'But how do you feel about it?' It was the wrong question to ask again, she knew, and she saw his face change, but she wanted to be brutal, wanted him to confront the reality of what she was being asked to do. 'How do you feel about me and Mason Harding in bed together.'
'I just want us to win this war,' he said. 'My feelings are irrelevant.'
'All right,' she said, feeling ashamed and then feeling angry for feeling ashamed. 'I'll do what I can.'
She was waiting in the lobby at six when Mason arrived. He kissed her on the cheek and they registered at reception as Mr and Mrs Avery. She could sense his tension as they stood at the front desk – she felt that adultery was not run-of-the-mill in Mason Harding's life. As he signed the register she looked around; somewhere she knew Bradley was taking pictures; later someone would pay the clerk for a copy of the booking. They went up to their room and, once the bellhop had left, Mason kissed her with more passion, touched her breasts, thanked her, told her she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met. They dined in the hotel restaurant, early, and Mason spent most of the meal quietly but forcefully denigrating his wife and her family and their financial hold over him. This mood of petulance helped her, she found; it was boring, small-minded and selfish and it allowed her to step back from any vision of what was about to ensue. It made her colder. People betray their country for only three reasons, Romer had said. Mason Harding was about to take the first step along that narrow, winding road.
They both drank too much, from different motives, she supposed, but as they went up to their room she felt her head whirl with the alcohol. Mason kissed her in the elevator, using his tongue. In the room, he called room service and ordered up a pint of whisky, and once it was delivered, began almost immediately to undress her. Eva switched on a smile, drank some more and thought, at least he isn't ugly or nasty – he was just a kind foolish man who wanted to betray his wife. To her surprise she found she was able to switch her feelings off. It's a job, she said to herself, one only I can do.
In bed, he tried but was unable to control himself and was ashamed at how quickly he came, blaming it on the condoms – 'Damn Trojans!' Eva soothed him, said it was more important just being together. He drank more whisky and tried again later but with no success.
She consoled him again, letting him hold her and caress her, huddling in his arms, feeling the room tilt and sway from all the booze she had drunk.
'It's always crap the first time,' he said. 'Don't you find that?'
'Always,' she said, not hating him – indeed feeling a little sorry for him and wondering what he would think in a day or so when someone – not Romer – approached him and said, Hello, Mr Harding, we have some photographs that I think your wife and father-in-law would be most interested in viewing.
He fell asleep quickly and she eased herself across the bed from him. She managed to sleep, herself, but woke early and ran a deep bath, soaked in it, and then ordered up a room-service breakfast before Mason awoke to pre-empt any early-morning amorousness, but he was crapulous and out of sorts – guilty, perhaps – and had turned moody and monosyllabic. She let him kiss her again in the room before they went down to the lobby.
He paid the bill and she stood close to him, picking some lint off his jacket as he paid the clerk in cash. Click. She could practically hear Bradley's camera. Outside at the taxi rank he seemed self-conscious and stiff all of a sudden.
'I've got meetings,' he said. 'What about you?'
'I'll get back to town,' she said. 'I'll call you. It'll be better next time, don't worry.'
This promise seemed to revive him and he smiled warmly.
'Thanks, Eve,' he said. 'You were great. You're beautiful. Call me next week. I got to take the kids…' he stopped. 'Call me next week. Wednesday.'
He kissed her on the cheek and in her head she heard another Bradley 'click' go off.
When she returned to London Hall there was a message – a note shoved under her door.
'ELDORADO is over,' it read.
'Oh, you're back,' Sylvia said when she came home from work and found Eva in the apartment, sitting in the kitchen. 'How was Washington?'
'Boring.'
'I thought you'd be gone for a couple of weeks.'
'There was nothing doing. Endless round of insignificant press conferences.'
'Meet any nice men?' Sylvia said, putting on a grotesque leer.
'I wish. Just a fat under-secretary of state at Agriculture, or something, who tried to feel me up.'
'I might just settle for that,' Sylvia said, heading for her bedroom, taking off her coat.
Sometimes it amazed Eva how fluently and spontaneously she could lie. Think that everybody is lying to you all the time, Romer said, it's probably the safest way to proceed.
Sylvia came back in and opened the ice-box and took out a small pitcher of Martini.
'We're celebrating,' she said, then made an apologetic face. 'Sorry. Wrong word. The Germans have sunk another Yank destroyer – the Reuben Jones. One hundred and fifteen dead. Hardly a cause for rejoicing, I know. But…'
'My God… One hundred and fifteen-'
'Exactly. This has got to change everything. They can't stand on the sidelines now.'
So much for Mason Harding, Eva thought. She had a sudden image of Mason, slipping out of his underwear, his thickening cock jutting beneath the eave of his young man's belly, coming to sit on the bed, fumbling with the foil on the condom. She found she could think about it with dispassion, coldly, objectively. Romer would have been pleased with her.
As she poured their Martinis, Sylvia told her that Roosevelt had made a fine, stirringly belligerent speech – his most belligerent since 1939, talking of how the 'shooting war' had begun.
'Oh yes,' she said, sipping her drink. 'And he has this wonderful map – some map of South America. How the Germans plan to divide it up into five huge new countries.'
Eva was half listening but Sylvia's enthusiasm provoked in her a small surge of confidence – a strange feeling of temporary elation. Similar spasms had come and gone in the two years since she'd joined Romer's team. Although she tried to tell herself to treat such instinctive reactions with suspicion she couldn't prevent them from blossoming in herself – as if wishful thinking were an innate attribute of being human: the thought that things were bound to improve being stitched into our human consciousness. She sipped her cold drink – maybe that's just the definition of an optimist, she thought. Maybe that's all I am: an optimist.
'So maybe we're getting there,' she said, drinking her chilled Martini, yielding to her optimism, thinking that if the Americans join us we must win. America, Britain and the Empire, and Russia – then it could only be a matter of time.
'Let's eat out tomorrow,' she said to Sylvia as they went to their bedrooms. 'We owe ourselves a little party.'
'Don't forget we're saying goodbye to Alfie.'
Eva remembered that Blytheswood was leaving the radio station and was going back to London, to Electra House, the GC amp;CS's radio interception station in the basement of Cable amp; Wireless's Embankment office.