenham.

Whoever was last to leave ended up with the direct line. So when the phone rang I answered.

‘Is that Hawes Greene?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sorry to be calling at this time of night. I’m trying to find Jack Turner.’

‘Speaking.’

‘Mr Turner . . . I’m Molly Bentinck.’

A young voice . . . a beautiful voice . . . a daughter omitted from Who Ain’t Who . . . a sister?

‘I’m Roger’s wife.’

Fuck me!

He was wedged halfway up the stairs, where a small landing enabled a 180-degree turn in the staircase. He’d fallen, collapsed, taken a snooze, whatever, at this point and Mrs Bentinck could not budge him.

He was wearing shirt, Y-fronts and socks. No trousers. She was wearing a neat little black skirt and a highly starched white blouse. She’d kicked off her high heels to get more purchase on 200 and more pounds of Mr Toad.

She was maybe five years older than me. A looker.

‘He just flopped,’ she said. ‘I tugged and shoved for a bit, then his eyes opened once. He said, “Get Jack,” and I was left wondering who Jack was. I found your letter from a week or two back among the rot and rubbish on the dining table and took a chance.’

Get Jack? Why, for God’s sake?

‘You want to move him now?’

‘If you wouldn’t mind, Mr Turner. He is between us and the loo.’

We got him to the next floor, into a bedroom, onto a bed that screamed with his weight.

It was, in utter contrast to his small back room, clean and ordered.

She caught me looking.

‘It’s my house. Been in my family since it was built. I told him when he wanted to move in all the crap from his mother’s house after she died that he could have two rooms on the ground floor, and that’s all. The rest he is to keep clean and tidy. He pays for the cleaner, who is never allowed into his pigsty at the back. He’s also responsible for the exterior. But you can see for yourself how conscientious he is about that. I don’t suppose you know what happened to the door knocker?’

‘I don’t. And I can assume you don’t live here?’

‘Good Lord, no. I live in Tuscany. I left Roger six years ago. Let me put the kettle on and I’ll fill you in. I suppose he’ll have tea. Somewhere.’

Back in Bentinck’s allotted portion of the house, among a lifetime supply of tinned desserts . . . custard, rice pudding, tapioca, semolina and some stuff called Angel Delight, which he whipped up in a Cuisinart — I had known him to spatter both of us in butterscotch — she found a packet of Typhoo.

‘You may imagine, I was not the first Mrs Bentinck.’

‘Well, there are no Mrs Bentincks in Who’s Who.’

She said nothing to this — a ‘so what?’ shrug.

‘He married Penny when he was twenty-five. She was taken ill while he was running some daft mission in the Baltic. He put the job first. Assumed she’d pull through. Dashed back at the last minute to find she’d died a couple of hours earlier. Never forgave himself. He had betrayed her — that was his word. Betrayed her in the service of a cause that in itself was a betrayal.

‘Had plenty of girlfriends after that, but he wouldn’t marry anyone until he was out of the service. Didn’t want to see the pattern repeated. Either something would happen while he was away or something would happen to him. Married again in ’67. Swiftly followed by an acrimonious divorce in ’69.

‘We met in ’72. You may find this hard to believe. In his late forties, he was still slim. Harder still, he was still charming . . . still . . . intriguing. Or perhaps you can see that. Perhaps that’s why you’re here?’

A few teacups later a voice from above bellowed, ‘Molly!’

Molly said, ‘The kraken awakes.’ And went to see what.

Five minutes later she returned with half a dozen foolscap sheets — hand-written on both sides.

‘For you,’ she said.

I leafed through them.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Read. I’ll make more tea. I might even warm up a can of tinned milk mush.’

‘If I’m to read more Rogerisms, I’d prefer a whisky.’

‘Why not? Why not, indeed?’

Instead of reaching for the half-empty bottle of Bells, she reached into her travel bag and pulled out a duty-free litre of Laphroaig.

OK, for Laphroaig I might just get through twelve sides of Bentinck-scrawl. By page four I was asking for a top-up.

It was rant. Twelve pages of semi-coherent drivel ending with ‘maurice oldfield was not a poof!’ in capital letters.

‘Well?’

‘Mrs Bentinck, did you know Maurice Oldfield?’

‘Yes. And I was at his funeral only a couple of years ago, as it happens. A good friend. So, Roger’s springing to his defence is he?’

‘Lurching would be more the word.’

I showed her the last line.

‘Oh. Well, there has been a lot of nonsense put about by those third-rate hacks who specialize in writing about MI6, hasn’t there? Maurice was gay . . . ergo Maurice was a security risk . . . ergo Maurice was a double agent. All bollocks, of course.’

‘That’s pretty much what Mr Bentinck says.’

‘And that’s his book, is it?’

‘No, Mrs Bentinck. It’s not a book. At best it’s a letter to The Times.’

‘Bad as that, eh?’

‘Why is he doing this?’

‘What? Defending a mate?’

‘No . . . that I do understand. The rest of it. Wanting to write a book at all. I don’t know what he believes. I don’t know what he’s saying.’

She crossed the room, picked up the cover of Bentinck’s Meccano kit and handed it to me. The two little boys in the half-light, the paternal gaze of a loving father.

‘It’s all there. Everything he believes in is in that picture. Everything about the England he defends. Look at the boys. Socks pulled up, garters in place, ties straight, hair combed . . . Dad’s even wearing a suit. And they produce something practical and useful and probably grow up to be District Officers in the far reaches of the Empire.’

‘All that in a box lid?’

‘Yes, all of it.’

‘Then why betray it?’

‘Ah . . . you think writing about it is betraying it?’

‘I . . . don’t know . . .’

‘Roger is defending it. If he ever writes his book he will be defending these values by exposing their betrayal.’

‘And that was . . .?’

‘I think you’ll find he blames you people for that.’

‘He already has.’

‘Which is why I was surprised he wanted an American anywhere near this. But . . . you’re one of the very people he’s trying to get through to, aren’t you? It’s addressed to you. It’s personal. After all, so much of it is. The betrayal is personal. He is so unforgiving.’

‘The first Mrs Bentinck?’

‘Exactly. A private betrayal matched by a public one. He cannot write about the former, so he writes about the latter. He berates the West and America in particular for betraying Eastern Europe. You should hear him on the subject of Berlin.’

‘I have.’

‘Or on Vietnam, for that matter.’

‘That he doesn’t much mention.’

‘Draft dodger, eh? This may surprise you, but in Roger’s eyes the only honourable thing to do about Vietnam was dodge. To go was to betray. To give false hope was to lie. To pitch in and pull out was to lie. He’s no respecter of cowards, don’t get me wrong. But he honestly believes it was better not to have got involved in the first place. I watched the final evacuation of the embassy in Saigon on the BBC with him. He was in tears. All he could say was “Betrayal”.’

Molly Bentinck kept a flat in St John’s Wood. We let Bentinck sleep it off and she drove me home. Just before I stepped out of the car she asked, ‘There’s nothing you can do with what he’s writing?’

‘Mrs Bentinck, he fired me.’

‘I think you’ll find not.’

Oh God, could I bear his ‘not’?

‘Do keep in touch, Mr Turner.’

For 200 quid the guy in the Edgware Road replaced my woofers. Woofers? I know. Don’t ask. Then I went back to Great Marlborough Street and spent another 200 on albums.

Pasta and punctuation. Lunch with Jeremy Crich. A man with an infinite ability to manipulate the comma. I had known him to ring up, asking to revise over the phone, only have him move commas around, swap semicolons for en rules, en rules for em rules and blah-de-blah.

He handed over Hackney Year Zero, a hard-hitting satire of his life and hard times at the proletarian ‘coalface’ in one of London’s less fashionable boroughs (where they can’t spell ‘cappuccino’), to which he had moved from Hampstead (where they can spell ‘cappuccino’), with, ‘Can you get me a hundred grand for this? I need to get me teeth fixed.’

When I got back to Henrietta Street there was a note on my desk from the Buckett:

Bentinck phoned for you.

Said something like ‘Mozart, 2 Joannas. 8.30 tomorrow night.’

Is this spook code of some sort? Vera.

I took Mr Bentinck a present. Two tins of Bird’s Custard. That’ll learn me. He pulled a face at the conjunction of two words on the label I’d never even noticed: ‘low’ and ‘fat’.

Molly had left the Laphroaig. He poured for us both, said, ‘Pin back yer lug’oles’ and pulled a long-playing Microgroove 33⅓ rpm record from its dusty paper sleeve. We had moved up from shellac to vinyl. I did not ask what. Mozart, that much I knew. Two pianos, that too. He’d fill in the rest later.

A lively piece. Lots of elbow on the strings. But no pianos. A couple of minutes pass and just as I’m thinking he might have picked up the wrong record a piano crashed in with a riff (rock’n’roll has riffs, why not Mozart?) that knocked me for six. Twenty minutes of bliss followed. I cannot even hear him breathe. I can forget that I am, for reasons which passeth the understanding of Our Freud, a prisoner of a fat toad with an inordinate ability to get under my skin. I am . . . bound by the beauty.

‘Well, what do you think, hippie?’

‘I think: can I live without this? Who was it?’

‘Concerto for Two Pianos in E flat. K whatever. Clara Haskil and . . . and . . . and some other bloke whose name I can’t read without me specs. Recorded about thirty years ago, I reckon.’

He didn’t mention his hymn to Oldfield. I could only assume that Molly had told him what I’d said and he’d shelved it. He made no reference to passing out — trouserless in Chelsea — halfway up the stairs. I could only assume he had little or no memory of it. He made no mention of screaming bloody murder at me down the phone and I was damn sure he remembered that.

We played the Mozart again. He showed me a dumper truck he was building with his Meccano kit, and as the evening struggled to its grateful close I said, ‘Mr Bentinck, about the book idea . . .’ . . . with every intention of concluding on ‘Let’s just forget it’, but he cut me short with:

‘Working on it.’

I got Jeremy Crich his hundred grand. (What fools these mortals be.) Syd congratulated me and the Buckett, for once, refrained from calling me a twat.

Syd said to bring him up to speed on the spookery. I related to him much of what Molly Bentinck had told me.

‘It’s a Chinese box. Layer upon layer. I’m not at all sure I understand the half of this.’

Syd said, ‘Perhaps I do.’

‘Betrayal is not the simple word I thought it was.’

‘Oh, I think it is. You’ll recall I said Bentinck’s grandfather Mad Mike Cholmondoley had been court-martialled in the Boer War. Cashiered. That is military justice. Much more prevalent is military injustice. The textbooks record the fate of Mad Jack . . . retired to his estate in Rutland and spent the rest of his life slaughtering pheasants and careering across the farms of his tenants in pursuit of the uneatable, till the day he fell off the horse and broke his neck. No book records the fate of the eighty-odd enlisted men under his command who came back wounded . . . half of them missing limbs . . . but you can bet your last farthing there were no pensions, no free medical care . . . no nothing.

‘I think your Mr Toad probably feels the injustice inherent in military folly. It is possible, though I doubt he would say so as clearly, that Bentinck regards everything MI6 has done since the Cold War began as folly, that they waste people just as surely as any crazy cavalry charge. That’s the betrayal. “Homes Fit for Heroes” was a betrayal. If you served in my war, most of the Fifties was a betrayal. If you served in that farce down in the Falklands, you’re being betrayed even as we speak. Bentinck is a patriot. I see no reason to doubt that. Bentinck is betraying those who politick with patriotism and the safety of the realm. He believes in both, needless to say. In his own mind Bentinck is only betraying the betrayers.’

‘Wheels within wheels.’

‘No. It’s simple, far simpler than you think.’

Bentinck’s next choice, the next module in my education in music, was simplicity itself. He had me sit through all six of Johann Sebastian Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello, played by Pablo Casals, relieved (but that honestly isn’t the word) by a Brunello di Montalcino 1976 and a bowl of butterscotch Angel Delight.

‘There’s an arrogance comes with the job. I know you think I’m an arrogant prick, but the kind of man who’ll do what I did will always think he’s right, otherwise he wouldn’t bloody do it. But it goes beyond that. The Deputy Head of MI6, back in the Fifties I mean, took arrogance to a new level. He spoke for many of us. You might even think he spoke for me. He sent around a memo, this would be twenty-five and more years ago, so leaked I’m amazed it didn’t end up in the Daily Mirror . . . It said that SIS was now the guardian of moral and intellectual integrity, that the Cold War had induced a moral stalemate as deadlocked as the nuclear stalemate of Mutually Assured Destruction. It was down to us. We were the front line, the Home Front . . . We were . . . everything.’

‘Stealth Knights in Teflon armour?’

‘Sneer if you like. Indeed, you may be right to sneer. It was in itself a delusion.

‘It’s like a law of physics. Some action and its inescapable reaction. We set up an organization like SIS . . . whose job is to serve and protect. How many police forces in the world have that as their motto, I wonder? But . . . the laws of physics prevail. Once set up, any organization has as its first principle its own survival. It can flip from serving the state to become the internal enemy of the state if it feels itself threatened. But since it still is the secret servant of the state it will feel wholly justified in its actions and in keeping them secret. Secrecy is not just its modus operandi, it is its very nature.’

A phrase from my student days came back to me: Lit 101.

‘“The law is the law, even when it’s wrong.”’

‘Eh?’

‘It’s Kafka. Either in The Trial or one of the short stories. Writing about the secret police.’

‘German?’

‘Czech Jew. But he wrote in German.’

‘Hitler get him?’

‘No. He died years before.’

‘Ah . . . one of the lucky ones.’

I had no idea where this was going and left the next moment to him.

‘And so . . . you see . . . we have a self-perpetuating, self-justifying body that has arrogated to itself the moral guardianship of the state . . . and what you end up with is a state within a state. A secret state. It will work against our enemies, wherever perceived, and because, as you said, it does not cease to be the law even when it is wrong, it doesn’t question what it does. It doesn’t question what it achieves.’

‘And you do?’

‘Shall we say I have come to.’

‘And you question what has been done? You question the achievement?’

‘Let me ask you . . . You’re a child of the Cold War. It’s your world. What do you think thirty-five years of espionage has achieved? Are we a safer world? Are we one inch nearer to Moscow? Does a single Russian soldier stand one inch beyond the spot he stood on in May 1945?’

Why hesitate? He surely knew exactly what I was thinking.

‘I think it’s all a game that wasn’t worthwhile, that achieved nothing. And if you now tell me that this not stalemate it is equilibrium, I shall say horsepuckey.’

‘So you think I wasted me time?’

‘You did ask.’

‘Well. At last we see eye to eye.’

I left, clutching a new foolscap summary of the book he still intended to write.

Inspector Plodder was on my doorstep. I’d sat in the back of a cab and read. Plodder had nipped ahead of me in his cop car and stood waiting, while his thug of a sergeant sat at the wheel of the car.

‘You turned over my flat so soon? I’ll be mightily pissed off if you trashed my hi-fi again.’

‘Haven’t been in.’

‘Such restraint.’

‘You’ll be showing it to me all the same.’

‘Yep. I will. In my office. Tomorrow.’

‘Nine o clock.’

‘Noon. I have to get it typed up first. There’ll be a copy waiting for you. Smile at Mrs Buckett, you might even get coffee.’

‘Glad you’re being sensible, son.’

Yeah. Two hundred quid sensible.

He read it through. So slowly that his coffee went cold.

His opinion might matter. His judgement didn’t. Bentinck had delivered much more — thumbnail sketches of all the old missions he’d told me about, enough to ring alarm bells — but Plodder would not be the judge of that. He could see spilled beans, but he’d no idea how big a crisis this might amount to. He’d have to take this back to SIS.

‘I’ll need to keep this.’

‘S’OK. It’s a copy. I have the original. Don’t ask for it. You’re not getting it.’

He weighed this up. He knew damn well he had what mattered, got up from his chair. Knocked back his cold coffee in a single gulp and crammed his hat back on.

‘I could make you, you know that.’

After he left the Buckett came in and plonked a small tin on my desk — Fuller’s Full Strength Laxative Sugar — ‘No nasty aftertaste!’

‘He asked for two sugars, so he got ’em. I ’ate coppers.’

Imagine this. A month has passed. We are into autumn. The rain is pelting down against the windows of Syd’s capacious office.

Around the table are Syd, me, Nathan Wolowitz, Jenny Broome, the Deputy Treasury Solicitor and a Mr Briggs, who has described himself merely as being from the Ministry. He doesn’t say which ministry, but it’s a phrase the rest of us take to mean spook.

Syd has made it clear that neither Jenny nor I should speak. He introduces himself as being . . . ‘in the words of Bismarck, an honest broker’. The matter is between the Government and Nathan. Between the Government and Roger Bentinck, whom I have advised not to attend, as I’m worried about words like ‘arselickers’ and ‘bunch of utter fucking gobshites’ clouding the discussion.

Nathan Wolowitz rarely made house calls. His man picked him up at home in the Bentley, drove him to the office and drove him back. He was not known to visit, but when he did it was an imperial procession. In my office two flunkeys and a chauffeur sat sipping what I hoped was unlaced Buckett-brewed instant coffee.

Nathan had not yet spoken. He was fond of nods and gestures and seemed sparing with words.

The DTS spoke first.

‘I’m afraid we can’t sanction publication of this.’

Nathan addressed his reply to the spook.

‘Why so?’

‘I’m afraid we can’t go into detail. Official Secrets Act and all that. You have signed the Act, I believe, during your time in Allied Propaganda during the war, and of course, needless to say, Mr Bentinck has signed it.’

Nathan looked briefly at Syd as though the two of them were cued.

‘Then I await your court order so restraining me. I bid you good day, gentlemen.’

He got up slowly. English manners made them rise at once. Nathan was maybe five foot four, they towered over him, but he’d wrong-footed them already. They’d not expected to be shown the door in less than two minutes.

‘Mr Wolowitz, you surely don’t want to go to court over this?’

‘Yes. That is exactly what I want. If I do not go to court then you, an unelected official and a secret policeman, will be allowed to decide what is in the public interest. I’d be happier with the courts deciding that . . . in public, such is the public interest.’

When they’d gone, Syd passed the single malt and said, ‘Jack, you have the list?’

I had. One sheet of A4 with the names of twelve other publishers who’d agree to say that they, too, intended to publish Bentinck and to share the legal costs.

Nathan glanced down it.

‘Magnus Reiter? We haven’t spoken in years. Peter Shaw? I should have said he would not deign to piss on me if I were on fire. However . . . perhaps the matter is bigger than the men. You must have done some silver-tongued persuading, young man.’

I had, but it was no time to boast.

Syd said, ‘A common front, Nathan. When it’s all over I’m sure normal service will be resumed and we can all go back to hating each other.’

Jenny Broome didn’t wait for normal service. Syd whisked Nathan off to lunch. She stood on the pavement in Henrietta Street and called me a shit.

‘Jack, what I wanted was a book. What have I got? A fucking lawsuit. You promised me the Fifth Man. What have I got? A fucking lawsuit.’

‘There’s a principle here, Jenny.’

‘Principle my arse. It’s just another boys’ game. Why don’t you stick to pissing through that damn thing instead of trying to think with it?’

Well, that was me put in my place.

The next thing, having scarcely recovered from the utter contempt of our putative editor, was to get Bentinck into the papers. If they were taking us to court, they would be doing so in the spotlight.

The Buckett came to see me. She knew my phone was searing hot from all the Fleet Street hacks that had called me in the last two days.

‘Don’t let it go to your head,’ she said.

I was not aware that I had.

‘It’s not about you. It’s about him. The agent is never the star. That’s the author.’

OK. Where was this leading?

‘They’re pestering you for interviews. Don’t give any. Get all you can for Mr Toad, but none yourself. You’re not the star . . .’

‘I heard you the first time.’

‘You’re just a facilitator. You put people together, you make a connection, you take your 10 per cent. Literary agent, estate agent. Not a deal of difference.’

‘What about secret agent?’

She told me to go fuck myself and left.

Well, that was me . . . and yadda yadda yadda.

There were dues to be paid. Tony Marks got first crack at Mr Toad. Bentinck was relaxed with him. He’d talked to him on half a dozen occasions about Maurice Oldfield. What he could talk about this time was limited: his motives for doing what he was doing; his conflict with the Government over it; but not what he was actually going to say in the book.

It went well. Tony was not the brightest bear in the woods and once or twice I stepped in to suggest a question to him, but apart from that I didn’t speak. If you look at all those photographs now, there’s usually two men in suits: Bentinck in a good bespoke that fitted, and some hack in an off-the-peg that sagged; I’m the figure usually half-cropped off by the frame — the one not wearing a suit.

After half a dozen such interviews Bentinck’s suit was fine, but the man sagged.

We went back to his house. He was muttering to himself about Rachmaninoff . . . or it could have been buggeroff . . . a confusion only solved when he fired up the hi-fi and stuck on Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto in D minor by Vladimir Horowitz. For once someone I’d heard of. He’d come out of retirement a few months ago to take up performance again at the age of eighty-two. The papers had been full of him.

‘First LP I’ve bought in years,’ Bentinck said. ‘Pour the booze after side one, will you? I need to get me feet up . . . God, I hate the Press’ . . . and his ‘fuck ’em, fuck ’em, fuck ’em’ was just audible over the brass that opened the piece . . . sounded like a French horn to me . . . but what did I know?

We sipped scotch in silence between the first and second movements. After the third . . . well that was when he’d usually talk at length, about the music, about his time in the field, whatever was uppermost in his mind.

Tonight he said, ‘Forgive me, dear boy, I must to me pit.’

And he went upstairs, leaving me to switch everything off and let myself out. I turned down the volume and played the piece over again, helped myself to a can of creamed rice pudding from his stash and left half an hour later.

It seemed to me that I had watched a kid’s balloon go pffft.

The next time we met was about ten days later. He rang me. I could no longer get him on the phone and I had assumed he’d left it off the hook because he was getting hack-pestered.

‘Tonight, 8.30. You bring a record.’

First time he’d suggested that. Perhaps he was finally certain I would not show up with the Incredible String Band or the Grateful Dead or whatever generic term stood in his mind for all the bands he’d never heard of.

I took him a novelty . . . not that I mean a joke. I mean I tried to take him something that might otherwise never have occurred to him: Debussy Preludes. OK, I knew he had them. I’d seen Walter Gieseking’s version from the Fifties gathering dust in his vinyl stacks. I took Debussy’s own version, from God-knows-when. A ‘gem’ I had found in Harold Moore’s shop.

After the custard, Bentinck said.

‘How did they do it? He never made any records. Conducted a lot, but he never recorded, and if he had they’d sound like crap.’

‘Piano roll.’

‘What?’

‘Debussy made piano rolls. Someone has found a way of playing the roll and recording the sound. It may be a machine, but effectively it is Debussy’s music as the man himself played it.’

‘Amazing,’ Bentinck said without a trace of pleasure. ‘O brave new world that has such people in’t.’

And I got ne’er a word more out of him.

More dues. I owed Jenny Broome lunch at the Ivy on Syd’s ticket. There was no way she would not collect.

‘And how is the man of the moment?’

I wasn’t sure if she was talking about me or Bentinck. She read my mind.

‘I don’t mean you. Of course I don’t mean you.’

‘Mr Bentinck is . . . down. Pffft.’

‘Really? Can’t say I’m surprised.’

‘It surprised me. It’s as though he’s lost interest. After all this time. As though he can’t be bothered any more.’

‘Try this on for size, Jack. Did it ever occur to you that your Mr Toad might be a ringer?’

‘A what?’

‘Oh God, you’ve never read a word of Edgar Wallace have you? Zero for Lit 101, Jack. A ringer. A fake. A plant. A . . . double agent, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Jenny, I’m really not following you here.’

‘Suppose he’s still working for SIS. Suppose he is a plant. A cat put among the pigeons. Put there to flush out the Left in London publishing. Well, you gave him exactly what he wanted, didn’t you? A list of every left-of-centre publisher in London who’s prepared to take on the law, the Government, the Establishment. He’s won, hasn’t he? So why wouldn’t he lose interest? Why wouldn’t he give up?’

‘Everyone knows who’s who in London publishing. What was there to be learnt?’

‘Everyone in London publishing thinks Left and lives Right. They read the Guardian, and then they vote SDP. They give to Band Aid, but they worry more about the catchment area for the local schools. It’s a quantum leap from making all the right sympathetic noises about the deserving poor to actually defying government. What have they gained? They know the sheep from the goats now.’

‘And me?’

She was stirring her soup now, not quite looking me in the eye, but I knew when the eyes lifted she’d fire point-blank.

‘You? You were his dupe.’

‘OK. OK . . . and why wouldn’t he dump me?’

‘Eh?’

‘He hasn’t. I admit I see less of him, but he hasn’t dropped me. Just at the point when you say there’s nothing more to be gained.’

‘He told you he’d name the Fifth Man, didn’t he? Well, has he? No . . . and he’s never fucking going to. He’s used you, Jack . . . and you, as ever, have used me.’

It is a happy man who sits before a pudding menu with his company credit card. Alas, that day I never got to. Come to think of it I was lucky I didn’t end up with onion soup dumped over my head. Jenny liked to freeload. To storm out of a lunch I was paying for must have stung.

Fifth Man? Worm to catch a sprat?

Jack Turner? Sprat?

Jack Turner? Twat?

The Buckett was standing in my office door, looking at me. I’d no idea how long she’d been there. The ashtray was poised in her left hand, the fag equally poised on her lower lip.

‘You was miles away.’

‘Was I?’

‘Penny for them.’

What? A penny for my thoughts? Endearment from this fucking Essex harridan? Did I look that bad?

A week or so passed.

The usual call to music came.

I went.

I have no recollection of what was on the turntable.

I watched Bentinck without hearing. The face that once had relaxed under music now had a line scored down the forehead to pinch the flesh together right between the eyes.

When whatever it was had finished, I said, ‘You’ve given up, haven’t you?’

One eye opened before the other, sized me up without the head turning.

‘Perhaps. I’m tired, my boy. Oh so tired. And I find myself ill at ease as a cause célèbre.’

‘Then what was the point of it all?’

‘The point was to make a point. The one thing we haven’t managed to do. Spin it again, Jack.’

Suddenly it all added up.

Sprat. Twat. Dupe.

I could call him out right now . . . You set me up . . . You used me . . . You betrayed me.

I didn’t. I put the record on again, his eyes closed and I slipped out silently before side one had finished.

The next summons, he said, ‘What do you have post-Stravinsky? I find I have next to nothing?’

I said I was really very busy right then, but I’d look.

I didn’t.

Sprat. Twat. Dupe.

Another couple of weeks passed.

He sent me a postcard. A photo of a man walking away from the Brandenburg Gate on the Soviet side — coincidentally the same photograph used as the cover of the new James McVey spy novel. And on the back . . .

Jack, dear boy . . . ?

It was Christmas 1986.

We had lost our court case, embarrassed Her Majesty’s Government worldwide, made a reluctant celebrity of Bentinck . . . but we had not published a book. What we had done was boost the ‘integrity’ of London publishing with a common cause that was topped only by the stand against the fatwa on Salman Rushdie a couple of years later.

The week before Christmas a small book arrived in the mail. I received books every day. Opening a book package was hardly a priority.

The Buckett slapped a pile of envelopes on my desk, but flipped the package and put her finger on the name on the back — one word, Bentinck, and a post code. After all these months.

He’d had it privately printed and was sending it out as a sort of Christmas card. Making his point. The note inside hoped I was well and added that he’d also sent copies to Jenny Broome and Nathan Wolowitz.

Thirty seconds later Jenny was on the phone.

‘Well . . . that’s the end of that then, isn’t it?’

‘I guess so. Jenny . . . I didn’t know he was going to do this.’

‘Yeah, right. Jack, the next time you have a fat toad from MI6 who tells you he’ll name names . . . take him somewhere else, will you?’

It was the evening of the next day. I was last out again, so the direct line rang on my desk.

‘Jack? It’s Molly. Could you come over to the Boltons right away?’

‘What’s wrong? Is Roger ill?’

‘No. He’s dead.’

He was in bed.

Old-fashioned enough to wear a nightshirt.

It seemed he had died in his sleep, a book on the counterpane, the reading light still on when Molly found him.

‘Have you called anyone?’

‘Just you. There’s no hurry. Is there?’

‘I suppose not. And . . . and . . . nothing suspicious?’

‘Let’s not go there, as they say these days. Roger’s health was appalling. Penny to a pound he died of natural causes . . .’

‘There are people who might find this very convenient. And just one day after he finally gets the book into print.’

She took my head in both her hands, made certain my eyes were looking into hers.

‘Don’t even think it. You hear me? Don’t even think it.’

We opened the Laphroaig and a tin of custard in Bentinck’s honour.

We sat in silence. I’d have put on music for him, but I had not the first notion of what I should choose.

After a while, Molly said, ‘Roger was a crap husband, you know.’

‘Why did you marry him?’

‘The question no woman ever wants to be asked. But since you do. I had been married once before. At what might be an early age, but what was probably typical of the early Sixties. And what I took from that marriage was a list of conditions. A checklist of that with which I would not up-put. I would not marry a boozer. I would not marry a slob. I would not marry a man who could not cook. I would not marry a man who could not support me and my, theoretical, children. If he was good in bed, that was a bonus. If he was good at DIY — jackpot. Neither was essential.’

‘And Roger?’

‘And Roger met none of those conditions. So I married him anyway.’

‘And?’

‘And . . . amor vincit omnia . . . and amor is plain fucking wrong. Roger was a crap husband. When I left him he became a friend. Not a great friend, not even a good friend, but . . . a friend. And now . . . I have lost him.’

What had I lost?

A friend?

Such a notion.

Had it ever occurred to me to think of him as a friend?

A grotesque, upper class, right-wing English Tory . . . a fat, rude, greedy drunkard . . . who despised everything I stood for . . . without despising me.

A friend I had abandoned and left to die alone. . . sprat, twat, dupe . . . betrayer.