Читать книгу Mystical Paths - Susan Howatch - Страница 23

I took the tube to Green Park and wandered down Piccadilly to Albany, that fabulous ex-palace where the waiting-list is about twenty years long and no one gets a ‘set’ of rooms unless they have a personal hotline to a bunch of nobs who appear to be less well-known than the Queen but more influential. How Perry had acquired this flat of his I had no idea. His grandmother was supposed to have been Edward VII’s mistress, but a lot of women were supposed to have been Edward VII’s mistress and presumably not all their grandsons had ended up in Albany. Anyway, there Perry lived in a ground-floor set that faced the Rope Walk, and there was I in the September of 1963 padding past the uniformed flunkey in the grand entrance hall.

Perry was a spy. Now that I had been informed that he was also a homosexual I thought: how typical! Apparently the Foreign Office had learnt nothing from the Burgess and Maclean affair. Then I remembered that it was only rumoured he was a spy; all that was known for certain was that he spoke fluent Russian and held some Foreign Office post which he refused to discuss. Possibly he just translated incoming mail from the Kremlin.

I had been bothered by Martin’s revelations about Perry, but during my journey to Albany I became less bothered and more sceptical. Martin had denied knowing Perry well. It seemed obvious in retrospect that he’d rushed to judgement after seeing Perry carousing with a certain bunch of actors, but just because Perry dabbled in the social side of the acting profession in order to give himself a break from the tight-lipped job at the FO I didn’t have to conclude he had a sex-life, lawful or unlawful. In fact Marina always said Perry was a eunuch. Perhaps he was just undersexed. Certainly I couldn’t see Christian being close friends with an active homosexual. That didn’t add up.

I rang the bell and seconds later Perry was flinging open the door. ‘Nick!’ he exclaimed, very crisp in a grey suit, white shirt and old Wykehamist tie. ‘Welcome to my orgy!’

I smiled at him warily and prowled across the threshold.