Doris Lessing - The Sun Between Their Feet - Collected African Stories Volume Two

Every window in the street already had heads packed behind the curtains.

‘Come in,’ said he, ‘but I don’t think I have the pleasure of knowing who …’

The roll of carpet was propped in the hall, the three children sent off to play with the teddy bear in the kitchen, and the box of chocolates set aside for the lady of the house, who was out doing the week’s shopping in the High Street. The vodka was opened at once.

It turned out that it was his wife they wanted: they were interested in him only as a go-between. They wished him to ask his wife, who was an employee of the town council, to get hold of the records of the council’s meetings, and to pass these records on to them. Now, this wasn’t London, or even Edinburgh. It was a small unimportant North of England town, in which it would be hard to imagine anything ever happening that could be of interest to anyone outside it, let alone the agents of a Foreign Power. But, said he, these records are open, anyone could go and get copies – you, for instance – ‘Comrades, I shall be delighted to take you to the Town Hall myself.’

No, what they had been instructed to do was to ask his wife to procure them minutes and records, nothing less would do.

A long discussion ensued. It was all no use. The Russians could not be made to see that what they asked was unnecessary. Nor could they understand that to arrive in a small suburban street in a small English town in a car the length of a battleship, was to draw the wrong sort of attention.

‘But why is that?’ they enquired. ‘Representatives of the country where the workers hold power should use a good car. Of course, comrade. You have not thought it out from a class position!’

The climax came when, despairing of the effect of rational argument, they said: ‘And comrade, these presents, the bear, the carpet, the chocolates, the vodka, are only a small token in appreciation of your work for our common cause. Of course you will be properly recompensed.’

At which point he was swept by, indeed taken over entirely by, atavistic feelings he had no idea were in him at all. He stood up and pointed a finger shaking with rage at the door: ‘How dare you imagine,’ he shouted, ‘that my wife and I would take money? If I were going to spy, I’d spy for the love of mankind, for duty, and for international socialism. Take those bloody things out of here, wait, I’ll get that teddy bear from the kids. And you can take your bloody car out of here too.’

His wife, when she came back from the supermarket and heard the story, was even more insulted than he was.

But emotions like these are surely possible only in the lowest possible levels of spy material – in this case so low they didn’t qualify for the first step, entrance into the brotherhood.

Full circle back to Our Man in the Post Office, or rather, the first of three.

After sedulous attendance at a lot of left-wing meetings, semi-private and public – for above all Tom was a methodical man who, if engaged in a thing, always gave it full value – he put his hand up one evening in the middle of a discussion about Agrarian Reform in Venezuela, and said: ‘I must ask permission to ask a question.’

Everyone always laughed at him when he did this, put up his hand to ask for permission to speak, or to leave, or to have opinions about something. Little did we realize that we were seeing here not just a surface mannerism, or habit, but his strongest characteristic.

It was late in the meeting, at that stage when the floor is well-loaded with empty coffee cups, beer glasses, and full ash trays. Some people had already left.

He wanted to know what he ought to do: ‘I want to have the benefit of your expert advice.’ As it happened he had already taken the decision he was asking about.

After some two years of a life not so much double – the word implies secrecy – as dual, his boss in the Central Post Office called him to ask how he was enjoying his life with the Left. Tom was as doggedly informative with him as he was with us, and said that we were interesting people, well-informed, and full of a high-class brand of idealism which he found inspiring.

‘I always feel good after going to one of their meetings,’ he reported he had said. ‘It takes you right out of yourself and makes you think.’

His chief said that he, for his part, always enjoyed hearing about idealism and forward-looking thought, and invited Tom to turn in reports about our activities, our discussions, and most particularly our plans for the future, as well in advance as possible.

Tom told us that he said to his boss that ‘he didn’t like the idea of doing that sort of thing behind our backs, because say what you like about the reds, they are very hospitable’.

The chief had said that it would be for the good of his country.

Tom came to us to say that he had told his boss that he had agreed, because he wanted to be of assistance to the national war effort.

It was clear to everyone that having told us that he had agreed to spy on us, he would, since that was his nature, most certainly go back to his boss and tell him that he had told us that he had agreed to spy. After which he would come back to us to tell us that he had told his boss that … and so on. Indefinitely, if his boss didn’t get tired of it. Tom could not see that his chief would shortly find him unsuitable material for espionage, and might even dismiss him from being a sorter in the Post Office altogether – a nuisance for us. After which he, the chief, would probably look for someone else to give him information.

It was Harry, one of the other two Post Office employees attending Left Club meetings, who suggested that it would probably be himself who would next be invited to spy on us, now that Tom had ‘told’. Tom was upset, when everybody began speculating about his probable supersession by Harry or even Dick. The way he saw it was that his complete frankness with both us and his chief was surely deserving of reward. He ought to be left in the job. God knows how he saw the future. Probably that both his boss and ourselves would continue to employ him. We would use him to find out how our letters were slowly moving through the toils of censorship, and to hurry them on, if possible; his chief would use him to spy on us. When I say employ, I don’t want anyone to imagine this implies payment. Or at least, certainly not from our side. Ideology had to be his spur, sincerity his reward.

It will by now have been noticed that our Tom was not as bright as he might have been. But he was a pleasant enough youth. He was rather good-looking too, about twenty-two. His physical characteristic was neatness. His clothes were always just so; he had a small alert dark moustache; he had glossy dark well-brushed hair. His rather small hands were well-manicured – the latter trait bound to be found offensive by good colonials, whose eye for such anti-masculine evidence – as they were bound to see it, then if not now – was acute. But he was a fairly recent immigrant, from just before the war, and had not yet absorbed the mores. He probably had not noticed that real Rhodesians, in those days at least, did not like men who went in for a careful appearance.

Tom, in spite of our humorous forecast that he would be bound to tell his boss that he had told us, and his stiff and wounded denials that such a thing was possible, found himself impelled to do just that. He reported back that his chief had ‘lost his rag with him’.

But that was not the end. He was offered the job of learning how to censor letters. He had said to his boss that he felt in honour bound to tell us, and his boss said: ‘Oh for Christ’s sake. Tell them anything you damned well like. You won’t be choosing what is to be censored.’

As I said, this was an unsophisticated town in those days, and the condition of ‘everybody knowing everybody else’ was bound to lead to such warm human situations.