A Foreign Country

26

It was half-past eleven by the time Sami called again. Kell had eaten another club sandwich in his room and read a centimetre of Thomas Pakenham’s The Scramble for Africa. There was that same cacophony of Arabic music on the line when he picked up, like a roomful of belly dancers having the time of their lives. Then Sami said:

‘I have just let them out.’ He still sounded tense, as though he had been confronted by the limits of his own decency. It was often the way with embryonic agents; the guilt and the adrenalin worked through them like poison and its antidote. ‘François took her to the Valencia to make sure she was safely home. He said he was going to have a cognac in your hotel bar. Maybe I can meet you somewhere and tell you what happened between them. His mother, she is an interesting woman.’

Kell almost asked Sami to repeat what he had said, but the logic of it was suddenly as clear to him as the trajectory of a setting sun. Malot was Amelia’s child, born to her in Tunis more than thirty years earlier. Was this possible? Kell thought back to Amelia’s file. The dates matched precisely. Malot had been born in 1979, only months after Amelia had finished working as an au pair in Tunis. How could he have missed the connection? Philippe and Jeannine must have adopted him at birth, with no trace of Amelia Weldon’s name on the adoption papers or birth certificate. He marvelled at her ability to have kept the child a secret; SIS vetting was forensic, yet somehow François had slipped through the net. But who was the father? Somebody from the ex-pat community in Tunis? There had been no record in the pre-recruitment file of a boyfriend from that period of her life. Had Amelia been raped?

Kell looked up at the bare whitewashed walls of his room, down at the worn beige carpet, and rubbed his eyes. ‘Come to my room,’ he said quietly. ‘We can talk here.’

He had not expected to feel resentment, but he was angry with Amelia because he felt that she had deceived him. Their shared childlessness, after all, had been the great private bond between them, a mutual absence that they had both quietly mourned. Yet all that time the master spy had concealed from him a simple tale of her youth. Then Kell began to feel enormous sorrow for his friend, because he could not imagine the agony of that separation, nine months of a body growing inside her body, the baby speaking to Amelia through her womb, then wrenched away to a life about which she would have known almost nothing. Kell wanted to knock on Amelia’s door and to tell her that he was a friend to whom she could turn if ever she needed to speak about what had happened.

‘You’re going soft,’ he muttered to himself, and stood up, as if he might regain a sense of professional decorum by doing so. He switched on the main overhead light in the room and poured himself the last of the glutinous red wine he had ordered from room service. Hannibal, the local poison. He retrieved his camera from the bed and began to click through the surveillance photos of the pool. In all, there were roughly fifty shots of Amelia and Malot. Looking at the images, Kell was sure that he could detect a family resemblance between the two and began to feel intrusive of Amelia’s privacy. Their holiday in Tunis would be one of only a few occasions when they managed to spend time together. He had no right to be snooping on them. Throughout his long career, Kell’s own privacy had been of the utmost importance to him; he knew that Amelia felt the same way about hers. As an intelligence officer, you had so little space in which to live a life free of scrutiny’s gaze; moments of unguarded seclusion were sacred. Amelia’s house in Wiltshire, for example, was a haven to which she would escape from the pressures of the secret world as often as she could. Kell had no comparable bolthole, and had instead shuttled between Claire and Vauxhall Cross until his personal and professional selves had seemed to bind together into a knot that would not be untied. On the one hand, a Service that had wanted his head on a plate for Afghanistan; on the other, a wife who would not release him from the cage of her resentment and frustration.

‘To you,’ Kell said aloud, raising the glass to Amelia. Then, more quietly: ‘To being a mother.’ And he drank.