Our Game

"I've told you already. Larry appointed Checheyev his university of the North Caucasus. Larry does that. He eats people whole. When Checheyev arrived here, Larry knew as little about the region as anyone else. He had a decent general knowledge of Russia, but the people of the Caucasus are a subject apart. After a few months, he could hold forth on the Chechen, the Ossetians, the Dagestanis, the Ingush, the Circassians, the Abkhazians, the you-name-them. Checheyev handled him really well. He had an instinct for him. He could crack the whip, and he could charm him out of the trees. He was droll. He had a gallows humour. And he kept Larry's conscience ticking. Larry always had to have a ticking conscience—"

Again she interrupted me. "Are you saying that your own affinity with Larry was more remarkable?"

No, Marjorie dear, I am not saying anything of the kind. I'm saying that Larry was a love thief on a seesaw, and as soon as he'd finished enchanting Checheyev he had to race back to me and make it right, because he was not only a spy but a clergyman's son with a diminished sense of responsibility who needed everybody's absolution for betraying everybody else. I'm saying that for all his breast-beating and moralizing and supposed intellectual breadth, he took to spying like an addict. I'm saying that he was also a bastard; that he was sly and vengeful and would steal your woman as soon as look at you; that he was a natural for tradecraft and the black arts and that my sin was to promote the cheat in him above the dreamer, which is why he sometimes hated me a little more than I deserved.

"Larry loves archetypes, Marjorie," I replied, adopting a weary tone. "If they don't exist, he appoints them. He's an action freak, to use the modern parlance. He likes scale. Checheyev delivered it."

"Did you?"

I gave an indulgent laugh. What on earth was she getting at—apart from me? "I was the home side, Marjorie. I was his England, warts and all. Checheyev was exotica. He was a closet Muslim the way Larry is a closet Christian. When Larry was with CC, he was on holiday. When he was with me, he was at school."

"And it lasted," she said. And left me dangling a moment. "Thanks to you." She consulted her hands again. "Long after our other Cold War agents had been laid off, Larry continued to enjoy a full operational life. Checheyev's tour in London was actually extended by Moscow so that he could go on handling Larry. Isn't that rather odd, looking back?"

"Why should it be?"

"With other Cold War agents being run down?"

"Larry's relationship with Moscow was unique. We had every reason to believe it could survive the Communist era. So did his Russian controllers."

"That was certainly the view you encouraged."

"Of course I did!" I had forgotten the force of my convictions in those days. "All right, there was a sea change. There was no Communist experiment left for Larry to admire, but then Larry was never that kind of agent anyway, not in their eyes, not in his. He was a scourge of Western materialism, a champion of Russia good or bad. What powered him—in the fiction and the reality—was his romanticism, his love of the underdog, his gut contempt for the British Establishment and its crawling adherence to America. Larry's hatreds didn't change when Communism collapsed. Neither did his loves. His dreams of a better, fairer world didn't change—his love of the individual over the collective—his love of differentness and eccentricity. Neither did our pigskin-clover society. After the Cold War it got worse. On both sides of the Atlantic. More corrupt, inward, conformist, intolerant, isolationist, smug. Less equitable. I'm talking Larry talk, Marjorie. I’m talking the renegade humanist who wants to save the world. The Britain that Larry was sabotaging in his imagination all those years is alive and well today. The worst government, the greyest leadership, the saddest, most deceived electorate we've ever had ... Why shouldn't Larry continue to betray us?"

Descending from my soapbox, I was pleased to see her blush. I imagined uncles in the cabinet and blue-rinsed aunts who were the backbone of the Tory right. "Leave Larry out there. That was my argument. Wait and see what the new Russian intelligence service does with him. They're only the same crowd in different hats. They're not going to sit back and let one corrupt superpower run the earth. Wait for the next act, instead of ditching him and then trying to catch up when it's too late, which is what we usually do."

"However, your eloquence failed to carry the day," she pointed out while she thoughtfully fingered her fob-chain.

"Unfortunately, yes. Anyone who had an ounce of history in him should have known it would be business as usual in a year or two. But that didn't include the Top Floor. It wasn't the Russians who dumped Larry. It was us."