Secret Asset

49

It was all very civilised. The Delft cups and the small Viennese biscuits on a china plate, the strong coffee, poured with a kind of Mittel European courtesy, and in the background classical music softly playing. It was so genteel that Liz wanted to scream.

Time seemed to have stood still, yet a furtive glance at the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece told Liz that she had been there precisely eleven minutes. Sipping her coffee, Margarita cocked an ear. “Oh dear, I forgot the radio. Do you mind the noise?”

“Not at all. It’s Bruckner, isn’t it?”

Margarita looked pleased. “You must like music,” she said. “Do you play?”

Liz gave a self-deprecating shrug. “Piano. I wasn’t very good.” She had passed Grade Eight and been competent enough, but since then she had lost the habit of playing. There was a piano at Bowerbridge, but even during her recent convalescence there, Liz had hardly touched the keys.

“We could talk all day about music, I suspect,” said Margarita, nursing her cup, “but that is not why you are here.”

“I’m afraid not.”

Margarita looked at her searchingly. “It’s Tom again, isn’t it? The young woman who came to see me before—she said it was just a formality. But it can’t be, can it? Not if you’ve come as well.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Is he in trouble?”

“Yes, I think he is. Have you heard from him?”

“No. I told the woman before I haven’t spoken to Tom since he went to Lahore. What has he done?”

“Disappeared, for one thing. We can’t find him anywhere. We think he may be helping some people. People who want to do harm.”

“What kind of harm?”

“That’s what we don’t know—and why we need to find him. I’ve been to his flat, but there weren’t many clues.”

“He didn’t like possessions. He called them clutter,” said Margarita with a hint of a smile. She pointed to the room around them, full of furniture and paintings and bibelots. “As you can see, we couldn’t have been more different.”

“Was that a problem?”

“No,” said Margarita a touch edgily. “We worked it out.” She smiled. “I was allowed certain areas for my things; others were strictly off-limits.”

“A negotiation?” asked Liz.

“Not really,” sighed Margarita. “More like capitulation on my part. It was usually that way. We got married here, for example, even though my parents were both alive and living in Israel. They wanted the wedding there. But Tom insisted.”

Margarita stood up and walked over to one of the side tables, covered in framed photographs. Most of them were of her family in Israel—one showed an older man in uniform, smiling as he squinted into the sun—but tucked further back was a picture in a silver frame which she handed to Liz. “I’m afraid this is my wedding album.”

The photograph had been taken in front of the Marylebone Register Office—which Liz recognised from newspaper photographs of celebrities. Tom and Margarita stood on the steps, arm in arm, facing the camera. What was immediately striking was the difference in their expressions: Margarita, stunning in a pale ivory silk jacket, beamed, her delight quite apparent; Tom, on the other hand, stood in a dark suit with a buttonhole carnation, staring emotionlessly at some point behind the camera. He looks like he’s just been sentenced to six months, thought Liz, handing back the photograph. “You look very happy,” she said diplomatically. “Who was best man?”

“He didn’t have one,” said Margarita, and the words spoke for themselves. She added dryly, “Our driver that day was the only witness. He took the photograph, too.”

“Weren’t your parents there?”

“No. Tom made it clear he didn’t want them. Naturally my mother was very upset.”

Margarita remained standing, and moved to the window where she stared out at the rooftops across the street. She wore a grey wool sweater which emphasised her full figure; she was tall, Liz realised, and must have caused quite a stir in the orchestra world. It’s not that she is no longer beautiful, thought Liz; it was rather that her beauty was now suffused by a haunting sadness.

“So Tom didn’t get on with your parents?”

“He only met them a few times, but it was all right. I’d worried, since he was an Arabist—I thought my father might think he was anti-Semitic. My father lost all his family in Poland, you know, during the War, so he was sensitive about such matters.”

“Was he right about Tom? Is he anti-Semitic?”

Margarita deliberated for a moment. “I have often thought about it. It’s certainly true that Tom had little time for Israel. He once told me the Balfour Declaration was the root of all modern evil. But I was sympathetic to the Palestinians myself—contrary to what you read, many Israelis are. So we did not really disagree about politics. That wasn’t the problem.”

“What was the problem?” Liz asked boldly. This was the tricky bit, the personal probing.

Margarita turned her head and stared at Liz, who suddenly worried she had pushed the woman too hard and too soon. But Margarita answered her question. “He never loved me,” she said without a trace of self-pity. Liz hated to think how much pain Margarita had suffered before she could speak so dispassionately.

“At the beginning he was charming. Relaxed, funny, irreverent. But I realise now that it was never really about me. Does that make sense?”

She looked so imploringly at Liz that she felt compelled to nod sympathetically. Liz had seen something of that mix of charm and ruthless self-absorption in Tom’s aborted overtures to her. Thank goodness I kept my distance, thought Liz.

Margarita said, struggling for control, “I thought for a while that he did love me.” She added ruefully, “Probably because I so much wanted him to. But he didn’t.”

She gestured at the wedding photograph on the table, and paused. Liz felt convinced that Margarita had never talked this way before, even to her most intimate friends, if she had any. She seemed too proud, too demure for self-revelation. Paradoxically, only the promptings of a stranger had unlocked the floodgates.

Margarita shook her head regretfully. “If you want to know what went wrong with our marriage, I have to say nothing really changed. I had thought, Well he is a bit of a cold fish, but he must care or why else would he want to marry me? But then it was as if he had chosen me, then decided to unchoose me. Like returning a dress that doesn’t fit to a shop.” With a strained voice, half raw from emotion, she said, “Love never entered into it.”

“Was there anyone he did love?”

“His father,” she said without hesitation. “I mean his real father of course. And that was only because he never really knew him.”

“Did Tom talk about his father?” The background music now was Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden,” the cello melancholic and slow.

“Almost never. And when he did, it wasn’t about his father so much, as the people who had ruined him. That was the word Tom always used—‘ruined.’”

“Who were these people?”

Margarita smiled bitterly. “You may well ask. I did, but he wouldn’t answer me.”

Liz said, “You know, at work Tom was very unemotional, very controlled. Most of us are like that—you have to be in our business. Emotion just gets in the way. But he must have felt strongly about something.”

“You mean other than his father?” said Margarita, turning her back to Liz and staring at the photograph on the table.

“I wasn’t thinking about what he loved so much as what he didn’t love. Did he get angry about anything?”

“He never showed anger,” said Margarita flatly, adding wistfully, “It would have been better if he had.”

Margarita sat down again. “He did hate school,” she said, “but doesn’t everybody?” She laughed lightly. “It seems a peculiarly English disease, this boarding-school business. And he was made to go to Oundle.”

“Oundle?”

“His stepfather’s old school. I know he resented that.”

Somehow Liz doubted Tom was planning to blow up the chapel at Oundle, wherever that might be. “I wonder—” she started to say but Margarita interrupted.

“The odd thing is that one would expect him to have loved Oxford.”

“Didn’t he?” asked Liz.

“Quite the contrary. I kept asking him to show me round. I’d have liked to see his old college with him, all his old haunts. But he refused. I had to go on my own.”

“Did he say why?”

“Not really. He was like that: he decided and that was that. He didn’t ever seem to feel the need to explain. I tried teasing him: I said, ‘What if our children want to go to university there?’ This was when I still thought we would have a family.”

“What did Tom say?”

“He said the Empire had been built on power and hypocrisy, and that Oxford still was. I thought he was joking. Then he said he’d sooner not have children than send them to Oxford.”

“Perhaps he was saying it for effect.”

Margarita looked intently at Liz, and Liz sensed she wanted their conversation to end. Perhaps she regretted her candour with Liz, and soon her openness might turn to post-confessional resentment. She spoke less gently now. “Tom didn’t say things for effect. He was very literal-minded—like an American. He could be very icy, even at the beginning. Towards the end he was like a freezer compartment.”

Liz decided she had got as much as she was likely to from the interview. It was time to go. “Thank you for the coffee and the chat,” she said, standing up. “It’s been very helpful.” As she moved towards the door, she stopped for a final question. “Tell me, if you had to guess where Tom had gone, where would it be?”

Margarita thought about this for a moment, then gave a weary shrug. “Who knows? He had no home of homes, not even in his heart. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

Had she learned anything about Tom? Liz wondered as she left the mansion block and walked towards the Tube at High Street Ken. The afternoon was turning sultry: a muggy, moist warmth hung in the air, like a stalking horse for thunderstorms.

In Liz’s experience, the people she pursued were often fuelled by motives which seemed to an observer almost paltry, even humdrum, compared with the extreme actions they prompted. Money, sex, drugs, a cause, even religion—how could they be justification for the violence to which they drove some people?

But with Tom she was facing something different. He seemed to be a man with no cause. A man who could not—did not—love anything or anyone. How else to explain an IRA recruit who seemed to have lost interest in Ireland? An IRA recruit enlisting British Muslims in Pakistan to commit who knows what atrocity against his own country? Tom seemed to possess a psychology that Liz had never encountered before.

What is this all about? thought Liz. She seemed to be pursuing an ice machine. But Tom must once have felt strong emotions. Why did he accept O’Phelan’s approach? Only the most fanatical believer in fighting for a united Ireland would have done so. But did he really feel that strongly? He wasn’t Irish.

As she brooded over everything she had learned about Tom, she kept returning to her question to Margarita. “Was there anyone he did love?” And the answer had been, “His father. I mean his real father of course.” But how could his love for his father, a disgraced hack who’d killed himself over thirty years before, be a motive now?

Suddenly Liz thought, I am only looking at this from one end. What if instead of loving, Tom hated, really hated—could that not be the motive for whatever he was doing?

Who had he blamed for his father’s downfall? She remembered the details from Peggy’s account. Unsurprisingly, Tom’s father had protested his innocence of the charges that he’d faked his story, those many years ago, claiming he’d been the victim of an elaborate sting. According to him, the mythical SAS man—source for his exposé—had been a plant, dangled like bait in front of his nose by… by whom?

The British of course, some unspecified cabal of the Army and the Secret Service, with the British Consulate in New York thrown in for good measure. Tom’s father had blamed his downfall on “the British.”

Liz stood stock-still on the pavement outside High Street Kensington Underground Station, as shoppers moved nimbly around her pensive figure. Was that the object of Tom’s animus then? The British—his own people? What had he said to Margarita—a country “built on power and hypocrisy”? And he’d been serious. Deadly serious.

How stupid I’ve been, thought Liz. She had persisted in trying to discover Tom’s attachments—hoping that would lead her to the place he would go to when all else had failed.

Don’t try and track him there, thought Liz—that way leads nowhere. There was only one trail to follow, she told herself. Follow the hate.