Javier Marías - Your Face Tomorrow 1 - Fever and Spear

'Ah, yes, that's right. Well, you know our privileged reputation: they think of us as prepared and qualified in principle for any activity, regardless of whether it bears any relation to our studies or our particular disciplines. And this university has spent too many centuries intervening, via its offspring, in the government of this country for us to refuse to collaborate when it most needed us. Not that we had any choice, it wasn't like in peacetime. Although there were people who did, who refused, and they paid for it, paid very dearly. All their lives. There were double agents and traitors too, you'll have heard of Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt, the scandal gradually dribbled out during the '50s and '60s, and even into the '70s, because no one knew anything about Blunt until 1979, when Mrs Thatcher decided to break the pact she had inherited and to make public what he had confessed in secret fifteen years before, thus completely destroying him and stripping him of everything, starting, ridiculously enough, with his title. Anyway, there were so many people involved, it's hardly surprising that four traitors should have emerged from our universities, fortunately the four came from the other place, not ours, and that's worked silently in our favour for the last half-century.' – 'Here too,' I thought, 'spatial malice, the punishment of place.' – 'Well, I say four: the Four of Fame from the Ring of Five, but there must have been many more.' – I didn't understand what he was referring to, but this time I gave no sign of my ignorance, not even by my expression, I didn't want to have to interrupt again. 'Ring' in English can also mean the kind of ring you wear on your finger. – 'I joined, Toby joined, as did so many others, and it's remained quite common practice, even after the war, they've always needed all kinds of expertise and have sought it out in the best and most appropriate places. They've always needed linguists, decoders, people who knew languages: I don't think there's anyone in the sub-faculty of Slavonic Languages who hasn't done some work for them at some time. Not in the field, of course, they haven't gone on missions, anyone working in Slavonic languages was already too marked out by his profession to be useful to them there, it would have been tantamount to sending a spy with a sign on his forehead saying "Spy". But they have used them to do translations, to act as interpreters, to break codes, authenticate recordings or polish accents, to carry out phone taps and interrogations, in Vauxhall Cross or in Baker Street. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, of course, now they don't need them so much, it's the turn of Arabists and Islamic scholars, they have no idea yet just what's hit them, they won't get a moment's peace.' – I thought of Rook with his massive head, the eternal translator of Tolstoy and the alleged and unlikely friend of Vladimir Nabokov, and about Dewar, a.k.a. the Ripper, the Butcher, the Hammer and the Inquisitor (poor Dewar and his insomnia, and how unfair all those nicknames were), a Hispanist who, as I discovered, could also read Pushkin in Russian, delighting in those iambic stanzas, either read out loud or to himself. Old acquaintances from the city of Oxford in which I had lived for two years – although I was only ever passing through – and with almost all of whom I had had no further contact once I returned to Madrid. Cromer-Blake and Rylands, with whom I had been friendliest, were both dead. Clare Bayes was back with her husband, Edward Bayes, or else with a new lover, but there would definitely be no room for me as a friend, there was no reason, our affair had been entirely secret. I was in sporadic contact with Kavanagh, the head of my sub-faculty, an amusing man and a great hypochondriac, which is perhaps why he wrote his horror novels under that pseudonym, two different forms of an addiction to fear. And Wheeler. Except that he really dated from after my time there, he was more like an inheritance from Rylands, his successor, his substitute or replacement in my life, I realised now the family nature of it, of that inheritance and that succession I mean. Wheeler remained thinking for a moment (perhaps he was feeling sorry for some Arabist acquaintance of his, and of his imminent fate under siege from MI6), and then returned to something from earlier in the conversation, saying: it's very odd that Toby should have told you about that. He didn't like anyone to know, he didn't even like thinking about it. Nor do I actually, so don't go imagining that I'm going to regale you with stories of my adventures in the Caribbean or in West Africa or in South-East Asia, according to Who's Who's rather imprecise accusations. What did he tell you? Can you remember how it came up?'

Yes, I did remember, almost word for word, on no other occasion had Rylands spoken to me with such intensity, so immersed in his own memory and with such disregard for his own will. It was true: he didn't like sharing his memories with others, and disliked revealing anything.

'We were talking about death,' I said. ('The worst thing about the approach of death isn't death itself and what it may or may not bring, it's the fact that one can no longer fantasise about things still to come,' Rylands had said, sitting in a chair in his garden next to the same slow river that we could see now, the River Cherwell with its muddy waters, except that Rylands's house gave on to a wilder, more magical, and far less soothing stretch of water. Occasionally swans would appear, and he would throw them bits of bread.)

'About death? That's odd too,' remarked Wheeler. 'It's odd that Toby should talk about that, odd that anyone should, especially once it's inevitable, because of infirmity or old age. Or, indeed, character.' ('Wheeler is talking about it now,' I thought, 'but more because he's an intelligent man than because of his age.')

'Cromer-Blake was already very ill, and we were worried then about what did, in the end, happen. Talking about that and about how little time there was left led Toby to speak of the past.' ('I've had what is commonly referred to as a full life, at least that's how I regard it,' Rylands had said. 'I haven't had a wife or children, but I've had a life spent in the acquisition of knowledge and that was what mattered to me. I've always gone on finding out more than I knew before, and it doesn't matter where you put that "before", even if it's only today or tomorrow.')

'And is that when he told you what he had done, about, his adventures?' asked Wheeler, and I thought I noticed a touch of apprehension in his voice, as if he were referring to something more specific than having collaborated with MI6 which, in Oxford, was, after all, something trivial, commonplace.

'He wanted to explain to me that he'd had a full life, that he hadn't, as it might seem, devoted himself solely to study and knowledge and teaching,' I replied. ('But I've had a full life, too, in the sense that my life's been crammed with action and the unexpected,' Rylands had said.) 'And that was when he confirmed the rumours I'd heard, that he'd been a spy, that was the word he used. And I assumed that he'd belonged to MI5, it didn't occur to me to think of MI6, perhaps because it's less familiar to us Spaniards.'

'That's what he told you.' There was no interrogative tone. 'He used that word. H'm,' murmured Wheeler, as so many people in Oxford did, including Rylands. 'H'm.' Seeing Peter so thoughtful and full of curiosity, it seemed to me selfish and unkind not to fill in the context, which I remembered so well, and not to quote to him verbatim his younger brother's words. 'H'm,' he said again.

' "As you'll no doubt have heard," he said, "I was a spy, like so many of us here, because that, too, can form part of our duties; but I was never just a pen-pusher like that fellow Dewar in your department, indeed like most of them. I worked in the field."' I could tell by the look in Wheeler's eyes that he had noticed that his brother had used some of the same expressions he had just used.