by Len Deighton
‘I can’t say.’ Fiona’s mind processed and reprocessed the complications this would bring into her life. She looked at her younger sister, sitting there on the yellow silk sofa, in an emerald-green Givenchy sheath dress that Fiona – although the same size – could never have got away with, and wondered whether to tell her that she might be in physical danger. If Trent told his Soviet contact about this perilous indiscretion it was possible that Moscow would have her killed. She opened her mouth as she tried to think of some way to put it but, when Tessa looked at her expectantly, only said, ‘It’s a gorgeous dress.’
Tessa smiled. ‘You were always so different to me, Fi.’
‘Not very different.’
‘The Chanel type.’
‘Whatever does that mean?’
Teasingly Tessa said, ‘Tailleur, with a jacket lined to match the blouse, chain belt and gardenia; everyone knows what a Chanel type looks like.’
‘What else?’ Sometimes Tessa’s manner could be trying.
‘I knew you would end up doing something important…something in a man’s world,’ said Tessa very quietly as she waited for her sister to pronounce on what might happen next. When Fiona made no reply, Tessa added, ‘I didn’t ask Giles what he did: he just came out with it.’
‘Yes. He works in the Department,’ said Fiona.
‘I’m sorry about all this, Fi, darling. Perhaps I shouldn’t have troubled you with it.’
‘You did right to tell me.’
‘Sometimes he can be so adorable,’ said Tessa.
‘Why did you ever get married?’ said Fiona.
‘For the same reason as you, I suppose. It was a way of making Daddy angry.’
‘Making Daddy what?’ said Fiona.
‘Don’t pretend you didn’t know that marrying your pigheaded tough-guy would make Daddy throw a fit.’
‘I thought you liked Bernard,’ said Fiona amiably. ‘You kept telling me to marry him.’
‘I adore him, you know I do. One day I’ll run off with him.’
‘And was marrying George your way of persecuting Daddy?’
She didn’t answer for a moment. ‘George is such a lovely man…a saint.’ And then, realizing that it wasn’t the accolade a husband would most wish for, added, ‘Only a saint would put up with me.’
‘Perhaps George needs the opportunity to forgive.’
Tessa gave no heed to that idea. ‘I thought a secondhand car dealer would lead an exciting life. It’s silly I know, but in the films they are always in the underworld with gangsters and their molls,’ she grinned.
‘Really, Tess!’ Delivered wearily it was an admonition.
‘It’s rather gruelling, darling, living with a man who gets upset when ladies use naughty words, and who gets up at six o’clock to make sure he doesn’t miss Mass. Sometimes I think he would like to see me slaving in the kitchen all day, the way his mother did.’
‘You’re a complete fool, Tessa.’
‘I know. It’s all my fault.’ She got to her feet suddenly and excitedly said, ‘I know! Why don’t we go and have dinner at Annabel’s?’ She stroked her beautiful dress. ‘Just the two of us.’
‘Sit down, Tessa. Sit down and calm down. I don’t want to go to Annabel’s. I want to think.’
‘Or I’ve got a home-made chicken stew in the freezer; I’ll put it in the oven while we go on talking.’
‘No, no. I’ll have to eat something with Bernard.’
Tessa dropped back into the sofa, grabbed her glass and drank some champagne. ‘You’re lucky not to live in Hampstead: it’s full of eggheads. My bloody cleaning woman phoned up and said she couldn’t come today: she has a conference with her script editor! Script editor; Jesus Christ! Do have some more booze, Fi. I hate drinking alone.’
‘No thanks, Tess. And I think you’ve had enough for one night.’
Tessa put the glass down and didn’t refill it. Being in her sister’s bad books made her feel wretched. Fiona was the only one she had, after George her husband, and she couldn’t go to George with all her troubles. Most of her troubles came from these silly little love affairs she was always becoming caught up in: she couldn’t expect George to help her with those.
‘Can I use your phone?’ said Fiona.
Tessa made an extravagant gesture with both hands. ‘Use the one in the bedroom if you want privacy.’
Fiona went into the bedroom. Upon the big four-poster bed, an antique lace bedspread was spread over a dark red cover to show it off. The bedside table held a smart new phone and an assortment of expensive perfumes, pill bottles and paperback books. An aspirin bottle had been left open and tablets were scattered about. Fiona picked up the phone but hesitated before dialling.
Despite Bret Rensselaer’s sanguine theories, Fiona Samson was not a person who readily turned to other people – male or female – for advice or instruction. She was self-sufficient, and self-critical too, in a way that an eldest child so often can be. But now she felt the need of a second opinion. She looked at her watch. Having carefully rehearsed the story in her mind, she dialled Bret’s number. His phone rang for a long time but there was no reply. She tried again: it was always possible that she had misdialled, but again the ringing was unanswered. This frustration put her off balance, and it was then that she was suddenly struck with the idea of phoning Uncle Silas.
Silas Gaunt’s career was little short of a legend in the unwritten story of the Department. Uncle Silas could not be compared to other men: he was virtually unique. Every now and again, the British establishment decorously embraces a rogue, if not to say a rogue elephant, a man who breaks every rule and delights in doing so. One who recognizes no master and few equals. Gaunt’s career was marked by controversy, and he began his time as Berlin Resident by having a vociferous argument with the Director-General. It was an indication of both his diplomacy and his ruthlessness when he emerged with no enemies in high places.
Gaunt, a distant relative of Fiona’s mother, was the man who had so energetically protected Brian Samson, and then his son Bernard, against well-placed people who believed that the senior ranks of the Secret Intelligence Service were the exclusive province of a certain sort of upper-class Englishman quite unlike Samson and his son. The Samsons survived: the opposition didn’t reckon on Gaunt’s ingenuity, devious games, or rage. But when Gaunt finally retired, the collective sighs of relief were heard throughout the service. Gaunt, however, was not out of the game. The Director-General knew and respected him, and his regard could be measured by the way that Sir Henry handled the Fiona Samson operation. Only Bret Rensselaer, who’d come to him with the idea, Silas Gaunt and himself were party to the secret.
Now, on impulse, Fiona dialled the number of the White-lands farm in the Cotswolds. Finding it was Silas himself who answered, Fiona didn’t hesitate nor waste time with pleasantries; she didn’t even give her name. Relying upon him to recognize her voice, she said, ‘Silas. I must see you. I must. It’s urgent.’
There was a long silence. ‘Where are you? Can you talk?’
‘At my sister’s flat. No, I can’t.’
‘Next weekend soon enough?’
‘Perfect,’ she said.
Another long silence. ‘Leave it to me, darling. Bernard will be invited, plus you and the children.’
‘Thank you, Silas.’
‘Think nothing of it. It’s a pleasure.’
She replaced the phone. When she looked down to see what was crunching underfoot she found she’d crushed aspirins and other pills into the gold-coloured carpet. She looked at the mess; she worried about Tessa. To what extent had she made her sister into the sort of woman she’d become? Fiona had always been the ‘eldest son’, with effortless top marks and a relationship with her father that Tessa never knew.
Despite being her father’s favourite she was never taken into his confidence, for he kept his financial affairs secret: to the extent of employing several different accountants and lawyers so that no one would know the ful
l picture of his investments and interests. But Fiona was taken to his office to meet the staff and there seemed to be a tacit agreement that eventually Fiona would replace her father.
It never happened of course. Fiona went to University, and flourished. She enjoyed being in a man’s world and while there she was recruited into the most masculine preserve of all: that mystic and exclusive British brotherhood that enjoys a duality of name and profoundly secret purpose. The obsessional secrecy that her father had maintained prepared her for the Secret Intelligence Service, but nothing her father showed her of his business world could compete with it.
And when, within this brotherhood, she found a man unlike any other she had ever met, she wanted him, and got him. Bernard Samson had grown up in this secret world of physical hardship and brutality. A kill or be killed world. Many of her father’s friends had seen service in the war – some had been decorated as heroes – but Bernard Samson was fundamentally different to any of them: for his war was a dark, dirty, private war. Here at last was a man her father could not fathom, and heartily detested. But if, as Chandler said, ‘down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid…Complete man, common man and yet an unusual man,’ then Bernard Samson was such a man. The day she first saw him she knew that it would be unendurable to lose him to another.
Fiona married. Tessa, neglected and insecure, floated away; a victim of Fiona’s career-making and her father’s indifference. Poor Tessa, what might she have been if Fiona had guarded her and advised her and given to her according to need?
‘Are you all right?’ Tessa called from the next room.
‘I’m coming, Tessa. It will all be all right. I promise you, I’ll sort it out.’
Tessa came to her. ‘I knew you would, Fi.’ She threw her arms round Fiona’s neck and kissed her. ‘Dearest, darling, wonderful Fi, I knew you would.’
Such displays of affection embarrassed Fiona, but she stood stiff and still and put up with it.
Had the invitation to see Silas come in other circumstances, Fiona Samson would have enjoyed every minute of the weekend she spent with her husband and children at Whitelands, the farming estate to which Silas Gaunt had retired. His six hundred acres of the Cotswolds provided superlative walks and breathtaking views across the mighty limestone plateau that borders the shining River Severn.
But in this context everything was fraught with worries and dangers. Dicky Cruyer, the enterprising German Desk Controller, and his arty wife Daphne were there. Bret Rensselaer had brought a young blonde girl. Diffident in the company of so many strangers, she clung tight to him; so tight in fact that they’d arranged to have the only two bedrooms with a connecting door. Fiona guessed that Bret had requested those two rooms when she asked Silas if she could have the two children next to her, and Silas had replied that there were other needs greater than hers, and laughed.
Silas was a pirate, or at least he looked the part. A huge pot-bellied ruffian with a jowly face surmounted by a huge forehead and bald head. His baggy clothes were of high quality but he preferred old garments – as he preferred old wine and old friends – and displayed the faded patches and neat darns that were the work of his faithful housekeeper Mrs Porter, as an old warrior his medals.
The house itself was made of local stone, a lovely tan colour, and the furnishings – like the family portraits obscured behind murky coach varnish and the superb early eighteenth-century dresser – were in appropriate style. Silas Gaunt liked the dining room, especially when it was crowded, as it was this Saturday lunchtime. Gaunt stood at the head of the lovely Georgian mahogany table, carving an impressive beef sirloin for his professional cronies: the Samsons, Tessa, the Cruyers, Bret Rensselaer, and dominating them by the force of his personality.
Fiona Samson watched it all with a feeling of detachment. Even when her son Billy spilled gravy down his shirt, she only smiled contentedly, as if it was an incident depicted in an old home movie.
She watched the Cruyers with interest. Fiona had been at Oxford at the same time as Dicky. She remembered seeing him being cheered to victory at the debating society, and his making a pass at her that day when he was celebrating his cricket blue. One of the brightest of the bright boys at Balliol, he’d got the German Desk for which Bernard had been shortlisted and there was talk that he’d get the Europe job when the time came. Now she wondered if Silas Gaunt was going to propose that he was made a party to her secret. She hoped not: already enough people knew, and if Dicky was to be told while Bernard was kept in ignorance she would find it intolerable. Dicky noticed her looking at him and smiled at her in that shy manner that he’d found so effective with the Oxford girls.
She looked too at Tessa. Her husband George Kosinski was away. It was typical of Silas, and his luck and intuition, to guess that Tessa was connected with the phone call and to go to the trouble of inviting her in case he needed to know more.
When, after lunch, Silas took the men into the billiards room with a trayful of cigars and brandy, Fiona took Billy and Sally upstairs to do their homework.
‘In leap year, Mummy, do ladies ask men to marry them?’ said Sally.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Fiona.
‘My teacher said they do,’ said Sally, and Fiona realized she had walked into the sort of trap Sally was fond of setting for her.
‘Then teacher is no doubt right,’ she said.
‘It was Miss Jenkins,’ said Sally. ‘Daddy said she is a fool.’
‘Perhaps you misheard Daddy.’
‘I was there,’ said Billy, joining in the conversation. ‘He actually said that Miss Jenkins was a bloody fool. It was when she told him not to leave our car in the headmaster’s car space.’
‘It was a Saturday,’ said Sally in defence of her father.
‘That’s quite enough,’ said Fiona sharply. ‘Let’s start the maths homework.’
There was a knock and then Tessa looked round the door. ‘Yes?’ said Fiona.
‘I wondered if the children would like to go to the stables.’
‘They must do their homework.’
‘There’s a foal: born last week…just for half an hour, Fi.’
‘They have a test on Monday,’ said Fiona.
‘Leave them with me, Fi. I’ll see they do their homework. Go for that long walk to Ringstone, you are always saying you enjoy that.’ Tessa was keen to be rid of her: she loved to be with the children and they seemed to respond to her. Tessa was a born rebel and they sensed it and were intrigued.
Fiona looked at them. ‘Very well. Thirty minutes and then you must do your homework.’ She turned. ‘I’m relying on you, Tess.’
There was a happy chorus as they declared their intention to work hard under their aunt’s direction. Sally came round and squeezed her mother’s hand as if asserting her love. Billy wasted no time before getting into raincoat and scarf. As Tessa took the children off, Fiona heard Billy telling her, ‘If the Russians restore the monarch, he will have to be a commie Tsar.’ It was his favourite joke since Silas had laughed at it.
Tessa was right, Fiona needed a little time to herself. There was so much to think about. She found an old raincoat and a man’s hat in the hall and, wearing the walking shoes she kept in the back of her beloved red Porsche, she slipped away. Alone, striding through the misty rain, she made for the summit of Ringstone Hill above Singlebury. It was about six miles and she walked with the brisk determination with which she did so many other things.
She knew the way, she had done it many times, sometimes with the family and sometimes just with Bernard. She was gratified by the sight of accustomed gates, streams and hedgerows, as familiar as the faces of old friends: varying sometimes with fresh patches of soft mud, a shiny new brass padlock, or the rusting frame of an abandoned bike. The boundary of Whitelands was marked by six fallen firs, casualties of the winter gales. Shallow-rooted trees, like their human counterparts, were always the first to go. She looked at one. From its rotting
bark came primroses uncurling their canary heads. She counted their petals as she had when a child: five petals, six petals, some with eight petals. All different; like people. She’d grown up believing that four-petalled primroses were lucky: no four-petalled ones in sight today. It was Bernard who explained that four-petalled primroses were a necessity of cross-fertilization: she wished he’d not told her. She strode on and waded through a vast rippling lake of bluebells before starting to climb again. No surprises; just the expectation before each grand view.
The light changed constantly. The wet fields became ever more radiant under the drizzling dark grey sky and the bright yellow gorse left its scent on the air. She scrambled up to the bare hilltop – for the stone is a stone in name only – and stopped to catch her breath. She’d not been aware of the wind but now it sent the light rain to sting her face, and crooned gently through the wire fence. She turned slowly to survey the whole horizon. Her kingdom: three hundred and sixty degrees and not a person, nor even a house in sight, just the distant clamour of a rookery settling down for the night. To the north the sky was buttressed by black columns of heavy rain. The exertion of the climb had driven from her mind all thoughts of what disturbing conclusions tomorrow’s dialogue with Silas Gaunt might bring. But now her mind raced forward again.
She was not an explorer nor an experimenter; Fiona’s brain was at its best when evaluating material and planning its use. It was a capacity that provided her with an excellent chance to judge her own potential as a field agent. Secrecy she had in abundance, but she didn’t have many of the qualities she saw in Bernard. She didn’t have his streetwise skill at fast thinking and fast moving. Fiona could be mean, stubborn and cold-hearted, but these for her were long-term emotions: Bernard had that mysterious masculine ability to switch on cold-blooded hostility at a moment’s notice and switch it off a split-second later. She pulled the hat down over her ears. The sky blackened and the rain was getting worse. She must get back in time to bathe and change for dinner. Saturday night dinners were dress-up affairs when you stayed with Uncle Silas. She would have to do something with her hair and borrow the iron to smooth her dress. Tessa and the other women would have been preparing themselves all afternoon. She looked at her watch and at the route back. Even the friendly rolling Cotswolds could become hostile when darkness fell.