A Foreign Country

53

He was just in time to find a burgundy Mercedes turning around in the lane. He closed the gate to the Shand house and stood in the road, holding a hand up to catch the driver’s eye. Kell knew who it was. He recognized the hunched figure at the wheel, the Blair-era sticker in the rear windscreen: ‘Keep Your Bullshit in Westminster’. The Mercedes came to a halt, mid-turn, and Kell heard the noise of an electric window sliding down.

‘Yes?’ came a voice. ‘Can I help you?’

He walked around to the driver’s window and leaned in.

‘Giles. Fancy seeing you here.’

Giles Levene was not a man noted for his ebullient personality, nor for a particularly wide range of facial expression. He greeted Kell with the same bland inconsequence that he might have reserved for an electrician who had come to read the meter.

‘It’s Tom, isn’t it?’

‘It is. Any chance you could switch off the engine?’

Giles, polite and accommodating to a fault, switched it off.

‘And the headlights please.’

The headlights snuffed out.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked. If he was surprised to find Thomas Kell standing outside his house at ten o’clock on a Friday evening, he did not betray it.

‘Well.’ Where to begin? Kell looked up the lane towards the tree-shrouded light in CUCKOO’s room. ‘We’re running an operation in your house. Amelia is in there …’

‘I know Amelia is in there.’ Giles was looking ahead, through the windscreen. His Mercedes was mid-way through a three-point turn, facing the Hamilton house. ‘I wanted to surprise her. I was hoping we would spend the weekend together.’

Kell heard movement in a nearby tree, the clack of a bird. He could not work out what was more extraordinary: the idea that Giles still believed, after more than a decade of marriage, that Amelia would welcome a ‘surprise’ visit from her husband; or the fact that she had forgotten to tell Giles to stay away for the weekend.

‘I’m afraid that’s not going to happen,’ he said.

Again, Giles did not seem unduly perturbed. ‘Not going to happen,’ he repeated, as though in a kind of daze. Kell felt like a policeman redirecting traffic away from the scene of an accident.

‘Is there any chance you could go back to London tonight, turn around and head for home?’ he suggested.

‘Why? What’s going on in there?’

Kell feared a long, drawn-out conversation. It was an unseasonably mild night and he was wearing only a short-sleeved shirt. He was reluctant to invite Giles into the comfort of the Shand house, not least because all those computers, all those TV screens, might prove too much for him.

‘Is this about her son?’ Giles asked. He made a minute adjustment to his rear-view mirror, as though something might be coming up behind the car. ‘Has she got François in there?’

Kell was about to say: ‘In a manner of speaking’ but didn’t want to overplay his hand. He knew that Amelia had told Giles about Tunis, about Jean-Marc Daumal, but her husband had no idea that CUCKOO was an impostor. Knowing that Amelia’s husband was a stickler for protocol, Kell retreated behind the convenient screen of the Official Secrets Act.

‘Look, I’m afraid I can’t say anything at this time,’ he said. ‘Even with your clearance level, Giles, I’d be hauled over the coals if …’

He was interrupted by a sudden animation in Giles’s face. He was frowning like a bad actor as he said: ‘Weren’t you booted out?’

Kell felt a muscle twist in the base of his spine and stepped back from the car, standing up to free it. ‘Brought back in from the cold,’ he replied. He placed his hands on the roof of the car, which was already damp with dew. ‘Look. If it’s too far to drive, the Office can put you up in a hotel in Salisbury. I’m profoundly sorry. I can see that this is very inconvenient. Amelia should have let you know …’

A characteristic stillness returned to Giles’s features, the emotional reticence of a stalled and defeated man. ‘Yes,’ he replied quietly, still staring out of the windscreen. ‘Perhaps she should have.’

There was a silence to which Kell contributed only the scuffing of his feet on the damp ground and a quick tap-tap of his hands on the roof. He knew why Amelia had married Giles Levene — for his money, for his loyalty, for his relative lack of ambition, which would never be allowed to impede her own — but in this moment he felt that Giles had made a wretched choice in accommodating Amelia’s many faults. He would have been better off alone, as the dysfunctional bachelor he seemed so closely to resemble, or with a younger wife, who might at least have been able to provide him with children. Kell’s heart went out to Giles, but he wanted nothing more than for him to switch on the engine and to head back up the lane to the village. As if in answer to his prayers, Amelia’s husband conceded defeat and turned the key in the ignition.

‘It seems I have no choice,’ he said. ‘If you see Amelia, will you tell her I was here?’

‘Of course I will,’ Kell replied, and felt a strange and disconcerting kinship with his fellow cuckold. ‘Best if you avoid talking to her on the phone or by email this weekend.’ It was like seeing off a friend whom he had betrayed. Giles nodded, as though absorbing yet another disappointment in a long ritual of humiliations. ‘I’m sure Amelia will explain everything on Monday.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m sure she will.’