Edith and kim, p.1
Edith and Kim, page 1
EDITH AND KIM
Charlotte Philby
Copyright
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
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HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2022
Copyright © Charlotte Philby 2022
Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2022
Jacket photograph by László Moholy-Nagy/Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Charlotte Philby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot reprinted with permission from Faber and Faber Ltd.
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Source ISBN: 9780008466374
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2022 ISBN: 9780008466398
Version: 2022-03-07
Praise
‘Every generation bears the ineluctable stamp of the strategic historical experiences to which it has been exposed. The history of Soviet youth, and indeed of Soviet society, has been a unique tale of turmoil in a turbulent age.’
Merle Fainsod, ‘The Komsomols: A Study of Youth Under Dictatorship’, American Political Science Review, 1951
‘It was an idea. This kind of resonance [could not be] achieved through organisation, nor through propaganda. Only an idea has the power to disseminate itself so broadly.’
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, third and final director of the Bauhaus
‘In the hands of the person who uses it with feeling and imagination, the camera becomes very much more than the means of earning a living, it becomes a vital factor in recording and influencing the life of the people and in promoting human understanding.’
Edith Tudor-Hart, from the essay ‘Photography as a profession’, written for the magazine Housewife, 1945
‘It is rarely the risky operation that brings most danger … The real risks can be assessed in advance and precaution taken to obviate them. It is the almost meaningless incident that often puts us in mortal hazard.’
Kim Philby, My Silent War, 1968
Dedication
In memory of John Philby, 1943–2009
Epigraph
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Praise
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s note
Prologue
The fact of who I was
New arrangements
The last line of defence
A fairly strenuous year
Those early London days
June 1934, Regent’s Park
Into the woods
Elementary precautions
Red squirrel
Nothing really amiss
Everything that followed
A special sort of peace
Epilogue / notes on the cast
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Charlotte Philby
About the Publisher
All history is fiction
Author’s note
There have been countless books written about the double agent Kim Philby, often with conflicting views on the hows and the whys and, indeed, the whos. Far fewer have been written about Edith Tudor-Hart, the woman who recruited him, referred to in British intelligence files as ‘the foreign woman’.
What follows is not meant as a comprehensive retelling of a highly contentious period, but a work of fiction based on the facts as I have variously found them, reimagining the lives of two people from starkly different backgrounds whose very existences transformed one another’s, and changed the course of history.
While much of this story is true, Edith and Kim is a novel. In pulling together strands of the principal characters’ lives, I have chosen to exclude certain family members and friends on both sides, either because it didn’t feel fair or right to include them, or simply because they didn’t serve the version of events as I have reconstructed it. Some characters in the story are entirely invented.
For suggestions of books I have leaned on and drawn from in my research, or simply been inspired by, please see the reading list at the end of this novel.
NOTE: The Secret Intelligence Service files used within are faithfully reproduced – including some inconsistencies, not least the interchangeable use of the names Litzi and Lizzy, and the conflicting dates on which Edith is believed to have joined the Communist cause. I have duplicated irregularities in punctuation, various spellings of names – for example Suschitzky and Suschitsky, Adele and Adela – and typographical errors. Where names have been redacted, this has been done in line with the documents found at the National Archives in Kew. In places, I have also removed sections of text where the names or events referenced are not part of the story I am telling. Where this happens, I have indicated so in the text.
Kim’s letters are partly fictional, adapted from those he wrote to the family in London between 1964 and 1988. Some sections are lifted verbatim; additional paragraphs I have invented based on his interviews, his autobiography, anecdotes, family folklore, and my imagination.
Dear Edith,
I’ve just received copies of various articles about yours truly, in the British press, sent via my children. The Observer pictures were a bit more flattering than the ones in the Daily Mail; thankfully I am much too old to worry about my looks. Much mention of Cambridge. It rather leads me to wonder what bothers them more: what I did, or the fact of who I was. The Third Man, apparently – poor buggers can’t even count.
Old Guy is also getting rather a time of it on account of his taste in men, it seems to me. Hypocritical bastards. You should hear the stories he tells about his days at Eton …!
It’s all rather strange, reading about oneself in the papers. For a moment, I find myself taking umbrage at something that is said, and which I know to be a total fiction, but then I am reminded that what others think of us is none of our business, and should be of little interest. It is not, after all, what they think of us so much as a reflection of what they think of themselves; of what they loathe and envy in others.
It was A.A. Milne who said it best: ‘Every human being is a mystery and nobody knows the truth about anybody else.’
Yours,
Kim
Prologue
London, June 1934
The journey from Marble Arch to Regent’s Park takes longer than it should.
Despite the morning sun, the woman wears a dark turtleneck and long skirt, a beret pulled down over bobbed hair. She moves quickly, sticking to the shadows. The man, a few years her junior, keeps pace, his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his overcoat, the bit of his pipe clenched between his teeth.
There is a portentous quality to the silence as they turn into Hyde Park, the scuffling of horse-hooves closing in from behind causing him to clench his fists until the sound passes, the morning riders kicking up dust as they skirt the perimeter.
A bead of sweat forms on his forehead as they turn left, away from the grass, and cross Park Lane. The streets that slice through Mayfair are blessedly shaded as they continue their walk for an hour or so, along New Bond Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, the woman’s eyes focused ahead but alert to every sound as the city comes to life: peals of laughter from a young couple bursting out from a doorway, the clatter of a rag-and-bone man fading into the echoes of a thousand muted voices, layered over one another across the city’s streets.
Somewhere near Aldwych she hails a taxi, the man ducking in beside her, a ripple of electricity passing between them, along with unspoken questions, as his hand accidentall y brushes hers.
London skids past on the other side of the glass, the two passengers facing away from one another, their attention fixed on the scenes playing out on their respective sides of the street as they head back the way they came: children skipping behind impatient parents; lovers walking arm-in-arm, locked in their own private world, faces tipped upwards like buttercups in the morning rays. A doorman outside the Ritz adjusts his cufflinks as they roll back along Piccadilly, stifling a yawn, his eyes flicking up, suddenly aware that he is being watched.
The couple inside the motor-car sit in silence until, after a while, the woman leans forward and asks the driver to stop. The response to her distinct Austrian lilt is an immediate slowing of wheels. She steps out and the man follows her, their footsteps weaving an invisible web. A while later still, she holds her arm out again, flagging down another passing cab; this time her companion pauses, raising his hand to his pipe, opening his mouth as if to speak.
But the words fall away as he steps in behind her, one of them the spider, the other the fly.
By the time they reach Maida Vale tube station more than two hours have passed.
The sound of their own footsteps follows as they take the stairs to the platform. It is cooler down here, below ground. The man bristles with nervous energy as the train approaches; a rat scuttles across the tracks and disappears into the black. The woman boards first, her companion stepping in behind, his thoughts turning briefly to his mother and father far from home, somewhere on the other side of the world.
Home. The word comes to her as they stand side by side in the carriage, and she lets it roll a moment in her mind, her thoughts tilting this way and that, unable to find a flat surface on which to land.
‘I do beg your pardon.’ The passenger seems to appear from nowhere, catching her eye momentarily as he squeezes past, touching the brim of his hat. Without warning, as the doors start to close, the woman takes her companion’s hand and pulls him out of the carriage, leading him across the empty concourse to the opposite platform where another train hurtles towards them, the sound of the brakes escalating into a scream.
It is only once they are on the path cutting through Regent’s Park, some four hours after they set off, that the man finally speaks.
‘He is expecting us?’
The woman says nothing in reply, only slowing slightly, allowing her charge to move ahead as they catch sight of a figure on the bench: short, stocky frame, boxer’s ears partly obscured beneath a hat.
Alert to their footsteps, the man looks up.
Instinctively the younger man, out of breath from all the walking, takes the pipe from his lips, turning briefly towards his chaperone. But she has already gone.
The fact of who I was
One of Edith Suschitzky’s most formative memories is her father’s first arrest, though she wasn’t there. It isn’t possible, some would say, to recall an event one hasn’t witnessed. But Edith Suschitzky lived with that day, on a loop, either regaled to her as a medal of defiance over family lunches, or whispered into her ear at night as she fell asleep, as a warning: Never let them break you. They will never let you be free. When you grow up with a story, the way she has grown up with this one, it becomes partly your own.
The story of that day in 1920, not long after her twelfth birthday, at the bookshop at Favoritenstrasse 57, refracts in Edith’s memory, parts of it growing more or less vivid with every retelling. On some days, she focuses on the smell of diesel and yeast carried on the air from the bakers along the street as the shop door creaks open, her father looking up from the counter, his eyes instantly hardening. On others, she pictures the officer’s shadow obliterating the doorway, homes in on the shine of his boot as he makes his way unhurriedly through the store, his fingers running over the spines.
Both Edith and her brother Wolf – now eight years old – have already headed to school. The fog had risen thick that morning, blanketing the city’s streets, obscuring Wilhelm Suschitzky’s view as he made his way past the brickworks and the row of shops that led to Brüder Suschitzky: the first Socialist bookshop in Vienna’s tenth district of over 120,000 people. These were the exact words he had used to his wife, Adele, the day he and his brother Philipp had first pulled back the doors in the autumn of 1901.
Already, those days felt like another lifetime. Post-war, the world had changed. Life had changed – though not as much as it would, not least for a business which extolled the virtues of enlightenment in one of city’s largest working-class districts, first simply as a bookshop and then, for the past eight years, also as a publisher.
Wilhelm paused that morning, as he did every morning before opening up, to take in the shop and its evidence of a life’s work: the original sign, BUCHHANDLUNG ANTIQUARIAT, now hanging alongside a second sign advertising Anzengruber-Verlag publishers.
From the moment the men had first opened the doors to Brüder Suschitzky almost two decades earlier – long before either of them could have envisaged what fate had in store – it was more than just a business. This was a manifesto for the world the Suschitzky brothers had wanted for the children they were yet to have. A middle-class family choosing to live amidst the poverty and the oppression of the working classes, dirt steeped in a growing sense of despair, the Suschitzky brothers – and their books – were consciously paraded as a bastion of hope.
It was this hope, Wilhelm would tell his daughter, soberly, as he stroked her hair at night, that the officials were trying to shut down when they came and seized the tomes and leaflets, novels and texts, from workers’ poetry to tracts on the women’s movement, pedagogical reform and sexual emancipation. That first time – the officers storming through their shop, trampling not just the carpet but the very fabric of their lives – was the ultimate act of aggression. And yet, Wilhelm would recall, repeating the events of that day as one might a lullaby, seeing those men there in their perfectly pressed clothes, their well-fed bellies moving self-righteously through the world he and his brother had created, he hadn’t cowered. Rather, Edith’s father had felt himself stand taller. A self-proclaimed pacifist, he hadn’t lashed out. He had refused to fight in a way against which they could have immediately retaliated.
But he never stopped fighting in the years that followed, as the harassment escalated along with the confiscation of books, the court trials worsening as Austria’s democratic government fell. Wilhelm Suschitzky fought quietly – he fought with his mind, he would tell Edith, proudly. And he never stopped fighting. Right up until the moment he held a gun to his own head.
When she was ten years old, Edith Suschitzky had pursued an argument with her father over supper as he condemned the attempted coup d’état by the newly formed KPÖ, the Communist Party of Austria, claiming that violence was not the answer, that it undermined the efforts that men like him had been making for years. (Men, she noted.) It wasn’t simply that she disagreed, she replied – more horrifying was the fact that someone she loved so dearly could think so strangely. A man who had seen with his own eyes the bodies floating in the Danube.
‘Books and ideas alone aren’t enough,’ she had chastised Wilhelm in no uncertain terms. ‘You can’t feed a dying man with thoughts.’
‘Your voice,’ he had snorted, marvelling at her passion. ‘It teeters at the edge of some terrible catastrophe. You are just a child, you cannot understand.’
But she did understand, innately, and with a received wisdom gathered over the weekends spent in Grundlsee; she felt it, vibrating through the words of the scholars at the camp organised by Eugenie Schwarzwald, sorrow hovering over the brushstrokes of the artists she met there, resonating through the semi-quavers and crotchets of composer Arnold Schoenberg as he taught. She understood in a way that, once acknowledged, was impossible for her to ignore.
Change requires action.
‘Father, for an atheist,’ she replied, ‘you do love to preach.’
‘Preach on, St John.’
This is as much as the boy hears before the men’s voices lower again so that Kim cannot decipher the rest of the conversation, beyond the odd snatched words: Hashemites and Gertrude Bell.
