for tea.
When she came back into the room she came to the window, putting a hand on my arm as she peered over my shoulder. She said: ‘The office says there are freak windstorms gusting over 100 miles an hour. It’s a disaster. The whole Continent is affected. The forecasters in France and Holland gave out warnings but our weather people said it wasn’t going to happen. Heavens, look at the broken shop-windows.’
‘This might be your big chance for a new Chanel suit.’
‘Will there be looting?’ she asked, as if I was some all-knowing prophet.
‘Not too much at this time of night. Black up your face and put on your gloves.’
‘It’s not funny, darling. Shall I phone Daddy?’
‘It will only alarm them more. Let’s hope they sleep through it.’
She poured tea for us both and we sat there, with only a glimmer of light from the window, drinking strong Assam tea and listening to the noise of the storm. Fiona was very English. The English met every kind of disaster, from sudden death to threatened invasions, by making tea. Growing up in Berlin I had never acquired the habit. Perhaps that was at the root of our differences. Fiona had a devout faith in England, a legacy of her middle-class upbringing. Its rulers and administration, its history and even its cooking was accepted without question. No matter how much I tried to share such deeply held allegiances I was always an outsider looking in.
‘I’ve got a long day tomorrow, so I’m going right back to bed.’ She lifted her cup and drained the last of her tea. I noticed the cup she was using was from a set I’d bought when I set up house with Gloria. I’d tried to dispose of everything that would bring back memories of those days, but I’d forgotten about the big floral-pattern cups.
Gloria’s name was never mentioned but her presence was permanent and all-pervading. Would Fiona ever forgive me for falling in love with that glamorous child? And would I ever be able to forgive Fiona for deserting me without warning or trust? Our marriage had survived by postponing such questions, but eventually it must be tested by them.
‘Me too,’ I said.
Fiona put her empty cup on the tray and reached for mine. ‘You haven’t touched your tea,’ she said. She knew about the cups of course. Women instinctively know everything about other women.
‘It keeps me awake.’ Not that there was much of the night remaining to us.
‘You’re not easy to live with, Bernard,’ she said, with a formality that revealed that this was something she’d told herself many times.
‘I was thinking about something else,’ I confessed. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You can’t wait to get away,’ she said, as if taking note of something beyond her control, like the storm outside the window.
‘It’s Dicky’s idea.’
‘I didn’t say it wasn’t.’ She stood up and gathered the sugar and milk jug, and put them on the tray.
‘I’d rather stay with you,’ I said.
She smiled a lonely distant smile. Her sadness almost broke my heart. I was going to stand up and embrace her, but while I was still thinking about it she had picked up the tray and walked away. In such instants are our lives changed; or not changed.
With characteristic gravity the news men made the high winds of October 1987 into a hurricane. But it was a newsworthy event nevertheless. Homes were wrecked and ships sank. Cameras turned. The insured sweated; underwriters faltered; glaziers rejoiced. Hundreds and thousands of trees were ripped out of the English earth. So widespread was the devastation that even the meteorological gurus were moved to admit that they had perhaps erred in their predictions for a calm night.
I contrive, as far as is possible considering our relative ranking in the Department, to make my travel arrangements so that they exclude Dicky Cruyer. Several times during our trip to Mexico City a few years ago, I had vowed to resign rather than share another expedition with him. It was not that he made a boring travelling companion, or that he was incapable, cowardly, taciturn or shy. At this moment, he was practising his boyish charm on the Swiss Air stewardess in a demonstration of social skill far beyond anything that I might accomplish. But Dicky’s intrepid behaviour and reckless assumptions brought dangers of a sort I was not trained to endure. And I was tired of his ongoing joke that he was the brains and I was the brawn of the combination.
It was a Monday morning in October in Switzerland. Birds sang to keep warm, and the leaves were turning to rust on dry and brittle branches. The undeclared reason for my part in this excursion was that I knew the location of George Kosinski’s lakeside hideaway near Zurich. It was a secluded spot, and George had an obsession about keeping his name out of phone books and directories.
It was a severely modern house. Designed with obvious deference to the work of Corbusier, it exploited a dozen different woods to emphasize a panelled mahogany front door and carved surround. There was no reply to repeated ringing, and Dicky said flippantly: ‘Well, let’s see how you knock down the door, Bernard… Or do you pick the lock with your hairpin?’
Across the road a man in coveralls was painstakingly removing election posters from a wall. The national elections had taken place the previous day but already the Swiss were clearing away the untidy-looking posters. I smiled at Dicky. I wasn’t going to smash down a door in full view of a local municipal employee, and certainly not the sort of local municipal employee found in law-abiding Switzerland. ‘George might be having an afternoon nap,’ I said. ‘He’s retired; he takes life slowly these days. Give him another minute.’ I pressed the bell push again.
‘Yes,’ said Dicky knowingly. ‘There are few worse beginnings to an interview than smashing down someone’s front door.’
‘That’s it, Dicky,’ I said in my usual obsequious way, although I knew many worse beginnings to interviews, and I had the scars and stiff joints to prove it. But this wasn’t the time to burden Dicky with the adversities of being a field agent.
‘Our powwow might be more private if we all take a short voyage around the lake in his power boat,’ said Dicky.
I nodded. I’d noted that Dicky was nautically attired with a navy pea-jacket and a soft-topped yachtsman’s cap. I wondered what other aspects of George’s lifestyle had come to his attention.
‘And before we start, Bernard,’ he said, putting a hand on my arm, ‘leave the questioning to me. We’ve not come here for a cosy family gathering, and the sooner he knows that the better.’ Dicky stood with both hands thrust deep into the slash pockets of his pea-jacket and his feet well apart, the way sailors do in rough seas.
‘Whatever you say, Dicky,’ I told him, but I felt sure that if Dicky went roaring in with bayonets fixed and sirens screaming, George would display a terrible anger. His Polish parents had provided him with that prickly pride that is a national characteristic and I knew from personal experience how obstinate he could be. George had started as a dealer in unreliable motor cars and derelict property. Having contended with the ferocious dissatisfied customers found in run-down neighbourhoods of London, he was unlikely to yield to Dicky’s refined style of Whitehall bullying.
Again I pressed the bell push.
‘I can hear it ringing,’ said Dicky. There was a brass horseshoe door-knocker. Dicky gave it a quick rat-a-tat.
