LITMIR.BIZ

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Department not once but several hundred times. Always until now she’d made me the sole focus of her anger and frustration. ‘They promised to let me go to Cambridge. They promised!’ She was getting angry at the thought of it. She looked up from the frying pan and waved the fork at me before again jabbing at the bacon.

      ‘And now they won’t? They said that?’

      ‘I’ll pay my own way. I have enough if I go carefully,’ she said. ‘I’ll be twenty-three in June. Already I’ll feel like an old lady, sitting with all those eighteen-year-old schoolkids.’

      ‘What did they say?’

      ‘Morgan stopped me in the corridor last week. Asked me how I was getting along. What about my place at Cambridge? I said. He didn’t have the guts to tell me in the proper way. He said there was no money. Bastard! There’s enough money for Morgan to go to conferences in Australia and that damned symposium in Toronto. Money enough for jaunts!’

      I nodded. I can’t say that Australia or Toronto were high on my list of places to jaunt in, but perhaps Morgan had his reasons. ‘You didn’t tell him that?’

      ‘I damned well did. I let him have it. We were outside the Deputy’s office. He must have heard every word. I hope he did.’

      ‘You’re a harridan,’ I told her.

      She slammed the plates on the table with a snarl and then, unable to keep up the display of fierce bad temper, she laughed. ‘Yes, I am. You haven’t seen that side of me yet.’

      ‘What an extraordinary thing to say, my love.’

      ‘You treat me like a backward child, Bernard. I’m not a fool.’ I said nothing. The toast flung itself out of the machine with a loud clatter. She rescued both slices before they slid into the sink and put them on a plate alongside my eggs and bacon. Then, as I began to eat, she sat opposite me, her face cupped in her hands, elbows on the table, studying me as if I were an animal in the zoo. I was getting used to it now but it still made me uneasy. She watched me with a curiosity that was disconcerting. Sometimes I would look up from a book or finish talking on the phone to find her studying me with that same expression.

      ‘When did you say the children would be home?’ I asked.

      ‘You didn’t mind them going to the sale of work?’

      ‘I don’t know what a sale of work is,’ I said, not without an element of truth.

      ‘It’s at the Church Hall in Sebastopol Road. People make cakes and pickles and knit tea cosies and donate unwanted Christmas presents. It’s for Oxfam.’

      ‘And why would Billy and Sally want to go?’

      ‘I knew you’d be angry.’

      ‘I’m not angry but why would they want to go?’

      ‘There’ll be toys and books and things too. It’s a jumble sale really but the Women’s Guild prefers to call it their New Year Sale of Work. It sounds better. I knew you wouldn’t bring any presents back with you.’

      ‘I tried. I wanted to, I really did.’

      ‘I know, darling. That wasn’t why the children wanted to be here when you arrived. I told them to go. It’s good for them to be with other children. Changing schools isn’t easy at that age. They left a lot of friends in London; they must make new ones round here. It’s not easy, Bernie.’ It was quite a speech; perhaps she’d had it all prepared.

      ‘I know.’ I was still examining the awful prospect of her taking a place at the university next October, or whenever it was the academic year started in such places. What was I going to do with this wretched house, far away from everyone I knew? And what about the children?

      She must have seen my face. ‘I’ll be back every weekend,’ she promised.

      ‘You know that’s impossible,’ I told her. ‘You’ll be working damned hard. I know you; you’ll want to do everything better than anyone’s ever done it before.’

      ‘It will be all right, darling,’ she said. ‘If we want it to be all right, it will be. You’ll see.’

      Muffin, our battered cat, came and tapped on the window. Muffin seemed to be the only member of the family who’d settled in to Balaklava Road without difficulties. And even Muffin stayed out all night sometimes.

       2

      There was another thing I didn’t like about the suburbs: getting to work. I braved the morning traffic jams in my ageing Volvo but Gloria seldom came with me in the car. She enjoyed going on the train, at least she said she enjoyed it. She said it gave her time to think. But the 7.32 was always packed with people from even more outlying suburbs by the time it arrived. And I hated to stand all the way to Waterloo. Secondly there was the question of my assigned parking place. Already the hyenas were circling. The old man who ran Personnel Records had started hinting about a cash offer for it as soon as I registered my new address. You’ll come in on the train now I suppose? No, I said sharply. No I won’t. And apart from a couple of days when the old Volvo was having its transmission fixed, I hadn’t. I calculated that five consecutive days in a row would be all I’d need to find my hard-won parking space reassigned to someone who’d make better use of it.

      So on Monday I went by car and Gloria went by train. She arrived ahead of me, of course. The office is only two or three minutes’ walk from Waterloo Station, while I had to drag through the traffic jams in Wimbledon.

      I got into the office to find alarm and despondency spread right through the building. Dicky Cruyer was there already, a sure sign of a crisis. They must have phoned him at home and had him depart hurriedly from the leisurely breakfast he enjoys after jogging across Hampstead Heath. Even Sir Percy Babcock, the Deputy D-G, had dragged himself away from his law practice and found time to spare for an early morning session.

      ‘Number Two Conference Room,’ the girl waiting in the corridor said. She whispered in a way that revealed her pent-up excitement: as if this was the sort of day she’d been waiting for ever since beginning to type all those tedious reports for us. I suppose Dicky must have sent her to stand sentry outside my office. ‘Sir Percy is chairing the meeting. They said you should join them as soon as you arrived.’

      ‘Thanks, Mabel,’ I said and gave her my coat and a leather case of very unimportant non-classified paperwork that I hoped she’d mislay. She smiled dutifully. Her name wasn’t Mabel but I called them all Mabel and I suppose they’d got used to it.

      Number Two was on the top floor, a narrow room that seated fourteen at a pinch and had a view right across to where the City’s ugly tower blocks underpinned the low grey cloud base.

      ‘Samson! Good,’ said the Deputy D-G when I went in. There was a notepad, a yellow pencil and a chair waiting for me and two more pristine pads and pencils that may or may not have been waiting for others who were arriving at work hoping their lateness would not be noticed. Bad luck.

      ‘Have you heard?’ Dicky asked.

      I could see it was Dicky’s baby. This was a German Desk crisis. It wasn’t a routine briefing for the Deputy, or a conference to decide about annual leave rosters, or more questions about where Central Funding might have put the odd few hundred thousand pounds that Jim Prettyman authorized for Bret Rensselaer and Bret Rensselaer never got. This was serious. ‘No,’ I said. ‘What’s happened?’

      ‘Bizet,’ said Dicky, and went back to chewing his fingernail.

      I knew the group; at least I knew them as well as a deskman sitting in London can know the people who do the real nasty dangerous work. Somewhere near Frankfurt an der Oder, right over there on East Germany’s border with Poland. ‘Poles,’ I said, ‘or that’s how it started. Poles working in some sort of heavy industry.’

      ‘That’s right,’ said

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