London Match

by Len Deighton

  ‘Bret Rensselaer didn’t spill his soup,’ said Daphne. ‘And he wears beautiful ties.’

  ‘Why don’t you get the supper, darling?’

  ‘The trays are all ready.’

  ‘And I’ll get the video,’ said Dicky. He stood, hitched his trousers up, and retrieved my report from under the paperweight before he strode from the room.

  ‘The video is on the machine,’ said Daphne. ‘He hates saying he’s going to the loo. He’s such a prude about some things.’

  I nodded.

  She stood by the kitchen door and said, ‘I’ll go and get the food.’ But she made no move.

  ‘Can I help you, Daphne?’

  To my surprise she said yes. Usually Daphne didn’t like visitors to her kitchen. I’d heard her say that many times.

  I followed her. The kitchen had all been redecorated since the last time I’d been there. It was like a cupboard shop; there were cupboards on every available piece of wall space. All were made of plastic, patterned to look like oak.

  ‘Dicky is having an affair,’ she said.

  ‘Is he?’

  She disregarded my feigned surprise. ‘Has he spoken with you about her?’

  ‘An affair?’

  ‘He relies on you,’ she said. ‘Are you sure he hasn’t mentioned anything?’

  ‘I’ve been with Bret Rensselaer a lot of the time lately.’

  ‘I know I’m putting you in a difficult position, Bernard, but I must know.’

  ‘He hasn’t discussed it with me, Daphne. To tell you the truth, it’s not the sort of thing he’d confide to me, even if it was true.’ Her face fell. ‘And I’m sure it’s not,’ I added.

  ‘It’s your sister-in-law,’ said Daphne. ‘She must be as old as I am, perhaps older.’ She opened the toasting machine and pried the sandwiches out of it, using the blade of an old knife. Without turning to me she said, ‘If it was some very young girl, I’d find it easier to understand.’

  I nodded. Was this, I wondered, a concession to my relationship with Gloria? ‘Those sandwiches smell good,’ I said.

  ‘They’re only ham and cheese,’ said Daphne. ‘Dicky won’t eat anything exotic.’ She got a big plate of previously prepared sandwiches from the oven. ‘Tessa, I mean. Your sister-in-law; Tessa Kosinski.’

  ‘I’ve only got the one,’ I said. And one like Tessa was more than enough, I thought. Why did she have to make everyone’s life so bloody complicated?

  ‘And she’s a friend,’ said Daphne. ‘A friend of the family. That’s what hurts.’

  ‘Tessa has been kind to me, helping me with the children.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Daphne sniffed. It wasn’t the sort of sniff that fragile ladies used as a prelude to tears – more the sort of sniff Old Bailey judges gave before passing the death sentence. ‘I suppose you must feel a debt of loyalty.’ She put cutlery on the trays. She did it very carefully and gently, so that I wouldn’t think she was angry.

  ‘I’ll do anything I can to help,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry about Dicky hearing us. We’ll hear the toilet flush.’ She began to look for soup bowls and she had to open four of the cupboards before she found them. ‘They had an affair before.’ She was speaking to the inside of the cupboards. ‘Now, don’t say you didn’t know about that, Bernard. Tessa and I made up after that. I thought it was all finished.’

  ‘And this time?’

  ‘A friend of mine saw them at a little hotel near Deal…Kent, you know.’

  ‘That’s a strange place to go for…’ I stopped and tried to rephrase the sentence.

  ‘No, it was chosen as one of the ten best places for a lovers’ weekend by one of the women’s magazines last month. Harpers & Queen, I think. That’s why my friend was there.’

  ‘Perhaps Dicky…’

  ‘He told me he was in Cologne,’ said Daphne. ‘He said it was top secret.’

  ‘Is there something you want me to do about it?’

  ‘I want to meet your brother-in-law,’ said Daphne. ‘I want to talk to him about it. I want him to know how I feel.’

  ‘Would that really be wise?’ I said. I wondered how George would react to an approach from Daphne.

  ‘It’s what I want. I’ve thought about it, and it’s what I want.’

  ‘It might just blow over.’

  ‘It will. They all blow over,’ said Daphne. ‘One after another he has these girlfriends, and I wait for it to blow over. Then he goes off with someone else. Or with the same one again.’

  ‘Have you spoken to him about it?’ I said.

  ‘He says it’s his money he spends, not mine. He says it’s the money his uncle left him.’ She turned to me. ‘It’s nothing to do with the money, Bernard. It’s the betrayal. He wouldn’t betray his country, would he? He’s fanatical about loyalty to the Department. So why betray his wife and children?’

  ‘Did you tell him that?’

  ‘Over and over again. I’ve had enough of it. I’m going to get a divorce. I want George Kosinski to know that I’m naming his wife in a divorce action.’

  Poor George, I thought, that’s all he needs to complete his misery. ‘That’s a serious step, Daphne. I know how you feel, but there are your children…’

  ‘They’re at school. I only see them in the holidays. Sometimes I think that it was a terrible mistake to send them to boarding school. If the children had lived at home, perhaps Dicky would have had more to keep him from straying.’

  ‘Sometimes it works the other way,’ I said, more to comfort her than because I believed it. ‘Sometimes children at home make husbands want to get out.’

  ‘Will you arrange it?’ she said. ‘In the next few days?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ I said. I heard Dicky upstairs.

  Daphne had the trays all ready. ‘Could you open the wine, Bernard, and bring the paper napkins? The corkscrew is in the drawer.’

  As she held the refrigerator door open for me to get the wine, she said, ‘Wasn’t that a surprise about Mr Rensselaer? I’d always liked him.’ She closed the door and I waited for her as she pushed the hot sandwiches onto the serving plate with flicking motions so that she didn’t burn her fingers.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Stealing a Cabinet memo and giving it to the Russians. And now they’re saying he tried to get you all killed.’ She saw the surprise in my face. ‘Oh, I know it’s still the subject of an enquiry, and we mustn’t talk about it, but Dicky says Bret is going to have a job talking his way out of this one.’ She picked up all three trays after piling them one on top of the other. ‘It must be a mistake, don’t you think? He couldn’t really be a spy, could he? He’s such a nice man.’

  ‘Come along, come along,’ shouted Dicky from the next room. ‘The titles are running.’

  ‘Dicky’s such a mean pig,’ said Daphne. ‘He can’t even wait for us before starting the film.’

  18

  ‘You said you wouldn’t be late.’ Gloria was in bed and my coming into the bedroom had wakened her.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. Our relationship had developed – or should I say degenerated? – into that of a married couple. She spent each weekend with me and kept clothes and makeup and jewellery in my house. To say nothing of countless pairs of shoes.

  She sat up in bed and switched on the dim bedside light. She was wearing a black chiffon nightdress. Her pale blonde hair was long enough to touch her shoulders. ‘Did you go on?’

  ‘No, I didn’t “go on”, if you mean to a nightclub or fancy-dress party.’

  ‘You don’t have to snap at me.’ There was enough light for me to see the neat way in which she’d folded her clothes before going to bed. It was a bad sign; such fastidious attention to detail was often a sign of her suppressed bad temper.

  ‘Do you think I like spending the evening with Dicky?’ I said.

  ‘Then why stay so late?’

  ‘He’d rented a video. I couldn’t leave before it had finished.’

  ‘Did you have din
ner there?’

  ‘Supper; a sandwich and a cup of soup.’

  ‘I ate with the children. Doris cooked a meat pie.’

  ‘I wish you’d call her “Nanny”,’ I said. The nanny was young and I wanted to keep my distance from her. ‘She’ll start calling me “Bernard” next.’

  ‘You should have told me before. I can’t suddenly change now,’ said Gloria. ‘She’d think she’d upset me or something.’ Her hair was falling over her face; she pushed it back with her hand and held her hand to her head as if posing. ‘So it wasn’t business?’

  ‘Of course it was business. I told you that Dicky insisted that I bring the first draft of my report with me.’

  ‘Who else was there?’

  I sat down on the bed. ‘Look, darling. If I’d mentioned you, Dicky would have included you in the invitation. We both know that. But didn’t we agree that it’s better to keep a low profile. We don’t want everyone in the office talking.’

  ‘That depends what they’re saying,’ said Gloria, who felt that we should be together every minute of our free time and especially resented being left alone for any part of the weekends.

  I leaned forward and embraced her tightly and kissed her.

  ‘What did you talk about?’ she said.

  ‘Bret is in trouble,’ I said.

  ‘With the Department?’

  ‘Dicky is the last of the big-time wishful thinkers. But even allowing for Dicky’s exaggeration, Bret is facing the music for everything that’s gone wrong with the Stinnes debriefing. Now they’re going to start saying it’s all been done on Moscow’s orders.’

  ‘It’s Bret’s own fault, darling. He thought it was all so easy. You said that yourself.’

  ‘Yes, he’s brought it on himself, but now they’re going to heap everything they can think of on him. Whether he’s KGB or not, they’ll make him the scapegoat.’

  ‘Scapegoat’s not the word,’ she said. ‘Scapegoats were released into the wilderness. You mean Bret will be delivered to MI5 as the person who’s been usurping all their powers and functions. Not so much a scapegoat as a hostage. Am I right?’

  ‘Perhaps consolation prize is the expression we’re looking for,’ I said bitterly. I’d seen too many severed heads delivered to the Home Office under similar circumstances to be optimistic about Bret’s fate. ‘Anyway, Bret is probably going to face more serious charges than that,’ I said.

  She looked at me quizzically and said, ‘He’s a KGB mole?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But that will be the charge?’

  ‘It’s too early for charges. Maybe there won’t be any. No one’s told me anything, but there’s been some sort of top-level meeting about Bret. Everyone is beginning to think he’s working for Moscow. Dicky seems to have told Daphne. She thought I’d already been told, so she gave the game away.’

  ‘What a bombshell when the newspapers get the story,’ said Gloria.

  I kissed her again, but she didn’t respond.

  ‘They should be shot,’ she said. ‘Traitors. Bastards.’ She didn’t raise her voice, but her body stiffened in anger and the depth of her feeling surprised me.

  ‘It’s all part of the game.’

  ‘No, it’s not. People like Rensselaer are murderers. To appease their social conscience they’ll turn over men and women to the torture chambers. What swine they are!’

  ‘Perhaps they do what they think is right,’ I said. I didn’t exactly believe it but that was the only way I could do my job. I couldn’t start thinking I was part of a struggle of good against evil or freedom against tyranny. The only way I could work was to concentrate on the nuts and bolts of the job and do it as well as I could do it.

  ‘Then why don’t they go to Russia? They know it’s not the kind of world we want or we’d have voted the Communists into power long ago. Why don’t they just go to Russia?’

  ‘Well, why don’t they?’ I said.

  ‘They want to have their cake and eat it. They’re always rich and well educated, aren’t they? They want their privileged status in a rich West while they’re appeasing their guilt about enjoying it.’

  ‘Are you talking about Bret?’ I said. I stood up. ‘Or are you talking about my wife?’

  ‘I’m talking about traitors,’ she said.

  I went over to the wardrobe and opened it. Somewhere there was a tweed suit that I hadn’t worn for years. I sorted through the clothes until I found it hung inside a plastic bag – Fiona put all my suits into plastic bags – and then I felt through the pockets. ‘I suspected Bret of having an affair with my wife. Did I ever tell you about that?’

  ‘If you’re looking for cigarettes, I threw them all out.’

  ‘I suddenly remembered leaving a packet in that tweed suit,’ I said. The suit brought back memories. The last time I’d worn it I’d been to a horse show with Fiona and my father-in-law. It was a time when I was working very hard at being nice to him. He’d won a prize for jumping over fences, and he took us all to a fancy restaurant on the river near Marlow. I ran out of cigarettes and my father-in-law wouldn’t let me pay cash for some more; he insisted they be added to his dinner bill. The incident stuck in my mind because it was in the restaurant that I first heard that he’d set up trust funds for the children. He hadn’t told me, and Fiona hadn’t told me either. Worse still, he’d told the children but told them not to tell me.

  ‘Yes, I threw them out. If there are cigarettes in the house, you’ll start smoking again, you know that. You don’t want to, do you?’

  I closed the wardrobe door and abandoned the notion of a cigarette. She was right; I didn’t want to start smoking again, but given my present level of stress I wasn’t sure how long I’d be able to resist the temptation.

  ‘You have to have someone to look after you,’ she said in a conciliatory tone.

  ‘Once, I was certain that Bret was having an affair with Fiona. I hated him. My hatred for him influenced everything I thought, said, and did.’ My need for a cigarette had abated. Even if I’d found a carton on my pillow, I wouldn’t have bothered to open it. ‘It was only with great effort that I could listen to anything that was said about him without reprocessing it and distorting it. Now I’ve got that feeling under control. I don’t even care if they did have an affair. I can look at Bret Rensselaer with a clear mind. When I tell you I don’t know whether he’s guilty, I mean exactly that.’

  ‘Jealousy, you mean. You were jealous of Bret Rensselaer because he’s rich and successful and maybe had an affair with your wife.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘That’s natural enough, Bernard. Why shouldn’t you be angry and prejudiced? Why should you be impartial to any man who treats you badly?’

  ‘Are you going to tell me why?’

  ‘Because you like to play God, Bernard. You killed two men the other night in the launderette. You didn’t gloss over it. You told me. You told Dicky. I have no doubt it’s in your report, with you taking unequivocal responsibility for their deaths. You’re not an insensitive brute, you’re not a thug or a killer. The only way you can cope with the guilt you suffer over those deaths is by convincing yourself that you observe the world around you with total objectivity. That’s playing God, darling. And it’s not the way to assuage your guilt. Admit that you’re fallible, accept the fact that you’re only human, admit that if Bret goes to the Old Bailey, you’ll be delighted to see him get his comeuppance.’

  ‘But I won’t be delighted. Not even a wronged husband wants to see the other man in the Old Bailey. And in Bret’s case, I have no real evidence. As far as I know, Fiona was never unfaithful to me.’

  ‘If you don’t hate him for betraying you, then hate him for selling out to the Communists. In that sort of hatred I’ll join you.’

  ‘Your father was one of our agents, wasn’t he?’

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘I just guessed. There always has to be some special reason for the daughter of a foreign national
to get into the Department.’

  ‘My uncle and my father…the secret police took my uncle away. They killed him in the police station. They were looking for my father.’

  ‘You don’t have to talk about it,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t mind talking about it. I’m proud of him. I’m proud of both of them. My father is a dentist. London sent him dental charts – it was part of his regular correspondence with other dentists – and he used the dental charts to identify agents. The dental surgery was a perfect cover for messages to be passed, and the secret police never succeeded in infiltrating the organization. But all the agents had met my father. That was the big disadvantage – everyone in every cell knew my father. The police finally got his name from someone they picked up photographing the frontier. He talked. They made a mistake and arrested my uncle because he had the same name. He managed to keep silent until my father and mother got away. I hate the Communists, Bernard.’

  ‘I’m going to have a drink,’ I said. I took off my jacket and tie and kicked off my shoes. ‘Whisky. Would you like one?’

  ‘No thanks, darling.’

  I went into my study and poured myself a stiff drink. When I got back to the bedroom, Gloria had combed her hair and plumped up the pillows. I went on undressing. I said, ‘Dicky is having an affair with Tessa, and Daphne’s found out about them.’

  ‘She told you that?’

  ‘A friend of hers saw them in a hotel.’

  ‘There are always wonderful friends who’ll bring you bad news.’

  ‘It’s difficult, isn’t it? You become a party to a secret and suddenly you have a terrible responsibility. Whatever you do is likely to be wrong.’

  ‘You’re talking about that Cabinet memo, aren’t you?’

  ‘Perhaps I am.’

  ‘You did nothing,’ she said.

  ‘It looks as though I didn’t have to. The Department knows about Bret. Daphne actually mentioned the Cabinet memo.’

  ‘What does she want you to do?’

  ‘Daphne? She wants to talk to George. She says she’s going to name Tessa in a divorce action.’

  ‘Is she serious?’