Hope. Len Deighton

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Hope - Len  Deighton

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late at night. ‘He’s changed his mind about the report. He told me to take you to Switzerland with me.’

      Now it was possible to see a little deeper into Dicky’s state of mind. The questions he had just put to me were questions he’d failed to answer to the D-G’s satisfaction. The Director had then told Dicky to take me along with him, and it was that that had dented Dicky’s ego. The nip from the dog was extracurricular. ‘Because it’s your brother-in-law,’ he added, lest I began to think myself indispensable.

      Using his uninjured hand Dicky picked up his phone and called Fiona, who worked in the next office. ‘Fiona, darling,’ he said in his jokey drawl. ‘Hubby is with me. Could you join us for a moment?’

      I went and looked out of the window and tried to forget I had a crackpot brother-in-law in whom Dicky was taking a sudden and unsympathetic interest. Summer had passed; we had winter to endure before it came again but this was a glorious golden day, and from this top-floor room I could see across the London basin to the high ground at Hampstead. The clouds, gauzy and grey like a bundle of discarded bandages, were fixed to the ground by shiny brass pins pretending to be sunbeams.

      My wife came in, her face darkened with the stern expression that I’d learned to recognize as one she wore when wrenched away from something that needed uninterrupted concentration. Fiona’s work load had become the talk of the top floor. And she handled the political decisions with consummate skill. But I saw in her eyes that bright gleam a light bulb provides just before going ping.

      ‘Yes, Dicky?’ she said.

      ‘I’m enticing your hubby away for a brief fling in Zurich, Fiona my dearest. We must leave Sunday morning. Can you endure a weekend without him?’

      Fiona looked at me sternly. I winked at her but she didn’t react. ‘Must he go?’ she said.

      ‘Duty calls,’ said Dicky.

      ‘What did you do to your hand, Dicky?’

      As if in response, Jennifer arrived with antiseptic, cotton wool and a packet of Band-Aids. Dicky held his hand out like some potentate accepting a vow of fidelity. Jennifer crouched and began work on his wound.

      ‘The children were coming home on Sunday,’ Fiona told Dicky. ‘But if Bernard is going to be on a trip, I’ll lock myself away and work on those wretched figures you need for the Minister.’

      ‘Splendid,’ said Dicky. ‘Ouch, that hurts,’ he told Jennifer.

      ‘I’m sorry, Mr Cruyer.’

      To me Fiona said: ‘Daddy suggests keeping the children with him a little longer.’ Perhaps she saw the quizzical look in my face for, in explanation, she added: ‘I phoned them this morning. It’s their wedding anniversary.’

      ‘We’ll talk about it,’ I said.

      ‘I’ve told Daddy to reserve places for them at the school next term, just in case.’ She clasped her hands together as if praying that I would not explode. ‘If we lose the deposit, so be it.’

      For a moment I was speechless. Her father was doing everything he could to keep my children with him, and I wanted them home with us.

      Dicky, feeling left out of this conversation, said: ‘Has Daphne been in touch, by any chance?’

      This question about his wife was addressed to Fiona, who looked at him and said: ‘Not since I called and thanked her for that divine dinner party.’

      ‘I just wondered,’ said Dicky lamely. With Fiona looking at him and waiting for more, he added: ‘Daph’s been a bit low lately; and there are no friends like old friends. I told her that.’

      ‘Shall I call her?’

      ‘No,’ said Dicky hurriedly. ‘She’ll be all right. I think she’s going through the change of life.’

      Fiona grinned. ‘You say that every time you have a tiff with her, Dicky.’

      ‘No, I don’t,’ said Dicky crossly. ‘Daphne needs counselling. She’s making life damned difficult right now. And with all the work piled up here I don’t need any distractions.’

      ‘No,’ said Fiona, backing down and becoming the loyal assistant. Now that Dicky had manoeuvred himself into being the European Controller, while still holding on to the German Desk, no one in the Department was safe from his whims and fancies.

      Dicky said: ‘Work is the best medicine. I’ve always been a workaholic; it’s too late to change now.’

      Fiona nodded and I looked out of the window. There was really no way to respond to this amazing claim by the Rip Van Winkle of London Central, and if I’d caught her eye we might both have rolled around on the floor with merriment.

      We stayed at home that evening, eating dinner I’d fetched from a Chinese take-away. Fulham was too far to go for shrivelled duck and plastic pancakes but Fiona had read about it in a magazine at the hairdresser’s. That restaurant critic must have led the dullest of lives to have found the black bean spare-ribs ‘memorable’. The bill might have proved even more memorable for him, had restaurant critics been given bills.

      ‘You don’t like it?’ Fiona said.

      ‘I’m full.’

      ‘You’ve eaten hardly anything.’

      ‘I’m thinking about my trip to Zurich.’

      ‘It won’t be so bad.’

      ‘With Dicky?’

      ‘Dicky depends upon you, he really does,’ she said, her feminine reasoning making her think that this dependence would encourage me to overlook his faults for the sake of the Department.

      ‘No more rice, no more fish and no more pancakes,’ I said as she pushed the serving plates towards me. ‘And certainly no more spare-ribs.’

      Fiona switched on the TV to catch the evening news. There was a discussion between four people best known for their availability to appear on TV discussion programmes. A college professor was holding forth on the latest news from Poland. ‘…Historically the Poles lack a consciousness of their own position in the European dimension. For hundreds of years they have acted out a totemic role that they lack the capacity to sustain. Now I think the Poles are about to get a rude awakening.’ The professor touched his beard reflectively. ‘They have pushed and provoked the Soviet Union… The Warsaw Pact autumn exercises are taking place along the border. Any time now the Russian tanks will roll across it.’

      ‘Literally?’ asked the TV anchor man.

      ‘It is time the West acted,’ said a woman with a Polish Solidarity badge pinned to her Chanel suit.

      ‘Yes, literally,’ said the professor with that determined solemnity with which those past military age discuss war. ‘The Soviets will use it as a way of cautioning the hotheads in the Baltic States. We must make it absolutely clear to Chairman Gorbachev that any action, I do mean any action, he takes against the Poles will not be permitted to provoke a major East–West conflict.’

      ‘Who will rid me of these troublesome Poles? Is that how the Americans see it?’ the Solidarity

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