“As long as you’re prepared to wait.”
“For as long as it takes. Does he still think he’s going to university next year?”
“No. Whether he’s told his parents or not I don’t know.”
Wetherby nodded sympathetically, stood up, and walked to the window. Stared out over the river for a moment before turning back to face her. “Tell me. What do you think you would be doing if you weren’t working here?”
Liz looked at him. “It’s funny you should ask that,” she said eventually. Because I was asking myself more or less the same question only this morning.”
“Why this morning in particular?”
“I got a letter.”
He waited. There was a reflective, unforced quality to his silence, as if the two of them had all the time in the world.
Hesitantly at first, uncertain of how much he already knew, Liz began to sketch the outlines of her life. Her fluency surprised her; it was as if she was rehearsing a well-learned cover story. Plausible-verifiable even-but at the same time not quite real.
For more than thirty years her father had been manager of the Bowerbridge estate, in the valley of the river Nadder near Salisbury. He and Liz’s mother had lived in the estate’s gatehouse, and Liz had grown up there. Five years earlier, however, Jack Carlyle had died, and shortly afterwards Bowerbridge’s owner had sold up. The woods and coppices which comprised the sporting estate had been sold to a local farmer, and the main house, with its topiary, greenhouses and walled garden, had been bought by the owner of a chain of garden centres.
The outgoing owner, a generous man, had made it a condition of the sale that his former manager’s widow should occupy the gatehouse rent-free for the remainder of her days, and retain the right to buy it if she wished. With Liz working in London, her mother had lived in the octagonal lodge alone, and when the estate’s new owner converted Bowerbridge House and its gardens into a specialist plantsman’s nursery, she had taken on part-time work there.
Knowing and loving the estate as she did, the job could not have suited Susan Carlyle better. Within the year she was working full-time for the nursery and eighteen months later she was running it. When Liz came up to stay with her at weekends they would go for long walks along the stone-paved avenues and the grassy allées and her mother would explain her hopes and plans for the nursery. Passing the lilacs, rank after cream and purple rank of them, the air heavy with their scent, she would murmur their names like a litany-Masséna, Decaisne, Belle de Nancy, Persica, Congo… There were entire acres of white and red camellias, too, and rhododendrons-yellow, mauve, scarlet, pink-and orchards of waxily fragrant magnolia. In high summer, every corner turned was a new and dizzying revelation.
At other times, as the rain beat against the glass and the damp green plant odours rose about them, they would pace the iron walkways of the Edwardian greenhouses, and Susan would explain the various propagation techniques as the lines of cuttings and seedlings extended before them to perspective infinity.
Her hope, clearly, was that at some not-too-far-distant point Liz would decide to leave London and involve herself in the management of the nursery. Mother and daughter would then live in happy companionship in the gatehouse, and in the course of time “the right man”-a dimly imagined Sir Lancelot-like figure-would happen along.
Liz was by no means wholly resistant to this idea. The dream of returning home, of waking up in the bedroom in which she had slept as a child and of spending her days surrounded by the mellowed brick and greenery of Bowerbridge, was a seductive one. And she had no objection to handsome knights on white chargers. But in reality she knew that earning a living in the countryside was grindingly hard work, and involved a deliberate narrowing of horizons. As things stood her tastes and friends and opinions were all metropolitan, and she didn’t think she had the metabolism to deal with the countryside on a full-time basis. All that rain, all those bossy women with their petty snobberies and their four-wheel drives, all those local newspapers full of non-news and advertisements for agricultural machinery. Much as she loved her mother, Liz knew, she just wouldn’t have the patience for it all.
And then that morning the letter had arrived. To say that Susan Carlyle had decided to buy. That she was investing her savings, along with the money that she had earned from the nursery and the life insurance payout after her husband’s death, in the Bowerbridge gatehouse.
“Do you think she’s trying to draw you back there?” asked Wetherby quietly.
“At some level, yes,” said Liz. “At the same time it’s a very generous decision. I mean, she can live there for nothing for the rest of her life, so it’s me she’s thinking of. The trouble is, I think she’s hoping for a…” she put her glass down and shrugged despairingly, “a corresponding gesture. And right now I just can’t think in those terms.”
“There’s something about the place one grew up in,” said Wetherby. “You can never quite return there. Not until you’ve changed, and can see the place through different eyes. And sometimes not even then.”
A spasm of knocking seized the radiator behind his desk, and there was a faint smell of heated dust. Outside the windows the skyline was vague against the winter sky.
“I’m sorry,” Liz said. “I didn’t mean to burden you with my not very important troubles.”
“It’s anything but a burden.” His gaze, touched with melancholy, played about her. “You’re very much valued here.”
She sat unmoving for a moment, conscious of things unsaid, and then rose briskly to her feet.
“A-you’ve been promoted,” hazarded Dave Armstrong a couple of minutes later, as she arrived back at her desk. “B-you’ve been sacked. C-despite heavy-handed official disapproval you’re publishing your memoirs. D-none of the above.”
“Actually,” said Liz, “I’m defecting to North Korea. Pyongyang’s heaven at this time of year.” She swivelled thoughtfully in her chair. “Have you ever talked to Wetherby about anything except work?”
“I don’t think so,” said Dave, stabbing pensively at his keyboard. “He once asked me if I knew the test match score, but I think that’s as personal as it’s ever got. Why?”
“No reason. But Wetherby’s sort of a shadowy figure, even for this place, wouldn’t you say?”
“You think perhaps he should appear on Celebrity Big Brother? As part of the new accountability?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I guess.” He frowned at his screen. “Do the words Miladun Nabi mean anything to you?”
“Yes, Miladun Nabi is the Prophet’s birthday. Sometime at the end of May, I think.”
“Cheers.”
She turned her attention to the flashing message light on her land-line. To her surprise, there was an invitation to lunch from Bruno Mackay.
“I know it’s hideously short notice,” came the languid voice, “and I’m sure you’re already booked, but there’s something I’d like to… mull over with you, if I may.”
She shook her head in disbelief. That was so Six, the suggestion that the day-and the business of counter-terrorism-was really one long cocktail party. Mull? She never mulled. She anguished, and she did it alone.
But why not? At the very least it would be an opportunity to examine Mackay at close quarters. For all the supposed new spirit of cooperation, Five and Six would never be serene bedfellows. The better she knew her opposite number, the less likely he was to outmanoeuvre her.
She called the number he had left her and he picked up on the first ring.
“Liz!” he said, before she had opened her mouth. “Tell me you can come.”
“All right.”
“Fantastic! I’ll come and pick you up.”
“It’s OK. I can easily-”
His words cut airily across her. “Can you be on Lambeth Bridge, your end, at twelve forty-five? I’ll see you there.”