A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [18]
I go to the fridge and take out the ham and cheese sandwich that I made last night, knowing I wouldn’t have time to do it this morning. There’s also a yoghurt in there, and a banana for the Tube. Getting on for seven thirty now. I sit down at the kitchen table and spoon back the yoghurt, leaning over the carton so as not to drop gobbets of strawberry goo on my suit trousers. That and the soggy sandwich, as well as a second cup of coffee, initiate the first adrenalin quiver in my bowels, and by the time I come out it’s nearly a quarter to eight.
Grab your jacket and go.
The Sisby examination centre is at the north end of Whitehall. This is the part of town they put in American movies as an establishing shot to let audiences in South Dakota know that the action has moved to London: a wide-angled view of Nelson’s Column, with a couple of double-decker buses and taxis queuing up outside the broad, serious flank of the National Gallery. Then cut to Harrison Ford in his suite at The Grosvenor.
The building is a great slab of nineteenth-century brown brick. People are already starting to go inside. There is a balding man in grey uniform behind a reception desk enjoying a brief flirtation with power. He looks shopworn, overweight, inexplicably pleased with himself. One by one, Sisby candidates shuffle past him, their names ticked off on a list. He looks nobody in the eye.
‘Yes?’ he says to me impatiently, as if I were trying to gatecrash a party.
‘I’m here for the Selection Board.’
‘Name?’
‘Alec Milius.’
He consults the list, ticks me off, gives me a flat plastic security tag.
‘Third floor.’
Ahead of me, loitering in front of a lift, are five other candidates. Very few of them will be SIS. These are the prospective future employees of the Ministry of Agriculture, Social Security, Trade and Industry, Health. The men and women who will be responsible for policy decisions in the governments of the new millennium. They all look impossibly young.
To their left a staircase twists away in a steep spiral and I begin climbing it, unwilling to wait for the lift. The stairwell, like the rest of the building, is drab and unremarkable, with a provincial university aesthetic that would have been considered modern in the mid-1960s. The third-floor landing is covered in brown linoleum and nicotine-yellow paint clings to the walls. My name, and those of four others, have been typed on a sheet of A4 paper which is stuck up on a pock-marked notice board.
Common Room B3: CSSB (Special)
ANN BUTLER
MATTHEW FREARS
ELAINE HAYES
ALEC MILIUS
SAM OGILVY
A woman - a girl - who can’t be much older than twenty is standing in front of the notice board, taking in what it has to say. She appears to be reading an advertisement requesting blood donors. She doesn’t turn to look at me; she just keeps on reading. She has pretty hair, thick black curls tied halfway down with a dark blue velvet band. Strands of it have broken free and are holding on to the fabric of her tartan jacket. She is tall with thin spindly legs under a knee-length skirt. Wearing tights. A pair of thick National Health glasses obliterates the shape and character of her face.
A middle-aged man comes around the corner and passes her at the top of the stairs. She turns to him and says:
‘Hello. By any chance you wouldn’t know where Common Room B3 is, would you?’
She has a Northern Ireland accent, full of light and cunning. That was brave of them to take her on. Imagine the vetting.
The man, probably a Sisby examiner, is more helpful than I expect him to be. He says yes of course and points to a room no more than ten feet away on the far side of the landing with B3 clearly written on the door. The girl looks embarrassed not to have noticed it but he makes nothing of it and heads off down the stairs.
‘Good start, Ann,’ she says under her breath, but the remark is directed at me. ‘Hello.’
She looks at me directly, for the first time.
‘Hi. I’m Alec.’
‘This Alec?’ she says, tapping ALEC MILIUS on the notice board.
‘The same.