Mexico Set

23

The prospect of returning to Mexico – even without Dicky – was daunting. I wanted to stay here; to see more of the children, get a bellyful of home cooking and an earful of Mozart. Instead I was headed for a round of plastic hotels, 'international cuisine' and Muzak.

I got home before midnight, having spent a pleasant evening dining with George. He'd gone on about what he described as exactly the right car for me: 'Shabby appearance but a lot of poke under the bonnet.' Was that what George felt about me, or subconscious reflections upon his own shortcomings?

I couldn't go to bed until the duty messenger arrived with my airline tickets. Feeling sorry for myself, I wandered into the nursery and fingered Sally's 'Joke Book': 'How do you catch a monkey? – Hang upside-down in a tree and make a noise like a banana.' And in Billy's book of children's verse I found Kipling:

Five and twenty ponies,

Trotting through the dark -

Brandy for the Parson,

'Baccy for the Clerk;

Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,

Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

And I'd promised to get batteries for their radio-controlled racing car and try to mend Sally's Donald Duck alarm clock. I'd missed both their birthdays this year and now they were packed off to Tessa's cousin. I felt guilty about them, but I couldn't refuse to go back to Mexico. I needed the department's backing.

If I said goodbye to the department I had no qualifications that would get me a comparable pay packet elsewhere. The department wouldn't fix a job for me. On the contrary, there would be those who'd say my resignation showed I was implicated in Fiona's activities. That had been made clear enough at the meeting. There was no choice but to be an exemplary employee of the department, a reliable professional, who produced solid results while the others produced empty rhetoric. And if, as I did my job without fear or favour and cleared myself of suspicion, some of the department's more outstanding incompetents got trampled underfoot, that would suit me fine.

The doorbell rang. 11.45. My God, but they took their time. There had been no sound of a motorcycle, and that was unusual for deliveries at this time of night. Bearing in mind Werner's ominous warnings about KGB hit teams, I opened the door very cautiously and stood well back in the shadows.

'Good evening, Mr Samson. What's the matter?'

It was Gloria Kent. 'Nothing.'

'You were expecting a motorcycle messenger, were you?'

She was damned quick on the uptake. 'Yes, I was.'

'Can I come in for a moment? I'm on my way home from seeing my boyfriend.'

'You've missed your last train,' I said sourly. 'Yes, come in.'

She was wearing a fur hat and a tan suede coat, trimmed with brown leather. Its big fur collar was buttoned up to the gold-coloured scarf at her throat. The coat was cut to emphasize her hips, and the flare of its hem meant you couldn't miss the shiny leather boots. I noticed the McDouglas Paris label as I took the coat from her to hang up. It was lined with some expensive-looking fur. It wasn't a coat you could afford on the salary of a Grade 9 executive officer. I supposed those people in Epsom must have had very well-cared-for teeth.

She sat down without invitation. She had a small case with her and she kept this by her side. 'I wanted to say thank you,' she said.

'What for?'

'For not sending me back down to Registry. For letting me stay upstairs and help your secretary. I thought you'd be angry. I thought you'd get rid of me.'

'I wouldn't want you to suffer for my error of judgement,' I said.

She smiled. 'Could you spare a very small glass of that delicious brandy I had last time? Martell, I think it was.'

'Sure.' I poured small measures into two glasses and gave her one. 'Did you leave some bath oil here? Secret of Venus?'

'Oh, good. Did you find it?'

'My sister-in-law did.'

'Oh dear.' Gloria laughed and drank half of her brandy in one go, and then all but coughed. 'It's cold tonight,' she said. She put the glass down and got the case on to her knees. 'I wanted to tell you that I'm sorry about what happened. I felt the least I could do was to make up for the damage I did.' She opened the case. It contained men's undershirts and underpants, all new and in transparent wrappings.

I wasn't going to let her make a fool of me a second time. I wondered if some of the other girls in the office were in on the joke. 'It's not my size,' I snapped.

She looked dismayed. 'But it is. 'Marks and Spencer's; Cotton; Large.' I noticed when I was… when I was cutting them up. I'm terribly sorry about that, Mr Samson. It was a childish thing to do.'

'We were both childish,' I said. She didn't smile, but I was still uncertain about her.

'But I was the one who did the damage.'

'I've replaced them. I don't need them.'

'I thought about that. But Marks and Sparks are very good at changing things. They even let you have cash refunds…' She looked at my face as she took a large manilla envelope from the case. 'Your tickets for Mexico City are here, and there's three hundred pounds in traveller's cheques. The tickets and cheques are made out in the name of Samson but I could change them first thing in the morning if you are on some other passport. If you want to use them, the traveller's cheques should be signed right away; the cashier's office hates letting them go out of their hands blank like this. Your secretary wasn't sure about what name or passport you'd be using. She said you preferred to keep that sort of information to yourself.'

'Thanks, Gloria. Samson will be fine.'

'Will you let me put these things away for you?' she said. She got to her feet, gulped the rest of her brandy and made for the stairs. I was going to say no but she was already on her way.

I shrugged.

She'd been upstairs about five minutes when I heard a heavy thump that made me think she'd knocked over the bedside TV set. I hurried upstairs and went into the bedroom. It was dark, but by the light of the bedside lamp I could see Gloria's clothes and silk underwear trailed across the room. Gloria was on the far side of the bed. She was stark naked. She'd just finished righting the heavy chair she'd knocked on its side. Now she stood arms akimbo as if about to do her morning gymnastics. 'What the hell…?' I said. I switched on the other bedside light.

'It was the only way I could think of getting you up here,' she said. 'It would have been corny to call to you.'

'Cut it out, Gloria. You said you've just come from your boyfriend.' She had a magnificent figure, and I found it impossible not to stare at her.

'There's no boyfriend. I said that in case you had some woman here already.'

'What's the joke?'

'No joke. I want a second chance on what I declined the other day. I was thinking about it. I was silly.' She climbed into bed and pulled the duvet over her up to her neck. She shivered. 'Hey, this bed is freezing cold. Haven't you ever heard of electric blankets? Come and warm me up.'

I hesitated.

'No security risk, Bernard. I've been vetted and cleared for all categories of documents.' She smiled dreamily and shook her head so that her hair shone in the lamplight. 'Come along, action man. Office talk says you are impulsive and instinctive.' She must have seen something in my face, for she quickly added. 'No, no one at the office knows. Your secretary thinks I gave the tickets to the duty messenger. It's not a joke, I swear it.'

She was irresistible. She was so young and so earnest. I undressed. She said nothing but she watched me, smiling to share the absurdity of our folly. As I got into bed she stretched right over me to switch off the light. I wanted her; I grabbed her.

Afterwards, long afterwards, I found myself staring at the bedside table that stood at what had once been my wife's side of the bed. There was a glimmer of light coming from the hall. I could see a history book that Fiona had never read beyond page 30, a comb and a packet of aspirins. She always combed her hair as she got out of bed in the morning. It was almost a reflex action, done before she was fully awake.

'Don't go to sleep,' said Gloria.

'I've never been more awake.'

'Are you thinking about your wife… your children.'

'The children are away.'

'I know that, you fool. I know everything about you, now that I work with your secretary.'

'Have you been prying?' I said with pretended severity.

'Of course I have. It's what we do, isn't it?'

'Not to each other.'

'Sometimes to each other,' she corrected me.

'Yes, sometimes to each other,' I said.

'I wish you trusted me… really trusted me.'

'Why?'

'Because I love you,' she said.

'You don't love me. I'm old enough to be your father.'

'What's that got to do with love?'

'It could never come to anything; you and me… it could never come to anything serious, Gloria.'

'Do you hate that name – Gloria?'

'No, of course not.'

'Because you say it as if you hated it. My family call me Zu, its short for Zsuzsa.'

'Well, Zu, I don't hate the name Gloria…'

She laughed and hugged me, and bent her head to bite my shoulder in mock anger. Then suddenly she was serious and, stroking the blue-striped cotton duvet, she said, 'Have you been in this bed with other women? Since your wife left you, have you?'

I didn't answer.

'I didn't realize that. It was insensitive of me.'

'No, it's good. I can't stay celibate for the rest of my life.'

'You still love her?'

'I miss her. You live with someone, you have children and watch them grow up. You worry together, you share bad times… she's a part of my life.'

'Will she come back, do you think?'

'It's not something we should be discussing,' I said. 'There was an official reminder circulated in the office about her. My wife's disappearance is now covered by the Official Secrets Act.'

'I don't care about the office, Bernard. I care about you…' A long pause. 'And about me.'

'She won't come back. They never come back.'

'You're angry,' she said. 'You're not sad, you're angry. It's not the political betrayal, it's the personal betrayal that is making you so bitter.'

'Nonsense,' I said.

I could see clearly now as my eyes adjusted to the dim light from the hall. She propped herself up on her elbow to see my face better. The bed covering slid from her shoulders and the light traced the lines of her nakedness. 'It's not nonsense. Your wife didn't defect because she read Das Kapital. She must have worked on a one-to-one basis with a Soviet case officer. For years she did that. It was an assignment; a romance, a seduction. No matter how chaste the physical relationship between them, your wife was seduced.'

'It's a romantic idea, Zu, but that's not exactly the way these things work.'

'Women have personal relationships. They don't give loyalty to abstractions the way that men do.'

'You're letting your imagination run away with you because this particular Soviet agent is a woman. Most spies are men.'

'Most spies are homosexuals,' she said. And that stopped me short. So many of the ones placed in Western society were homosexuals – latent or active – and it is true that the KGB depended upon regular and frequent personal contact. Our people in the East could not move so easily, and personal contact was confined to emergencies.

'Homosexuals are the most socially mobile element in Western society,' I said glibly.

'Promiscuous, you mean. Cabinet Minister one night, laboratory technician the next. Is that what you mean?'

'That's what I mean.'

'I hope you don't think I'm promiscuous,' she said, moving from the general to the personal in that way that women so often do.

'Aren't you?' I said.

'Don't be beastly, darling.' She put her hand out and touched my face. 'What are you thinking about?'

I remembered what Stinnes had told the clumsy Pavel Moskvin in the empty Biedermann beach-house in Mexico. You rush in like a rapist when we are in the middle of a seduction, he said. On more than one occasion I'd spoken in the same terms. I'd warned Dicky that Stinnes was not being recruited, he was being enrolled. Recruiting is a seduction, I'd told him, but enrolment is a divorce. You recruit an agent by glamorizing that innocent's future. But an enemy agent like Stinnes is not susceptible to romance. You bring him over by promises of house, motor car and payments of alimony. 'Nothing,' I answered.

'You can be so distant,' she said suddenly. 'You make me feel as if I was no longer here. No longer necessary.'

'I'm sorry,' I said. I reached and pulled her close to me. Her body was cold as she snuggled against me, and I pulled the bedclothes up almost over our faces. She kissed me. 'You're here; you're necessary,' I said.

'I do love you, Bernard. I know you think I'm immature but I love you desperately.'

'I think you're very mature,' I said, caressing her.

'Oh, yes,' she said dreamily. And then, as the thought came to her, 'You won't hide me from your children, will you?'

'No, I won't.'

'Promise?'

'Of course.'

'I'm good with children.'

'You're good with grown-ups too,' I said.

'Oh, yes,' she said. She snuggled down in the bed and cuddled me. I stayed awake as long as I could. I was frightened of going to sleep in case I had another nightmare about MacKenzie and woke up screaming and bathed in sweat the way I had two or three times before. But eventually I dozed off. I didn't dream at all. Gloria was good for me.