Free Young Philby by Robert Littell Page A

married at eight-fifteen the next morning by a town hall clerk who badly needed the talents of a dentist. I signed the register identifying myself as a student without religious affiliation. Kim claimed to be a British tourist. Next to “Religion” he wrote, in English, “None that I am aware of.” At nine the British Consul handed me a brand-new British passport with an old photograph of me glued onto one page—I had dredged it up from the metal box under the bed; it was me before I’d seen piles of shoes with limbs still attached to them. There was no mistaking the innocence in my eighteen-year-old eyes. In the photograph my hair was shoulder length and sun-bleached. The consul, a kindly gentleman who was counting the days until he could return to Scotland, asked me if blond was the original color. I told him I had dyed my hair so often I wasn’t sure. He said not to worry, that if the frontier police noticed the discrepancy, they wouldn’t find it remarkable that I had transformed myself into a redhead. All the girls were doing it these days, he said. He wished us good luck and Godspeed. I told him I didn’t believe in God. Kim coughed up a laugh and said he did believe in speed. The Consul said he did, too. He saluted the newlyweds from the small balcony over the embassy’s polished brass entrance as we saddled up in the courtyard below. Kim wore his rucksack on his chest, I wore mine on my back. It contained clothing and (in the hope they might one day be worth something) my two small rolled-up Modiglianis. I hung on to Kim’s shoulder straps as he stomped the motorcycle into life.
    Was it the airstream in my face that brought tears to my eyes as we headed through the achingly familiar boulevards of my beloved Vienna toward England, a country nine hundred miles away, give or take, that I could scarcely imagine?

 
    2: LONDON, APRIL 1934
    Where a Chap from Cambridge Has the Bright Idea of Spying for the Reds
    Bugger if I remember who came up with the idea of organizing a welcome home bash for Kim. The word spread that the sod was back in town with a Magyar wife in tow and suddenly the party was on the agendum. One of Philby’s Cambridge chums offered his mother’s Cadogan flat—she was said to be traveling on the Continent with her husband and his lover at the time. At the appointed hour Don Maclean came round. Good fellow, Maclean. He’d put on weight since Cambridge, where he earned a first in foreign languages. Straight as a ramrod, sexually speaking, but I don’t hold that against a chap. He and Kim had had a falling-out at university, never did find out over what, think it had to do with Maclean’s having joined the fledgling Communist cell at Cambridge whilst Kim, for reasons beknownst only to himself, never actually pocketed a party card. That asshole Anthony Blunt crashed the party. He was wearing a starched col cassé , you’d have thought the twit was the King of England; he wasn’t bashful about claiming to be a distant cousin of the Queen, he certainly dressed to fit the role he’d assigned himself. Would have turned him away except he was clutching a bottle of half-decent whiskey. Anthony made something of a splash at Cambridge in French art and you could count on him to tone up the conversation if, as was often the case, I toned it down. Bob Wright, Kim’s coal miner mate—Kim had lodged with Wright in Huthwaite when they were both reading economics—appeared with two Malthusian League ladies, one on each arm. He’d picked them up at a stationer’s shop on Kensington High, they’d just come away from a forum on constipation, or was it contraception? With their little yellow badges, Malthusian Leaguers, like the suffragettes before them, were fair game if you were heterosexual. It was common knowledge they preached birth control in order to practice free love. (At the nightly poker games during our Cambridge undergraduate days, there had been a running argument over whether