16

People made jokes about 'the yellow submarine', but Fiona seemed to like going down to the Data Centre, three levels below Whitehall. So did I sometimes, for a brief spell. Down there, where the air was warmed, dehydrated, filtered and purified, and the sky was always light blue, you had the feeling that life had temporarily halted to give you a chance to catch your breath and think your own unhurried thoughts. That's why the staff down there are so bloody slow. And why, if I wanted anything urgently, I went down and got it myself.

The Data Centre can only be entered through the Foreign Office. Since this entrance was used by so many others, it was difficult for enemy agents to identify and target our computer staff. The Centre occupied three underground levels: one for the big computers, one for the software and its servicing staff, and the lowest and most secret level for data.

I went through the security room on the ground floor. I spent the usual three minutes while the uniformed guard got my picture, and a physical description, on his identity-check video screen. He knew me of course, the old man on the desk, but we went through the procedures just the same. The higher your rank, the longer it took to satisfy the security check, the men on the desk were more anxious to impress the senior staff. I'd noticed the way some of the junior employees seemed to get past with no more than a nod or a wink.

He punched a code to tell the computer I was entering the Centre, and smiled. 'Here we are, sir.' He said it as if he'd been more impatient than I had. 'Going to see your wife, sir?'

'It's our anniversary tonight,' I told him.

'Then it'll be champagne and roses, I suppose.'

'Two lagers and an Indian take-away,' I said.

He laughed. He preferred to believe I wore these old suits because I was a spy.

Fiona was on level 3 in Secret Data. It was a very big open room like a well-lit car park. Along one wall, the senior staff had been allotted spaces marked out by means of a tiny rug, a waist-high bookcase and a visitor's chair for visitors who never came. There was endless metal shelving for spools and, facing that, some disk-drive units. Underfoot was the special anti-static carpet, its silver-grey colour reflecting the relentless glare of the fluorescent lighting.

She didn't see me as I came along the glass-sided corridor that ran the length of the Centre. I pushed through the transparent door. I looked around: there was no one in sight except my wife. There was a hum of electricity and the constantly whirring disk drives. Then came the sudden whine of a machine going into high speed before modulating into a steady pattern of uneven heartbeats.

Fiona was standing at one of the machines, waiting for it to whine down to a complete standstill. Then she pressed the button, and a drawer purred open. She dropped a cover over the disk and snapped the catches before closing the machine again. It was Fiona's boast that she could stand in for any one of the Data Centre staff. 'That way they can't tell you it's a long job, or any of the other fairy stories they invent to get home early.'

I went to the nearby terminal, a typewriter keyboard with a swivel display screen and printer. There was a roller-foot typist's chair pulled close to it, and a plastic bin spilling over with the wide, pale green paper of the terminal's printer.

'You remembered,' said Fiona. Her face lit up as she saw me. 'You remembered. That's wonderful.'

'Happy anniversary, darling,' I said.

'You know we're going to the school to watch our son win his race?'

'Even that I remembered.' It was a convention of our marriage that I was the one who was overworked and forgetful, but Fiona gave more hours to her work than I ever did. She was always making mysterious journeys and having long late meetings with people she did not identify. At one time I'd simply felt proud of having a wife senior enough to be needed so much. Now I was no longer sure of her. I wondered who she was with and what she did on those nights when I was alone in my cold bed.

She kissed me. I held her tight and told her how much I loved her, and how I missed her when we were apart. A girl wheeling a trolley loaded with brown boxes of new magnetic tapes saw us, and thought she'd discovered some illicit romance. I winked at her and she smiled nervously.

Fiona began tidying the papers spread across her metal desk; behind her, shelves of files, books and operator manuals were packed to capacity. She had to move a pile of papers before she could sit down. She began to speak, but changed her mind and waited as a nearby tape suddenly went into high speed and then ran down to silence. 'Did you phone Nanny and tell her to give the children early dinner?'

'She was doing something in the garden. I told Billy to tell her.'

'You know how Billy gets everything mixed up. I wish she would stay with the children. I don't want her doing something in the garden.'

'She was probably doing something about the children's clothes.'

'We have a perfectly good tumble dryer,' said Fiona.

Nanny preferred to hang the clothes to dry in the garden, but I decided not to mention this. The dryer was an endless source of disagreement between the two women. 'Phone her again if you like,' I said.

'Are you going to be long?'

'No. Just one personnel printout,' I said.

'If you're going to be here for half an hour or more, there's work I could do.'

'Ten minutes,' I said. I sat down at the terminal and entered open. The machine purred and the screen lit up with 'Please type your name, grade and department.' I typed that and the screen went blank while the computer checked my entry against the personnel file. Then 'Please ensure that no other person can see the screen or the console. Now type your secret access number.' I complied with that request and the screen said 'Please type the date and time.' I did it. The machine requested 'Today's code number, please.' I entered it.

'What time does this sports show begin?' Fiona called across to me. She was hunched over her desk giving all her attention to the task of painting her nails Passion Red.

The screen said 'Program?'; I responded with kagob to enter the KGB section. 'Seven-thirty, but I thought we'd have a quick drink in that pub opposite.'

The same girl who'd seen us kissing came past carrying a huge bundle of computer output clutched to her bosom. There were plenty of other boxes for secret waste, but she obviously wanted to have a closer look at the lovers.

I typed in the other codes, 'Redland Overseas' and the name of 'Chlestakov', and the screen asked 'Screen only?' It was a 'default query', which meant the material was typed on the printer unless the operator specified otherwise. I pressed start.

The terminal made a loud buzzing noise. It was running background, which meant it was rejecting millions of words that were not about Chlestakov. Then suddenly the printer cleared its throat, hiccupped twice, and rattled off four lines of text before the machine settled into background again. 'And don't tug at the printout,' Fiona called to me. 'The new lot of continuous tracking paper has got something wrong with the sprocket holes. We've had three printouts jam this afternoon.'

'I never tug at the printout.'

'If it doesn't feed, dial 03 on the internal for the duty engineer.'

'And say goodbye to being anywhere before midnight.'

'Don't tug at it and it won't jam,' she said. She still hadn't raised her eyes from peering closely at her nails.

The printer suddenly came to life and produced a long section of data on Chlestakov, the daisy wheel whizzing backwards and forwards. It always amazed me the way it printed every second line backwards. It was a little like Leonardo da Vinci mirror writing. No doubt its designers wanted to make human operators feel inferior. The run ended with a little tattoo of end codes to show that all the relevant data had been searched, and the printer was silent. The red light on the console came on to systems busy, which is computer language for doing nothing.