LITMIR.BIZ

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but never dared say before. Whether her husband heard her or not seemed unimportant.

      Without a word of reply, he pushed back the bedclothes and got out of bed. It was not a violent movement. He did it gently so as not to disturb her. She turned her head to watch him go across the carpet. Naked he looked thin, if not to say skinny – that was why he looked so elegant in his carefully cut suits. She wished she was skinny too.

      Bret went into the bathroom, drew back the curtains and opened the window. It was a glorious autumnal morning. The sunlit trees made long shadows across the gold-tipped grass. He’d not seen the flower-beds so crowded with blooms. At the end of his garden, where the fidgeting boughs of weeping willows fingered the water, the slow-moving river looked almost blue. Two rowing boats tied up at the pier bobbed gently up and down amid a flotilla of dead leaves. He loved this house.

      Since the eighteenth century, many wealthy Londoners have favoured such upstream Thameside houses. With grounds that reach the water’s edge they are hidden behind anonymous brick walls all the way from Chiswick to Reading. They come in all shapes, sizes and styles from palatial mansions in the Venetian manner to modest three-bedroom residences like this one.

      Bret Rensselaer breathed deeply ten times, the way he did before doing his exercises. The view of the garden had reassured him. It always did. He had not always been an Anglophile but once he’d arrived in this bewitching land, he knew there was no escape from the obsessive love he had for everything connected with it. The river that ran at the foot of his garden was not an ordinary little stream; it was the Thames! The Thames with its associations of old London bridge, Westminster Palace, the Tower, and of course Shakespeare’s Globe. Still, after living here for years, he could hardly believe his good fortune. He wished his American wife could share his pleasure but she said England was ‘backward’ and could only see the bad side of living here.

      He stared at himself in the mirror as he combed his hair. He had the same jutting chin and blond hair that his mother had passed on to him and his brother. The same good health too, and that was a priceless legacy. He put on his red silk dressing gown. Through the bathroom door he heard a movement and a clink of glass, and knew it was his wife taking a drink of bottled water. She didn’t sleep well. He’d grown used to her chronic insomnia. He was no longer surprised to wake in the night and find her drinking water, smoking a cigarette or reading a chapter of one of her romantic novels.

      When he returned to the bedroom she was still there: sitting cross-legged on the bed, her silk nightdress disarranged to expose her thighs, and its lacy shoulder trimming making a ruff behind her head. Her skin was pale – she avoided the sun – her figure full but not overweight, and her hair tousled. She felt him examining her and she raised her eyes to glare at him. In the past such a pose, that fierce look on her face, and a cigarette in her mouth, had aroused him. Perhaps it was a shameless wanton that he had hoped to discover. If so his hopes had soon been dashed.

      He stepped into the alcove that he used as a dressing room and slid open the mirrored wardrobe door to select a suit from the two dozen hanging there, each one in its tissue paper and plastic bag as it had arrived from the cleaners.

      ‘You have no feelings!’ she said.

      ‘Don’t, Nikki,’ he said. Her name was Nicola. She didn’t like being called Nikki but it was too late now to tell him so.

      ‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘You send men out to die as if you were sending out junk mail. You are heartless. I never loved you; no one could.’

      What nonsense she spoke. Bret Rensselaer’s position at SIS was Deputy Controller of European Economics. Yet it was a shrewd guess, there were times when he had to give the final okay on dangerous jobs. And when those tough decisions were to be made Bret did not shy from making them. ‘You left it a darn long time before telling me,’ he said reasonably, while hanging a lightweight wool and mohair suit near the light of the window and attaching the braces to the trousers. He screwed up the blue tissue wrapping and tossed it into the linen basket. Then he selected shirt and underclothes. He was worried. In this quarrelsome mood Nikki might blurt out some melodramatic yarn of that kind to the first stranger she came across. She hadn’t done such a thing before but he’d never known her in this frame of mind before.

      ‘I’ve been thinking about it lately,’ she replied. ‘Thinking about it a lot.’

      ‘And did this thought process of yours begin before or after last Wednesday’s lunch?’

      She looked at him coolly and blew smoke before saying, ‘Joppi has nothing to do with it. Do you think I would discuss you with Joppi?’

      ‘You have before.’ The way she referred to that Bavarian four-flusher by that silly diminutive name made him mad. No matter that just about everyone else did the same.

      ‘That was different. That was years ago. You ran out on me.’

      ‘Joppi is a jerk,’ said Bret and was angry with himself for betraying his feelings. He looked at her and knew, not for the first time, murderous anger. He could have strangled her without a remnant of remorse. No matter: he would have the last laugh.

      ‘Joppi is a real live prince,’ she said provocatively.

      ‘Princes are ten a penny in Bavaria.’

      ‘And you are jealous of him,’ she said, and didn’t bother to conceal her pleasure at the idea of it.

      ‘For making a play for my wife?’

      ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Joppi has a wife already.’

      ‘One a day, from what I hear.’

      ‘You can be very childish sometimes, Bret.’

      He didn’t respond except to look at her with fierce resentment. He deplored the way that Americans like his wife revered these two-bit European aristocrats. They’d met Joppi at Ascot the previous June. Joppi had a horse running in the Coronation Stakes and was there with a big party of German friends. Subsequently he’d invited the Rensselaers for a weekend at a house he’d leased near Paris. They had stayed with him there but Bret had not enjoyed it. He’d watched the unctuous Joppi looking at Nikki in a way that Bret did not like men to look at his wife. And Nikki had not even noticed it: or so she said when Bret complained of it afterwards. Now Joppi had invited Nikki to lunch without going through the formality of inviting Bret along. It made Bret sizzle.

      ‘Prince Joppi,’ said Bret with just enough emphasis upon the first word to show his contempt, ‘is a two-bit racketeer.’

      ‘Have you had him investigated?’

      ‘I ran him through the computer,’ he said. ‘He’s into all kinds of crooked deals. That’s why we’re going to stay clear of him.’

      ‘I don’t work for your goddamned secret intelligence outfit,’ she said. ‘Just in case you forgot, I’m a free citizen, and I choose my own friends and I say anything I want to say to them.’

      He knew that she was trying to provoke him but still he wondered if he should phone the night duty officer. He’d have a phone contact for Internal Security. But Bret didn’t relish the idea of describing the nuances of his married life to some young subordinate who would write it down and put it on file somewhere.

      He went and ran the bath: both taps fully on gave him the temperature he preferred. He squirted bath oil into the rushing water and it foamed furiously. While the bath was filling he returned to Nikki. Under the circumstances, reasoning with her seemed the wiser course. ‘Have I done something?’ he asked with studied mildness. He sat down on the bed.

      ‘Oh, no!’ said his wife sarcastically. ‘Not you.’ She could hear the water beating against the bath with a roar like thunder.

      She was tense, her arms clamped round her knees, the cigarette forgotten for a moment. He looked at her, trying to see something in her face that would give him a hint about the origin of her anger. Failing to see anything that enlightened him he said, ‘Then what …?’ And then more briskly but with a conciliatory tone, ‘For goodness’ sake, Nikki. I have to go

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