'You've got a cold nose,' said Billy accusingly and then chuckled. He looked so like Bernard.
'You're rude,' his little sister told him. She had been raised to the level of the table by sitting upon a blue silk cushion from the drawing room sofa. Fiona noticed that a dollop of tomato sauce had fallen upon it but kept smiling as she gave her daughter a kiss and a hug. She had a special love for little Sally, who sometimes seemed to need Fiona in a way that no one else had ever done.
Fiona embraced Bernard. 'What a wonderful surprise. I didn't expect you until the weekend.'
'I slipped away.' Bernard put an arm round her, but there was a reluctance to his embrace. For some other wives such a hesitation might have been a danger signal. Fiona knew that it was a sign that something had gone wrong in Berlin. A shooting? A killing? She looked at him to make sure he was not injured. She wouldn't ask him what had happened, they didn't talk about departmental matters unless they concerned the both of them, but she knew it would take a little time before Bernard would be capable of physical contact with her.
'You're all right?'
'Of course I'm all right.' A smile did not hide the hint of irritation. He did not like her to show her concern.
'Will you have to go back?' The children were watching them both with great interest.
'We'll see.' He contrived a cheerfulness. 'Nothing will happen for a few days. They think I'm chasing around Bavaria.'
She gave him another decorous kiss. She wished Bernard would not be so intractable. Deliberately disobeying instructions in order to come home early was flattering but it was the sort of behaviour that the Department found inexcusable. This was not the time to say that. 'It's a lovely surprise,' she said.
'Eat some dinner, Mummy,' said Sally. 'There's plenty.'
'Mummy doesn't eat frozen meals, do you Mummy?' said her brother.
Nanny, who had no doubt purchased the 'delicious ready-to-eat country farmhouse dinner', looked embarrassed. Fiona said, 'It depends.'
'It's not meaty,' said Billy, as if that was a recommendation. 'It's all sauce and pasta.' He pushed a spoon into the remains to show her.
'It's very salty,' said Sally. 'I don't like it.'
The nanny took the spoon away from Billy and then went to get a cup and saucer for Fiona to have tea with them.
Fiona took off her coat and hat. Then she grabbed a piece of kitchen paper in order to see what could be done to remove the sauce from the silk cushion. She knew that in doing so she would be spoiling the gemütlich atmosphere into which she had intruded but she simply could not sit down and laugh and talk and forget it. She couldn't. Perhaps that was what was wrong with her and with her marriage.
Before she could get started, Nanny poured tea for her and then began clearing the table. Bernard leaned over and said to the children. 'Now who's my first passenger on the slow train to Dreamland?'
'Me, Daddy, me!' They both yelled together.
Soon Fiona was left alone, dabbing at the stain on the cushion. From somewhere above she could hear the excited calls of the children as Bernard carried them up to bed. 'Choo-choo! Choo-choo!'
Darling, darling, Bernard. How she wished he could be a wonderful father without making her feel like an inadequate mother.
7
London. September 1978.
Sylvester Bernstein was a fifty-year-old American. Together with his wife he lived in a Victorian red brick terrace house in Battersea. One small room on each of three floors with a kitchen and bathroom that had been added at the back by a previous owner in the early Seventies. Now that this south side of the river had been invaded by affluent young couples – who'd discovered how close it was to central London – the whole street was undergoing a transformation. There were yellow coloured front doors, and even pink ones with brass knockers, and nowadays more and more of the cars parked nose to tail along the street were without rust. The local 'planning department' regulations prohibited the use of these houses as offices but Bernstein was confident that no one would complain about the way he'd made his garret room into an office with a typewriter, a couple of desks, two phone lines and a telex machine. Private investigators didn't spend much time in offices: at least Sylvester Bernstein didn't.
Bernstein had been a CIA man for twenty-one years. He took retirement after the wounds in his leg refused to heal. He'd married a girl he'd met in Saigon, an English nurse working for Christian Aid, and she suddenly decided that they must live in England. At that time the dollar was high against sterling, so his retirement pay gave him enough to live well in London. When the dollar weakened, Bernstein was forced to go back to work. His contacts in Grosvenor Square helped him to get that elusive work permit and he set up in business as Sylvester Bernstein, private investigator. But truth to tell, most of his clients came to him because of his long career as a CIA man. Some of those clients were still in the twilight world of 'security'; people who wanted a job done while they remained at arm's length from it. The job Bernstein was doing for Bret Rensselaer was typical of the work he did, and because he'd known Bret a long time, and because Bret was a demanding client, Bernstein did not have one of his sub-contractors do the job for him. He did most of it personally.
They were sitting in the downstairs room. On the walls hung cheap Victorian prints of scenes from Walter Scott novels. The elaborate fireplace was complete with lily-patterned tiles and polished brass fender and all the fire-irons. The iron grate however held not coal but an arrangement of dried flowers. Virtually everything, even the furniture, had come with the house. Only his wife's china collection, the beige wall-to-wall carpet, the American-style bathroom and such things as the large-screen TV on a smart trolley were new. It was a diminutive room, but panelled wooden connecting doors were open to reveal an even smaller dining room, and through its window a view of the tiny back garden. Bret lounged on the sofa, the papers Bernstein had prepared for him fanned out so that he could refer to them.
'Is Martin Euan Pryce-Hughes his real name?' asked Bret, who was unfamiliar with Welsh names. He had to look down at the papers to remember it.
'His old man was Hugh Pryce-Hughes.' Bernstein was a short potbellied man wearing a grey three-piece suit that he'd been heard to describe as 'native costume'. It was more or less like the suit that Bret Rensselaer wore – and which gave him the urbanity one expected of a diplomat or surgeon – but the suit looked wrong on Bernstein, for his features, complexion and demeanour suggested a manual labourer, or maybe an infantryman. He was not now, however, in the right physical shape to be either; his face was red, the sort of complexion that comes with high blood-pressure, and he had a wheeze that smoking aggravated. Enough grey hair remained to see that it had once been brown and curly, and his hands were strong with short thick fingers upon one of which he wore a fraternity ring and upon another a flashy diamond. With ramrod spine, he sat splayfooted on a little bentwood chair. One black sock had sagged to reveal a section of bare leg. He was aware of his stiff unnatural pose but it reconciled his legs with the fragments of Vietnamese metal embedded in them. His voice was low and firm; unmistakably American but not stridently so. 'The famous Pryce-Hughes.'
Bret looked down and furrowed his brow.
'The writer,' said Bernstein. 'Internationally famous… the one who wrote those books about the Fabian Society. His memoirs created all the fuss about Wells and Shaw. You must have heard of him.' Bernstein was a great reader. The bookcase held Dreiser, Stendhal, Joyce, Conrad and Zola – he was not too fond of the Russian novels – and he'd read them all not once but several times. He was proud to be a graduate of Princeton but he was also aware that Bret, and others like him, regarded Bernstein as reassuring proof that an Ivy League education did not guarantee success in what Bret called 'the real world'.