He sniffed again just as she came in behind him. ‘I think you will find your book upstairs,’ she said sharply, and motioned him to leave the room.
He held up a hand. ‘Don’t I smell tobacco?’ he asked.
‘Not unless you have been sneaking a cigarette yourself.’
He sniffed again. The aroma was unmistakable.
She sighed. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It was the workmen when they painted the windows. The swine – I expressly told them to do their smoking outside.’
‘Ah,’ he said, nodding, though he thought – the workmen left six weeks ago. But he said nothing.
Later, after supper, as he swept the leftovers from their plates into the pedal bin, he saw something glinting. He reached down and found himself holding the stub of a dark brown cigarette with a gold filter tip. A special cigarette – a Sobranie, in fact, the sort he remembered the man in the Homburg hat smoking so many years before, one after another. For a brief second, he wondered if that man had been in his house, but he realised that was impossible – that man would have died years ago. But who had smoked it then, and what had they been doing here? And why had Irma lied to him?
He was the one used to hiding behind countless untruths: how many glasses of wine he’d had at lunch, who his friends were in Brussels – he made sure to mention Matilda only rarely – even the occasions when he had taken a taxi rather than public transport, and of course the big untruth, the secret he had told nobody, the secret of his real identity.
The nature of his relationship with Irma meant that he was the one who hid things, half out of fear of his wife’s tongue, half from a need for some fragment of independence. The very concept of Irma lying to him was entirely novel. He felt he had lurched on to disturbing new ground and he did not know what it might mean.
15
Matilda Burnside stood at one corner of the Grand Place, ignoring the appraising glances of passing men as she waited for her husband Peter, who as usual was several minutes late. She was a tall woman with shoulder-length chestnut hair and the sort of strong features that are often called handsome but in her case verged on the beautiful.
She had been in Brussels for two years, working in the Migration department of the European Commission, and had been married for one. Her husband Peter was in the Foreign Office – or at least that’s what he told people – and was based in the British Embassy, as Counsellor Economic, a job title that gave away nothing at all about his true responsibilities.
Matilda was a Home Counties girl who had discovered a flair for languages at school, and had studied French and Spanish at university, where despite an active social life and a passion for the cinema she had managed a stunning First Class Honours degree and promptly been snapped up by a multinational bank. The pay had been high, the prospects mouthwateringly attractive, but life in the City of London had proved repetitive and dull, and after eighteen months she had jumped at an offer of a position with the European Commission working on the problem of refugees and migrants arriving in unprecedented numbers from North Africa and the Middle East.
The money wasn’t bad, though it didn’t compare with the bank’s offer when it tried to keep her, and the bureaucracy was stifling, but at least her days were spent trying to help people who needed help, rather than padding the already comfortable coffers of the wealthy. And lest she sounded too pious about the merits of her new posting, it had also provided her with a husband – a tall, intelligent and, yes, slightly dashing kind of husband – though one who was always late, she thought with a flicker of annoyance. It was raining slightly and the lights were just coming on in the square. From where she stood just under the arcade in front of the Palais du Roi she could see their reflection sparkling in the wet cobbles. It was beautiful, which certainly could not be said of much of modern Brussels, particularly not of the buildings in the area where she worked.
Her colleagues liked to joke that the B in Brussels stood for ‘boring’. But if anything, Matilda Burnside thought it should be for bouffe – as in ‘nosh’ or ‘grub’. Never had she eaten so well or so much; her husband, Peter, said the food here was better than in France. There were restaurants everywhere and when they met after work in the Grand Place, as they did at least once a week, without walking more than a few steps they could take their pick from haute cuisine in a restaurant with Michelin rosettes to pizza in a bar.
But tonight she fancied nothing more complicated than moules frites eaten at a long wooden table in the cellar bistro of one of the old buildings in the square.
Her mind these days was flooded by images of the refugee camps in Syria and Libya, and increasingly in Italy as well – though at least on the European mainland the refugees were fed. What haunted her most were the children, shrunk like African famine victims, trapped in the Middle East and North Africa, beyond reach of anything she could do, vulnerable to the worst of humanity – the traffickers, the rapists, the killers. And hungry, hungry all the time. Increasingly, Matilda found herself feeling quite ill at the prospect of another splendid meal.
She’d shared this feeling with Dieter Nimitz, her colleague at work; it was unusual for her to share her feelings with him – it was almost always the other way round, especially when he was battling with their department head, the dour Dutchman Van der Vaart. Sometimes, despite being twenty years younger, she felt like an older sister to him. He often seemed stressed, as he had done this week – so much so that today she finally asked him what was wrong. He had started to say it was nothing, then he’d changed his mind and said, ‘It’s Irma,’ in a voice that was barely more than a whisper.
Matilda knew very little about his wife. Dieter might tell her every detail of Van der Vaart’s latest stupidities, and moan at length when Accounts questioned his expenses, but he very rarely talked about his home life. Matilda knew that though married, he was childless, and that he went back home most weekends and seemed very proud of his wife, who was the headmistress of a school in Hamburg. But she knew little else, so what he had then said about her was unprecedented – and also rather strange. His wife’s school had seemingly lost one of its pupils – or at the very least allowed one of them to stay behind after a sponsored visit to America.
That in itself seemed mildly peculiar, but Dieter’s account of his wife’s mysterious visitor last weekend was also odd. At first, Matilda thought silently that his wife was simply having an affair – not too unlikely given that she was on her own all week. But the photos she’d seen on Dieter’s desk of Frau Nimitz did not suggest a woman given to philandering; nor, to be blunt, a woman likely to receive approaches. What was odd was that Dieter didn’t seem at all concerned about his wife’s possible infidelity but rather, for reasons she couldn’t understand, he was worried that the visitor had something to do with the missing student.
She’d decided to tell Peter about it. He would know if she was making a mountain out of a molehill; he was always very good at that. And there he was, she thought, seeing the tall figure walking briskly across the square, holding a large, striped golf umbrella. As he tipped it back slightly and saw her, he grinned broadly and she forgot her irritation at his lateness.
‘Hello hello,’ he said and kissed her on the cheek. ‘What a horrible evening. Let’s go somewhere warm. Do you know, I really fancy a nice plate of moules frites.’
‘You must be a mind-reader! That’s just what I want.’
‘Come on then,’ he said, grabbing her hand.
She laughed, and they set off at a trot, sending a pigeon that was pecking at something beside their feet off with a wild beating of wings.