"No, it was only going to be me and Mozart. If I can get three or four dishes into the freezer I can do a dinner party without worrying about being home in time to cook. " Realising she'd never invited him, she moved the topic on quickly. "Do you cook?"
"I'm learning."
"Don't they teach you cooking in the Army?"
"A bit, but it mostly seems to be with rats and hedgehogs and seaweed."
"You're joking."
"No. The only cookery I got taught was survival training in the SAS."
"Lord. Do you get used to it?"
"I hope I never know." He took a deep breath. "You mentioned a constitutional crisis. Did you mean that?"
Agnes threw the last of her cigarette out of the window. "So much for preserving the beauty of the countryside… I don't think you quite realise how much money's being bet on Plainsong. If they can really get a hook into this Eismark, a member of the Secretariat and likely to be there for years, it'll be quite a coup in its very quiet way. Something the West Germans or Uncle's boys or the French couldn't do. For once there could be enough credit for everybody who wants it. Scott-Scobie, he's one of the most ambitious young men at the Forbidden City. I don't know what he wants, it could be the Permanent Under-Secretary's Department, it might be the next Director-General of Six… And Guy Husband, he's new to the Sovbloc desk; if he pulls this off in his first few months, he could become a living legend. "
"Does he want to be one?"
"Oh yes. It's their top word. What else can they want if they're in these behind-the-arras jobs? They're never going to get rich or famous, but they love thinking they'll one day be legendary to Those Who Really Know. As for Dieter Sims, I don't know much about him except that he's been building up the East German unit under Husband's wing. Maybe he'll have to be content with merely doing all the work, but there's compensations in being indispensable, too."
She looked at the few cigarettes left in her pack and then impulsively threw them all out of the window. "The hell with the countryside… The whole of what's usually called the Intelligence Community's feeling a bit frisky at the moment. I imagine you've noticed that our dear Prime Minister doesn't exactly go a bundle on us, on any of us?"
"That was why he invented my job, wasn't it?" An all-too-nearly-public scandal caused, that time, by Agnes's service had prompted the PM to appoint an Army officer to Number 10, although it hadn't prompted him to decide exactly what Maxim should do once there.
"That's right. He's always been paranoid about intelligence, seeing plots and hidden microphones and leaks to the media • •. he kept the money tight, too. Now it seems he won't bewith us for ever. He's not a well man. "
"Did George say that?"
Agnes thought long enough for Maxim to glance at her, making sure she'd heard. "No-o, not in so many words. But we have sources of our own. We're supposed to know what goes on in this country, and the PM's health is a national asset, so… But he isn't responding to treatment."
"I thought it was just bronchitis."
"By now it's pneumonia. It's probably only that old quack Hardacre feeding him the wrong antibiotics -" Agnes shared George's view of Sir Frank "- but if each course takes five days before they decide it isn't working, it can run on. He's over sixty and he's had chest trouble before. And every day he spends in bed wastes away a little more of his authority: Parliament doesn't like sick leaders, it casts them out to die on the cold, cold slopes of the House of Lords. Quite right too, of course. But that makes now a good time for a little discreet character assassination, suggest the old boy can't even control his own Private Office. That's you. "
"They're using me to try and bring him down?"
"They're using anything they can find. Yes, they're using you."
Maxim was silent for a while. "And there's nothing I can doaboutit."
"You could give up consorting with deserters and street fighting in all its forms… I realise it'll be tough, trying to cut it down, but just say to yourself-"
"None of thiswas planned, was it?"
"Oh Lordy me, no. You leave the conspiracy theory of history to the professors, and keep your eye on the opportunists. A sense of timing's always been more important than mere dishonesty."
They were on the choppy, wavelike hills before Milford, a narrow road with too much Friday evening traffic heading south, against them, for Maxim to risk trying to overtake an elderly truck in front. He resigned himself and let the car drift back to a comfortable fifty-yard gap. A fat Jaguar promptly swerved past him, closed up on the truck and started weaving in and out, forced back every time.
"Everybody's a contender," Maxim said, so softly that Agnes had to think for a moment to be sure what she'd heard.
"Aren't you?" she asked sharply. "Don't you want to run the Army? Or even a battalion?"
"I think I did once," Maxim said slowly. "But now… now I just don't know…"
Agnes let it go at that. He might go on to talking about his dead wife, Jenny, and she didn't want to hear about her. She wanted to know, she just didn't want to hear.
Chapter 12
During the week – and weekends when he was the duty Private Secretary – George and his wife Annette lived in the family set of rooms in Albany, just a few quiet yards from the snarling traffic of Piccadilly. The porter was expecting them and let Maxim park in an awkward position on the forecourt pavement.
It was dark now, but warmer than when they had left the coast nearly two hours before, and the air tasted like something breathed through a hot towel. The weather was going to break, and noisily.
As they walked through the lamplight of the Ropewalk, Maxim noticed a small incised plaque to Lord Macaulay, who had lived there in the 1840s.
"That's the bastard who loused up my promotion chances. "
"What?" Agnes stopped and peered.
"He once wrote: 'Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.' "
She chuckled. "Did you run across that yourself?"
"Oh no. There've always been plenty of kindly brother officers to bring it to my attention. We're a very well-read Army these days. "
George's rooms were on the first floor; they had the traditional stolidity of a steak and kidney pie and were much the same colour. Annette had never dared touch the dark panelling that George's family had put in eighty years before, nor even most of the ponderous mahogany furniture and the lovingly detailed pictures of dead hares and partridges surrounded by dewy vegetables. She had counter-attacked with bright lampshades and curtains, but she hadn't won.
Agnes knew the room and went straight for the telephone. George was sitting at one end of a vast empty dining table, with a little oasis of bottles, coffee pot and cheeseboard at hiselbow.
"Ah," he greeted Maxim; "do I see you refreshed by two days of country air? Revived? Refulgent? More to the point, do I see yourepentant? Your lad's really done it this time. Port or brandy?"
"Just coffee, please. Who got shot?"
"The man in hospital hasn't been named, but he isn't your Corporal. It happened around seven o'clock, at a place called Neptune Court. Do you know it? No? I thought you knew Rotherhithe like your own back garden. "
"I don't have a back garden. "
"Neither does Neptune Court. It's a block of council flats, probably one of those redbrick Edwardian things, with a court in the middle and a service road down the back. Front doors • open onto long balconies with iron railings covered in damp washing and snotty little kids dribbling on your head through the bars."
Maxim grinned, surprised less by George's attitude than by his knowledge of such parts of London. They were certainly Rotherhithe blocks he was describing; Maxim had seen them.
"It happened in the service road. Five or six shots. Neighbours saw one man drive away and it looked as if he was hurt. Another one running in the opposite direction. "
"Running?"