‘I’m not authorized by my line manager to be here. Probably he’d blow a gasket if he knew. I’m about to explain why I came, having looked you and your husband up in the computer system, which is at best an irregular action. There are three courses open to you, Mrs Lawson. You can ask me to leave, and I will. You can ring Thames House or report my having been here to your husband’s office, and I will face dismissal pretty damn fast. Or you can talk to me and I’ll listen. It’s about a problem I have.’
Plates and bowls, a pan and a solitary wine glass were dried. Cupboards were opened and the items put away, but most often the eyes of Mrs Lavinia Lawson were locked on her.
‘I’m not very important. I do the work that’s pretty dreggy, and right now it’s liaison between our place and your husband’s. I had to send him some information on something — you won’t want me to be specific — and it was all a bit eccentric as we met in the rain and outside on the Embankment. I needn’t have done, but I gave him the name of an undercover police officer who was on a criminal investigation and close up with the principal target. I thought that would help your husband. Mr Lawson said to me that national security was threatened — was at risk big-time — and I felt giving him the name was the right thing to do. Now, back at Thames House, I hear nothing but badmouthing of your husband. I can put that down, perhaps, to the juvenile rivalries that men have. Then I was at a meeting on their ground, Mr Lawson’s, and it was the same refrain. Your husband was condemned as selfish, arrogant and a user of men. Mrs Lawson, I put a man into your husband’s hands, and I’m doubting now whether I should have. You are not, of course, under any obligation to tell me anything, you can show me the door and dump my career, or you can talk to me.’
She had a carefully fostered urchin’s look. Dark hair cut short on her scalp, no cosmetics, no jewellery, not even stud earrings. The appearance that the liaison officer, Alison, cultivated was one of earnest simplicity. It usually did the business for her.
She was asked, ‘Do you know what I do?’
Honesty always did the business. ‘I looked you up before coming. It’s victim support, yes?’
‘There’s a crime epidemic on our streets.’
‘Yes.’
‘And money’s short for services, resources are slashed and customer numbers are rising.’
‘I realize that.’
She was offered more coffee, and accepted. Lawson’s wife tossed aside the tea-towel, let it lie on the draining-board, came and sat opposite her, and pushed aside an unopened copy of the day’s newspaper.
‘Well, my dear, I could throw you out and dump your career, or I can help you with your problem. You were never here, were you?’
‘I was never here.’
She listened. Alison was a good listener and could use the innocence of her eyes to nudge a narrative forward.
She was told, ‘To keep my desk minimally clear, and to stop the line of my customers stretching round the corner of the street, I leave here, five mornings a week, at seven, and I’m back here at seven in the evening. You were lucky to find me, but I’ve the start of a cold and got away a little early. At the weekends I do paperwork, expenses and reports. You see, my dear, we don’t actually live together. Under the same roof, in the same bed, meals at the same table, but I’m too damn tired to talk. He does his own breakfast, I do the supper and the crossword, and he’s at the word teasers, and we read our books in bed — maybe ten minutes — and we’re asleep. We go for the same train in the morning, so we’re walking beside each other and usually hurrying, and he’s never home before me. Are you getting an idea of our life? We’re adjacent to each other, certainly no closer.
‘Our son might have bound us once. Not any more. He’s in Vietnam, does aid work in the Highlands there, tries to help communities around Pleiku start up cottage industries that can be marketed in Europe. He hasn’t been home in two years and when he was last here he hadn’t anything to say to his father. Put bluntly, I don’t either. We don’t share hobbies because I haven’t time for them. We used to do holidays, but not any longer — there isn’t a common area. Now I go on those all-inclusive trips where you get painting or sketching instruction in France or Italy. He, for his annual leave, which they force him to take, goes to the West Country and scours the villages for churches, fourteenth or fifteenth century, and the bed and breakfast he’s staying at will find him someone who’d like their dog walked in the lanes and along the bridleways. He lives for his work.
‘He’s a driven man. Nothing else matters to him. I think, but he doesn’t confide now and never has, that he came from one of those army families where showing affection was forbidden, then boarding-school and university. Quite a good degree from Oxford, where we met, and he was recruited on the old-boy recommendation, which was the routine. I don’t think he ever believed that a job which might be completed that day, or evening, should be left for tomorrow. Went against his nature. Exacting standards were set, still are, and those who fail such examinations are rated failures and set aside. And one day, of course, it will end. There’ll be a leaving party, and I’m damn sure I won’t be there, and he’ll be home. This place will go on the market and we’ll buy something small and easy in Kingswear or across the river in Dartmouth, and I suppose we’ll rattle around, and maybe we’ll find each other.
‘We used to be a pretty normal couple, with the baby. He was posted to Berlin, three years, and married accompanied. We were out at the Olympic stadium. I did a dinner party every week and had a circuit of some of the most devastatingly boring men and their wives to entertain. Then one Saturday night he invited an American. I bitched about it when he told me whom he’d asked because it was going to get the numbers wrong and I had to scrape up a secretary from the field station to match the table up. He had a ridiculous name, Clipper A. Reade Junior. He lit his first cigar when I served salmon and salad — I promise you, my dear, it was a meal I haven’t forgotten — and smoked it right through the next course, beef, and kept it going when I gave the guests fruit salad and meringue, stubbed it out and spread ash across my tablecloth, then lit another when I did the cheeseboard. He talked the whole time, barely ate, didn’t drink the wine and I had to dive into the kitchen repeatedly for little pots of tea for him. At first, at that meal, as the American hogged the conversation, others tried to ignore him and talk among themselves, but he steamrollered them. By the end of the meal, they were hanging on what he had to say on the craftwork of agent-running. He did anecdotes so welclass="underline" near misses with the Stasi, the KGB and the others, triumphs that were fascinating and not boastful, techniques and tactics of brush contacts and dead-letter drops. But the silence when you could have heard that lousy cliché fulfilled, could have heard a pin drop, was about the loss of an agent — shot and drowned — in the Spree river, by the Oberbaumbrücke. Nobody spoke as that story was told. No emotion to it, and no passion, could have been the description of the death of a pet rabbit, and it sort of killed the evening. I remember, all our other guests left pretty early. Christopher never admitted it, but good old female intuition did the job. My husband was present when the agent was lost, but he gave no sign of it and let the story unfold. I hazard it for you, my dear, but Christopher was under the spell of that American, was — by then — a changed man with his personality altered and soft in that man’s hands. Needless to say, Clipper Reade was never invited to dinner with us again.