The Hothouse by the East River by Muriel Spark

says, ‘It was a fruitless journey, Pierre.’
    ‘Oh, I
wouldn’t say that,’ Pierre says. ‘The truth is always fruitful.’
     

‘The
truth, yes,’ says the father. ‘But you failed to find the truth. The records
have been falsified. Kiel is here in New York and he’s after me. They always
get their revenge.’
    Peregrine
sips his drink and then turns the glass this way and that, as if he too feels
that all this palaver has occurred many times before, many times, like the new
spring today blowing in on Manhattan from Long Island Sound, making the dust
dance on the pavements.
    ‘About
this show that Pierre and I are planning to put on at the Very Much Club,’ he
says, ‘we don’t have a lot of time to get started if we want the spring
audiences; May, June at the latest. But we can’t fail, Mr Hazlett, that’s for
sure. It’s right for the spring.’
    But
Paul is still in the compound of Intelligence buildings in the spring of 1944.
He is twenty-eight. Paul has been back and forward to England since his late
school-days, having been sent from Montenegro to his father’s English
relatives. He studied in Paris, then London. ‘His intellect has a hundred
eyes,’ his mother wrote to her friends. In fact he has made his way quite well,
starting on foreign broadcasts for the B.B.C. Then, since it had come round to
wartime, he was sent to the Compound, a secret government department which
specialised in propaganda broadcasts to Europe.
    ‘I’m
not ambitious,’ he says to Elsa when he has fallen in love with her. ‘Not an
ambitious man at all.’ He says this in self-commendation; what he really means
is that he is afraid he will not be successful in achieving any ambitions. She
is not interested one way or another in his ambitions, being attracted to him
in any case more and more, day after day. If he should say he is ambitious for
anything whatsoever the word would not mean anything to her. She is
twenty-three, and at this time does not cast a shadow at the least angle
different from anybody else’s within her range of visible light; sunlight and
artificial light act on Elsa as they do on everyone else.
    The
norm in the air about Elsa and Paul is the war with Germany.
    At
times, when she is not on late duty, Elsa takes the German prisoners for walks
in the country within a five-mile radius of the Compound. For various reasons
these men, having been taken prisoners of war, have chosen to leave their camps
and work for their enemy. What they are engaged with in this particular
Compound is known as black propaganda and psychological warfare. This is the
propagation of the Allied point of view under the guise of the German point of
view; it involves a tangled mixture of damaging lies, flattering and plausible
truths.
    ‘I
think you’re out of your element,’ says Miles Bunting to Elsa. He is a lanky
man with a twisted smile, reputed to be the most intelligent member of the
Compound. The Compound is reputed to be the most intelligent outfit of the war.
The source from which these reputations have arisen will never be found.
    ‘I
think you’re out of your mind,’ she says.
    ‘Our
war effort here is extremely valuable,’ he says.
    ‘Valuable
to yourselves,’ says she.
    ‘No, to
the country,’ he says. And he adds, ‘We have means of testing the results.
These are things you don’t know a thing about.’
    She has
said the place is ridiculous. Deep in the heart of it, she is nevertheless
deprived of any insight into its doing. It is the policy of the little
organisation to tell the workers only what they need to know to perform their
individual functions.
    Miles
Bunting says again, ‘You’re out of your element.’
    ‘And
you, your mind,’ she says.
    It is
true she is out of her element; for one thing she is the only member of the
Compound who does not know German. And in a sense it is true he is out of his
mind for indulging a desire to confide in her, with hints and references to
which she cannot