A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [44]
‘Don’t exaggerate. Don’t just repeat what you’ve heard on TV.’
‘Anyway, it’s too late. I should have done it straight out of LSE. That’s the time to spend two or three years working away from home. Not now. I’m supposed to be establishing myself in a career.’
‘That’s bullshit.’
‘Look around, Saul. Everybody we knew at university did the milk round, did their finals, and then went straight into a sensible job where they’ll be earning thirty or forty grand in a couple of years’ time. These were people who were constantly stoned, who never went to lectures, who could barely string a sentence together. And now they’re driving company cars and paying fifty quid a month into pension plans and BUPA. That’s what I should be doing instead of fucking around waiting for things to happen to me. It doesn’t work that way. You have to make your own luck. How did they know what to do with their lives when they were only twenty-one?’
‘People grow up.’
‘Evidently. I should’ve gone into the City. Read law. Taken a risk. What was the point in spending four years reading Russian and business studies if I wasn’t going to use them?’
‘Jesus, Alec. You’re twenty-four, for Christ’s sake. You can still do whatever you like. It just requires a bit of imagination.’
There’s a glimmer here of something hopeful, a zip of optimism, but the stubbornness in me won’t grasp it.
‘If you could have just met some of the people I did the entrance exams with. To think that they could have got the job and not me. There was this one Cambridge guy. Sam Ogilvy. Smooth, rich, vacuous. I bet they took him.’
‘What does it matter if they did? You jealous or something?’
‘No. No, I’m not. He was… he was…’ How to describe Ogilvy to Saul? In an uncomfortable way, they reminded me of one another. ‘What did that man on TV call Tony Blair? “A walking Autocue in a sensible suit.” That’s exactly what this guy was like. In order to get anywhere these days we have to be like Sam Ogilvy. An ideas-free zone. A platitude in patent leather shoes. That’s what employers are looking for. Coachloads of Tony Blairs.’
There is a message from Hawkes on my answering machine when I get home at eight fifteen. Were it not for the fact that I have had four vodkas, I might be more surprised to hear from him.
‘Alec. It’s Michael. I’m coming to London tomorrow and I suggest we get together for lunch. Have a chat about things. Give me a ring in the country.’
His voice sounds stern. He leaves a contact number and I say ‘Yeah, fuck off’ to the machine, but out of inquisitiveness I scribble it down on a pad.
For dinner I microwave some pasta and watch television for an hour, unable to concentrate on much beyond the shock of SIS. The rejection begins to act like heartbreak: just when I think I’ve found some respite, after six hours of soul-searching and self-pity, something triggers the pain again - a memory of Stevenson, of Rouse standing firm in the window. So many ideas and plans, so many secret aspirations that will now remain untested. I was absolutely prepared to live my life as a shadow of who I really am. Surely they saw that? Surely there was something I could have done for them? I cannot understand why I have been discarded with such speed and ruthlessness: it makes no sense. To be left with this shaming feeling, the grim realization that there is nothing which marks me out from the crowd.
At around nine, after finishing a half-empty bottle of wine in the fridge, I go out to the corner shop and buy a four-pack of Stella. By the time I have finished the first can, I have written this in longhand:
Alec Milius
111E Uxbridge Road
London W12 8NL
15 August 1995
Patrick Liddiard
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
No. 46A––Terrace
London SW1
Dear Mr Liddiard
Further to our conversation on the telephone this morning, there are one or two points I would like to raise in relation to my failed application to join the Secret Intelligence Service.
It concerns me that your department is in possession of a file which contains detailed