Yesterday’s Spy. Len Deighton
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Avenue. It was more convenient and more comfortable but only half the fun. In the fifties, in several tiny Japanese villages I found clean accommodation so cheap that my Japanese friends refused to believe the low prices I had paid and thought I didn’t understand the money. When I first booked into the famous Hotel Sacher in Vienna it had not fully recovered from its occupation by some of the more uncaring, and trigger-happy, elements of the Red Army infantry, and I looked in vain for the Schlagobers and Sachertorte.
As I see it, it is the task of a writer to seek the truth and truth is not to be found in the silky indulgence of grand hotels, which tend to be the same in all parts of the world. Truth is found where people work and suffer. As a base for my research for Yesterday’s Spy I rented a room in a flea-bitten little hotel in Villefranche-sur-Mer. It was an establishment that I have depicted realistically in this story. The Princess was much as I have described.
Why Villefranche? The bay of Villefranche has water deeper than any other such port anywhere in the Mediterranean. From 350 feet near the shore the ocean bed slopes away steeply to 1,700 feet of dark water. It was this unique deep-water anchorage that brought the US Sixth Fleet here regularly: carriers, cruisers and even big battleships such as the USS Missouri. In those frantic years of the Cold War, France was in love with its American protectors. Americans were subject to the draft and these little streets and alleys were packed with high-spirited young sailors on brief shore leave looking for action of one kind or another.
When the dollar was high, France fondly embraced all American visitors, but love affairs can cool and lovers prove unkind. France switched its affections to Teutonic neighbours brandishing Deutschmarks, and the Sixth Fleet found other spots to drop anchor. By the time I was researching this book Villefranche was going through a period of quiet. Visitors of any kind were not much in evidence and the whole place had a hushed spooky feeling, as if the lonely little town was waiting for the sailors to return.
The Savoy is one of the most attractive regions that I have ever known. I have returned to it time and time again. Eventually – and long after this book was written – it became home to my wife’s parents, and in a comfortable rented house nearby we made it our home too. My children went to the local village school, learned to speak French like the natives, enjoyed long-lasting friendships and, like us, count it among the happiest times of their lives. The inhabitants of the Savoy are unique for their welcoming ways, neighbourliness and love of food and cooking. During our time there I wrote much of a book later published as the ABC of French Food. Cooking provides the lingua franca of this region, and while the affable sociability is – like so many of the family names – Italian, the cooking is French. The winter hereabout is not always mild. The Alps and the River Rhone both bring winds and cold weather but that in turn means heartwarming food and roaring log fires. In summary it is an excellent place in which to settle back and write a book.
Writing books is like a spell on a battlefield. For the first two or three books you survive largely by luck. After that the odds are against you, and you have to learn quickly and learn by narrow escapes. To construct Yesterday’s Spy I decided to use a second character and thus create a dual leading role. Conan Doyle had shown us how Dr Watson could be a useful tool for explaining facts and theories to the reader. I was right to believe that Yesterday’s Spy would benefit from assigning to ‘Harry Palmer’ a belligerent American boss, Schlegel, but I didn’t include in my calculations the intimacy that would come from sending Harry back to fraternize with his old friends from the Resistance. This intimacy battled against the closeness between Harry and his boss. Perhaps it is a minor matter, and only applied to this special circumstance of this story, but I soon became aware of the limitations this put upon the crisscross relationships.
Dividing the number of major characters into the size of your typescript tells you how much space you have for character development. Yesterday’s Spy has quite a lot of major characters and that meant wasting no time when it came to describing each of them. The idea of having a group of Second World War Resistance workers who, some long time later, have different allegiances and different enemies provided an interesting writing problem. It was so interesting that I felt afterwards that I should have made it a far longer book.
Len Deighton, 2012
1
‘The Guernica network!’ said Steve Champion, holding up his glass.
I hesitated. White’s Club – sanctus sanctorum of Establishment London – seemed an inappropriate place to indulge in revolutionary nostalgia.
‘Let’s just drink to Marius,’ I said.
‘Marius,’ said Champion. He drank, and wiped his blunt military-style moustache with the back of his glove. It was a gesture I’d noticed that time we’d first met – Villefranche, landing from a submarine, one night when the war was young. It was as wrong for him then as it was now. In those days Regular Army captains of the Welsh Guards did not wipe the froth off their faces with the back of their hand. But then Regular captains of the Brigade of Guards, sent to France to set up anti-Nazi Intelligence networks, were not expected to meet newly arriving agents with a girl on each arm and an open bottle of champagne.
‘Marius,’ I said. I drank too.
‘What a comical crew we were,’ said Champion. ‘Marius the revolutionary priest, you straight from training school, with your terrible accent and your pimple ointment, and me. Sometimes I thought we should have let the Nazis catch us, and watched them die of laughing.’
‘It was Marius who reconciled that network,’ I said, ‘the Communists and the deserters and the hot-heads and us professionals. It was Marius who held the network together. When he went, we all went.’
‘He was past his prime by then,’ said Champion. ‘He’d had too much of it. He wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway. None of us would have.’
‘Marius was young,’ I said. ‘Almost as young as I was.’
‘Marius died in a torture chamber,’ said Champion. ‘He died within six hours of being arrested … it was incredibly brave and he deserved the medal … but he could have saved himself by giving them some useless information. He could have deciphered some ancient codes and given them the names of people who’d already gone back to London. He could have bought a few days, and in a few days we could have rescued him.’
I didn’t argue. Even after all this time it was difficult to be objective about the death of Marius. His energy and his optimism had kept us going at times when it seemed that all was lost. And his reckless bravery had more than once saved us.
For Champion it was even more difficult. He’d always blamed himself for the young priest’s death. Perhaps that was partly why he’d married Marius’s younger sister. And perhaps it was partly why the marriage had now fallen apart.
We both watched the far end of the room, where two Socialist Cabinet Ministers exchanged jokes about their golf handicaps and tips about the stock exchange. Champion reached into the waistcoat of his beautifully cut chalk-stripe suit. He flipped back the cover of the gold hunter that had belonged to his father and his grandfather, looked at the time, and then signalled a club servant to bring more drinks.
‘The divorce came through,’ he said. ‘Caty and me – it’s all over. Nowadays I live all the time in France.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Why?’ said Champion.
I shrugged. There was no point in telling him that I liked them both, and enjoyed what had once been their happy marriage. ‘Those weekends at the house in Wales,’ I said. ‘Where will I go now to get French cooking like Caty’s?’
‘Well, Caty still lives there,’ said Champion. ‘And she’d love to see you again, I’m sure.’
I looked at him. I would have expected him to invite me to his new house in France rather than to that of his ex-wife in Wales, but Steve Champion was always unpredictable. Even more so since he’d become a wealthy businessman. He lit a fresh