A Colder War

26

‘Read it,’ said Rachel.

Kell felt an odd surge of sympathy for Wallinger, the adulterer who fancied himself in love and whose shabby secret had been exposed. At the same time, he was horrified that Rachel had come into possession of the letter. He could not imagine what effect the contents would have had on her.

The words ‘adult’ and ‘who I am’ were underlined twice, as though Wallinger had finally abandoned any pretence at gravitas and was writing in the mode of an adolescent.

Rachel was standing at the window, the towel again wrapped around her body, looking out on to the city through a tiny gap in the shutters. Kell did not know what to make of the letter. If Paul had been deeply in love with Cecilia, why had he kept a photograph of Amelia in a book beside his bed? Had he been giving serious consideration to quitting, or was that the philanderer’s way of keeping a mistress keen and tenterhooked? And who were the ‘friends’ he was referring to? Amelia, certainly. But who else had Paul trampled on? Had there been other adulteries with Service wives?

Kell put the letter down. He had read enough. It felt as though this was now all that he would remember of Paul. He would no longer be a spy or a friend or a father; he would just be the man who had lost himself to a mistress in an oblivion of infatuated sex. To Kell’s relief, Rachel turned around and made a joke.

‘I’ve seen her photograph. She looks like a fucking Na’avi.’

‘What’s a Na’avi?’ Kell asked. He wanted to match her arch mood.

‘You know. Avatar. Six-foot-six blue gimp from another planet. She’s so fucking tall she looks like a kind of plant. Fake tits, too.’

Kell folded the letter and placed it on the table beside the bed.

‘You know I can remember the afternoon when he wrote that,’ she said. ‘He told me he had a report to write. He couldn’t go into Meribel with me. I was looking forward to spending time with him, because he’d been skiing with Mum and Andrew in the morning.’ Kell doubted this. He felt that Rachel was lying to herself in order to pile further blame on to her father. ‘But, no, work had to come first. The whole week I really thought he and Mum were finally happy. She did too. They’d had problems in the past, you know?’ Kell nodded. ‘I remember them kissing and holding hands as they walked down the street. Something as simple as that. Something old-fashioned between a husband and wife.’ Rachel shook her head and smiled. ‘But of course my father was the sort of person who could act like the family man with his wife and his son and his daughter, then write that shit in the afternoon to a Hungarian whore half his fucking age.’

‘Rachel …’

‘It’s OK. I’m not angry. I sound angrier than I am. Believe me, I’ve had enough time to get to know who my father was. It’s just upsetting that that week now means nothing, because he was thinking about fucking the Na’avi all the time. Composing this shit in his head. Getting it all down in the bar while he was pretending to write a report on spies. I found lots more letters. Maybe ten of them. That’s the only one from him though. You notice the neat, controlled handwriting — no mistakes, no crossings out? Typical controlling Pappa. The other letters are all from the Na’avi. She can hardly spell, ignorant cow.’

‘So the card at your father’s funeral. The flowers. They were from her? She was sending him a private message, one that your mother wouldn’t be able to understand, but you recognized her handwriting?’

‘Yes.’

For some time they said nothing. Kell eventually went to the bathroom. When he came back into the room, Rachel was still standing by the window.

‘Come back to bed,’ he said.

She did so, wordlessly, and curled into him again. He knew that there would be no more talk. Kell set an alarm for eight, and closed his eyes, his hand stroking Rachel’s back as she drifted off to sleep. He was listening to her breathe when she whispered:

‘You are lovely.’

He kissed her forehead.

‘You are too,’ he replied, wondering how long it had been since he had said those words, how long it had been since he had heard them.