"What's the matter with it?"
He put down his fork noisily.
"Isn't it good enough for you?"
He pushed away the plate. Now he looked down at the table mat.
"It's not much it's what Stephen likes. A bit late to start complaining, you've had it before."
He'd cut through half a sausage and eaten it. He'd forked a few chips, and hardly any of the beans.
"What's the problem, Frank?"
Her boy had cleared his plate. He had a muted fear in his eyes, a child's loathing of adults' argument.
"All right, it's not much, but I had a long day. I did that typing… Come on, Frank, what's it about?"
He shook his head, jerked it from side to side.
"Are you ill? Do you want an aspirin?"
Again he shook his head, more slowly.
"For God's sake, Frank, what is going on?"
There was the violent scrape of Stephen's chair as the boy fled the kitchen, the clatter of his feet on the stairs. Then his bedroom door slammed.
"You know what? He did really well in his English assessment, better than he's done before. He was bubbling to tell you but he didn't have the chance, did he? Come on, Frank, you're always so good with him."
His head was sunk in his hands.
They hadn't spoken, not properly, since she had come home and had recognized the lie. She had been in the kitchen, doing the typing for Peggy before cooking supper, and he had been in the living room.
He still hadn't put a light on. He had turned his chair away from the unit fire and the television so that he could sit and stare out of the window. Dusk had come early and he hadn't drawn the curtains. He gazed out on to the green and the street-light on the far side. He had not listened to the news bulletin, as he usually did, or opened the paper she had brought him.
Meryl had never known him lie, and she felt a desperate anxiety. When she had met Frank Perry, four years before, she had been a single mother without a name for her son's father, working in a small company in east London, pushing paper, when he had come to advise on the engineering required for the heating system in the old factory floor. He'd made her laugh, and, God, it had been a long time since anyone else had. Next week, when Donna came to babysit, they were going out to celebrate the fourth anniversary, 3 April, since she and Stephen had come to the village with their cases, all that they owned, and moved into the house that she and Frank had found. Living here, with him, she would have said, had given her and Stephen the best years of their lives.
She touched and tugged at her fair hair nervously.
"Is it about me?"
"No."
She took Stephen's plate, stacked it under hers.
"Is it about him? Has he said something done something?"
"No."
"It's about you?"
"My problem," he said. His words were muffled through his hands.
"Aren't you going to tell me?"
"When I'm ready."
She was up from the table, carrying away the plates.
"Of course, we're not husband and wife. We're only man and woman with a bastard child. Makes a difference, doesn't it?"
"Don't talk such rubbish, don't hurt yourself."
"Frank, look at me. Is it what we don't talk about? Is it that forbidden area, the past? Two men came, and you lied. Did they come out of the past?"
He pushed back his chair, took the plates from her and put them in the sink. He held her close against him and his hands were gentle on her hair. He kissed her eyes as tears welled.
"Just give me time, please… I have to have time." He gave her his handkerchief, then went upstairs to Stephen's room to ask about his English assessment.
She tipped the food from his plate into the bin, wiped the table, then went back to typing the Institute's minutes and the details of the Wildlife Field Day and the Red Cross bring-and-buy morning.
She heard him talking with her boy. Because two men had come from the past and he had lied, she thought, somewhere in the darkness outside the window there was danger.
The previous evening, four men and a woman from the Mujahiddin-e-Khalq had been brought in a closed lorry to the camp at Qasvin. Normally it was the corpses of executed criminals -rapists, drug-dealers and murderers that were dumped at the Abyek camp, but because the four men and one woman were filth and apostates they were alive. He had heard them singing in their cell in the night, low, chanting voices.
They had headed north from the training base in southern Iraq and crossed the frontier in the mountains between Saqqez and Mahabad, and been ambushed by the pasdars. Most of the raiding party had fled, but five had been captured. After interrogation, trial and sentence, they had been brought to the Abyek camp at Qasvin.
Normally the corpses were propped against bare wood chairs or low walls of sandbags but once, when an airforce officer had been found guilty of spying for the Great Satan, he had been offered as live target practice.
It was not a camp like a military compound but was constructed as a small town, on the outskirts of Qasvin. It was a miniature Babel, for the recruits spoke in many dialects, with a sprawl of concrete houses and shops, a market that sold vegetables, meat and rice, and a mosque. For many years the Abyek camp had deceived the spy satellites of the Americans, but no longer. Now there was stricter security around the perimeter and greater caution on all methods of communication. Only the best, the most determined, of the Palestinians, Lebanese, Turks, Saudis, Algerians and Egyptians were brought to the camp to finish their training.
Many came to watch, marshalled by their instructors into small groups of their own nationality. In front of them, in the sand scape that stretched to the perimeter wire and then the open country, were the low heaps of sandbags and the chairs. He wore a scarf across his face. Even the most dedicated and determined of the recruits might be captured, interrogated, might not have the resolve of those who had gone from the mountain at Alamut. He did not cock his Kalashnikov automatic rifle until the terrorists were brought out from their cell and were within hearing range of the metal scrape. They were not blindfolded.
They were led to the chairs and the sandbags. Their ankles were not tied. The airforce officer who had spied for the Great Satan had tried to run, which had made for a better shot. It would be good if some of them ran. They were between thirty metres and a hundred metres from him. They were denounced by the commander of the camp, who read from a page of text. There was a silence and the sun caught their bared faces. He shot two with a short burst and saw them spill over, dead. He fired a long burst into another, a dozen rounds, and watched as the body kicked in spasm. He used many shots on the fourth man, but his mind was clear enough to reckon when he had one bullet left. She was furthest away, the last. She stared back at him. None of the men had given him the satisfaction of running, and neither did she. He shot her in the forehead, and she fell backwards. There was applause. He cleared his weapon, and walked away.
As the recruits blasted at the corpses it hardened them to fire at real bodies he made a call on his digital telephone. He was ready to begin his journey.
"I cannot fashion it out of nothing. I can only pass on what I've been given by the Americans, and I've done that. I've gone to the edge of my remit. If you can't shift him, that's your problem."