‘Ahh!’
‘It’s not against my conscience, it’s against the German legal code. The old German law, that made incest a crime, still applies in the case of a man committing adultery with his sister-in-law.’
‘I’ve never heard of that,’ said Dicky, suspecting, rightly, that I was inventing this historic clause on the spur of the moment. ‘Are you sure?’
I turned slightly towards the phone on his table and said, ‘I can get someone in the legal department to look it up for you.’
‘No,’ said Dicky. ‘Don’t do that for the moment. I might go downstairs and look it up myself.’
I said, ‘You didn’t explain why I had to go.’
‘To Berlin? It has been ordained that you, me and Frank Harrington have a pow-wow in Big B to go through some damned stuff the Americans want.’
‘Can’t it wait?’
‘Written instructions from the D-G himself. No way to wriggle out of that one, Gunga Din.’
‘And you’re taking Tessa?’
‘Yes. She has these bonus tickets that airlines give to first-class passengers who fly a great deal. She has to use up the free mileage.’
‘So you don’t have to pay Tessa’s fare?’
‘It was too good an opportunity to turn away.’
‘I suppose it was.’
‘I should have married someone like Tessa, I suppose,’ said Dicky.
I noticed it wasn’t Tessa’s unique attractions he wanted but only someone in her category. Whether this left Daphne wanting in brains, wealth, beauty, chic, charm or sexual performance was left unspecified. ‘Tessa is already married,’ I said.
‘Don’t be so priggish, Bernard. Tessa is a grown-up woman. She’s sensible enough to decide these things for herself.’
‘When is this meeting?’
‘Frank is being difficult about precise times. We have to fit it in around his golf and bridge and his jaunts with his army cronies.’
‘You’ve booked the hotel?’
‘They get so full at this time of year,’ said Dicky.
I heard a defensive tone in his voice. On a hunch I said, ‘Have you booked it in my name?’
‘Yes…’ Momentarily he was flustered, but he recovered quickly. ‘I told the hotel that we are not yet sure who will be using the suite. They think we are a company.’
I was damned angry but Dicky had played his cards with customary finesse. I couldn’t see anything specific that I could complain about that Dicky wouldn’t be able to explain away. ‘When do we leave?’
‘Friday. Tessa insists on going to some bloody opera that’s only on that night. Pinky is arranging the tickets. I’m hoping for a preliminary meeting with Frank and his people on Friday afternoon. We should be through by Monday evening. Tuesday evening at the latest.’
There goes my weekend with Gloria and the children. Dicky saw my face and said, ‘You’ll have days off to make up for the loss of the weekend.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said, although it wasn’t much fun to be monitoring the weeds in the garden, and fixing my own lunch, while the children were at school and Gloria was slaving in the office.
‘You’re getting to be very surly lately,’ Dicky observed while he was pouring the last of the coffee for himself. ‘Don’t fly off the handle: I’m just telling you that for your own good.’
‘You’re very considerate, Dicky.’
‘I can’t understand you,’ Dicky persisted. ‘You’ve got that gorgeous creature doting on you and still you go around with a long face. What’s the problem? Tell me, Bernard, what is the problem?’ Although the words were arranged like questions, Dicky made it quite clear from his tone and delivery that he didn’t want an answer.
I nodded. It was best to nod with Dicky. Like the Japanese he framed his questions in the expectation of affirmative responses.
‘Brooding won’t bring Fiona back. You must pull yourself together, Bernard.’ He gave me a ‘chins up’ smile.
I felt like telling Dicky exactly what I thought about him and his plan to implement me in the cuckolding of George but he wouldn’t have understood the reasons for my anger. I nodded and left.
At the end of the working day I drove homeward with Gloria but we didn’t go directly to number thirteen Balaklava Road. She said she wanted to collect some clothes from her parents’ home. The actual reason for the visit was that she’d promised to look in and see the house was safe while they were away on holiday. They lived in a smart, burglar-afflicted suburb near Epsom, a few stations beyond us on the Southern Railway’s commuter routes.
The Kents – her parents had changed their name after escaping from Hungary – lived in a four-bedroom double-glazed neo-Tudor house with a gravel ‘in and out’ front drive on which their two cars could be parked and still leave room enough for the tanker that delivered their heating oil.
This evening the front drive was empty, the cars locked away. Her parents were spending ten days at their holiday villa in Spain. Gloria went through an elaborate routine of unlocking doors and switching off burglar alarms within the prescribed sixty seconds. Then we went inside.
The house smelled of a syrupy perfume resembling violets. Gloria said their cleaning woman was coming in every morning and systematically ‘shampooing’ the carpets. ‘I’ll make you a cup of coffee,’ she suggested. I agreed. It was interesting to watch her in her parents’ home. She became a different person: not a more diffident or childlike one, but vicariously proprietorial, as if she were a real estate clerk showing the house to a prospective purchaser.
We sat in the kitchen. It was a designer kitchen: Marie-Antoinette at her most rustic. We sat on uncomfortable stools at a plastic Louis Seize counter and watched the coffee dripping through the machine. The overhead light – bleak and blue – came from two long fluorescent tubes which buzzed.
It gave me a chance to look at her. All day she’d been her usual warm and good-natured self. It was almost as if she’d forgotten yesterday’s clash. But she hadn’t. She didn’t forget anything. How beautiful she was, with all that energy and radiance that is the prerogative of youth. No wonder people such as Dicky envied me. Had they realized that Fiona would soon be returning perhaps they would have envied me even more. But for me it was a miserable dilemma. I couldn’t look at Gloria without wondering if I was going to be able to handle the personal crisis that Fiona’s return would bring. The idea of Fiona being kept in deep cover for six months made it even more irresolvable. And what about the children?
‘I don’t think you’ve been listening to a word of what I’ve said,’ I suddenly heard Gloria say.
‘Of course I have,’ and with an inspired evasion tactic I added, ‘Did I tell you who Dicky is going to Berlin with?’
‘No.’ Her eyes were wide open. She swung her blonde hair back and held it as she leaned very close so that I was conscious of the warmth of her body. She was wearing a crimson shirt dress. On most women it would have looked awful but she brought a dash to such cheap bright clothes, just as small children so often do.
‘Tessa,’ I said.
‘Your Tessa?’
‘My sister-in-law. Yes.’
‘So Tessa is up to her old tricks. I thought the affair with Dicky was over long ago.’
‘Yes. That’s been puzzling me too.’
‘It’s hardly a puzzle, darling. People like Dicky, and Tessa too, are capricious.’
‘But Dicky was warned off last time.’
‘Warned off seeing Tessa? By Daphne, you mean?’
‘No. The Department didn’t like it. Clandestine meetings with the sister of a defector looked like a potential security risk.’
‘I’m surprised Dicky took any notice.’
‘You shouldn’t be. Dicky may wear funny bow ties and play the Bohemian student, but he knows exactly how far to go. When the bugle sounds and the medals are being awarded he toes the line and salutes.’
‘Except when it comes to Tessa you mean. Perhaps it’s love.’
‘Not D
icky.’
‘So perhaps he’s had official permission to bed Tessa,’ she joked.
‘That’s what it must be,’ I agreed, and not long afterwards I was to reflect upon her joke. ‘Perhaps what Dicky found irresistible was not having to pay her fare.’
‘What a swine he is. Poor Daphne.’ She poured the coffee and, in a dented biscuit tin, discovered a secret supply of chocolate biscuits.
‘And he’s booked his hotel in my name. What about that?’
She took it very calmly. ‘Why?’
‘I suppose he’s going to tell Daphne some story about me going off with Tessa.’
‘But you’re not going?’
‘I’m afraid I am.’
‘The weekend?’ I nodded. She said, ‘I told the Pomeroys to come to dinner on Saturday.’
‘Who the hell are the Pomeroys?’
‘The parents of Billy’s friends. The children were eating with them last night. They are terribly kind.’
‘You’ll have to put them off,’ I said.
‘I’ve put them off twice before when you went on trips.’
‘It’s an order from the D-G. You know what that means. There’s no way I can get out of it.’
‘The weekend?’
‘I go on Friday morning; back on Monday or Tuesday. Dicky’s secretary will know what’s happening over there.’
‘And on Sunday there’s Billy’s car club meeting. I said you’d take him.’
‘Look! It’s not my idea, darling.’
For a long time she drank her coffee without speaking. Then she said, ‘I know it’s not,’ as if responding to some other question that only she knew about. ‘But you said there was going to be a party at Werner’s hotel. I know you wanted to go.’
‘It’s just to promote the hotel. We’ll go some other time. They are always having parties, and anyway it would be no fun without you.’
After the coffee I went with her to the room she had when living here with her parents. They kept it for her as if they were expecting her every night. Toys, teddy bear, dolls, children’s books, school books, a Beatles poster on the wall. The bed had been made up with freshly laundered linen. Taking her away from them was my doing and there were times when I felt bad about it. And I hadn’t even married her. How would I feel if some time my daughter Sally disappeared with some middle-aged married man? Sometimes I wondered how I would be able to deal with the inevitable separation from the children. Would I find myself keeping their bedrooms as shrines at which I could pray for a return of their childhood days with me?
Looking out from the bedroom window I could see the flat roof of a large single-story building that had been added to the house. Seeing me looking at it, Gloria said, ‘I cried when they ruined my view of the garden. There was a lovely chestnut tree there and a rhododendron.’
‘Why did you need extra space?’
‘It’s a surgery and workshop for Daddy.’
‘I thought he had a surgery in town.’
‘This is for special jobs. Didn’t you know?’
‘Why would I know?’
‘Want to see? It’s where he does work for the Department.’
‘What kind of work?’
‘Come and see.’
She got the big bunch of keys that her father had left with her and we went down into the neat little dental surgery. She opened the door, and while she searched for the light switches the room was only lit from a glass box in the corner where tropical flowers appeared under ultraviolet lights. When she switched on the light, apart from seeming unusually crammed with apparatus, it was like any other dentist’s workplace: a modern fully adjustable chair and elaborate drill facing a large window. There was a big ceramic spittoon, a swivelling cold-light and many glass-fronted instrument cabinets, packed with rows and rows of curiously shaped drills, forceps, scalers and other spiky implements.
Gloria went round the room naming the equipment and describing what it was for. She seemed to know a lot about dentistry despite having resisted her father’s wish that she should become one. This she said was her father’s secret sanctum.
‘Who comes here for treatment?’ I asked.
‘Not so many nowadays, but I can remember a time when Daddy worked more hours here than at his proper surgery. I remember one poor Polish boy who was in the chair for at least six hours. He was so exhausted that Daddy let him come and sit in the drawing room with Mummy and me, to take his mind off things.’
‘Agents?’
‘Yes, of course. At university, Daddy wrote a thesis on the history of European dentistry. After that he began his collection of old dental tools. Now he can look into anyone’s mouth and know where they had their teeth fixed, and when. Look at that.’ She held up a particularly barbarous-looking instrument. ‘It’s very old…from Russia.’
‘I was lucky,’ I said. ‘My teeth were always fixed by a Berlin dentist and my cover story was always German. I didn’t have to have any of my dental work changed.’
‘I’ve known my father to completely eliminate all previous dentistry to give an agent a completely new mouth: Russian, Polish, Greek…Once he did old-fashioned Spanish dental work for a man who was going to be using the identity of a Civil War veteran.
‘Come and look at the workshop.’ She unlocked the door of an adjoining room and we went inside. This was even more cramped, with filing cabinets and racks of tools and equipment. There was a tiny lathe, a bench drill and even a small electric kiln. On a large table near the window there was the work in progress. A desk light was centred upon something concealed under a cloth. Gloria removed the cotton dust-cloth and gave a little shriek as a human skull was revealed. ‘Alas, poor Yorick! We mustn’t touch it. It’s probably a demonstration piece that will be photographed for a textbook. He does replicas of old dentistry and sends them as examples to police pathologists and coroner’s departments all over the world. This one must be a special job, from the way he’s covered it over so carefully.rs;
I went closer to look at the skull. It was shiny, like plastic, and there were gold inlays and porcelain crowns fitted into it. ‘Did you never want to be a dentist?’
‘Never. And Daddy was always so considerate that he never really pressed the idea on to me. It was only recently that I realized how much he’d always hoped I’d become interested in his practice, and his collection. Sometimes he had students work with him. Once I remember he brought a young newly qualified dentist home for dinner. I’ve often wondered if he was hoping that a romance would blossom.’
‘Let’s lock up and go home,’ I said. ‘Shall we take some fish and chips back for everyone?’
‘Do let’s.’
‘I’m sorry if I’ve been a bit bad-tempered lately, darling.’
‘I haven’t noticed any difference,’ she said.
18
Afterwards I looked back and saw that weekend in Berlin as the beginning of the end, but I don’t know how much of that view was hindsight. At the time, it seemed unusual simply because of the hectic way in which meeting followed meeting and the way Frank Harrington – always something of a mother hen – became so flustered that he was phoning me in the middle of the night, and then admitting that he’d forgotten what he was calling about.
Not that any of the meetings decided anything very much. They were typically casual Berlin Field Unit conferences at which Frank presided in his inimitably avuncular style and smoked his foul-smelling pipe and indulged in long rambling asides about me or my father or the old days or all three together.
It was on Sunday morning that Frank first gave me an inkling of what was happening. Dicky was not there. He had left a message to say he was showing Tessa ‘round the town’, although what Dicky knew about Berlin could be written on the head of a pin and still leave plenty of room for the Lord’s Prayer.
It was just me and Frank. We were in his study in the big house at Grunewald. He had a secretary there and some of the top secret material was filed there. It gave Frank an excuse
for a day at home now and again. That incredible and un forgettable study! Although I could not identify any single object as having its origins in the sub-continent, this room could have been the Punjab bungalow of some pukka regimental officer, some hero of the Mutiny just back from hunting the nimble blackbuck with cheetahs. Shuttered against the daylight, the dim lamps revealed a fine military chest with magnificent brass fittings, the mounted horns of some un identified species of antelope, a big leather-buttoned sofa and rattan furniture; all of it bleached, creaky or worn, as such things become in the tropics. Even the sepia portrait of the sovereign seemed to have been selected for her resemblance to the young Victoria. The room expressed all Frank’s secret longings, and like most people’s secret longings they had no basis in reality.
Even Frank was at his most regimental, with a khaki safari shirt, slacks and plain brown tie. He’d been tapping the map with his fountain pen and asking me questions of a sort that usually were the concern of other technical grades. ‘What do you know about the East Berlin Autobahn entrances?’ he said.
He indicated the wall upon which two large maps had been fixed. They were a new addition and rather spoiled the ‘great days of the Raj’ décor. One was a map of east Germany, or the German Democratic Republic, the rather Orwellian name its rulers prefer. Like an island in this communist sea, our Sectors of Berlin were bridged to the West by three long Autobahnen. Used by motorists of both East and West, these highways were a favoured place for clandestine meetings. Smugglers, spies, journalists and lovers all arranged brief and dangerous rendezvous at the roadside. And consequently the DDR made sure the roads were policed constantly night and day.
The second map – the one Frank was tapping upon – was a Berlin street map. The whole city, not just the West. It was remarkably up to date, for I immediately noticed the projected changes to the Autobahn entrances, including the yet to be built turn-off which would – some time in the dim and distant future – provide the West with a new control point on the south side of the city. Rumours said the East Germans wanted the West to pay a great deal of money for it. That was the usual way that anything got done.