23

England. March, 1987.

Bernard Samson was spending that Saturday at home with Gloria in their little house at 13, Balaklava Road, Raynes Park, in London's commuter belt. He was clearing all sorts of unwanted oddments from the garden shed. Most of them were still in the big cardboard boxes bearing the name of the moving company which had brought their furniture here.

Gloria was upstairs in the bedroom. The wardrobe door was open to reveal a long mirror in which she was studying herself. In front of her she was holding a dress she had found in one of the cardboard boxes. It was an expensive dress with a Paris label, a dramatic low-cut cocktail dress of grey and black, the barber-pole stripes sweeping diagonally with the bias cut. It belonged to Fiona Samson.

As she held it up she tried to imagine herself wearing it. She tried to imagine what Fiona was really like and what sort of a marriage she had enjoyed with Bernard and the children.

Bernard was wearing his carpet slippers and came noiselessly upstairs. Entering the room without knocking he exclaimed, 'Oh!' Then he recognized the dress she was holding and said, 'Far too small! And grey is not your colour, my love.'

Embarrassed to be caught with it, Gloria put the dress on the rail in the wardrobe and closed the door. 'She has been away four years. She will never come back, Bernard, will she?'

'I don't know.'

'Don't be angry. Every time I try to talk about her you become bad-tempered. It's a way of blackmailing me into keeping quiet about her.'

'Is that the way you see it?'

Still selfconscious, she touched her hair. 'It's the way it is, Bernard. You want to have me here with you; and you also want to hang on to the increasingly unlikely chance that you will ever see her again.'

Bernard went close and put his arm round her. At first her anger seemed assuaged, but as Bernard went to kiss her she showed a sudden anger. 'Don't! You always try to wriggle out of it. You kiss me; you say you love me; and you shut me up.'

'You keep asking me these questions and I tell you the truth. The truth is that I don't know the answers.'

'You make me feel so bloody insecure,' said Gloria.

'I'm always here. I don't get drunk or run around with other women.'

It was the sort of indignant answer he always gave: a typically male response. He really couldn't understand that that wasn't enough. She tried male logic: 'How long will you wait before you assume she's gone for ever?'

'I love you. We are happy together. Isn't that enough? Why do women want guarantees of permanence? Tomorrow I could fall under a train or go crazy. There is no way that you can be happy ever after. Can't you understand that?'

'Why are you looking at the clock?' she asked, and tried to move apart from him, but he held her.

'I'm sorry. The D-G is going down to Whitelands to see Silas Gaunt this afternoon. I think they are going to talk about Fiona. I'd give anything to know what they say.'

'You think Fiona is still working for London, don't you?'

The question came like an accusation, and it shook him. He made no move whatsoever and yet that stillness of his face revealed the way his mind was spinning. He had never told Gloria of that belief.

'That's why you won't talk of marriage,' she said.

'No.'

'You're lying. I can always tell. You think your wife was sent there to spy-'

'We'll never know the truth,' said Bernard lamely, and hoped that would end the conversation.

'I must be mad not to have seen that right from the beginning. I was just the stand-in. I was just someone to bed, someone to look after your children and keep the house tidy and shop and cook. No wonder you discouraged all my plans to go to college. You bastard! You've made a fool of me.'

'No, I haven't.'

'Now I understand why you keep all her clothes.'

'You know it's not like that, Gloria. Please don't cry.'

'I'm not bloody crying. I hate you, you bastard.'

'Will you listen!' He shook her roughly. 'Fiona is a Soviet agent. She's gone for ever. Now stop this imagining.'

'Do you swear?'

He stepped back from her. There was a fierce look in her eyes and he was dismayed by it. 'Yes, I swear,' he said.

She didn't believe him. She could always tell when he was lying.

At that moment the meeting between the Director-General and Silas Gaunt was in full swing.

'How long has Mrs Samson been in place now?' asked Silas Gaunt. It was a rhetorical question but he wanted the Director-General to share his pleasure.

'She went over there in eighty-three, so it must be about four years,' said Sir Henry Clevemore. The two men had worked wonders and were rightly proud of what they had achieved. The East German economy was cracking at the seams, the government had become senile and could muster neither will nor resource to tackle the problems. Fiona's information said that the Russian troops would be confined to barracks no matter what political changes came. The USSR had problems of its own. Bret Rensselaer's heady prediction about the Wall coming down by 1990 – considered at the time no more than the natural hyperbole that all SIS projections were prone to – now looked like a real possibility.

They had got some fine material from Fiona Samson that had enabled the two of them to master-mind the campaign as well as facilitating contact with the most level-headed opposition groups. To protect her they had given her a few little victories and a few accolades. Now they were enjoying the feeling of great satisfaction.

These two were alike in many ways. Their family background, education, bearing and deportment were comparable, but Silas Gaunt's service abroad had made him cosmopolitan, which could never be said of the aloof and formal Sir Henry Clevemore. Silas Gaunt was earthy, wily, adaptable and unscrupulous, and despite their years together Sir Henry always had reservations about his friend.

'Do you remember when young Volkmann came knocking at your door in the dead of night?' said Silas.

'The bloody fool had forgotten my phone number.'

'You were in despair,' said Silas.

'Certainly not.'

'I'm sorry to contradict you, Henry, but when you arrived here you said that Fiona Samson had made a dire error of judgement.'

'It did seem somewhat ominous.' He gave a dry chuckle. 'It was the only damn thing he had to commit to memory, and he'd forgotten it.'

'Volkmann turned up trumps. I didn't know he had it in him.'

'I'll get him something,' said the D-G. 'When it's over I'll get him some sort of award. I know he'd like a gong; he's that sort of chap.'

'You know his banking business is being wound down?' said Silas, although he'd briefed the D-G on that already.

'He's taking over that flea-bitten hotel run by that dreadful old German woman. What's her name?'

'Lisl Hennig.'

'That's the one, an absolute Medusa.'

'All good things come to an end,' said Silas.

'There were times,' said the Director-General, 'when I thought we would simply have to pull Mrs Samson out and give up.'

'Samson's a bull-headed young fool,' said Silas Gaunt, voicing what was in the minds of both men. They were sitting in the little-used drawing room of Gaunt's house, while in the next room workmen were slowly rebuilding the fireplace of Gaunt's little study. This room had been virtually unchanged for a hundred years. Like all such farmhouse rooms, with thick stone walls and small windows, it was gloomy all the year round. A big sideboard held well-used willow-pattern plates, and a vase filled with freshly cut daffodils.

Upon the lumpy sofa Silas sprawled, lit by the flickering flames of a log fire. Above him some steely-eyed ancestor squinted through the coach varnish of a big painting, and there was a small table upon which, for the time being, Silas Gaunt was eating his meals. Sir Henry Clevemore had made the journey to Whitelands after hearing that Silas was recuperating after falling from a horse. The old fool shouldn't have gone near a horse at his age, thought the D-G, and had resolved to say as much. But in the event he hadn't done so.