Gavin Lyall - The Conduct of Major Maxim

"Forget Corporal Blagg!" Agnes shouted. "Forgetall the bloody corporals inall the bloody Army! Just get it through your tiny I9i4-pattern mind that you have started a constitutional crisis! Haveyou got that, or should I send it in cipher?"

There was nothing to cause an echo in the car, already full of engine and wind noise, so it was probably only in their minds that her voice seemed to fade in throbbing waves, as across a vast canyon. Both of them were rather shaken; Maxim slowed abruptly and sat up straighter in the seat.

"I haven't lost my temper with anybody in years." Agnes was speaking through teeth clenched against any further emotion, and fumbling in her handbag. "In my job you're not supposed to. Does that dashboard lighter work?"

"I think so. I didn't know you smoked."

"I don't often. I want to now. " She rammed the lighter knob viciously, and lit her cigarette with trembling fingers. "I understand you also told George that you had a rehearsal in Rotherhithe the night before you tried to reform the Intelligence Serviceby forcemajeure. What was the score there? – one busted arm, one ruptured spleen. Had you thought about howthat might look in the public prints? Thank God Husband doesn't know about that, not yet, anyway." Her voice was small and hurried. "Stop at the next phone box, would you?"

They drove in total silence for five minutes until they found one.

Agnes got back into the car shaking her head. "Nothing new, but I've asked our people to bend an ear that way." She lit another cigarette, but now her hands were steady; Maxim drove off, changing gears very precisely.

There was still perhaps three-quarters of an hour of daylight left, but the sun was just glimpses of coppery gold between vast castles of cloud stacking up on the horizon. It was only the breeze when the car was moving that made the warm air breathable. Agnes watched the clouds, the incredible impermanent detail of the cumulo-nimbus that had fascinated all the English landscape – and seascape – artists.

"I don't get out of London enough, " she said. "You have to get out to see what thejob's really about. London doesn't give you enough reasons."

"Were you country?"

"Worcestershire. My father kept a small flat in London and commuted for the week. It made it a weekend marriage, but it seemed to work. I remember loving Friday nights, when he came home… I suppose that's usually your set-up, too."

"Usually." But this Friday he was drivingback to London. "What would you be doing now if you hadn't come down?"

"Cooking."

"Sorry. Did I get your evening wrecked?"

"No, it was only going to be me and Mozart. If I can get three or four dishes into the freezer I can do a dinner party without worrying about being home in time to cook. " Realising she'd never invited him, she moved the topic on quickly. "Do you cook?"

"I'm learning."

"Don't they teach you cooking in the Army?"

"A bit, but it mostly seems to be with rats and hedgehogs and seaweed."

"You're joking."

"No. The only cookery I got taught was survival training in the SAS."

"Lord. Do you get used to it?"

"I hope I never know." He took a deep breath. "You mentioned a constitutional crisis. Did you mean that?"

Agnes threw the last of her cigarette out of the window. "So much for preserving the beauty of the countryside… I don't think you quite realise how much money's being bet on Plainsong. If they can really get a hook into this Eismark, a member of the Secretariat and likely to be there for years, it'll be quite a coup in its very quiet way. Something the West Germans or Uncle's boys or the French couldn't do. For once there could be enough credit for everybody who wants it. Scott-Scobie, he's one of the most ambitious young men at the Forbidden City. I don't know what he wants, it could be the Permanent Under-Secretary's Department, it might be the next Director-General of Six… And Guy Husband, he's new to the Sovbloc desk; if he pulls this off in his first few months, he could become a living legend. "

"Does he want to be one?"

"Oh yes. It's their top word. What else can they want if they're in these behind-the-arras jobs? They're never going to get rich or famous, but they love thinking they'll one day be legendary to Those Who Really Know. As for Dieter Sims, I don't know much about him except that he's been building up the East German unit under Husband's wing. Maybe he'll have to be content with merely doing all the work, but there's compensations in being indispensable, too."

She looked at the few cigarettes left in her pack and then impulsively threw them all out of the window. "The hell with the countryside… The whole of what's usually called the Intelligence Community's feeling a bit frisky at the moment. I imagine you've noticed that our dear Prime Minister doesn't exactly go a bundle on us, on any of us?"

"That was why he invented my job, wasn't it?" An all-too-nearly-public scandal caused, that time, by Agnes's service had prompted the PM to appoint an Army officer to Number 10, although it hadn't prompted him to decide exactly what Maxim should do once there.

"That's right. He's always been paranoid about intelligence, seeing plots and hidden microphones and leaks to the media • •. he kept the money tight, too. Now it seems he won't bewith us for ever. He's not a well man. "

"Did George say that?"

Agnes thought long enough for Maxim to glance at her, making sure she'd heard. "No-o, not in so many words. But we have sources of our own. We're supposed to know what goes on in this country, and the PM's health is a national asset, so… But he isn't responding to treatment."

"I thought it was just bronchitis."

"By now it's pneumonia. It's probably only that old quack Hardacre feeding him the wrong antibiotics -" Agnes shared George's view of Sir Frank "- but if each course takes five days before they decide it isn't working, it can run on. He's over sixty and he's had chest trouble before. And every day he spends in bed wastes away a little more of his authority: Parliament doesn't like sick leaders, it casts them out to die on the cold, cold slopes of the House of Lords. Quite right too, of course. But that makes now a good time for a little discreet character assassination, suggest the old boy can't even control his own Private Office. That's you. "

"They're using me to try and bring him down?"

"They're using anything they can find. Yes, they're using you."

Maxim was silent for a while. "And there's nothing I can doaboutit."

"You could give up consorting with deserters and street fighting in all its forms… I realise it'll be tough, trying to cut it down, but just say to yourself-"

"None of thiswas planned, was it?"

"Oh Lordy me, no. You leave the conspiracy theory of history to the professors, and keep your eye on the opportunists. A sense of timing's always been more important than mere dishonesty."

They were on the choppy, wavelike hills before Milford, a narrow road with too much Friday evening traffic heading south, against them, for Maxim to risk trying to overtake an elderly truck in front. He resigned himself and let the car drift back to a comfortable fifty-yard gap. A fat Jaguar promptly swerved past him, closed up on the truck and started weaving in and out, forced back every time.

"Everybody's a contender," Maxim said, so softly that Agnes had to think for a moment to be sure what she'd heard.

"Aren't you?" she asked sharply. "Don't you want to run the Army? Or even a battalion?"

"I think I did once," Maxim said slowly. "But now… now I just don't know…"

Agnes let it go at that. He might go on to talking about his dead wife, Jenny, and she didn't want to hear about her. She wanted to know, she just didn't want to hear.