Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

Wheeler seemed to read my thoughts, as well as my inopportune question.

'Many never left, there they still are, terrified and wounded. Wounded unto death,' he replied. 'But please, let's not talk about the Spanish Civil War now, however immersed you were in it last night. Almost no one used their real name there, nor did a lot of people in the Second World War. Not even Orwell was called George Orwell, if you remember.' I didn't remember, and seeing that I had forgotten, he added: 'His real name was Blair, Eric Blair, I knew him slightly during the war, he was in the BBC's India Section. Eric Arthur Blair. He was born in Bengal and had lived in Burma in his youth, he knew the East well. He was ten years older than me. Now I'm infinitely older. He died young, as you know, didn't even make it to fifty.' – 'Another one,' I thought, 'another foreign Britisher or bogus Englishman.' – 'Anyway, carry on reading, otherwise we'll never get to what I want to talk about.'

'Sorry, Peter.' And I read: 'Commissioned Intelligence Corps, December 1940; Temporary Lieutenant-Colonel, 1945; specially employed in Caribbean, West Africa and South-East Asia, 1942-46. Fellow of Queen's College, 1946-53…'

'That's enough,' he said in English, which was the language we were speaking, to do otherwise would have been a discourtesy to Mrs Berry, although I found it slightly odd that she had not left the table, as she usually did, even during more conventional conversations or ones that had no clear direction, not that I knew yet which direction this one was heading in. So this was what Wheeler wanted to show me: 'Commissioned Intelligence Corps, December 1940 ('Cuerpo de Informatión in Spanish, not 'Cuerpo de Inteligencia' as a bad translator might render it, not that it matters, both refer to the Secret Service, MI5 and MI6, the initials mean Military Intelligence, a contradiction in terms some might say, the British equivalent of the Soviets' GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MGD, KGB, it has been called so many things over the years: MI5 for internal matters and MI6 for external ones, the first focused on the national and the second on the international); 'Temporary Lieutenant-Colonel, 1945; specially employed in Caribbean, West Africa and South-East Asia, 1942-46'. That was what I had just read. 'The rest doesn't concern us now,' he added, 'it's all about awards and publications and jobs, blah-blah-blah.'

'Toby worked for MI5 too, or so people said when I was teaching here,' I said. 'And he did actually confirm that to me once.'

'He talked to you about it?' asked Wheeler. 'That's strange. That's very strange indeed, you must be one of the few people he did talk to. He was in MI6 actually, we both were during the war, as was nearly everyone in Oxford and Cambridge, I mean those of us with enough training and confidence and who knew languages; besides, we would have been much less use at the front, although some of us did spend time there too. Being recruited or summoned by MI6 or SOE soon ceased to be anything very special, indeed, they started appointing us to responsible positions and tasks.' He realised that I was not familiar with the last acronym he had mentioned, so he explained: 'Special Operations Executive, it only existed during the war, between 1940 and 1945. No, I lie, it was officially dismantled in 1946. Fully and completely, well, I suppose that nothing that exists is ever fully and completely dismantled. They were executioners, fairly inept ones too: MI6 was devoted to research and intelligence, well, call it espionage and premeditated deceit; the SOE to sabotage, subversion, murder, destruction and terror.'

'Murder?' I'm afraid that when confronted by this word, no one can possibly restrain themselves and keep quiet, even less when confronted by its companion 'terror'.

'Yes, of course. They bumped off Heydrich, for example, the Reich Protector in Bohemia and Moravia, in 1942, it was one of their major successes, they were so proud of it. Two Czech resisters actually hurled the grenades at his car and machine-gunned it, but the operation was masterminded by Colonel Spooner, one of the SOE's top men. With, as it happens, little foresight, poor judgement and only average implementation, you may have heard about this episode or seen it in films, I don't know how much you know about the Second World War. Heydrich wasn't in fact mortally wounded; people thought he would pull through, and one hundred hostages were shot at dusk each day of his convalescence (although it turned out to be his death agony). He took a whole week to die, imagine, and they say he only died in the end because the poison in the bullets was so slow to take effect. That was the German story anyway: they said the bullets had been impregnated with botulin brought from America by the SOE, I don't know though, maybe the Nazi doctors messed things up and invented the story to save their own necks. If the story is true, though, and Frank Spooner did poison the ammunition, he could have smeared it with something a bit deadlier and faster-acting, don't you think, curare perhaps, like the Indians use on their arrows and spears.' And Wheeler laughed a brief, mirthless laugh: for the first time his laugh reminded me of Rylands's laugh, which was short and dry and slightly diabolical and not aspirated (ha, ha, ha), but plosive, with a clear alveolar t, as the t always is in English: Ta, ta, ta, he said. Ta, ta, ta. 'Of course the same thing would have happened if it had been quick. When Heydrich did finally die, the Nazis exterminated the entire population of Lidice, the village the SOE's agents had parachuted into in order to direct the assassination in situ. Not a soul was left alive, but that wasn't enough for the Nazis, they reduced the place to rubble, they levelled it, erased it from the map, it was so odd that strong spatial sense of theirs, unhealthy, the malice they felt towards places, as if they believed in the genius loci, a kind of spatial hatred.' – 'Franco was the same,' I thought, 'and above all he hated my city, Madrid, because it had rejected him and refused to surrender to him until the bitter end.' – 'They were a pretty inept bunch, the men from the SOE, they often acted without establishing first whether the action was worth the consequences. Some soldiers hated them, despised them even. A few months ago I read in a book by Knightley that the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris, dubbed them amateurish, ignorant, irresponsible and mendacious. Others said still worse things. In fact, their most beneficial effect was psychological, which was not without importance: knowing of their existence and their exploits (which were more legend than truth) raised the morale of the occupied countries, where they credited them with powers they lacked, and with far more intelligence, infallibility and cunning than they ever had. They made a lot of mistakes. But, as we know, people believe what they need to believe, and everything has its moment to be believed. Where were we? Why were we talking about that?'

'You were telling me about the people in Oxford and Cambridge who entered MI6 and the SOE.' Someone simply has to mention or explain a name for one to start using it almost with familiarity. Wheeler had used the same words Tupra had used, 'everything has its moment to be believed', I wondered if it was a motto, known to both. While Wheeler was talking I had been glancing over the rest of his biographical note which no longer concerned us: a man laden with distinctions and honours, Spanish, Portuguese, British, American, Commander of the Order of Isabel the Catholic, of the Order of the Infante Don Henrique. Amongst his writings, I noticed this title from 1955: The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and Richard II. – 'He's spent his entire life studying his country's interference abroad,' I thought, 'from the fourteenth century, from the Black Prince on, perhaps he got interested after his time in MI6.' – 'You said Toby belonged to the former.'