MI5 and Me Page 5

  The policeman on the door gave me a patronising smile. I did not like it at all. I bolted back up to our floor, and skidded to a halt in the main room. Hardly able to put one foot in front of the other, I wobbled up to my safe. It was locked all right. I turned to the main safe. Remembering all the numbers, I reopened it. Everything that should be in there was in there. I relocked it using the right combination, and then I sat down for a few seconds. I had done it right. I could hardly believe it, but then I remembered the one thing that Arabella had told me – never, ever to lock any safe without turning back to it and saying out loud: ‘I have locked the safe.’ I had been so busy being irritated by her clicking at me, I had forgotten the golden rule.

  I staggered past the policeman on the door. He gave me another patronising smile.

  ‘Forgot the golden rule? They always do, the new ones,’ he murmured.

  I said nothing in reply. I had no money left in my purse. Happily it was a warm evening. I walked all the way home, and since I was so tired it took a long, long time to reach my parents’ house. When I did, having no appetite for anything else, I went up to my bedroom and lay down on my bed.

  It would be the last time I didn’t listen to Arabella.

  ‘Well,’ she said the next day, realising from my extreme pallor and my weary tones that all had not been well the night before, ‘at least you only had to come back from Kensington. That poor thing over there,’ she nodded across the room at a figure bent over her typewriter, ‘her first night on Security Safe, she had to come back from Basingstoke. Basingstoke! I mean, can you imagine?’

  I could not imagine. Gracious, Kensington had been bad enough.

  ‘No last buses,’ Arabella went on, obviously determined to make me feel sympathetic to the luckless girl across the way, which was rather annoying when all I wanted to feel was sorry for myself. ‘No bus to take her home so she had to walk the fifteen miles to her mother’s cottage, by which time she had pneumonia.’

  ‘Pneumonia’s very difficult to get,’ I said with some feeling.

  ‘Well, a cold then,’ Arabella conceded.

  So now what? I wondered. Another ten days shouting at the Top Secret safes ‘I have done your codes, so you can’t deceive me again’? Suddenly it was too quiet, and more than that the Dragon was dictating very, very slowly, and not speeding up at all towards the end. I was worried, and I was not the only one. Like most people who breathe fire if not brimstone at every turn, the Dragon was expected to continue behaving in a familiar pattern, but she wasn’t and to be truthful I was worried. She was walking more slowly, the air was not filled with fury whenever she saw a comma out of place, she had even suggested it would be nicer for me if she used a pencil to correct anything that was wrong with my typing, and no further memos came back down the stairs to the section with a bold inked line through them. Even Arabella noticed.

  ‘I don’t think she’s well,’ she said, and looked both solemn and mystical at the same time, which was a special quality that Arabella and only Arabella could exude. It was as if she was not sitting on a typing chair in front of an old Underwood, but poised Gandhi-like on nails and oblivious to whatever was happening around her, while at the same time exuding a kind of goodness that would help to cure the ills of anyone passing by. It was an extraordinary quality, and I wished so much that I could have it too, but the truth was I was sadly lacking in any natural serenity.

  ‘What shall I do?’ I asked, a little helplessly, while feeling the terrible guilt that overwhelms anyone who thinks they have been beastly about someone who is not well.

  ‘I will tell Head of Section that she should see the M.O.,’ Arabella said, quietly, and of course serenely. She stood up and carefully pushed her chair in. ‘Rosalie said something must be done before she went on leave, but she forgot to say what.’

  Sometime later Arabella came back into the Section. She still looked serene, but pale.

  ‘The Dragon has collapsed,’ she said, shortly. ‘Security have had to call an ambulance.’

  I pulled back the yellowing lace curtain that hid MI5 from the rest of the world, and watched in silence as indeed an ambulance pulled up and a stretcher bearing the Dragon disappeared within. Suddenly she seemed very sad and frail, and I felt dreadful. Suppose my attempts at annoying her with garlic and Roman Catholicism and snatches of Noël Coward songs had added to her ill health? Worse – suppose they had even caused it?

  I went home feeling at a loss, as is only natural when you find yourself without a wall to bang your head against.

  Later my father came in and told me that it was peritonitis.

  ‘She is a game old thing. I’m sure she’ll pull through,’ he said, absently, his mind on other things.

  I didn’t go along with this, so I prayed hard for the Dragon that night. I prayed in the only way I knew how, in the ‘please, God, help the Dragon to get better’ kind of way, because those were the only prayers I knew really. Arabella too was praying, but she was more organised with her prayers, saying masses of Our Fathers, she told me, making sure that I knew.

  Next day I went into MI5 bright and early, hoping against hope that the Dragon news was going to be good. I missed her. My telephone was all too silent. I looked at the files she had prepared for me in previous weeks, and even missed her bold inky lines swiping through some hapless memo.

  Rosalie returned from leave, and we all decided to send the Dragon some flowers. She was at King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers, and the news was that she was recovering.

  ‘Do you think she would like us to visit her?’ I asked Arabella.

  Arabella thought for a minute.

  ‘If we don’t stay too long and don’t eat all the Newbury Fruits we’re going to take her, I think she would probably like it.’

  I had never thought of the Dragon as a human being before, but now that she was sitting up in bed, pale but determined, wearing a pink angora bed jacket, I saw all too clearly she really was an actual human being.

  ‘We won’t make you laugh, I promise,’ Arabella began, ‘because of your stitches.’

  The Dragon smiled, and it was a warm, kind smile, which transformed her whole face.

  ‘You have been through a dreadful time,’ I put in. ‘And I’m not just talking about having me for a secretary.’

  Her hands slid down the counterpane to where her stitches must be as she tried not to laugh.

  ‘One thing I must tell you,’ she said, her expression still gentle and kindly. ‘Rosalie said that you were both praying for me, and it was that thought that brought me through. I’ve never thought too much of Papists, on account of the Gunpowder Plot, but now I believe I’ve changed my mind.’

  We did not stay long despite the Newbury Fruits looking so tempting, especially the raspberry ones.

  Once outside in the street I said to Arabella, ‘I didn’t know you pretended to her that you were a Papist too?’

  Arabella smiled with redoubled serenity.

  ‘Supposing she goes over to Rome?’ I went on. ‘It will be our entire fault.’

  ‘It won’t matter if she does,’ Arabella said, crossing the road in her usual confident manner, expecting all the cars to stop for her, which for some reason they always did, probably because she was so beautiful. ‘After all, MI5 loves Roman Catholics now. They’ve even forgotten about them trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament in sixteen hundred and five.’

  With that comforting thought my guilt about the Dragon disappeared, and we went to Baker Street for a coffee.

  THE SECURITY FILMS

  Arabella, for reasons of her own, had taken to calling my parents’ elegant house in Kensington ‘Dingley Dell’. Given the fact that it was, as I now saw it, playing a very important part in the security of the nation, this nickname seemed a little too light-hearted, but once Arabella seized on something, it stayed seized, and there was nothing to be done about it. My parents and myself now lived in Dingley Dell.

  It was a bright late-spring mornin
g – the sort of morning when London seems to be at its best, with the parks full of flowers, and gentlemen strolling in bowler hats to meet ladies wearing fine suiting, all of them going for lunch somewhere elegant and quiet. Arabella was not one of them, which was probably why she came up with a question for me.

  ‘Any changes at Dingley Dell?’ she wondered brightly.

  I stared at her.

  She had a way of knowing about things almost before they happened.

  Perhaps she thought there might have been changes at home on account of the changes that had happened in our Section. The Dragon had not returned and my guilt about her had still not completely disappeared. Suppose she had turned to religion on account of my constantly blessing her? She had, according to Rosalie, gone off to Greece, to a place of repose and quiet, in order to recover her health and regain her peace of mind. That sounded to me suspiciously religious, and I was slightly comforted by the idea that if she were in a Greek convent, the religion there would be Greek Orthodox and not Roman Catholicism so I could, in a way, allow myself to feel less guilty.

  ‘Yes, there are some changes, as a matter of fact,’ I admitted, as we toyed once again with a teacake in the canteen. ‘We now have lodgers in the spare bedrooms, not just guests.’

  Arabella looked up from her teacake. It took a great deal to make her look up from it, especially if she happened to be partitioning it into the usual tiny portions.

  ‘Lodgers rather than guests?’ she repeated. ‘Now that is a change.’

  I could only agree by nodding because my teacake was not neatly partitioned but sliced down the middle and being scoffed in a way that I knew Arabella tried not to find off-putting – but then a great deal of what I did was upsetting to Arabella, which meant that being completely different we were quite able to be friends, whereas had I been serene and beautiful, or had she been a bit of an unmade bed, we could never have been close.

  Arabella stared past me. I knew that in her own mind she was preparing to take over the Director General’s job and run MI5 and, if needed, MI6, so any significant changes at Dingley Dell must be a serious matter.

  ‘There must be a new campaign being mounted or else why would your father suddenly decide to put up with lodgers? He must be planning infiltration of some new hotbed of communism.’

  I agreed although inwardly I was still bemused by the intensity of the pursuit of communism since so many of the documents I typed seemed to be full of suspicion rather than fact, but I had come to the conclusion that this was what the defence of our country must be about: deep suspicion. My mother maintained it was due to the last war when even nuns – well, especially nuns apparently – were regarded as potential spies, and people in railway carriages watched them closely to see if the black-clad women had unnaturally hairy ankles, or bosoms that kept flattening under their arms – or, in the case of suspicious men, wigs that came off with their hats when they greeted a lady, which apparently had happened once at Haywards Heath station, resulting in the immediate arrest of a person who turned out to be a very important Nazi spy. Of course they got everything they wanted out of him in the usual British way: by being nice to him and giving him Scotch whisky, which the Germans apparently loved. After that they sent him back to Sussex where they let him dig people’s gardens, which he very much enjoyed, ending up marrying one of the local girls and becoming a pillar of the community.

  But none of this was helping Arabella get closer to the reason why life at Dingley Dell was changing.

  ‘Let me know the moment one of the new lodgers moves in, won’t you?’ she urged. ‘It will be easier to work out the new thinking once we know what sort of person they are recruiting.’

  I nodded and it was not long after I returned there that I realised my mother was in a state of some excitement. The first of the new lodgers had arrived, and had turned out to be a quite famous actor.

  ‘You must remember him, Lottie. We saw him in The Tempest.’

  My mother was theatre mad, as a result of which I was hardly out of my pram before I had seen at least two Hamlets and As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not to mention The Tempest and Much Ado About Nothing. The only trouble was I couldn’t remember The Tempest as I had drunk too much cough mixture in order not to disturb everyone around us, and had fallen sound asleep for most of the play.

  ‘Don’t tell him that,’ my mother warned when I reminded her. ‘Actors don’t like not to be remembered.’

  This was only too understandable. I myself liked to think that people would remember me, but I was unhappily aware that if they did it would not be because I had been brilliant in a Shakespeare play, but because I had done something to annoy them.

  Drinks before dinner that night were interesting. Now I knew that Arabella was convinced there was a new campaign being planned, I stood about saying nothing except ‘how do you do’ and making the kind of sounds that female persons were meant to make in front of male persons, the kind of marvellous, marvellous sounds that I had observed older women making and that rendered the opposite sex terribly happy. Once we were at dinner I also used the head resting on hand approach during coffee. This worked a treat, and since it was neither a formal dinner, nor a ‘bogeys only’ one, the result was good. I knew it was good because I heard the soon-to-be-well-known actor telling my mother that he found me ‘delightful’.

  I went to bed still feeling delightful and thinking that, all in all, I would have a great deal to tell Arabella in the morning.

  The next day, before I could report back, found me in the Section and my new boss, who was to my mind almost as delightful as I was, calling me in to take dictation.

  He spoke so slowly that I found myself half asleep and looking back on my days with the Dragon as somewhat halcyon. At least we’d whizzed through the work whereas now, with Commander Steerforth dictating, everything seemed to happen in slow motion.

  This morning, however, I noticed that he had speeded up a little, because the content of the memo I was taking down was, like the fall of the rupee, somewhat sensational. It seemed that twenty-eight security films bound for Africa had gone missing. It was particularly important that they should be found as they were full of the kind of details that were meant to help Africa, but not Russia.

  I was terribly glad it was not I who had lost the twenty-eight films, but the luckless girl from Basingstoke who, happily for her, had left to marry a naval officer and gone to live in Malta, which as far as I could gather everyone who married naval officers seemed to do, including the Queen.

  Commander Steerforth looked at me in gentle bewilderment.

  ‘What can she have done with them?’

  I thought for a minute.

  ‘Perhaps she left them on a bus?’

  He seemed hardly to have heard.

  ‘It’s not as if she has lost two or even three, she has lost twenty-eight.’

  ‘Could she have perhaps sent them on to Africa and they have lost them?’

  My boss shook his head.

  ‘There will be questions asked about this,’ he said gloomily. ‘And I mean right up there.’ He pointed at the ceiling, and we both knew what he meant: not God or heaven. He was pointing at a place where the Director General might suddenly be wondering about those twenty-eight missing security films.

  ‘Would you like a jam doughnut?’ I asked him suddenly. ‘They’re fresh in at the canteen.’

  He looked at me; it was obvious he was sunk in gloom.

  ‘Do you know, I would,’ he said in a broken voice.

  I went back to his office with a cup of tea and a jam doughnut, and that seemed to cheer him.

  ‘What sort of security films are they?’ I asked as he coped with the jam doughnut. ‘I mean, what are they about?’

  ‘Well,’ he said thickly, through the doughnut, ‘as I remember it they are to do with training. They show people how to do things in the correct manner, the British way, because we do have a way of doing things, and it’s usually correct. At
any rate, they show, again, as I remember it, how to dismantle a bomb safely – not that there is such a thing as a safe way, not really. Then, I think, taking the pin out of a grenade also with regards to safety – not that the English method can always be counted on if the grenades come from China, and – what else? Oh, yes. What to do if you tread on a bomb, but that too is a bit difficult because, as you can imagine, first aid is a bit of a waste of time if that happens.’

  We looked at each other and I knew the same thought was occurring to both of us. The security films, all twenty-eight of them, sounded a bit, well – to put it mildly, a bit sort of useless really.

  ‘Who made these films, Commander?’ I asked.

  ‘The MI5 film unit, I believe, or at least the one that we use. Most of the film people used to be part of ENSA – you know, doing comedy sketches for the Army, to keep up their spirits, and the Navy too, but less so on account of sea sickness. We had far fewer entertainers than the other services – the odd crooner, but nothing more really.’

  I frowned and tried to imagine what Arabella might say. I finally arrived at: ‘Perhaps it’s not such a bad thing if these security films have got themselves lost?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, from what you said, they sound a bit de trop.’

  He stared at me and it was obvious from his expression that he did not understand French.

  ‘I mean maybe they’re not going to be much use to Africans anyway? Especially if they’re lost.’

  He nodded slowly.

  ‘I think you have a point. So maybe, you’re thinking, we should advise the relevant department to remove them from top-security status as being unsuitable, out of date, and not pertinent? Therefore they will no longer be sensitive material?’

  That seemed the best idea to me, which was probably why I nodded my head slowly, and he did too.