This is the book I meant to read, a domestic spy story, but very good.
Maurice Castle is a minor functionary in the security services in London, working at the Africa desk, where he used to live and whose black wife and her son he helped to spring from apartheid South Africa.
They live a comfortably middle class English life in Berkhampstead where, I believe, Greene himself lived as a child.
Castle’s equally comfortable clubbish bosses suspect a traitor in the organisation and one of Castle’s colleagues Davies is poisoned by these people, to avoid any scandal. But Davies is innocent and it is Castle, who was helped by communist radicals to get his family out of Africa, who was spying for the Russians out of a tired and misplaced loyalty.
The ending is not as I remember it:
Castle is smuggled out to Moscow a la Guy Burgess and his wife is abandoned with his mother in England, unable to get a passport for her son. The book ends with them in telephone contact but, one suspects, rather forlorn hope of being reunited in Moscow.
I don’t know whether Greene knew Burgess and McLean, (I suspect he probably did), but the ending echoes their fate, the earlier bits with a Greene twist.
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