The building is a great slab of nineteenth-century brown brick. People are already starting to go inside. There is a balding man in a grey uniform behind a reception desk enjoying a brief flirtation with power. He looks shopworn, overweight, and 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. Nicotine-yellow paint clings to the walls. My name, and those of four others, have been typed on a sheet of paper that is stuck up on a pockmarked 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 this 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.’
‘Hi. I’m Alec.’
‘This Alec?’ She is tapping ALEC MILIUS on the notice board.
‘The same.’
Her skin is very pale and lightly freckled. She has a slightly witchy way about her, a creepy innocence.
‘I’m so nervous,’ she says. ‘Are you? Did you find it okay?’
‘Yes, I did. Where are you from?’
‘Northern Ireland.’
We are walking into B3. Cheap brown sofas, dirty windowpanes, a low MFI table covered in newspapers.
‘Oh. Which town?’
‘Do you know Enniskillen?’
‘I’ve heard of it, yes.’
Old men with medals pinned to their chests, severed in two by the IRA. Maybe an uncle of hers, a grandpa.
‘And you?’
‘I’m English.’
‘Aye. I could tell by your accent.’
‘I live here. In London.’
The small talk here is meaningless, just words in a room, but the beats and gaps in the conversation are significant. I note Ann’s sly glances at my suit and shoes, the quick suspicion in her wide brown eyes.
‘Which part of London?’
‘Shepherd’s Bush.’
‘I don’t know that.’
No talk for a moment while we survey the room, our home for the next forty-eight hours. The carpet is a deep, worn brown.
‘Do you want a drink?’ she asks, but her smile is too full of effort. There is a machine in the corner surrounded by polystyrene cups, threatening appalling coffee.
‘I’m all right, thanks.’
A gnomic man appears now in the doorway of the common room, carrying a brown leather satchel. He looks tired and bewildered, encumbered by the social ineptitude of the fabulously intelligent.
‘Is this B3?’ he asks. His hair is unbrushed.
‘Yes,’ Ann says, keenly.
He nods, clearly heavy with nerves. A hobbit of a man. He shuffles into the room and sits across from me in an armchair that has sponge pouring out of its upholstery. Ann seems to have decided against coffee, moving back toward the window at the back of the room.
‘So you’re either Sam or Matthew,’ she asks him. ‘Which one?’
‘Matt.’
‘I’m Alec,’ I tell him. We are near each other and I shake his hand. The palm is damp with lukewarm sweat.
‘Nice to meet you.’
Ann has swooped in, bending over to introduce herself. The Hobbit is nervous around women. When she shakes his hand, his eyes duck to the carpet. She fakes out a smile and retreats below a white clock with big black hands that says half past eight.
Not long now.
I pick up a copy of The Times from the low table and begin reading it, trying to remember interesting things to say about Gerry Adams. Matt takes a cereal bar out of his jacket pocket and begins tucking into it, oblivious of us, dropping little brown crumbs and shards of raisin on his Marks & Spencer blazer. It has occurred to me that in the eyes of Liddiard and Lucas, Matt and I have something in common, some shared quality or flaw that is the common denominator among spies. What could that possibly be?
Ann looks at him.
‘So what do you do, Matt?’
He almost drops the cereal bar in his lap.
‘I’m studying for a master’s degree at Warwick.’
‘What in?’
‘Computer science and European affairs.’
He says this quietly, as though he is ashamed. His skin is fighting a constant, losing battle with acne.
‘So you just came down from Warwick last night? You’re staying in a hotel?’
She’s nosy, this one. Wants to know what she’s up against.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Not far from here.’
I like it that he does not ask the same question of her.
A young