Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 3 - Poison, Shadow and Farewell

'The problem isn't the group, Jacobo,' he said. 'You'll find this out for yourself, but leaving it won't necessarily prevent what you feel has happened to you happening again. It hasn't, in fact, happened to you. It has simply happened, and that kind of thing can occur anywhere. You can't control what use other people might make of your ideas or words, nor entirely foresee the ultimate consequences of what you say. In life in general. Never. It doesn't make sense for you to ask me if I knew or didn't know: no one can ever know, in any circumstance, what they might be unleashing, and everything can be put to use, for one purpose or for its complete opposite. The risk that you might trigger misfortunes was no greater here than if you had never moved from your home, from Madrid, from Luisa's side.' I thought of Custardoy for a moment, of my hand holding the pistol and of his shattered hand. Wheeler, with his now recovered voice, was still looking at me hard, as if he were analyzing me. I couldn't help but feel observed or more than that: spied on, decoded, laid bare. Then he added, as if, having examined me, he had decided to risk a diagnosis. 'Of course you can live with it. I can assure you that, unlike Valerie, you can live with what's happened to you or with what you think of as having happened to you. Strange though it may seem, in some respects I know you better than I knew her. We've studied you, but in her case, we were too late.'

I didn't know what to ask him about first, whether about the study that had been made of me or about Valerie, his wife, whom he had already mentioned; on that particular Sunday her name was haunting his tongue. I felt that if I showed too much curiosity about her fate, he might withdraw and say again: Ah… Do you mind if I tell you another day. If that's all right.' It was possible that there wouldn't be another day. It was best if that story arrived of its own accord, if it ever did.

'I know you've studied me,' I repeated. 'I've seen a report about me in some old files at the office. Who wrote that? Was it you?'

'Oh, no, it wasn't me, I've never written reports, I've only ever given them orally, you know, keeping to the bare essentials; writing reports would be too bureaucratic, too boring. No, that must have been Toby, during the time when you taught at Oxford. He was the one who discovered you, if I may use that expression. The first to speak of you to me and, I imagine, to the others.

The one who discovered your good gifts, as I think I told you, what, fifteen years ago? Twenty? No, it can't be that long.'

It didn't seem very likely to me. It was possible, but in that case, who were the 'you' and the 'her' alluded to in the report? '… It's almost frightening to imagine what he must know, how much he sees and how much he knows,' it said. 'About me, about you, about her. He knows more about us than we ourselves do. About our characters I mean. Or, more than that, about what shaped us. With a knowledge to which we are not a party …' Perhaps 'you' was Cromer-Blake, my other Oxford friend from that time and who was also a great friend of Rylands; and then 'her' had to be Clare Bayes, my former lover, from my youth, and whom I had never seen again. But that would mean that Cromer-Blake had belonged to the group as well, and that didn't fit at all; although, who knows, in Oxford everyone pretends all the time… I didn't believe Wheeler in that respect. I assumed that he didn't want to tell me who had written that report and it was easy to attribute it to someone who was dead. Or else he preferred not to confess it had been him, that was more likely. He was always reserved, except when he dropped his guard a little, as on that Sunday.

'What happened to your wife, what happened to Valerie?' And again I had that sense of abuse or sacrilege on my lips when I pronounced her name.

This time he raised his hand to his forehead, the same hand on which he had been resting his cheek and chin, while his other hand was holding, no, gripping his walking stick. He narrowed his eyes as we short-sighted people do in order to see into the distance and no longer directed them at me, but further off, at some point in the garden or the river, through the windows.

'We miscalculated, or, rather, it never even occurred to me that a calculation needed to be made. Had the group been formed earlier, if whoever had come up with the idea had done so a few months before (Vivian, Menzies, Cowgill or Crossman, or it might have been Delmer or even Churchill himself), she might not have been allowed to go so far. Or else I wouldn't have let her. They would of course: they would stop at nothing.' And here he used the Spanish expression pararse en barras. 'But I wasn't around much during the War, I was away on those "special employments." I only came back occasionally and then only briefly, and so I probably wouldn't have been able to prevent it anyway' He stopped. He must have been thinking that he had started, but that he could still stop. But I think he decided not to make a dilemma out of it and simply to carry on. 'Valerie, like almost everyone then, wanted to make an active contribution, to help in some way. As I said, she spoke excellent German, because she had spent many summers in her childhood and adolescence with an Austrian family who were old friends of her parents, and the couple's youngest daughter was about her age; there were three other children, the eldest of whom was ten years older than her. She used to spend the summers in Melk, on the banks of the Danube, in Lower Austria, near the famous Benedictine abbey, you know, the Baroque monastery' He saw my blank look, and added, as a parenthesis: '(It doesn't matter, there's no reason why you should know it.) And the girl who was the same age as her used to spend Christmas with her here in England. When war broke out, Val thought of volunteering as an infiltrator and being sent to Germany. However, she knew she wasn't very brave and would easily have lost heart and been discovered at once. She was very willing and intelligent, but she just didn't have the right temperament for a job like that. She lacked the necessary aplomb and the ability to pretend or, indeed, to deceive. She would never have made a good spy. Contrary to popular belief, most people wouldn't or couldn't spy. Besides, she was very young, only nineteen when the War began; I was seven years older than her at the time, but now the gap in our ages is much greater, and I oughtn't to let that gap get any bigger.' As if to confirm this, he looked down resignedly at his own veined, wrinkled, freckled hand. 'She worked as a translator and interpreter for the Foreign Office until, in August 1941, all the propaganda, both black and white, was handed over to the PWE, and they recruited as many people with a good knowledge of German as they could. The Political Warfare Executive,' he explained at last, and I immediately tentatively translated this to myself: "'El Ejecutivo de la Guerra Political I thought; or "El Ejecutivo Politico de la Guerra" or perhaps "del Guerrear" would be closer.' 'I thought this would suit her well. It was quite safe. I didn't want her running any risks, excessive risks, I mean, I didn't want her to be too exposed, because obviously everyone was running risks, as you know, at the front and in the rearguard. The PWE was a secret department and purely temporary, lasting only as long as the War, and began to be dismantled as soon as Germany signed the unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945. Its name or its acronym didn't become public knowledge until much later. A lot of the people who worked there didn't even know they were working for it and thought they were just part of the Foreign Office's PID, Political Intelligence Department, supposedly a small, non-secret section of the Ministry. The people who wrote the white propaganda (the BBC broadcasts intended for Germany and occupied Europe, for example, or the pamphlets that the RAF threw out of their planes on their raids, bearing the imprint of His Majesty's Government and all that) tended to know absolutely nothing about the existence of the black propaganda, or even the grey propaganda, which was being created by their colleagues, who were working in separate divisions and in utmost secrecy. The great advantage of the black propaganda was that no one ever acknowledged that it was British in origin, and we, of course, always denied authorship. As a consequence, the people involved had a completely free hand, with almost no restraints. Remember that officially we weren't doing certain things, even though we were doing them undercover. We never admitted it, because, among other reasons, hardly anyone knew that such things were being done. When Richard Crossman talked about the PWE in the 1970s, in a newspaper article about Watergate that had a lot of repercussions at the time (I remember that Lord Ritchie-Calder and others intervened), he admitted that during the War there had been what he called "an inner Government" with rules and codes of conduct that were completely at odds with those of the visible public Government, and he added that during total warfare, this was a necessary mechanism. Crossman was one of the key figures in the PWE, although not as important as Sefton Delmer, who was the genius responsible for creating a whole new concept of psychological warfare as purely destructive. Crossman had been a member of Harold Wilson's Cabinet in the 1960s and so his views were respected and what he said couldn't easily be contradicted…'