A Scattering of Light

Chapter 73

Chapter 73

The media coverage the day after Anthony’s press conference was uniformly negative. According to the papers, Anthony was arrogant, lofty, detached. The most damning comments, unsurprisingly, came from the outlets that had been purposefully excluded from the event. These dubbed him "the spy with no shame" and an "evil arrogant poseur."

And yet when I watched the footage on the evening news I was amazed by Anthony's bravura performance. In a calm, measured voice he stated that he "bitterly regretted" his past actions which were, he admitted, "totally wrong." He didn't defend his behavior or try to excuse it, though he said more than once that he "acted according to my conscience" to fight fascism, and that he had remained loyal to his friends if not his country. Under harsh questioning he repeatedly invoked the Official Secrets Act and refused to provide the names of other agents. He played down his once-coveted position in the royal household so skillfully that an uninformed listener might assume he had never even laid eyes on the Queen, much less curated her vast art collection for more than three decades.

As the enormity of Anthony's perfidy, and of his disgrace, became obvious in the days that followed, sides were quickly chosen by his friends and colleagues, though even those who remained nominally loyal seemed to make very little effort. Meanwhile, Anthony was methodically stripped of every honor he had ever received; even worse, the Courtauld made it clear that he was unwelcome within its precincts for the foreseeable future.

And yet Anthony retained his composure throughout—when I called him a few days after the press conference to offer practical assistance (shopping, etc.) he sounded calmer than he had in some time. "I don't mind losing the knighthood or those ridiculous honorary doctorates, what a joke they are anyway; and as for the nasty statements from so-called friends, well you know how that goes. Schadenfreude is a booming business."

When I went around the next day with milk and bread and a bottle of vodka I was disconcerted to find two reporters still camped on Anthony's doorstep. It occurred to me to confront them: they were, after all, torturing a disgraced old man for the advancement of their own morally questionable careers, but I recalled Jonathan's warning and checked myself, though doing so made me feel cowardly and small. And my feelings of unworthiness deepened when Anthony opened the door and led me shufflingly into the drawing room. Despite his breeziness over the phone, the exposé had clearly taken a profoundly heavy toll--within the space of a week he had aged by months or even years. His soiled cardigan hung forlornly on his emaciated frame, and his complexion had acquired the waxy sheen I associated with extreme ill health. He gave off a slight pong of earthiness, of poor hygiene and unwashed parts.

"It was kind of you to shop for me," he said in a perfunctory manner, folding himself into a Louis Seize chair beside the gaping, drafty hearth with a determined grimace. "I could have survived without the milk and bread, but vodka, as you know, increasingly becomes a Staple of Life."

I arranged myself in a chair near the window and searched for an appropriate response. I was aware that there were many questions I would need to ask myself going forward, that a self-reckoning must eventually occur. In the meantime, the task at hand was to comfort a friend whose life had just been blown apart. "Should we open it now?' I asked, glancing at the bottle of Stolichnaya I had brought, a slight smile hovering on my lips.

He gazed myopically at the bottle. “Posh,” he said. "And how very tempting. But on balance I think not."

I rather regretted his unexpected abstinence. I could have used a bracing blast of alcohol to propel me through this painful interview. For lack of a more original line I said, "So how are you faring?"

He chose to address my rather inane expression of concern literally (perhaps because to have addressed it metaphysically was simply too enormous a proposition). "I'm here," he began with a despairing smile. "I breathe, my heart beats. I converse with John on the rare occasion when he's not crying. I try to focus on my research."

"I'm so glad you're able to work..."

He glanced at me obliquely. "Oh yes, I poke along. I'm not quite dead yet, you know, despite the annihilation of my reputation."

I struggled again to find the right words—there were so many landmines ahead, so many potentially awkward avenues of discourse. "I imagine you're hearing from quite a few old friends?" I managed after awhile.

He was silent for a few moments, causing me to wonder if he'd even heard me. "About that vodka..." he said finally. "Perhaps a snifter wouldn't be such a bad idea after all."

With relief I took up my old position beside the dusty drinks cart. I poured each of us a generous shot and sat down again in a chair near the window. Rays of weak sunlight slanted into the room through the streaked French doors, and dust motes swam across the chilly space.

A crashing sound could be heard from somewhere in the apartment, causing Anthony to screw up his mouth disapprovingly. "I do hope John hasn't taken another tumble," he said, sipping his drink, giving no evidence of being particularly concerned by this somber possibility.

"Shouldn’t we check?" I asked.

Anthony gave me a steady look. "Best not."

I felt that I was glimpsing some profound and perhaps unsettling truth about Anthony's and John's relationship—how could it be better not to determine if your drunken, dissolute life partner has taken a fall?--but my host's expression suggested that it would be inadvisable to contradict him.

"As for old friends," Anthony said, turning his glass back and forth in his hands, "that's an interesting question altogether."

I had hoped we might have moved on from this unfortunate topic, which chafed uncomfortably against several sensitive areas including loyalty and even patriotism, but Anthony went on: "Tess has been marvelous, particularly since Victor has dropped me and advised her to do so as well. Fortunately for me she's always thought her husband a bit of an oaf." He stroked the tattered arm of the sofa as he spoke. "My protégés at the Courtauld—Golding and Anita and your man Kitson—have behaved, how shall I put it, humanely towards me in my ‘time of need’." And here he pulled a face. "Although I must say Kitson gave me a dressing down of sorts even as he was supposedly comforting me. As for the rest, the high and mighty curators and grand poohbahs who've always thought I was a jumped up nobody, I daresay my downfall has given their lives a whole new meaning. They're practically slobbering with delight." He emptied his glass in one last greedy gulp and held it up for a refill. I duly obliged while searching for an apt response.

"There've been several supportive letters in the Times."

But he tut-tutted this. "The writers of whom are far more interested in getting their names in print than supporting me."

"But surely it takes a bit of courage to defend you in this particular climate," I hazarded.

"Perhaps," he said, accepting the idea quite gamely. "But everyone has an ulterior motive, my dear." He cast his eyes around the room languidly, as if he might almost nod off. "Even you," he added in a quiet voice, as if from some distant reverie.

I sat up straighter in my chair and resettled my feet more firmly on the tattered carpet. "I believe I've tried to be as helpful as possible," I said in a carefully modulated voice.

"Helpful, yes. 'Helpful' could almost be your middle name. Only..."he hesitated.

"Only what?" I asked, perched warily on the edge of my chair.

Anthony cocked his head to one side, his sunken eyes screwed up in the exaggerated concentration of near-drunkenness. "It’s just that your helpfulness is so unfailingly--how shall I put it—convenient." Here he paused, and I thought perhaps he was finished; but there was more. "In your own interest," he concluded after a few moments with a small, unjocular hiccup.

His words, though jumbled, struck home. I felt color rushing to my cheeks. "I think that's a little unfair."

He rested his head on the sofa back. "Do you?" he said, as if he regarded my indignation as purely academic, barely worth acknowledging.

"I've stuck by you, haven’t I?" I said, my voice rising on a note of self-righteousness. "I've been a good friend."

He roused himself a bit, sitting up and looking directly at me; the alcoholic fog seemed to have lifted somewhat along a tide of anger, of long pent-up emotion or resentment. "You've been a good friend to a great many people, including some pretty dicey ones. But by your own admission you don't consider me a worthy object of true friendship."

I flashed back to the afternoon of the press conference. Clearly my candor had wounded Anthony more than I had realized at the time. "That's not what I meant," I claimed somewhat unconvincingly.

"Ah, but you did, my dear. I'm not likely to have misunderstood something so profoundly unpleasant." Before I could speak he pushed on. "You're a do-gooder, Paul, like so many Americans I've known. You're aggressively beneficent, to the point of doing harm."

"So now you're judging me based on my nationality?"

"Oh, not just that. And anyway," he continued, as if he hadn't heard me, as if my retorts were utterly irrelevant, "you wouldn't have let yourself be drawn into this dubious enterprise if you weren't a certain type of person."

My drink trembled slightly in my hand. "And what type of person is that?"

"Oh dear," he began with an embarrassed shrug. "I don't know exactly. Damaged.” He paused. “Insecure, socially ambitious, all that sort of thing. Nothing terribly bad, but nothing particularly good either."

I felt almost sick with righteous indignation. "I had absolutely no idea you felt this way."

He glanced at me with genuine puzzlement. "When I learned yesterday that you'd been to the House of Commons to witness my denunciation by Mrs. Thatcher, I realized that I'd fundamentally misjudged you."

I flushed again with shame. "Who told you that?"

"Really, Paul, it hardly matters who told me. Do you deny it?"

"I don't deny going, but I do deny that there was any malicious intent."

"Don't be silly, I didn't use the word 'malicious.' That you're not. But you're something almost worse, which is squishy. You make tiny compromises with dreary regularity--it's almost a tic with you. And those compromises have revealed you to be a bit of a moral shyster."

I sat back in my chair, feeling an almost physical impact from Anthony's words. Was any of it true? All of it? But even as I wondered, I reminded myself that many of the so-called 'compromises' I had made were for his sake. And in that moment I allowed my true feelings to flare up. "Considering your own abhorrent behavior, I don’t think you're in a position to judge me so harshly."

But he slumped back again on the sofa as though he had definitively lost interest in our conversation. "Of course I am. That's what people do, they judge. Even disgraced old fairies like myself."