Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

Clarissa took to the tropics at first. It was a big adventure for both of us and for a while it seemed like paradise. She spent a good deal of time and energy making our house beautiful. Most expat residences tended to be a little dreary, filled with gimcrack furniture, gaudy ornaments, tiger skins and the like. She supervised the decoration herself and made our bungalow bright and spare with clear lines. We had a long spacious veranda and a well-tended garden. Beyond it wild and lush foliage thickened along the bank of a broad and gently flowing river. Clarissa loved the astonishing natural world that surrounded us. When we could she liked to trek through the pathways in the jungle, to bathe in a nearby river pool so clear that one could see the golden sand of its bed.

But security was very tight for most of the time we were there. The communists were targeting rubber planters. Barbed wire went up around our little compound. She began to feel trapped. Clarissa had a charming obsession with Eastern mysticism but she soon found that colonial society was actually quite dull and suburban. Once the novelty wears off one can feel trapped in a sort of exotic boredom. I had my work, of course; I was absorbed by it. But Clarissa grew tired of the languid routine, the dreary cocktail parties.

It was all very disappointing for her and I couldn’t help much. There had been a spark to our marriage at first, but that’s all it was, a flicker that could so easily go out. I tried everything I could but I don’t suppose anyone would find my company particularly exciting. Intelligence work does tend to make men dull and introspective.

She began a prolonged flirtation with a handsome veterinary surgeon attached to the Commissioner-General’s office. Alan Munro was charming, sensitive and, above all, interesting. He knew most of the native fauna and could describe it exquisitely; he played the piano and read poetry. After six months of this I finally challenged her. I couldn’t blame her for having an affair but in my professional pride I could not bear being deceived.

‘But, darling,’ Clarissa assured me, ‘Alan’s queer. I thought you knew that.’

I did not but the thought of it suddenly unsettled me. Clarissa noticed it almost at once.

‘This business about Alan has really upset you, hasn’t it?’ she asked me later. ‘I didn’t think that you were particularly anti.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘What then?’

I couldn’t say. It was a sense of uncertainty, something disjointed and fugitive. Like a fragment of encrypted intelligence. An awkwardness developed in our relationship. We bluffed our way through our time in Malaya, keeping up appearances and following the pattern of a well-bred marriage. There were other postings: to Beirut, Cairo, Berlin. But each move in the Service seemed to consolidate the distance between us. Clarissa spent more and more time back home. When I finally returned to London, what was left of our shared life had all but reduced to the politeness of strangers.

Quite by chance Clarissa had seen something of Fleming in town. She was an old friend of his wife; Ann Fleming, née Charteris, granddaughter of the 11th Earl of Wemyss, once widowed, once divorced, now on her third marriage, a formidable creature of London society and its most impressive hostess. Her parties brought together the elite of cultural and political life. She was elegant and imperious, with a sharp and outrageous tongue. Clarissa confided to me that she found Ann more than a touch frightening.

The Flemings had set up house in Victoria Square and on the night we were invited there the guests included Cyril Connolly, Lucian Freud, Hugh Gaitskell and Teddy Thursby. But no sign of Fleming. As it got late the drawing room became packed with people. I found myself standing out in the hallway. Clarissa was in the heart of the throng, looking on as Ann Fleming told a joke to James Pope-Hennessy. I heard the front door slam and someone brushed past me, calling a terse greeting to the hostess, then turning to mount the staircase.

‘Come and join us, Commander!’ a voice shouted above the drone.

The man sighed and shook his head. As he looked up I saw it was Fleming.

‘Good Lord, Trevelyan,’ he said. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘I was rather hoping to see you.’

‘Sorry. I can’t abide these gab-fests. No place for our sort of talk. Come to lunch at Boodle’s.’

We made a date and he thundered upstairs. I wandered back to the doorway. Ann Fleming was telling everybody about the routine at their house in Jamaica.

‘Well, darling, I’m in one room, daubing away with a paintbrush, and he’s in the other, hammering out the pornography.’

Over lunch Fleming confided to me that it stung a little that Ann and her literary friends rather looked down on his novels. And despite achieving some commercial success, he felt trapped by his own creation.

‘He began as a sort of empty alter ego,’ he said of his central character. ‘I mean, I even gave him a slave name. But now he’s becoming the master.’

He shrugged and made a small wave of the hand, indicating that we should change the subject. He lit another cigarette. I noticed then how much he was smoking. He seemed constantly wreathed in fumes, smouldering away.

He wanted to talk about the Rote Kapelle or Red Orchestra, a series of anti-Nazi espionage rings that had operated in Germany in the early years of the war. He was working out the background for a Russian character in his new book, a spymaster who would have had dealings with the Red Orchestra. We discussed the theory that one of the networks was a Service operation to get Ultra decrypted information about Operation Barbarossa to the Soviets in a way untraceable to our code-breaking system and in a form that might not be dismissed by Stalin as British disinformation.

‘This would have been just before the Hess flight,’ I said.

‘So?’

‘Perhaps the Service was also using the Red Orchestra to send messages to the Deputy Führer.’

Fleming smiled.

‘That’s an amusing idea,’ he said, as if it were an idea for one of his plots. ‘A faked astrological chart giving him the most auspicious time for his mad mission. A soothsayer insisting that he must go now, before it was too late!’

We laughed.

‘Of course,’ Fleming went on, in a lowered tone, ‘there was a Gestapo round-up of all the astrologers a month after he landed in Scotland. It was called Aktion Hess .’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. So if you were to find somebody who had been picked up in that and had a connection to the Red Orchestra, then you might be on to something.’

He gave me that bloodhound look of his. One was never really sure how serious he was. After lunch we wandered out on to Pall Mall: a bright boozy day, a truant afternoon. Fleming broke into a wheezing cough. All at once he looked haggard, his noble face drawn and blotched, his blue eyes dulled to grey. I stupidly asked if he was all right.

‘Yes, yes,’ he snapped, lighting up another of his hand-made cigarettes. ‘He’s killing me, that’s all.’

I didn’t know what he meant but laughed almost out of politeness. As we parted, he told me that he was off to his place in Jamaica the following week.

‘You must come and visit some time,’ he called out as a parting shot.

At this point my career in the Service was on the rise. I’d just been promoted to section chief of a new department at Head Office. A more permanent job in London meant that Clarissa and I had to decide what we were going to do about our fragile marriage. I begged her to let us give it another try. We got a charming flat in Cheyne Walk with a view of the river. Clarissa once said that she liked to watch the tide go out, because it gave her the promise of escape if things went wrong.