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‘What’s wrong, Nanny?’
‘It would be better if we eat in the kitchen. The children will make a lot of crumbs and mess on the carpets and Mrs Dias won’t come in again to clean until Tuesday.’
‘You’re a fusspot, Nanny,’ I said.
‘I’ll tidy up, Doris,’ Gloria told Nanny. Doris! Good grief, those two were getting along too nicely!
‘And Mr Samson,’ said Nanny tentatively. ‘The children were invited to spend the evening with one of Billy’s school friends. The Dubois family. They live near Swiss Cottage. I promised to phone them before five.’
‘Sure, that’s okay. If the children want to go. Are you going too?’
‘Yes, I’d like to. They have Singin’ in the Rain on video, and they’ll serve soup and a snack meal afterwards. Other children will be there. We’d be back rather late, but the children could sleep late tomorrow.’
‘Well, drive carefully, Nanny. The town’s full of drunk drivers on a Saturday night.’
I heard cheers from the kitchen when Nanny went back and announced my decision. And tea was a delight. The children recited ‘If’ for Gloria, and Billy did three new magic tricks he’d been practising for the school Christmas concert.
‘As I remember it,’ I said, ‘I’d promised to take you to the Greek restaurant for dinner, have a drink or two at Les Ambassadeurs, and then drive you home to your parents.’
‘This is better,’ she said. We were in bed. I said nothing. ‘It is better, isn’t it?’ she asked anxiously.
I kissed her. ‘It’s madness and you know it.’
‘Nanny and the children won’t be back for hours.’
‘I mean you and me. When will you realize that I’m twenty years older than you are?’
‘I love you and you love me.’
‘I didn’t say I loved you,’ I said.
She pulled a face. She resented the fact that I wouldn’t say I loved her, but I was adamant; she was so young that I felt I was taking advantage of her. It was absurd, but refusing to tell her that I loved her enabled me to hang onto a last shred of self-respect.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. She pulled the bedclothes over our heads to make a tent. ‘I know you love me, but you don’t want to admit it.’
‘Do your parents suspect that we’re having an affair?’
‘Are you still frightened that my father will come after you?’
‘You’re damned right I am.’
‘I’m a grown woman,’ she said. The more I tried to explain my feelings to her, the more amused she always got. She laughed and snuggled down in the bed, pressing against me.
‘You’re only ten years older than little Sally.’
She grew tired of the tent game and threw the bedclothes back. ‘Your daughter is eight. Apart from the inaccurate mathematics of that allegation, you’ll have to come to terms with the fact that when your lovely daughter is ten years older she will be a grown woman too. Much sooner than that, in fact. You’re an old fogy, Bernard.’
‘I have Dicky telling me that I’m fat and flabby and you telling me that I’m an old fogy. It’s enough to crush a man’s ego.’
‘Not an ego like yours, darling.’
‘Come here,’ I said. I hugged her tight and kissed her.
The truth was that I was falling in love with her. I thought of her too much; soon everyone at the office would guess what was between us. Worse, I was becoming frightened at the prospect of this impossible affair coming to an end. And that, I suppose, is love.
‘I’ve been filing for Dicky all week.’
‘I know, and I’m jealous.’
‘Dicky is such an idiot,’ she said for no apparent reason. ‘I used to think he was so clever, but he’s such a fool.’ She was amused and scornful, but I didn’t miss the element of affection in her voice. Dicky seemed to bring out the maternal instinct in all women, even in his wife.
‘You’re telling me. I work for him.’
‘Did you ever think of getting out of the Department, Bernard?’
‘Over and over again. But what would I do?’
‘You could do almost anything,’ she said with the adoring intensity and the sincere belief that are the marks of those who are very young.
‘I’m forty,’ I said. ‘Companies don’t want promising “young” men of forty. They don’t fit into the pension scheme and they’re too old to be infant prodigies.’
‘I shall get out soon,’ she said. ‘Those bastards will never give me paid leave to go to Cambridge, and if I don’t go up next year I’m not sure when I’ll get another place.’
‘Have they told you they won’t give you paid leave?’
‘They asked me if unpaid leave would suit me just as well. Morgan, actually; that little Welsh shit who does all the dirty work for the D-G’s office.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I told him to get stuffed.’
‘In those very words?’
‘No point in beating about the bush, is there?’
‘None at all, darling,’ I said.
‘I can’t stand Morgan,’ she said. ‘And he’s no friend of yours either.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I heard him talking to Bret Rensselaer last week. They were talking about you. I heard Morgan say he felt sorry for you really because there was no real future for you in the Department now that your wife’s gone over to the Russians.’
‘What did Bret say?’
‘He’s always very just, very dispassionate, very honourable and sincere; he’s the beautiful American, Bret Rensselaer. He said that the German Section would go to pieces without you. Morgan said the German Section isn’t the only Section in the Department and Bret said, “No, just the most important one”.’
‘How did Morgan take that?’
‘He said that when the Stinnes debriefing is completed Bret might think again.’
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘What’s that bastard talking about?’
‘Don’t get upset, Bernie. It’s just Morgan putting the poison in. You know what he’s like.’
‘Frank Harrington said Morgan is the Martin Bormann of London South West One.’ I laughed.
‘Explain the joke to me.’
‘Martin Bormann was Hitler’s secretary, but by controlling the paperwork of Hitler’s office and by deciding who was permitted to have an audience with Hitler, Bormann became the power behind the throne. He decided everything that happened. People who upset Bormann never got to see Hitler and their influence and importance waned and waned.’
‘And Morgan controls the D-G like that?’
‘The D-G is not well,’ I said.
‘He’s as nutty as a fruitcake,’ said Gloria.
‘He has good days and bad days,’ I said. I was sorry for the D-G; he’d been good in his day – tough when it was necessary, but always scrupulously honest. ‘But by taking on the job of being the D-G’s hatchet man – a job no one else wanted – Morgan has become a formidable power in that building. And he’s done it in a very short time.’
‘How long has he been in the Department?’
‘I don’t know exactly – two years, three at the most. Now he’s talking to old-timers like Bret Rensselaer and Frank Harrington as man to man.’
‘That’s right. I heard him ask Bret about taking charge of the Stinnes debriefing. Bret said he had no time. Morgan said it wouldn’t be time-consuming; it was just a matter of holding the reins so that the Department knew what was happening, from day to day, over at London Debriefing Centre. You’d have thought Morgan was the D-G the way he was saying it.’
‘And how did Bret react to that?’
‘He asked for time to think it over, and it was decided that he’d let Morgan know next week. And then Bret asked if anyone knew when Frank Harrington was retiring, and Morgan said nothing was fixed. Bret said, “Nothing?” in a funny voice and they laughed. I don’t know what that was about.’
‘The D-G has a knighthood to dispose of. Rumour says it will go to Frank Harrington when he retires from the Berlin office. Everyone knows that Bret would give his right arm for a knighthood.’
‘I see. Is that how people get knighthoods?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘There was something else,’ said Gloria. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you this, but Morgan said the D-G had decided it would be just as well for the Department if you didn’t work in Operations as from the end of this year.’
‘Are you serious,’ I said in alarm.
‘Bret said that Internal Security had given you a clean bill of health – that’s what he said, “a clean bill of health”. And then Morgan said it was nothing to do with Internal Security; it was a matter of the Department’s reputation.’
‘That doesn’t sound like the D-G,’ I said. ‘That sounds like Morgan.’
‘Morgan the ventriloquist,’ said Gloria.
I kissed her again and changed the subject. It was all getting too damned depressing for me.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, responding to my change of mood. ‘I was determined not to tell you.’
I hugged her. ‘How did you know the children’s favourite cakes, you witch?’
‘I phoned Doris and asked her.’
‘You and Nanny are very thick,’ I said suspiciously.
‘Why don’t you call her Doris?’
‘I always call her Nanny. It’s better that way when we’re living in the same house.’
‘You’re such a prude. She adores you, you know.’
‘Don’t avoid my question. Have you been plotting with Nanny?’
‘With Nanny? About what?’
‘You know about what.’
‘Don’t do that. Oh, stop tickling me. Oh oh oh. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Oh stop it.’
‘Did you connive with Nanny so that she and the children were out for the evening? So that we could go to bed?’
‘Of course not.’
‘What did you give her?’
‘Stop it. Please. You beast.’
‘What did you give her?’
‘A box of chocolates.’
‘I knew it. You schemer.’
‘I hate Greek food.’
4 (#u86bf1dc7-af96-5a24-ac9e-e85bd184c6d3)
Taking the children to see Billy’s godfather was an excuse for a day in the country, a Sunday lunch second to none, and a chance to talk to ‘Uncle Silas’, one of the legends of the Department’s golden days. Also it gave me a chance to tie up some loose ends in the arrested woman’s evidence. If Dicky didn’t want it done for the Department, then I would do it just to satisfy my own curiosity.
The property had always fascinated me; Whitelands was as surprising as Silas Gaunt himself. From the long drive, with its well-tended garden, the ancient stone farmhouse was as pretty as a calendar picture. But over the years it had been adapted to the tastes of many different owners. Adapted, modified, extended and defaced. Across the cobbled yard at the back there was a curious castellated Gothic tower, its spiral staircase leading up to a large, ornately decorated chamber which once had been a mirrored bedroom. Even more incongruous in this cottage with its stone floors and oak beams was the richly panelled billiards room, with game trophies crowding its walls. Both architectural additions dated from the same time, both installed by a nineteenth-century beer baron to indulge his favourite pastimes.
Silas Gaunt had inherited Whitelands from his father, but Silas had never been a farmer. Even when he left the Department and came to live here in retirement, he still let his farm manager make all the decisions. Little wonder that Silas got lonely amid his six hundred acres on the edge of the Cotswolds. Now all the soft greenery of summer had gone. So had the crisp browns of autumn. Only the framework of landscape remained: bare tangles of hedgerow and leafless trees. The first snow had whitened rock-hard ridges of the empty brown fields: crosshatched pieces of landscape where magpies, rooks and starlings scavenged for worms and insects.
Silas had had few guests. It had been a hermit’s life, for the conversation of Mrs Porter, his housekeeper, was limited to recipes, needlework, and the steadily rising prices of groceries in the village shop. Silas Gaunt’s life had revolved round his library, his records and his wine cellar. But there is more to life than Schiller, Mahler and Margaux, which trio Silas claimed as his ‘fellow pensioners’. And so he’d come to encourage these occasional weekend house parties at which departmental staff, both past and present, were usually represented along with a sprinkling of the artists, tycoons, eccentrics and weirdos whom Silas had encountered during his very long and amazing career.
Silas was unkempt; the wispy white hair that made a halo on his almost bald head did not respond to combs or to the clawing gesture of his fingers that he made whenever a strand of hair fell forward across his eyes. He was tall and broad, a Falstaffian figure who liked to laugh and shout, could curse fluently in half a dozen languages, and who’d make reckless bets on anything and everything and claimed – with some justification – to be able to drink any man under the table.
Billy and Sally were in awe of him. They were always ready to go to Whitelands and see Uncle Silas, but they regarded him as a benevolent old ruffian of whose sudden moods they should constantly be wary. And that was the way I saw him myself. But he’d had a fully decorated Christmas tree erected in the entrance hall. Under it there was a little pile of presents for both children, all of them wrapped in bright paper and tied neatly with big bows. Mrs Porter’s doing no doubt.
