A Foreign Country

37

It did not take long for Amelia Levene to clean up the loose ends of her truncated visit to France. There was a chambermaid at the Hotel Gillespie who had agreed, for the sum of two thousand euros, to say nothing about Madame Levene’s prolonged absence from her room. Amelia had paid her half in advance on the morning of her flight to Tunis and now settled the debt as she packed her belongings, the chambermaid having made a special visit to her place of work in mid-afternoon from her home in the suburbs of Nice.

Next, Amelia put a call through to the Austrian divorcee who had organized the painting classes. Brigitta Wettig accepted Amelia’s effusive apologies for abandoning the course after less than two days, but assumed that she had been ‘sick or something’ and seemed concerned only that Mrs Levene would now demand a refund.

‘Of course not, Brigitta. And one day I hope to be able to return. You really do have the most wonderful set-up here.’

Three hours after landing in Nice, Amelia was on her way back to the airport, having retrieved her personal effects from the boot of the hire car in Rue Lamartine. By eight o’clock she was in London, en route by cab to Giles’s house in Chelsea. They had arranged to eat supper together. Amelia had told her husband that she had something ‘important’ that she wished to discuss with him.

They picked a favourite Thai restaurant at the western end of King’s Road. Giles ordered a green curry, Amelia a chicken and basil stir-fry. It was late on a Saturday evening and there were perhaps a dozen other customers in the restaurant, none within earshot and most on the point of asking for the bill.

‘So you had something you wanted to say,’ Giles began, hoping to get the more awkward part of the evening out of the way so that he could enjoy his curry in relative peace. Whenever Amelia called a summit meeting of this kind, it was usually to confess that she had ‘slipped up again’ with Paul Wallinger, her long-term lover. Giles was long past caring and, frankly, would have preferred not to know. It irritated him that his wife always chose one of their favourite restaurants in which to vouchsafe her indiscretions, thereby preventing him from giving expression to his rage with a full-scale row.

‘I’m afraid I haven’t been entirely honest with you about something in my childhood.’

That was a new line. Usually it was: ‘I’m afraid I’ve behaved rather unkindly,’ or: ‘I’m afraid you’re not going to be pleased.’ This time, however, Amelia had opted for the enigma of her past.

‘Your childhood?’

She dabbed her face with a napkin, swallowed a prawn cracker.

‘Not my childhood, exactly. My teenage years. My early twenties.’

‘You mean Oxford?’

‘I mean Tunisia.’

And so it came out. The story of her affair with Jean-Marc Daumal; the birth of their child; the boy’s adoption by Philippe and Jeannine Malot. Giles’s curry arrived but he found that he could not eat it, so great was his sense of shock and near-revulsion. The first ten years of his marriage to Amelia had been a prolonged nightmare of fertility tests, of third trimester miscarriages, of interviews with adoption agencies which had offered the shattering verdict that Giles and Amelia Levene, despite their impeccable professional and personal credentials, were considered too old to take on the responsibility of caring for a young child. And now here was Amelia calmly informing him that, at the age of twenty, she had given birth to a healthy baby who had surfaced in Paris more than thirty years later to steal her heart and to draw her away from him still further. Giles wanted, for the first time in his life, physically to assault a woman, to send the whole edifice of their sham and sexless marriage crashing to the ground.

But Giles Levene was not the demonstrative type. He lacked physical courage and he hated making a scene. If he had been a more self-analytical man, he might have acknowledged that he had married Amelia because she was emotionally stronger than he was, intellectually at least his equal, and his social passport to the high tables that would otherwise have been denied him. Taking a sip of his white wine and a first mouthful of curry, he found himself saying: ‘I’m glad you’ve told me this’ and thought how much his own conciliating voice sounded like his father’s. ‘How long have you known?’

‘About a month,’ Amelia replied, and took his hand across the tablecloth. ‘As you can imagine, I don’t know how I’m going to work things out with the Office.’

This astonished him. ‘They don’t know?’

Amelia chose her words carefully, as though picking out the chillies in a stir-fry. ‘I decided never to tell them. I didn’t want it on my record. I thought it would affect any chances I had of making a success of my career.’

Giles nodded. ‘Obviously nothing turned up during the vetting process.’

‘Obviously.’ Amelia felt the need to expand. ‘The adoption was arranged through a Catholic organization in Tunis. They had links back to France, but my name was never recorded in the paperwork.’

‘Then how did François find you?’

More out of habit than calculation, Amelia decided to protect Joan Guttmann’s identity.

‘Through a friend in Tunis who helped me during that period.’

Giles leaped to a conclusion. ‘The boy’s father? This Jean-Marc?’

Amelia shook her head. ‘No. I haven’t seen him for years. In fact, I’m not sure he even knows that François exists.’

As the meal progressed, Giles’s temper subsided and Amelia told him of her plans eventually to bring her son to London. They had talked about it at the hotel in Tunisia. With his parents murdered, François felt that he no longer had much of a life in Paris and would welcome a change of scene.

‘What about his friends?’ Giles asked. ‘Is there a wife, a girlfriend? A job?’

Amelia paused as she recollected all that François had told her.

‘He’s never had a serious relationship. You might call him a bit of a loner. A rather melancholy soul, if I’m honest. Prone to the odd mood swing. Not unlike his father, in fact.’

Giles wasn’t interested in pursuing this line of enquiry and asked how Amelia was going to clear things with SIS.

‘I think the best thing is to present him as a fait accompli. It’s hardly a sackable offence to have given birth to a child.’

Giles saw how proud she was to have uttered these words and felt the revulsion again, the returning sense of his own miserable isolation.

‘I see. But they’ll want to know that he’s the real thing.’

It was the closest he could come to wounding her. Amelia reacted as though he had spat in her food.

‘What does that mean?’

‘Well, surely they’ll want to vet him? You’re about to become the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, Amelia. They can’t have a cuckoo in the nest.’

She pushed her plate away from her, a sound of crockery meeting glass.

‘He’s mine,’ she said, hissing the words as her napkin hit the table. ‘They can test him all they fucking want.’