The Glory Boys

"Mushroom", and the man they're having the flap about is a nuclear scientist. Seems a nice easy equation. Quite a pretty little code-name, better than all those Greek god-desses we're forever calling our fiascos after. But don't tell Jones what I told you. Let it come to virgin, suitably surprised ears. I'll see you tonight – I'll try not to be late again, and we'll cook something.'

Helen stepped up quickly, gave the prone figure a wave and was on her way out of the flat. Early enough not to meet the neighbours on the stairs, stupid bloody looks they gave her. Two years she'd been coming now. First time after a department party, and Jimmy too drunk to notice she'd driven him home, and waking in the morning and taking his time to remember who she was. And then a habit had set in, and she'd come more often, and taken to cleaning up, and washing his smalls, and cooking him meals. The department directed both their lives, and the few chances of contact with people who did not share an existence governed by the Official Secrets Act ensured a curtailed horizon of friends. They began to accept each other, enough to make love in a perfunctory and clumsy style that satisfied the immediate needs of Jimmy as much as Helen. There was no talk of marriage.

The curtains were still drawn together. Jimmy switched off the bedside light, darkening the room. Be a bugger of a day, he thought, waiting for the telephone to ring the summons. Be by it all day in case Jones called, just as Helen had said he would, just as he always did when there was something rumbling at the department. Wouldn't go out, not even to stock the larder, not even down to the off-licence. Whisky was thin, drained after last night. He could see the bottle over on the table, by the divan in the living part of the room. Barely an inch left, and it had been two-thirds full at the time she should have come back last night.

There was not much else on the table; just the ashtray, a big, cut-glass effort, and piled high with cigarette ends, stubbed and strangled to extinction, and the water jug. He could remember that he'd started by mixing it with water, but the last two inches they'd been neat. Constant refills, the way it generally worked out when he sat up late at night on his own. Need another bottle if any possibility of another late night. But couldn't leave the phone, not if Jones was going to call. There was a nerve-breaking ache in his head now, splitting it from side to side, and a deep throbbing somewhere far inside and behind his temples.

Jimmy lay back, trying to shut out the pain. This was the way it worked out. A big scene down at the department, high level stuff, top men nattering to each other, twisting their knickers, and at the end of the day finding a place for Jimmy somewhere in the set-up. Hadn't been anything for four months, not since the MP, little grovel-merchant. Represented sixty thousand miners and their families and cohorts up in the West Riding. Smug little sod, with too much to say till they worked out the links, the Hungarians, how he afforded the London flat, the rendezvous points, what he had to offer from the Select Committee on Defence Expenditure. Found it only after Jimmy had slipped the kitchen window at Division Bells' time in the House, picked the lock of the drawer in his working table, and pocketed the over-filled, concisely documented diary. Must have missed it, the little bugger, but he'd never reported it. Just looked crestfallen, as if he might weep when they read the charge out. Asked for his solicitor – lot of good that would do him.

But life had been hard since then. The department's retainers didn't go that far. For Jimmy existence on the fringe of the department had started a long time ago.

Recruitment was haphazard, following few fixed patterns and depending mainly on personal recommendation.

Jimmy owed his connections with the Security Services to his actions on a glorious moonlit night on 24 August 1944. He was aged nineteen, with the exalted wartime rank of Flight Sergeant (Rear Gunner) in a Lancaster bomber squadron. He flew in 'Charley Apple' off one of those eternal concrete runways that littered the flat Lin-colnshire countryside. The whole eight-man crew, officer included, had bitched about flying that night.

'Should have their bloody heads examined, those desk bastards,' the pilot had said.

'Sitting bloody duck for whatever they send up,' had been the contribution of the navigator.