by Len Deighton
‘No one told me,’ I said.
Dicky sipped his drink and glanced around the room to see who was talking to who. ‘Well, you are not exactly senior staff, old boy,’ he said with a boyish smile. Dicky was looking young and fresh and energetic this evening. And his hair had suddenly become almost unnaturally curly. I wondered if he had it permed from time to time. ‘It’s nothing to be alarmed about. The embassy hoodlums have been ordered to provide some sort of back-up. And that’s as much as we have discovered. I doubt if it’s a hit of any sort. I suspect it’s something to do with dissidents. It could be anything. It could be a break-in or a line-tap.’
Daphne came to Dicky’s side. She was wearing a long plain dress with large embroidered flowers on it. Daphne had picked up a damaged piece of tapestry in one of the antique markets she frequented, and had removed the flowers from it. ‘Will you be able to carve the lamb?’ she asked Dicky.
‘I told you not to get a leg.’
‘A shoulder is so fatty,’ said Daphne.
‘Get Bernard to carve it,’ said Dicky. ‘He’s good at that kind of thing.’
‘Could you, Bernard? I’ve had the knife sharpened.’
‘Of course he can,’ said Dicky before I could reply. ‘He’s my slave, isn’t he? He’ll do anything I tell him to do.’ He put a hand round my shoulder and hugged me. ‘Right, Bernard?’
‘I’ll carve it for you, Daphne,’ I said. ‘But I’m not an expert.’
‘Your poor face,’ said Daphne. ‘What happened, Bernard?’
‘He applied the old powder-puff a bit too energetically,’ said Dicky.
‘No, really,’ said Daphne, looking at me with sympathy.
‘It’s secret,’ said Dicky. ‘Let him alone. Bernard is paid to take a few knocks when the job calls for it.’
I knew of course that Dicky was giving me the sort of treatment he would have liked to be giving to Bret. Although I hadn’t followed the exact implications of his brief exchange with Bret, his subsequent irritation was enough to tell me that Dicky did not feel entirely secure in his Europe Desk job. I wondered if Bret was about to leap-frog Fiona into becoming Dicky’s senior. It was the sort of device that Bret would use to shake up the Department. And Bret had been heard to say that a shake-up was exactly what the Department urgently needed. The trouble was that I was always the one who got Dicky’s flak.
‘It’s mid-life crisis,’ said Daphne when we reached the kitchen and I was appraising the roast leg of lamb and putting an edge on the carving knife. ‘That’s what my doctor says.’
Daphne was wearing a professional cook’s white apron of starched white cotton. Her name – Daphne Cruyer – was embroidered in red on its front, in the style of self-acclaim made famous by Paul Bocuse. ‘You’re young yet, Daphne,’ I said.
‘Not me; Dicky,’ she said, showing a flash of pique. ‘Dicky’s in mid-life crisis.’
‘Your doctor said this?’
‘The doctor knows how upset I am,’ she explained. ‘And he knows how insensitive Dicky can be. It’s all those young girls he has around him all day. He has to keep proving his masculinity.’ She fetched a large oval plate from the massive shiny steel professional oven she’d had fitted since my previous visit. ‘You can carve it in advance, Bernard.’
‘I’ll do it at the table, Daphne. I know that’s how you like to serve dinner.’
‘You are a dear man,’ she said. ‘If all the girls were chasing after you, I would find it easier to understand.’
‘Yes, so would I,’ I said.
After that the guests sat down and the dinner party continued in the way that Dicky’s dinner parties usually continued. Daphne made sure that Gloria and Fiona were sitting as far apart as possible. And for that I was grateful to her.
The next day I made a journey that took me into England’s authentic countryside. This was a stark contrast to the cosy toyland which my father-in-law shared with London’s stockbrokers, bankers, judges and gynaecologists.
Visits to ‘Uncle’ Silas had punctuated my life ever since I was a small child. I had always loved Whitelands, his rambling great farm on the edge of the Cotswolds. Even in winter it was magnificent. The house, built of local light-brown stone, its ancient carved-oak front door, and its mullioned windows, provided a perfect image of old England as the Christmas card industry chose to record it. Countless times I had hidden in the cobwebbed attic or sat in the panelled billiards room, on the bench under the cue-rack, looking at the doleful heads of assembled deer, now moth-eaten and threadbare. I couldn’t think of Whitelands without smelling the freshly baked scones that Mrs Porter brought from that temperamental old solid-fuel oven. Just as I couldn’t remember exploring that vast stone barn without sneezing, or recall the chilly Sunday morning journeys to the church in the village without a shiver.
For me, the highlight of my visits to Whitelands was the perfect roast beef lunches cooked with loving care by Mrs Porter, the housekeeper. On Sundays it was always local game: if not partridge or pheasant, then Silas would be carving and serving hare or rabbit. As I grew up and learned to count, I was permitted to supervise the billiards score-board. It provided an excuse to be there, an opportunity to watch my father, Silas and other luminaries of the Department, smoking Silas’s Cuban cigars, drinking his vintage Hine brandy and arguing in a good-natured way about how the world should be arranged and exactly how and when they would do it.
Whitelands had been in the Gaunt family since one of his more affluent predecessors bought it from a beer tycoon who went to something more grandiose. Only after he retired did Silas come to live here all the year round, and his hospitality became legendary. All manner of weird people came here for the weekend; musicians – prominent or penniless – were especially welcomed, for Silas was devoted to music. They were seldom famous people but they were always convivial and interesting. The weekends were an unchanging ritual: a country walk as far as the river, church service, smoky afternoon billiard games for men only, and a formal dinner for which the guests were expected to dress in long gowns and penguin suits.
Silas was a distant relative of Fiona’s family, and he became the godfather of my son. Friends became relatives, and relatives became friends. The Department had always been like that; a curious intermingling of bright boys from expensive schools and their otherwise unemployable male relatives. Perhaps it would have been better and more efficient if its personnel had been recruited from a wider spectrum of British life, but it wouldn’t have been so amusing, or so frustrating.
Now Whitelands and all it represented was to end for ever. Some of the rooms had already been cleared of Silas’s more personal possessions. One capacious white dust sheet had transformed the chairs, and the long polished table of the dining-room, into a wrinkled dirigible. The dining-table, without extension panels, was shorter than I ever remembered it. I was saddened to think that I would never again see that table loaded under food, crowded by visitors and noisy with arguments.
‘I’ll come back,’ said Silas firmly, as if reading my thoughts. ‘I’m only leasing this place … short lease. And to people I know well. I’ve told them I will be returning. I’m even trusting them with the key of my wine cellar.’
‘I hope so, Silas,’ I said. ‘What about Mrs Porter?’
‘She’ll be living nearby. I made that a condition. I need to know there is someone here, keeping an eye on things on my behalf. You’ll come and see me?’
I nodded. We were sitting in what Silas called ‘the drawing-room’. Most of the light came from the big open fire upon which he had just placed a mossy log. This was the sanctum to which Silas had retired when he first became unwell. Around him he had arranged some of his most cherished possessions: his favourite lumpy sofa and an equally lumpy painting of his grandfather on a horse. Silas was lumpy too. Already big in frame, his indulgence in good food, and complete indifference to his personal appearance, had made him fat and unkempt. His remaining hair was fuzzy, his jowls heavy, his shirt frayed a
nd his woollen cardigan – like Silas himself – slowly coming unravelled.
‘You put in the new trees,’ I said.
‘It broke my heart to lose the elms.’
‘They’ll soon grow.’
‘Canadian maples or some such thing. The forestry people said they grow quickly, but they are sickly-looking growths. I don’t like the look of them.’
‘Give them a chance, Silas. You mustn’t be impatient.’
‘An apartment,’ said Silas. ‘What will life be like in an apartment block?’
‘I thought it was your idea.’
‘It was a compromise,’ he said. ‘At first it was only my local doctor threatening me. Then the Department joined in. They say it’s all for my benefit, but I’d rather stay here and put up with whatever happens. We’ve all got to die some time.’
‘You mustn’t talk like that,’ I said. ‘You’ve got years of life and work ahead.’
‘What about my music?’ said Silas. ‘I’m taking all my records and tapes. I hope I’m not going to have some wretch banging on the wall just because it’s after eleven o’clock.’
‘Get well,’ I said. ‘That’s the important thing. Get well and come home to Whitelands again.’
‘I’m not sick,’ he declared. Although old and somewhat wheezy, he appeared to be in good health and quick-witted too. ‘But the Department made me submit to a physical examination by their stupid doctor. It’s some new rule about the pension funds. That’s what started the fuss. Otherwise I wouldn’t have agreed to go away at all. Before you go, you might like to take a last look around, Bernard?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And I want you to take a crate or two of wine with you. Choose whatever you like.’ Before I could respond, he added: ‘I will never get through it all even if I live to be one hundred.’
I looked at him and waited to hear the reason for him demanding my presence. Silas was a noisy extrovert, a blunt and yet devious old man, and certainly not likely to bring me down here without a specific reason. He got up and closed the door. Tall and plump and untidy, he had many weaknesses, of which gambling was the one most associated with him both at work and at play. ‘There are things that were never committed to paper, Bernard. When I go, the facts will go too. You understand?’
‘Of course.’
‘I’ve always been a gambler,’ said Silas. ‘Sometimes I’ve won. When I’ve lost I’ve paid up without complaint. But in all my years in the Department I’ve never gambled with people’s lives. You know that, Bernard.’
I didn’t answer. The truth was that I didn’t know what was decided in the secret dialogues that men like Silas had on the top floor.
‘When I thought we were going to lose Fiona last year, I was worried. They are not like us, Bernard, those people over there. They don’t interrogate, explicate and isolate.’ He smiled; it was one of the maxims of the Department. ‘If they had got wind of what Fiona was doing to their precious socialist empire her end would have been too savage to think about. They put that fellow … what’s his name … into a furnace: alive. At first no one here would believe it, but then we intercepted the official account. It was done in front of witnesses.’
‘What is it, Silas? What are you trying to tell me?’
‘I didn’t know they would kill Tessa,’ he said. ‘All I was told was that there would be a faked identity. Her identity.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘We handed the whole project over to the Yanks,’ said Silas. ‘We needed to be distanced from it.’
‘That doesn’t fit with what I know,’ I told him. ‘It was done by a man named Thurkettle, wasn’t it?’
‘Thurkettle. Yes: an American.’
‘An American mercenary. The story I heard is that he was released from a high-security prison to do some dirty work for the CIA. Very dirty work.’
‘Perhaps he was,’ said Silas. ‘I thought he was a bona fide Washington man. I was persuaded to give him a free hand.’
‘To do what?’
‘Certainly not to murder anyone,’ said Silas indignantly. ‘I never met him personally of course, but I was assured that he could provide a smoke-screen while we brought Fiona out.’
‘A smoke-screen? What did you think he was going to do?’
‘It was vital that the Stasi people, and Moscow too, should think Fiona had died. If they had known that she was safe, and in California, giving us a detailed picture of everything they had done … Well, they would have simply taken emergency action: changed codes, changed methods, changed agents, changed everything. Fiona’s years of courage and jeopardy would have been in vain.’
‘But Tessa was killed. And her body was burned to help the deception.’
‘What can I say to you? I can’t say I wasn’t at fault, because I was. I trusted that swine. I thought it was going to be only a matter of paperwork.’
‘Without a body? How would that have worked?’ I asked him.
‘A dead body perhaps. A body taken from a hospital mortuary. That has been done before, and will no doubt be done again. It’s not the use of the body, is it? It’s the killing.’
‘Yes, it’s the killing,’ I agreed.
‘Tessa’s death has brought terrible consequences,’ said Silas. ‘None of us will ever be the same again. Not you, not Fiona, not that poor husband of hers. And certainly not me. I haven’t slept one full night since I heard the news. It was the end of my relationship with the Department, of course. The D-G wanted me to continue in my arm’s-length advisory role, but I told him I couldn’t. It broke my heart.’
‘Where is Thurkettle now?’
‘He went to Oregon, the last I heard of him. But he may have moved on. Canada perhaps. The Americans had given him a new identity so he could do more or less as he wished. There was talk of having him face some sort of murder charge, but that would have meant negotiations with the Americans. And even if they had agreed we could hardly drag our covert actions through open court. Concealing the fact that Fiona was alive and well was exactly what we had started out to do in the first place.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And to some extent Thurkettle probably feels he did what had to be done.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And to some extent I suspect that’s how you feel too.’
Silas frowned. ‘I thought you would understand,’ he said. ‘Your father would have understood.’
‘He would have understood all right. He was accused of shooting some Germans named Winter back in 1945. He was innocent. But the Department let the charges stand because they didn’t want him to face questioning by American lawyers in another jurisdiction.’
‘That’s an over-simplification,’ protested Silas.
‘It ruined his career, didn’t it?’
‘Your father understood that it was necessary.’
‘Very well. But don’t expect me to go along with the kind of bloody nonsense my father put up with. My father is not me, and I am not my father. Time has moved on, and so has everything else.’
‘I hate rows,’ said Silas plaintively.
‘Yes, of course you do. So do I, if I can get my way without having them.’
When I left the room Silas leaned back and closed his eyes as if in pain. I sought out Mrs Porter to say goodbye. I was hoping to hear her confidential opinion about Silas and his plans. I found her in the kitchen, and she was determined to keep her own counsel. ‘I know what you want to talk about, Mister Bernard,’ she said. ‘But I know my place. It’s not for me to have an opinion about anything.’ She took out her handkerchief and wiped her nose. ‘I can’t seem to shake off this head-cold,’ she said. ‘And there is so much to do in the house.’ She smiled at me. Mrs Porter had helped to create the magical atmosphere of Whitelands. It was difficult to guess how much of all I loved would remain after new tenants moved in.
I got into the car and found myself trembling. I don’t know why, perhaps it was due to anger and resentment, or the memories of my fat
her’s humiliation. I drove down to the village and stopped at the Brown Bess. It was an unfashionable little pub, sandwiched between a scum-encrusted duck pond and a neglected war memorial. Those villagers who could afford it, and the weekend inhabitants, kept to the other pub, the big multi-mirrored Queen Victoria that faced the village green, where the weekend cricketers and their adoring families could enjoy frozen food with foreign names, and champagne with a dash of blackcurrant juice. The Brown Bess was an intimate gathering place for dart-playing farm-workers. The landlord served me with an excruciating politeness bordering on hostility.
I took my beer and my Cheddar cheese sandwich and sat on the steps of the war memorial to eat it, scarcely noticing the cold. I wanted to think. To be subjected to the devious ways of my father-in-law, and then Silas Gaunt, in close succession was more than anyone should be asked to endure. I rebelled. Afterwards – when it was too late – even my most loyal friends and staunchest supporters said my plan of action had been headstrong and ill-advised. The kinder ones said uncharacteristically so. They wondered why I acted impulsively without taking one of them into my confidence, or giving more thought to the consequences.
It was David’s claim upon my children – and Fiona’s apparent indifference to it – that worried me most. The problem and possible solutions went round and round in my head. That day, sitting on the war memorial with my pint of beer, I listed on a single page of my notebook every alternative open to me; no matter how absurd or impractical. I went through each answer one by one and rejected only those that stood no chance of success. It looked like this: arguing with David would get nowhere, while fighting him through Britain’s expensive legal system would result in custody of the children for him and legal fees that would bankrupt me. With the conversation about arsenic fresh in my mind, I even considered killing him. I might have done it too; but I felt that even undetected it would provide the children with a legacy even worse than having David as a ‘father’.