Charity

by Len Deighton

  ‘Next Tuesday the builders said, but now they are wavering. The carpenters haven’t finished and the painters have hardly started. They will have to finish and clear up completely before anyone can start polishing the floor. It will all take quite a time. Rudi is looking for somewhere else to hold his opening party. Somewhere bigger. Maybe a hotel.’

  ‘I can’t just walk away and forget about Tessa,’ I said. ‘I just can’t.’

  Werner was closely studying some tiny spots of paint that had been splashed on the table-lamp.

  By the time I left, the pianist was playing a Bach partita in a minor key. It wouldn’t be easy to dance to.

  3

  The North Downs, Surrey, England

  When someone asks you to make an objective decision that will affect their future, you can confidently assume that they have already decided upon the course they intend to follow. So when my father-in-law phoned to be sure that I would be with Fiona when she visited the children at the weekend, I sensed that there was something else on his mind and I wasn’t expecting to hear anything comforting.

  But those vague forebodings had faded a little by the time I was with Fiona in her shiny new Jaguar. It was one of the perquisites of her new post. The Department frowned upon senior staff using foreign cars, and a Porsche like the one she’d previously owned would have earned a quiet rebuke.

  Fiona was at her magnificent best. She liked driving. Her dark hair was shiny and loose and wavy, and she had let it grow, so that it almost touched her shoulders, and swung wide to frame her face as she turned to smile at me. Her relaxed grin, natural skin texture and rosy cheeks reminded me of the young girl with whom I’d fallen so desperately in love. There was nothing to reveal her long ordeal in East Germany or the demanding workload that she now took upon herself without respite.

  Escaping from London’s seemingly interminable squalor, and its brooding suburbs, is not easy. The beguiling villages that once surrounded the capital had become small plastic versions of Times Square. Even the snow could not completely conceal their ugliness. But finally we reached some stretches of open countryside, and eventually the lovely old house where Mr and Mrs David Kimber-Hutchinson made a home for my children. Set in a particularly attractive part of southern England, the house was secluded. There were trees on every side: pines and firs mostly, evergreens that ensured that the scene changed little in winter or summer. The house was Jacobean but successive wealthy owners, and acclaimed architects, had done everything possible to obliterate the original structure. Since my last visit David had squeezed permission from the local bureaucrats to further deform the property with a six-car garage. The new building had a lacquered-brass weather-vane on its red plastic roof, and automatic doors at both ends, so that he could drive right through rather than face the hazards and inconvenience of backing out.

  Fiona turned off the road and drove through the entrance where wrought-iron gates entwined the monogram of my in-laws. ‘What a horror,’ she said as she caught sight of the new garage. Perhaps she’d said it to forestall any rude reaction that might have been my first response. The concertina doors were pushed back far enough to reveal her father’s silver Rolls, and the black Range Rover that was her mother’s current car. Her mother got through a lot of cars because each time she dented one she ‘lost confidence in it’. This latest one had been chosen by David and, on his specific instructions, fitted with massive steel crash bars at front and rear. As if in tacit warning to other road users, it was painted with a livery of formalized flame patterns along its side.

  Fiona gave a toot on the horn and parked outside, alongside a battered little Citroën with Paris licence plates and a ‘Teachers against the Bomb’ bumper sticker. We got out and went into the garage, which was wide enough to take half a dozen Rolls-Royces and still have room for workbench, sinks, neatly coiled hoses and an air compressor. I inspected David’s latest pride and joy, a 3-litre Bentley open tourer, one of those shiny green icons of the nineteen twenties. Vintage cars had become his passion since a series of bad falls, and a bitter dispute with the master of foxhounds, had stopped him chasing foxes.

  Her father was standing at the workbench when we arrived. He waved her forward, using both hands upraised as if marshalling a Boeing into its slot. He was wearing dark blue coveralls of the sort that garage mechanics favour, but peeping from the collar there was a yellow cashmere rollneck.

  ‘You made good time, darling,’ he announced approvingly as Fiona scrambled from the driving seat and kissed him.

  ‘We were lucky with the traffic,’ said Fiona.

  ‘And Bernard … what have you done to your face, Bernard?’ He was sharp, I must say that for him. My face was only slightly swollen and had drawn little reaction from others.

  ‘I walked into a bird-cage.’

  ‘Bernard, you …’

  Fiona interrupted whatever her father was about to say: ‘Bernard fell down the stairs … in Berlin. He cracked a rib. He’s not fully recovered.’

  Fiona knew where I’d got the bruises of course. We’d not spoken of it but she must have read my brief report about the Polish fiasco and guessed the bits I left out.

  ‘Watch yourself, Bernard,’ said her father, looking from one to the other of us as if suspecting that the whole truth was being withheld. ‘You’re not a youngster any more.’ And then, more cheerfully: ‘I saw you looking at the Bentley. She’s one hundred per cent authentic; not a replica or made up from new parts.’

  ‘It’s cold, Daddy. Let’s go inside the house.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’ll show you later, Bernard. You can sit in her if you want.’ He led the way through a doorway that had been cut through a side wall of the original house to gain direct entrance from the garage.

  ‘That frost last night,’ he said as he opened the door into his carpeted drawing-room. ‘I think it may have killed the eucalyptus trees. I’ll be shattered if they go – after all the love and labour and money I’ve spent on them.’

  ‘Where’s Mummy?’

  ‘I have a tree expert coming this afternoon. They say he’s the man Prince Charles uses.’

  ‘Where’s Mummy?’

  ‘She’s resting. She gets up in the small hours and does all that yoga malarkey. Huh! And then she wonders why she gets tired.’

  ‘She says it’s doing her good,’ said Fiona.

  ‘Six o’clock is far too early. She runs the bath and that wakes me up,’ said David, ‘and then I sometimes have trouble getting off to sleep again.’ He slapped his hands together. ‘Now for elevenses, or would you prefer a real drink?’

  ‘It’s too early for me,’ said Fiona, ‘but I’m sure you can persuade Bernard to join you.’

  ‘No,’ I said. It was a culture trap. England’s holy ritual, of halting everything to sit down and drink sweet milky tea at eleven o’clock in the morning, would be marred by a dissenter guzzling booze, or even coffee.

  ‘I’ll order tea then,’ said David, picking up a phone and pressing a button to connect him to one of his many servants. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked, and having elicited the name of a servant he instructed: ‘Tell cook: morning tea for three in the Persian room. My usual – toasted scones and all that. And take tea to Mrs Hutchinson: Earl Grey, no milk, no sugar. Ask her if she’s going to join us for lunch.’

  ‘How lovely to be home again,’ said Fiona. I know she only said it to appease her father, but it made me feel as if I’d never provided a proper home for her.

  ‘And you are not looking too well,’ her father told Fiona. Then realizing that such remarks can be interpreted as criticism added: ‘It’s that damned job of yours. Do you know what you could be earning in the City?’

  ‘I thought they were firing people by the hundred after the crash last year,’ she said.

  ‘I know people,’ said David, nodding significantly. ‘If you wanted a job in the City you’d be snapped up.’ He leaned towards her. ‘You should come to the health farm with us tomorrow. Five days of rest an
d exercise and light meals. It would make a new woman of you. And you would meet some very interesting people.’

  ‘I have too much urgent work to do,’ said Fiona.

  ‘Bring it with you; that’s what I do. I take a stack of work, and my tiny recording machine, and do it away from all the noise and commotion.’

  ‘I have a meeting in Rome.’

  He shook his head. ‘The life you people lead. And who pays for it? The poor old taxpayer. Very well then, it’s your life.’

  ‘The children are still studying?’ Fiona asked him.

  It was not just her way of changing the subject. She wanted me to hear the wonderful things her parents were doing for our children. On cue, her father described the highly paid tutors who came to the house to give my children additional lessons in mathematics and French grammar, so that they would do well in their exams, and be able to go to the sort of school that David went to.

  When the tea-tray came, everything was placed on the table before Fiona. While she was pouring the tea David divested himself of his coveralls to reveal a canary-coloured cashmere sweater, beige corduroy trousers and tasselled loafers. He spread himself across a chintz-covered sofa and said: ‘Well, what have you done with poor little Kosinski?’

  Since David was looking at me as he said it, I replied: ‘I haven’t seen him for ages.’

  ‘Come along! Come along!’ said David briskly. ‘You’ve locked him up somewhere and you’re giving him the third degree.’

  ‘Daddy. Please,’ said Fiona mildly while pouring my tea.

  Pleased that his provocation had produced the expected note of exasperation from his daughter, he chuckled and said: ‘What are you squeezing out of the little bugger, huh? You can confide in me; I’m vetted.’

  He wasn’t vetted, or in any way secure, and he was the last man I would entrust with a secret of any importance. So I smiled at him and told Fiona that I wanted just one sugar in my tea and yes, a toasted scone – no, no homemade strawberry jam – would be lovely and promised that it wouldn’t spoil my appetite for lunch.

  ‘I flew to Warsaw to see him,’ said David, flapping a monogrammed linen napkin and spreading it on his knee. ‘Just before Christmas; at five minutes’ notice. No end of bother getting a seat on the plane.’

  ‘Did you?’ I said, inserting a note of mild surprise in my answer, although I had been shown a surveillance photo of him and Kosinski there at that time.

  ‘He told me that Tessa was still alive.’

  I watched Fiona’s reaction to this startling announcement; she just shook her head in denial and drank some tea.

  ‘It was a ruse,’ I explained. ‘He probably believed it but it was just a cruel attempt to exploit him.’

  ‘And exploit me,’ added David. He accepted a buttered scone from Fiona and nibbled at it as he thought about his visit to his son-in-law.

  ‘Yes, and to exploit you,’ I agreed, although it was hard to imagine how even the wily tricksters of the Polish security service would find ingenuity enough for that. ‘Now he is working for us. I don’t know any more than that.’

  ‘Don’t know or won’t tell?’

  Fiona got to her feet, looked at the ceiling as she listened, and said: ‘I believe the French lesson is ending.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed David, after punching the air in order to expose his gold wrist-watch to view and see the time. ‘She doesn’t give us a minute of extra time. The French are all like that, aren’t they?’

  Reluctant to censure French venality in such general terms, Fiona said: ‘I’ll just go and say hello to her, and ask her how they are coming along.’ Clever Fiona; she knew how to escape. It must have been something she learned while working with the KGB. Or with Dicky Cruyer.

  ‘Fifteen pounds an hour she costs me,’ David confided to me. ‘And she has the nerve to add on travelling expenses from London. The trouble is I can’t get anyone from the village. You need the authentic seizième arrondissement accent, don’t you, huh?’

  I drank my tea until, from somewhere upstairs, I heard Fiona trying out her Paris slang on the lady teacher. She hit the spot judging from the sudden burst of hearty feminine laughter that followed the next exchange.

  I faced David and ate my scone, smiling between bites. We both sat there for a long time, silent and alone, like a washed-out picnic party, under dripping trees, waiting for the thunder to stop.

  Having finished my scone before my host I got up and went to the window. David came and stood alongside me. We watched Fiona tramping across the snowy garden. The teacher was with her, and hand-in-hand with the children they inspected the snowman. The snow had retreated to make icy-edged white islands into which the children deliberately walked. Billy – coming up to his fourteenth birthday – considered himself far too old to be building snowmen. He had supervised the building of this one on the pretext that it was done solely to entertain some local infants who had been at the house for a tea party the previous afternoon. But I could tell from the way they were acting that both Billy and his younger sister Sally were proud of their elaborate snow sculpture. It wouldn’t last much longer. A slight thaw had crippled it so that it had become a hunch-backed figure, glazed with the icy sheen that had formed upon it overnight.

  ‘Everybody respects her,’ said David.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. It was true that everyone respected Fiona, but how significant it was that her father should claim that. Even her mother and father didn’t really love her. Their love, such as could be spared, had been lavished on Tessa, the younger sister, the eternal baby. Fiona had too much dignity, too much achievement, too much of everything to need love in the way that most people need it.

  My memory went back to the day that I first met Fiona’s parents, and to the briefing she provided for me as we drove down here to see them in my old Ferrari. It was my final outing in that lovely old lady. The car was already sold, the deal settled, and the first instalment of the money deposited in my bank. The money was needed to buy Fiona an engagement ring with a diamond of a dimension that her family would judge visible to the naked eye. Tell them you love me, she had advised. It’s what they will be waiting to hear. They think I need someone to love me. I told them that. I would have told them anyway. I did love and never stopped loving her.

  ‘You love her,’ said David, as if needing to hear me say it again. ‘You do: I know you do.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘I love her very much.’

  ‘She bottles everything up inside,’ he said. ‘I wish I knew what went on inside her head.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Many people would have liked to know what went on inside Fiona’s head, including me. From what I knew, even the KGB agent – Kennedy – who had been assigned to seduce her, and monitor her thoughts, had failed. He’d fallen for her instead. The wounding fact was that Fiona had taken that sordid little adventure seriously. She’d fooled him of course. She hadn’t betrayed her role as a double-agent working for London because Fiona was Fiona – a woman who would no more reveal her innermost thoughts to her lover than she would to her father, her children or her husband.

  I watched her with my children; this woman who had bowled me over and from whom I would never escape, this remote paragon, dedicated scholar and unfailing winner of every contest she entered. She might even emerge as the victor in the bitter contest for power in the Department. I suppose my feeling for her was founded upon respect as well as love. Too much respect and not enough love perhaps, for otherwise Gloria would never have turned my life upside down. Gloria was no fool but she was not wise; she was sizzling and street-smart and perceptive and desperately in love with me. I was torn in half: I found myself in love with two women. They were entirely different women but few people would find that an adequate explanation. I told myself it was wrong but it didn’t make the dilemma less excruciating.

  ‘That cloud base: it never gets really light these days,’ said David, turning away from the window and sitting down. ‘I hate winter. I wanted to get a
way to somewhere warm but there are things here that I must do myself. You can’t trust anyone to do their job properly.’

  I chose a chair and sat down opposite him. It was a lovely room, the sort of comfortable family retreat that is only found in England and its country houses. So far this room had escaped the ‘face-lifts’ that David had inflicted on so much of the house. The furniture was a hodgepodge of styles; a mixture of the priceless and the worthless. The Dutch marquetry cabinet, and the collection of Lalique glass displayed inside it, would have fetched a fortune at auction. Next to it there were two battered sofas that had only sentimental value. A lovely William and Mary marquetry mirror reflected an ancient stained and frayed oriental carpet. The log fire made crackling sounds and spat a few sparks over the brass fire-irons. The yellow light of the flames made patterns on the ceiling and lit up David’s face. ‘He tried to murder me, you know,’ he said, and turned to look out of the window as if his mind was entirely given to his family in the garden. ‘George,’ he added eventually.

  ‘George?’ I didn’t know what to say. Finally I stammered: ‘Why would he do that? He’s family.’

  David looked at me as if declining to respond to a particularly offensive joke. ‘It makes me wonder what really happened to Tessa.’ He went and stood by the window, his hands on his hips.

  ‘George didn’t kill your daughter, David. If that’s what you are driving at.’

  ‘Then why try to poison me?’

  Again I was speechless for a moment. ‘Why do you think?’ I countered.

  ‘Always the police detective, aren’t you, Bernard?’ He said it with a good-natured grunt, but I knew he had long since categorized me as a government snooper. He said society was rife with prying petty officials who were taking over our lives. Sometimes I wondered if he wasn’t right. Not about me, but about the others.