She looked at me and nodded. 'You must see a doctor in the morning.'
'I saw a doctor: I'm fine.'
'I knew something must have gone amiss,' said Fiona. 'Dicky arrived in the office breathing fire and saying that someone had betrayed the operation. He saw you in Berlin but you slipped away, he said. What happened?'
'When Dicky has to face the consequences of his own incompetence, he always roars around shouting that he's been betrayed.'
'He immediately set up a conference. He went bursting into a meeting of the estimates committee in the big conference room, and told them there was an operational emergency and threw them out. They had to hold their meeting in the D-G's ante-room. That was the only place available. They were spitting mad.' She related this story without focusing on Dicky. She spoke about him as if he were someone she hardly knew. And yet I was sure she blamed Dicky for taking Tessa to Berlin. If Tessa had stayed at home with George she'd still be alive. Fiona had told me that more than once.
'When did you first go into the office?'
Fiona turned and looked at me. 'Bernard, you must speak to her.' I didn't have to ask. She meant Gloria Kent, with whom I'd been living until I discovered that Fiona's defection to the East was all part of a long-term deception plan which had never been confided to me.
'You know I'm going to do that, sweetheart,' I promised once again.
'I thought she was going to university.'
'The Department let her down. They promised to continue paying her while she was studying and then changed their minds.'
'There must be all sorts of other scholarships,' said Fiona wistfully.
'I'm sure the present situation ... with you being there, is just as difficult for her,' I said.
'She's waiting for you to marry her,' said Fiona with a brave smile that she had trouble holding on to.
'Of course she isn't. She knows I'm married to you.'
'If Daddy hadn't collected the children from her ...' She stopped and I filled in the spaces. She was thinking of how she might now be asking Gloria if she could visit her own children. She'd probably spent a long time thinking about it.
'Don't be ungrateful, darling,' I said. 'What would have happened to the children if Gloria hadn't looked after them?'
'Daddy wanted them all along.'
I clenched my lips tight. The truth was that David Timothy Kimber-Hutchinson, Fiona's father, had been his usual autocratic uncooperative self when I'd asked for his help-with the children. In any case, if Fiona would only admit the truth, she would have to say that any choice between having one's children under the care of Gloria Kent or exposing them to the long-term influence of her mischief-making old fool of a father was no choice at all. 'He could have done worse than leaving them with Gloria.'
'He said they were running wild.'
'I doubt that. She was trying to work in the office and look after the children too,' I said calmly and mildly. 'She did the best she could.'
'Is that what she told you?'
'I haven't discussed it with her, you know I haven't. Once I heard that your father had swooped in and grabbed the children there was nothing to discuss.'
'Swooped in and grabbed them,' she repeated. 'We're indebted to Gloria for looking after them, I notice, but when Daddy rescues them a and gets them a place in a good private school at short notice, pays their fees and does everything a he is said to have swooped in and grabbed them.'
'Don't let's argue about the children,' I said. My face was aching again, I suppose it was something to do with the bruising and the blood circulation. 'We both only want what's best for them.'
'So does Daddy.'
'Yes, of course,' I said. Fiona looked at me. She knew I was bursting to add that Gloria also wanted only what was best for them. I counted to ten and then said: 'But you must admit, it was you who left the children. It wasn't me or Gloria who created the problem.'
'How dare you say I abandoned them? You had them in your care. It was you who gave them to a stranger.'
Both of us were crippled with that English inability to discuss anything truly important. Perhaps I should have been more brutal and told her that now she would have to live with the consequences of her heroic escapade, even if it meant being a stranger to her children. I put my arm round her shoulder but she stiffened. 'We'll sort it out,' I said. 'When we go and see the children at the weekend we'll sort it out.'
She sipped some wine and then wiped her lips. 'I'm sorry, Bernard. I spent all day telling myself that when you arrived we mustn't get into a squabble about Daddy and the children.' She stood up and began clearing the table, collecting the plates and cutlery.
'Everyone means well,' I said. 'Everyone is trying to help.'
'I can't work alongside her,' said Fiona. 'And I won't.'
'You won't have to.'
'Suppose they assign me to the Hungary desk?'
'Yes, well Hungary is the place where it's all going to happen,' I said. 'If we can get the Hungarians to open their border, the DDR would have to fortify that entire frontier to prevent their people crossing over. That might prove the last straw for the regime.'
'It's a big if,' said Fiona, who was determined not to be cheered up. 'And meanwhile Miss Kent is running the Hungary desk.' She put down the plates and cutlery and stood there as if she'd forgotten what she was about to do.
'Not ...?'
'No, she hasn't actually got the desk; she's just working there. But she speaks Hungarian like a native. What chance do I have working in a department with a chief already established, and Gloria a living encyclopedia on Hungary and everything Hungarian?'
'Tell Dicky you want to work somewhere else,' I said. 'He's Ops supremo for the time being: he could put you anywhere you want.'
'I asked for Northern Ireland, but Dicky said that was out of the question.'
'Why? It's up for grabs I hear.'
'You know why. It's the old boy network. It will go to some boozy someone with drinking companions in the army and "Five" and the RUC. Belfast is reserved for political nominees these days.'
'Maybe it's just as well. I wouldn't like to see you embroiled in all that Irish mess and mayhem. Belfast is too dangerous for a woman.'
'You sound like Dicky.'
'Dicky has to get it right once in a while, just by the law of averages.'
'Yes. And I wish you would try harder to see that. You make trouble for yourself by openly displaying your contempt for him. It undermines his authority.'
'I'll talk to Gloria tomorrow,' I said. 'I promise.'
'She'll be in the Data Centre. They are working hard burying their mistakes inside one of those very very thick reports for the Minister, in the hope that he'll not have time to winkle out the bits they need to conceal.'
'Wherever she is, I'll find her and talk to her. I promise.'
'She visits the children every week. Every week! She takes them presents and sends them cards. Sometimes her father goes too; the children call him "Uncle".'
'She goes to your father's home to see them?'
'Daddy won't hear a word said against her,' said Fiona. 'She's won him over completely.'
'Well, well.' Fiona's father always became totally gaga in the presence of any nubile girl, but it was easy to understand why Fiona felt isolated.
'Just tell her it's all over. Thank her for looking after the children and all that. But make sure she knows it's all over. You're happily married. Married to me. And I don't want her visiting my children.'
I nodded. Fiona's stories about Tessa's ghost may or may not have been passing delusions, but her feelings about Gloria were unmistakably heartfelt and chronic. 'Tell me something, darling,' I said. 'When Tessa made her Will assigning this flat and its contents over to you, you were in Berlin working for the DDR. What would you have done with an apartment in London?'
'Sold it, I suppose,' said Fiona, eyeing me warily.
'And thrown George out?'
'Perhaps Tessa knew George wouldn't want to remain here if anything happened to her. Perhaps they discussed it. Or perhaps some lawyer framed the terms of the Will. Anyway, who could have guessed Tessa would predecease George and me?' Fiona offered me the fruit bowl. 'The pears are ripe. Shall I give you a clean plate?'
'No thanks,' I said. 'So did you tell Tessa that your defection was all a stunt? Did you hint to her that eventually you hoped to return to normal duty and life in London?'
'But didn't tell you my secret? Is that what's troubling you?'
'Well, did you?' Changing my mind, I took back my meat plate from where she had stacked it and took a pear and started to peel it with the knife I'd used for the veal.
'You need a clean plate and a fruit knife.' Having left two small plates ready, she now reached for them and gave me one, together with a fruit knife. She took the pear from my hand and put it on the clean plate, and then removed the meat plate. Fiona was a careful planner, and she stuck to her plans; whether it was pears on fruit plates or anything else. She looked at me. 'Of course not. Almost no one knew. It was the closest-guarded secret the Department ever had. I wish you wouldn't keep brooding about it.'
'I'm not brooding on it a nor on anything else,' I said, masterfully restraining myself from asking why I mustn't keep brooding about her betrayal but she could keep brooding about its outcome.
'Oh, there are some letters for you.' She got them from a silver toast-rack on the sideboard which George had always used for mail.
'Who knows this address?'
'Don't be so secretive.'
'I've not given this address to anyone,' I said.
'Open your mail and perhaps you'll find out,' she said, and began to clear the table.
The letters were a collection of circulars and bills for telephone and gas, and a chatty letter from an uncle in Chicago. Unremarkable except that I had no uncle in Chicago.
'Good news, darling?' she asked as she took the dishes away to the kitchen and began filling the dish-washer.
'Yes, they are going to cut off the phone.'
'I paid,' said Fiona's voice from the kitchen.
I looked at the letter from Chicago. After two pages of banal chit-chat there were two lines of phone numbers. The handwriting was cramped and angular, to disguise the identity I suppose, but I had guessed what it was even before I'd got to the lists of numbers. 'I think I'll take a bath,' I called. 'Is the water hot?'
'Help yourself. There are mountains of lovely new towels and I bought a razor and shaving cream for you in case you arrived without your bag.'
'You think of everything.'
'Uncle' was of course Bret Rensselaer. The bogus phone numbers provided a message. He'd used the crudest code of all and yet, like so many crude devices a from home-made bombs to the three-card trick a it could be effective enough to defeat a great deal of sophisticated effort. The first number was the page, the second number the line and the third number showed which word it was. All you needed to read the message was the same edition of the same book that the sender had used. Since the code was based upon words, rather than letters, it provided no letter-frequency, which cracks most amateur codes wide open. In an age when there was an infinity of printed books available such codes were not easy to break. I had the right book: Bret's Bible. I'd carried it with me just as Bret had urged me to do. I suppose some instinct had already told me it would be needed.
I felt somewhat foolish running my bath in a steam-filled bathroom while I counted my way through the tiny Bible with its thin, almost transparent, pages. I hadn't decoded a coded message since I left the boy scouts. Or was it the training school: there's not a lot of difference.
Each page of the ancient little Bible was in two columns, but I soon realized that Bret was using only the left-hand column. I flipped the pages and the words emerged one by one in a strange sequence, giving me the eerie feeling that Bret was speaking from beyond the grave: as if the words were a spiritual communication coming by Ouija board.
UNKNOWN DEAD NEVERTHELESS REVEALED 4 WIFE'S SERVANT I imagined Bret scouring his Bible for the words he wanted. It would be a frustrating task, and the names of people and towns were unavailable. It was typical of Bret that, having lavished a 'nevertheless' upon his text, he eventually grew impatient enough to use a numeral instead of 'for'.
'Don't phone me,' my uncle said in his letter. 'I won't be home.' But I rather thought that was a reminder that Bret's phone was not completely private. Poor old Bret. The last of the old top-floor warriors, he'd never give up his hopes of getting back to active duty in London.
'Is the water hot?' Fiona yelled from the other side of the door.
'Yes, and I'm in it,' I said feelingly, and flushed Bret's cryptic message down the toilet.
8.
Dicky arrived at work only thirty minutes after I did. He'd been arriving earlier since getting temporary control of Operations. Which elements of his daily routine, of jogging across Hampstead Heath and returning home for breakfast, had been abandoned I don't know, but he was steadily putting on weight. I suppose the early arrival was part of his campaign to get the Ops appointment made permanent.
'Come in, Bernard,' he said brusquely as he came into the ante-room, hurrying past his secretary while extending a hand to grab the batch of opened mail she held aloft for him.
He went into his office where his lion-skin rug was stretched, limbs extended, mane tangled and glass eyes glinting malevolently. Dicky avoided stepping on his lion, I'd noticed that before, and went around to stand behind the polished rosewood table he used instead of a desk.
Set close together, and occupying a large section of the wall behind him, there were neatly framed black and white photos in all of which a smiling Dicky was clasping hands with someone rich and important. On the other wall there stood a reproduction Chippendale glass-fronted case containing books which Dicky had bought because of their impressive leather bindings. He kept it locked because closer inspection revealed them to be such volumes as Glorious Days of Empire and incomplete histories of the Crimean War and of Vickers Armstrong. The only one I'd seen him open was a battered old copy of Who's Who which he used in order to look up the antecedents of people he met at parties. 'Ah ha!' He shuffled quickly through his mail before dropping it into a tray. Then he pulled off his brown leather replica WW2 fighter pilot's jacket, and tossed it across the room to the waiting arms of his assistant. He stood there while I admired his knitted sweater; the grass-green one with a pattern of life-size apples, oranges and bananas across its front.
Arrayed before him on his bright red blotter there was a tumbler of water and half a dozen pills of various shapes and colours. Still on his feet, Dicky began picking up the pills one at a time, gulping each with a mouthful of water. 'Do you take vitamins, Bernard?'
'No,' I said. He sounded a little short of breath but I didn't remark on this.
'I have to take vitamins at this time of the year.' He popped a large red pill into his mouth.
'What debilitation strikes you down at this time of year?' I asked with genuine interest.
'Social commitments, Bernard. Dinner parties, Whitehall ceremonies, banquets, official gatherings, staff booze-ups and so on. It's very demanding.' This time he popped a flecked orange cylinder on to his tongue. 'B12,' he explained.
'It's tough,' I said. 'I never realized what it was like at the top.'
'It's all part of the job,' he said philosophically. 'It's the work behind the scenes that keeps this Department going.' When the last pill had been swallowed he finished the water and shouted very loudly: 'Coffee, slaves. Coffee!' In the ante-room beyond the door I could hear the unfortunate girl who worked there beginning the frenzied business of making Dicky's coffee. He forbade them to grind the coffee in advance; he said it lost the essential oils.
He sat down behind the table. 'Take the weight off your feet, Bernard, and have some coffee.' He seemed to be practising the charming smile and servile manner that he usually reserved for the Director-General. An invitation to join Dicky for coffee was not extended impulsively, so I knew he wanted something. 'Have you brought your revised report?'
'No,' I said, and sat down in the Charles Eames chair. Now that Dicky had taken delivery of a remarkable new 'posture' chair he'd seen advertised in House and Garden, the Eames was relegated to seating visitors. I sank deep down into the soft armchair, and as he watched me settle he focused on my face. The bruises had lost their initial dark purple hues and were streaked with crimson and orange, like a sunset. 'What in hell happened to you?' he said in an awed voice that made me think my bruises were worse than they were.
'A drunken idiot tried to rob me.'
'Where?'