A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [145]
I have heard all this before. The words have changed, but the well-worn message remains exactly the same. It is her standard tactic, a withering assault on my masculinity, disowning our sex life to wound me. My regrets about JUSTIFY, my fears for Cohen, are of no consequence to her. She does not see herself as my friend: there is still too much that she feels enraged by. Nothing has changed, nothing at all. It is still impossible to talk to Kate without her twisting a subject until it becomes a conversation about her. This is the selfishness in her that I had forgotten.
She is still not finished. She puts her tea down on the small table beside the sofa and shakes her head with disappointment.
‘In the beginning, when we first met, I saw you like someone might see a jigsaw. Just starting off. You were seventeen and I didn’t know how you would work out, the shape of you. And then, as I got to know you, as the jigsaw came together, I saw that you were just made up of lies. Not big lies, not all the infidelities or womanizing or cheating or anything really dangerous, but weak, cowardly, fearful lies. And you lied because you were afraid of me. You were afraid of everybody. To console me you would open your mouth and something sweet and caring would come out, but I couldn’t know if it was deeply felt. I couldn’t know if you really meant it or if you just liked the sound of those words in the room, the way the sentences altered my face. I felt that you were never with me. You couldn’t let me near you, you couldn’t let anyone near you. Your whole life is just a process of holding people off in case they have an effect on you.’
I do not deserve this. She has never found it in herself to forgive me; the damage to her self-esteem was just too great. I came here today on an impulse, to tell her things as a friend that I had never told to anyone else. And yet she wants to use my confession as an excuse to criticize me for things that happened between us more than two years ago. The only thing that is of any interest to Kate is Kate. I had forgotten that.
‘I’m going to go,’ I tell her very firmly, with no doubt in my mind that this is the right thing to do. ‘I don’t have time to be talking about this. I need to find out about Harry and then get home. I’m sorry you weren’t able to see the bigger picture, I really am. But I’m trusting you not to speak to anybody about what I’ve told you. You’ve given me your word and I trust you. Because if you do it would certainly mean the end of my career. I could even be killed.’
She smirks at this. She does not want to believe any of it.
‘I’m serious,’ I tell her. ‘So that’s it. You’ve got it?’
‘Yes,’ she says, exasperated.
‘Good. Because I’m trusting you.’
I travel home numbed by all the bad decisions I have made, each falling on the heels of the other. Young and blind to consequence, I have done and said things which have led me to the point at which I now find myself. This afternoon was just another example, a pointless tracking back into the past.
When Kate and I were together, there was such arrogance in me, an inability to see things for what they were. I just threw everything we had away on a whim and never properly fought to get her back. And then with Hawkes, what was it? Vanity? Is that all it was, a craving for recognition? What do Saul and Kate know that I do not, that they can make the right decisions, that they can appear to live life in the way that it is meant to be lived?
More waiting now. Nothing to be done. Always the ball in someone else’s court. So I open a bottle of wine and read for five hours straight about Philby.
I cannot conceive of the scale of his deceit: the entire span of a life lived as a vast deception - to friends, to family, perhaps even to wives. I have done it for less than two years and the relentless demands