was broken in three places and it took ages for him to recover fully.
‘And you tell Mr Gaunt I remember him. He’s long ago retired, I know, but I suppose you still see him from time to time. You tell him any time he wants another bet on what the Ivans are up to, he calls me up first.’
‘I’ll see him next weekend,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell him that.’
‘I thought you must have missed the plane,’ said my wife as she switched on the bedside light. She’d not yet got to sleep; her long hair was hardly disarranged and the frilly nightdress was not rumpled. She’d gone to bed early by the look of it. There was a lighted cigarette on the ashtray. She must have been lying there in the dark, smoking and thinking about her work. On the side table there were thick volumes from the office library and a thin blue Report from the Select Committee on Science and Technology, with notebook and pencil and the necessary supply of Benson & Hedges cigarettes, a considerable number of which were now only butts packed tightly in the big cut-glass ashtray she’d brought from the sitting room. She lived a different sort of life when I was away; now it was like going into a different house and a different bedroom, to a different woman.
‘Some bloody strike at the airport,’ I explained. There was a tumbler containing whisky balanced on the clock-radio. I sipped it; the ice cubes had long since melted to make a warm weak mixture. It was typical of her to prepare a treat so carefully – with linen napkin, stirrer and some cheese straws – and then forget about it.
‘London Airport?’ She noticed her half-smoked cigarette and stubbed it out and waved away the smoke.
‘Where else do they go on strike every day?’ I said irritably.
‘There was nothing about it on the news.’
‘Strikes are not news any more,’ I said. She obviously thought that I had not come directly from the airport, and her failure to commiserate with me over three wasted hours there did not improve my bad temper.
‘Did it go all right?’
‘Werner sends his best wishes. He told me that story about your Uncle Silas betting him fifty marks about the building of the Wall.’
‘Not again,’ said Fiona. ‘Is he ever going to forget that bloody bet?’
‘He likes you,’ I said. ‘He sent his best wishes.’ It wasn’t exactly true, but I wanted her to like him as I did. ‘And his wife has left him.’
‘Poor Werner,’ she said. Fiona was very beautiful, especially when she smiled that sort of smile that women save for men who have lost their woman. ‘Did she go off with another man?’
‘No,’ I said untruthfully. ‘She couldn’t stand Werner’s endless affairs with other women.’
‘Werner!’ said my wife, and laughed. She didn’t believe that Werner had affairs with lots of other women. I wondered how she could guess so correctly. Werner seemed an attractive sort of guy to my masculine eyes. I suppose I will never understand women. The trouble is that they understand me; they understand me too damned well. I took off my coat and put it on a hanger. ‘Don’t put your overcoat in the wardrobe,’ said Fiona. ‘It needs cleaning. I’ll take it in tomorrow.’ As casually as she could, she added, ‘I tried to get you at the Steigerberger Hotel. Then I tried the duty officer at Olympia but no one knew where you were. Billy’s throat was swollen. I thought it might be mumps.’
‘I wasn’t there,’ I said.
‘You asked the office to book you there. You said it’s the best hotel in Berlin. You said I could leave a message there.’
‘I stayed with Werner. He’s got a spare room now that his wife’s gone.’
‘And shared all those women of his?’ said Fiona. She laughed again. ‘Is it all part of a plan to make me jealous?’
I leaned over and kissed her. ‘I’ve missed you, darling. I really have. Is Billy okay?’
‘Billy’s fine. But that damned man at the garage gave me a bill for sixty pounds!’
‘For what?’
‘He’s written it all down. I told him you’d see about it.’
‘But he let you have the car?’
‘I had to collect Billy from school. He knew that before he did the service on it. So I shouted at him and he let me take it.’
‘You’re a wonderful wife,’ I said. I undressed and went into the bathroom to wash and to brush my teeth.
‘And it went well?’ she called.
I looked at myself in the long mirror. It was just as well that I was tall, for I was getting fatter, and that Berlin beer hadn’t helped matters. ‘I did what I was told,’ I said, and finished brushing my teeth.
‘Not you, darling,’ said Fiona. I switched on the Water-Pik and above its chugging sound I heard her add, ‘You never do what you are told, you know that.’
I went back into the bedroom. She’d combed her hair and smoothed the sheet on my side of the bed. She’d put my pyjamas on the pillow. They consisted of a plain red jacket and paisley-printed trousers. ‘Are these mine?’
‘The laundry didn’t come back this week. I phoned them. The driver is ill … so what can you say?’
‘I didn’t check into the Berlin office at all, if that’s what’s eating you,’ I admitted. ‘They’re all young kids in there, don’t know their arse from a hole in the ground. I feel safer with one of the old-timers like Werner.’
‘Suppose something happened? Suppose there was trouble and the duty officer didn’t even know you were in Berlin? Can’t you see how silly it is not to give them some sort of perfunctory call?’
‘I don’t know any of those Olympia Stadion people any more, darling. It’s all changed since Frank Harrington took over. They are youngsters, kids with no field experience and lots and lots of theories from the training school.’
‘But your man turned up?’
‘No.’
‘You spent three days there for nothing?’
‘I suppose I did.’
‘They’ll send you in to get him. You realize that, don’t you?’
I got into bed. ‘Nonsense. They’ll use one of the West Berlin people.’
‘It’s the oldest trick in the book, darling. They send you over there to wait … for all you know, he wasn’t even in contact. Now you’ll go back and report a failed contact and you’ll be the one they send in to get him. My God, Bernie, you are a fool at times.’
I hadn’t looked at it like that, but there was more than a grain of truth in Fiona’s cynical viewpoint. ‘Well, they
