Archangel by Gerald Seymour Page B

woman of his life. When they had met at the pub, and boasted of the ease of the despatch of the packet that Michael Holly would carry, he had never thought of a moment such as this. He wanted only to be gone, to break out of the circle of reproach and injury around him.
    'My son will survive, Mr Millet. That is what you want to hear from me? Michael will survive. If he serves every day of the sentence passed on him. . . even if you desert h i m . . . he will survive. He would never bow to them. I know my son, Mr Millet.'
    The tears dribbled on her face and made bright lines across the greyness of her cheeks and then her head was lost in her hands.
    'You should go now, Mr Millet,' Stephen Holly said.
    'You should not come to us again.'
    Alan Millet plucked his coat from the fender and saw that the drips had made a pool on the linoleum floor. He let himself out of the front door and when he was beyond the shelter of the porch he felt the sting of rain on his cheeks.
    He walked on glistening pavements, across streets where the rain spat back from the tarmac. He shivered in shop doorways as he waited for the traffic lights to give him green. He traversed this suburb of south-west London with its roads of London brick terraces and Snowcem semi-detached homes.
    A strange quest for him, an eccentric Grail that he sought.
    This was a place where the Soviet world was a thing of books and newspapers and television shows and magazines
    - not tangible. And Alan Millet traced a path to discover how well a man might withstand the sophistication of modern interrogation at the hands of the masters of that art.
    There should have been a better backcloth, something that smacked more of the dramatic and less of the bare ordinariness of these humble homes.
    He met a schoolmaster, now retired.
    Alan Millet sat in a front room filled with books of modern English history and photographs of small boys lined in the formations of the posed soccer team. He watched a man scratch back the memory of many years. He heard of a boy who was a loner - but not lonely, you know -
    satisfied to be with himself, happy with his own company.
    i don't think he needed the rest of the class, I don't think he even needed us, his teachers. A very self-contained child, if you know what I mean. Very strong in his own way, not swaggering or throwing his weight about, but a great inner strength. You'll appreciate that it's years back, that boys come and go for a schoolmaster, they're a bit phantom. But I remember this o n e . . . No real brilliance, nothing outstanding in class or sports, but there was an individuality there. I suppose you want an example from me . . . ? Well, I'll tell you this, he wasn't exceptionally strong, but none of the other lads ever fought with him. That's a pretty poor example, but none of them ever dared to rag him. There was this sort of aura round him. The other boys shied away from him, and he didn't seem to notice an absence of their friendship. . . I'm afraid I haven't been of much help to you, Mr Millet.'
    There was a lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at the Kingston Technical College across the river from Hampton Wick.
    Millet took the bus to the pre-war inelegance of the College close to the Thames towpath and blessed the warmth that he found on the upper deck.
    The lecturer was at first impatient at being called from a tutorial session, before his vanity was fed the magical words of 'Foreign and Commonwealth Office'. He wore a bow tie, a corduroy jacket, and suede shoes and appeared to Millet to be well-distanced from any workshop floor. He sat his guest down in a cubbyhole office, mixed instant coffee with the help of a whistling electric kettle, and rambled into a monologue of his thoughts on Michael Holly.
    'Academically there wasn't anything to shout from the ceilings, in fact I don't think that he found the work easy, but there was a dedication there that some of his contem-poraries of the same ability could have used. If he didn't