A Foreign Country

23

He was conceived as an act of love; to destroy him would be an act of hate.

Amelia remembered almost every word of the long-ago conversations with Joan, the to-and-fro of their arguments, her own steady conviction that she had no right to abort Jean-Marc’s child without his knowledge. Joan had at first advised her to terminate the pregnancy, to fly back to London and to chalk up the experience to the cruelties of youth. Once Amelia had convinced her of her determination to give birth to the child, however, the American had proved a priceless ally and unshakeable friend. It was Joan who had installed Amelia in a one-bedroomed apartment just two blocks from the Guttmann residence, an arrangement so secret that only David, Joan’s husband, had known anything about it. It was Joan who had put Amelia to work on American consular business so that she would have something with which to occupy herself in the seven months of the pregnancy. A few weeks after moving her into the apartment, the Guttmanns had taken Amelia to Spain for a fortnight, treating her as the daughter they had never had, showing her the treasures of the Prado, the splendours of Cordoba, even a bullfight at Las Ventas, during which David had rested his hand gently on Amelia’s stomach and said: ‘You sure a lady in your condition ought to be watching this stuff?’ And it had been Joan, once they were back in Tunis, who had first floated the notion of adoption through Père Blancs, an idea that Amelia had grasped at perhaps too readily, because she was so ambitious for herself at that age, so hungry for life, and terrified that a baby would rob her of all of the experiences and possibilities in her future.

Paris seemed to have been waiting for her. The humid summer streets were crowded with tourists, the pavement cafés alive with bustle and conversation. Sometimes, arriving in a new city, Amelia would feel an immediate and underlying sense of threat, as though she had been displaced into an alien environment, a home to bad luck. She was well aware that this was not much more than a hunch, a superstition, the sort of thing that her colleagues would laugh at if she had ever shared it with them. Yet a sixth sense — call it intuition — had been with her throughout her career, serving her, for the most part, very well. As an SIS officer working under diplomatic cover in Cairo, for example, or during her years in Baghdad, Amelia had reckoned that she needed fifty per cent more cunning and persistence than her male equivalents, simply to survive in such hostile environments. But France had always embraced her. In Paris she was always something close to her old self, the self before Tunis, the twenty-year-old Amelia Weldon with the world at her feet. As soon as they had taken François from her — it had been an immediate thing, she had never held or even seen her own child — the process of constructing a new and invulnerable personality had begun. Lovers were betrayed, colleagues discarded, friends forgotten or ignored. The double life of SIS had presented Amelia with what she looked back on as ideal laboratory conditions in which to re-make herself in the image of a woman who would never fail again.

Yet she was failing now. Failing to keep calm, failing to maintain whatever decorum she had brought with her across the Channel. She longed for the slow hours to quicken and to be in a room with her boy, just the two of them, and yet she dreaded what she might discover: a person unknown to her, a young man with whom she had nothing in common but their shared contempt for a mother who had abandoned him at birth.

There was a message waiting at her hotel, sent by the adoption agency and addressed to ‘Madame Weldon’. The concierge had been reluctant to hand it over, because Amelia had booked her room under the name ‘Levene’, but when she explained that ‘Weldon’ was her maiden name, he relented. François had contacted the agency and requested that Amelia go to his apartment at four o’clock on Monday afternoon. He did not wish to speak to her by telephone beforehand, nor to communicate with her in any way prior to their first meeting. Without hesitation, Amelia rang the agency to confirm, because she was predisposed to cooperate with all of their instructions, yet she worried that the arrangement was a sign of François’ anger. What if he told her, face-to-face, that she could never replace the mother who had been killed? What if he had lured her to Paris merely to wound her? All her life, Amelia had been blessed with an ability to assess people and to develop a quick and intuitive understanding of their circumstances. She could sense when she was being lied to; she knew when she was being manipulated. Some of this gift had been taught, as a necessary skill for a career in which human relationships were at the core of the work, but mostly it was a talent as innate as the ability to kick a ball or to capture the play of light on a canvas. Yet now, faced with what might become the most important relationship of her life, Amelia was almost helpless.

There was so much time to kill. The waiting was slower, the anticipation more sickening, than any intelligence operation she could recall. So many times in her career she had sat in hotel rooms, in safe houses, in offices that ticked like clocks, waiting for word from a joe. But this was quite different. There was no team, no chain of command, no tradecraft. She was just a private citizen, a tourist in Paris, one of ten thousand women with a secret. She had unpacked her suitcase and overnight bag within minutes of arriving, hanging the black suit from Peter Jones in a cupboard and putting the dress that she had picked out for the reunion on a chair in the corner of the room, so that she could look at it and try to decide if it was the correct choice for such an occasion. As if François would be concerned about her clothes! It was her face that he would want to see, her eyes into which he would pour his questions. For an hour Amelia tried to read one of the novels she had brought, to watch the news on CNN, but it was impossible to concentrate for more than a few minutes. Like a memory of her former self, she longed to speak to Joan again, to tell her what was about to happen, but could not trust the security of the line from the hotel. She thought of Thomas Kell, of all people, her confidant in matters of marriage and children, the one colleague in whom she might have confided. But Kell was long gone, forced into disgrace and a stubborn retirement by the same men whom she had leapfrogged to ‘C’. Would Tom even know about her triumph? She doubted it.

And then, finally, the meeting was upon her, the last hour before arriving at the flat passing as fleetingly as a face in the street. A vandal had scoured a deep scratch in the street door; a Chinese couple walking hand in hand smiled at Amelia as she walked into the lobby. Once inside, she felt as though she was going to be sick. It was as if the hole that had gaped inside her for three long decades was suddenly opening up. She had to steady herself against the door.

‘Would a man behave like this?’ she asked herself, a reliable maxim of her entire working career. But of course a man could never have known what it felt like to be in such a situation.

François lived on the third floor. Amelia ignored the lift and walked there, feeling as though she had never met any person in the course of her long life, had never climbed a flight of stairs, had never learned how to breathe. Reaching the landing, she felt that she was about to make a terrible mistake and would have turned and walked away if there had been any other choice.

She knocked on the door.