Fiona was holding her tonic aloft and trying again to interpret the note from Mrs. Dias. She looked up. 'So that's it? No one is conspiring against you, darling. But suppose it was a scheme that Dicky and I had cooked up, would that make a difference?'

'No, it wouldn't make any difference,' I said without getting angry. 'There is no way I am taking any job in Berlin. I know what it entails and I'm too old for all that tough-guy stuff. And too cynical to believe in it.'

Her head was bent as she studied the note and she gave no sign that she had heard my response. 'Do let's eat out,' she said, and put her glass back on to the note. 'Somewhere lovely: Annabel's. I'll pay. Daddy's raised my allowance this month.'

She raised her eyes to mine. Her lips smiled sweetly as if she adored me. She didn't answer my question of course. She didn't have to; her eyes said gotcha.

7

Fletcher House (SIS annexe), London.

'Your wife loathes me,' said Gloria. 'She won't be happy until I am fired.'

'No,' I said. I'd had no warning that she was going to track me down to the other side of Oxford Street and burst into this miserable little office, hugging a parcel, her face filled with indignation and despair.

'And I say yes,' she said.

I remembered the way Gloria always said 'your wife' as if Fiona existed only by means of the status our marriage conferred upon her. 'You're imagining it,' I said. In wishful and stupid desperation I added, 'I'm not sure she even knows about us.'

Gloria glared at me for a moment and then said, 'I'm not completely bonkers,' spitting out the words with anger that made me flinch. Of course I had gone too far. Gloria no doubt needed reassurance of some kind, but there was no way that her self-deception would extend to believing that Fiona didn't know that, after she'd gone away, I'd fallen foolishly and irretrievably in love with this beautiful girl, about the way we'd set up house, and the way in which Gloria had loved, cared for and enchanted the children.

'I'm sorry.' I worried what she would do next. She was cuddling a large white polystyrene box in her arms. I wondered if she'd brought it to throw it at me, and if so what it might contain.

'You're a smooth talker, Bernard. Perhaps that's why I fell for you in the first place. You're a smooth talker and I'm the most gullible woman in the world.'

Some of the initial rage seemed to have gone out of her and she stood there looking at me, silent as if trying to think of the next thing she'd planned to say. She was dressed in a long suede coat and fur hat; an outfit that suited her so well that it was the image of her that returned to my mind when I thought of her. A great ball of fur like a clown's fright wig. She'd never taken off that hat during the entire night that we spent together waiting in the hospital, worrying about little Billy's bronchitis. It was a long time ago but I remembered it vividly. Brown roll-neck sweater, brown wool skirt, pale leather ankle boots and that crazy hat. No one could have taken Billy's plight more to heart, than she did. She paced up and down, I remember, disappearing into the toilet so that I wouldn't see her crying.

'What a spooky place to work. I've never been here before.' She'd tracked me to Fletcher House, a Departmental annex building lost in the confusion of offices and cheap dress factories behind Tottenham Court Road. A neo-Georgian building of dull red brick with Portland stone, it dated from the early Thirties and followed the design that the government then favored for Britain's telephone exchanges.

'I'm not working here permanently; just for a few days while Dicky talks to the surveyors and looks at the library and so on. They want the Department to vacate the building. The Treasury people say they need it.'

'Where will the library go?'

'It's not really a part of our main library. It's a leftover consignment of German-language books and documents brought over in 1945 — Nazi Party publications and reference books and even some ancient telephone directories — some of it still in its packing cases. I'd send it all back to Bonn and let the Germans sort it out.'

'Is that what Dicky will do?'

'I shouldn't think so. The books provide our only legitimate excuse for hanging on to the building; we're using less than half the office space, and there's no way of hiding that.'

'I don't get it.'

'There ire sixteen parking spaces in the back yard here. The car pool uses them. Dicky would get hung, drawn and quartered if he gave way and the Department lost any of its Central London parking spaces.'

'I'm relieved to hear that they are not locking you away here forever, Bernard.'

'Just while Dicky thinks up reasons for hanging on to it.'

'Couldn't you find a better room than this?'

'Not all the floors are heated,' I explained. 'And I had to have a phone that was working.' I'd made myself at home with a decrepit desk and a couple of chairs in a long narrow room. It was little better than a corridor really, situated between a seldom occupied 'police liaison office' and a room where three cheerful women clerks kept frantically active operating a dozen or so copying machines.

'No one seemed to know where you'd gone to.' Gloria put her parcel down on my desk and then went rummaging in her handbag for a handkerchief. The white foam box was sealed with sticky tape, and adorned with labels and writings that indicated that it had been on a roller coaster ride through every last nook and cranny of the Foreign Office, a place with a surfeit of nooks and crannies. She wiped her nose on her handkerchief and put it away before saying, 'They asked me to bring this parcel over to you. It's fragile.'

'Thanks,' I said.

It had the big red international signs for fragile contents — a drinking glass in jagged pieces — and Via Air Bag markings, and the elaborate Courier Service rubber stamp, with date and clock face to record receipt. There were also the instantly recognizable Foreign Office Inward Bag Room marks crossed through with decisive strokes of blue pencil, as if in angry denial that it had even arrived there. 'Try Cruyer — SIS' was written in neat penmanship underneath it. My name was not in evidence anywhere.

'It came last night . . . in the bag from Warsaw,' she said, stroking the top of it. 'I know you both went to Poland last week.'

'I'll see Dicky gets it.'

'I shouldn't have come in and yelled at you, but I've just lost my job.'

'What do you mean?'

'Your wife has got what she wanted.' Gloria's face was bright red, or at least bright pink. Whether this flushed countenance was due to exertion, embarrassment or anger I was not sure. Despite the intimacy that living with her had provided, she still had me guessing. Perhaps it, was her Hungarian background, perhaps it was the generation gap, perhaps it was my chronic failure to understand women, perhaps it was all those things and perhaps that was what made her so alluring. 'I'm going to work in Budapest. I'm there as from the beginning of next month. I'm taking time off to straighten things out before I leave. I won't be in the office anymore.' She gave a smile that lasted only a split second before adding breathlessly, 'So it's goodbye.'

'Goodbye? I'd heard that you were going to be working for Bret Rensselaer. I heard you were going to be promoted to be some kind of big-shot trouble-shooter on the top floor.'

'Haven't you heard? We're all going before a Review Board. They're going to decimate the Department: twenty-five percent staff reductions. Going to the Budapest embassy is my chance to escape.'

'Sit down, Gloria. Who told you that?'

'They will make a position for me there. No diplomatic status, of course, but I'll be near my Dad.'