'My mother told me it fell when Grandfather died,' said Silas, as if the honour of his family rested upon the truth of it.

'Don't be such a fool, Silas. Sometimes you have to sacrifice the things you love. It has to be done. You know that.'

'I suppose so.'

'I'm going to send Mrs Samson over to Bret when she comes out. California. What do you think?'

'Yes, capital,' said Silas. 'She'll be well away from any sort of interference. And Bernard Samson too?'

'No. Unless you…?'

'Well, I do, Henry. Leave Samson here and he'll roar around trying to locate her and make himself a nuisance. Bundle him off and let Bret take care of them both.'

'Very well.' The grandfather clock, which Silas had moved to this room because he didn't trust the work-men not to damage it, struck five p.m. 'Is that really the time? I must be going.'

'Now, you're leaving all the arrangements to me, Henry?' Silas wanted to get it clear; he wanted no recriminations. 'There is a great deal to be done. I'll have to have matching dentistry prepared, and that takes ages.'

'I leave it to you, Silas. If you need money, call Bret.'

'I suppose the special funding mechanism will be wound up once she is safe,' said Silas.

'No. It will be a slush fund for future emergencies. It cost us so much to set up that it would be senseless to dismantle it.'

'I thought Samson's probing into the money end might have made it too public.'

'Samson will be in California,' mused the D-G. The more I think of that idea the better I like it. Volkmann said that Mrs Samson has aged a lot lately. We'll send her husband there to look after her.'

24

Müggelsee, East Berlin. May 1987.

'How stunning to have the Müggelsee all to ourselves,' said Harry Kennedy. He was at the tiller of a privately owned six-metre racing yacht: Fiona was crewing.

On a hot summer day the lake was crowded with sailing boats, but today was chilly and the lake was entirely theirs. It was late afternoon. The sun, sinking behind bits of cumulus – ragged and shrinking in the cooling air – provided fleeting golden haloes and sudden shadows but little warmth.

The wind was growing stronger, pressing upon the sail steadily like a craftsman's hand, so that the hull cut through the water with a loud hiss, and left a wake of curly white trimmings.

Fiona was sitting well forward, huddled in her bright yellow hooded jacket complete with heavy Guernsey sweater and Harry's scarf, but still she shivered. She liked the broad expanse of the lake, for it enabled her to sit still and not have all the work of tacking and jibing and trimming which Harry liked doing so much. Or rather liked to watch her doing. He never seemed to feel the cold when he was sailing. He became another man when dressed in casual clothes. The short red anorak and jeans made him look younger: this was the intrepid man who flew planes over the desert and the tundra, the man who fretted behind a desk.

She had seen a lot of him during that year he'd spent at the Charité. He'd taken her mind off the miseries of separation at a time she'd most needed someone to love and care for her. Now that he was working in London again, he saw her only when he could get a really long weekend, and that meant every six weeks or so. Sometimes he arranged to borrow this sailing boat from a friend he'd made at the hospital, and she brought sandwiches and a vacuum flask of coffee so they could spend all the day on the lake. These trips must have involved him in a lot of trouble and expense, but he never complained of that. She couldn't help wondering if it was all part of his assigned duty of monitoring her, but she didn't think so.

Neither had he ever suggested the impossible: that she should come to London to see him. He knew about her, of course, or at least he knew as much as he needed to know. Once late at night in her apartment after too much wine he'd blurted out, 'I was sent.' But he'd immediately made it into some sort of metaphysical observation about their being meant for each other and she'd let it go at that. There was nothing to be gained from hinting that she knew the real story behind that first meeting. It was better to have this arm's-length love affair: each of them examining the thoughts and emotions of the other, neither of them entirely truthful.

'Happy?' he called suddenly.

She nodded. It wasn't a lie: everything was relative. She was as happy as she could be in the circumstances. Harry sat lounging knee-bent at the stern – head turned, arm outstretched, elbow on knee, fingers extended to the tiller – looking like Adam painted on the Sistine ceiling. 'Very happy,' she said. He beckoned to her and she moved to sit close beside him.

'Why can't it always be just like this?' he asked in that forlorn way that her children had sometimes posed similarly silly questions. She would never understand him, just as she had never been able to understand Bernard. She would never understand men and the way their minds could be both mature and selfishly childlike at the same time.

'Ever been to the Danube Delta? There is a vast nature reserve. Ships – like floating hotels – go right down the Danube to the Black Sea. It would be a wonderful vacation for us. Would you like that?'

'Let me think about it.'

'I have all the details. One of the heart men at the Charité took his wife: they had a great time.'

She wasn't listening to him. She was thinking all the time of the recent brief meeting she'd had with Bernard. They had met in a farmhouse in Czechoslovakia and Bernard had urged her to come back to him. It should have made her happy to see him again, but it had made her feel inadequate and sad. It had reawakened all her fears about the difficulties of being reunited with her family. Bernard had changed, she had changed, and there could be no doubt that the children would have changed immensely. How could she ever be one of them again?

'I'm sorry, Harry,' she said.

'About what?'

'I'm not good company. I know I'm not.'

'You're tired: you work too hard.'

'Yes.' In fact she'd become worried at her lapses of memory. Sometimes she could not remember what she had been doing the previous day. Curiously the distant past was not so elusive: she remembered those glorious days with Bernard when the children were small and they were all so happy together.

'Why won't you marry me?' he said without preamble.

'Harry, please.'

'As a resident of the DDR you could get a divorce with the minimum of formalities.'

'How do you know?'

'I explored it.'

'I wish you hadn't.' If he had talked to a lawyer it might have drawn attention to her in a way that was undesirable.

'Fiona, darling. Your husband is living happily with another woman.'

'How do you know?'

'I saw them together one evening. I almost stumbled into them in the crush at Waterloo Station. They were catching the Epsom train.'

'You recognized them?'

'Of course. You showed me a photo of him once. The woman with him was blonde and very tall.'

'Yes, that's her.' It hurt like a dagger in the heart. She'd known, of course, but it hurt even more when she heard it from Harry.

'You know her?' he said.

'I've met her,' said Fiona. 'She's pretty.'

'I don't want to make you miserable but we should talk about it. It's madness for us to go on like this.'

'Let's see what happens.'

'You've been saying that since the time we first met. Do you know how long ago that is?'

'Yes. No… A long time.'

'Living without you is Hell for me: but being separated from me doesn't make you miserable,' he admonished her, hoping for a contradiction, but she only shrugged. 'We haven't got much time, Fiona.'