The Dog Who Came In From The Cold

Chapter 3: A Middle-class Woman Comes to the Door

When William opened the door, it was to find a woman standing before him - an attractive woman in her forties, wearing a navy-blue trouser suit and, most significantly, a pair of elegant gold-rimmed glasses. He had seen her before somewhere - he was sure of it - but he could not place her now. Was she collecting for the lifeboats perhaps? Or for the Heart Foundation? Was she something to do with the Neighbourhood Watch? He tried hard to remember, but could not.

The woman smiled. “I'm sorry to disturb you,” she said. “I meant to phone you first, but I lost your number.”

So she knew him. “Not at all,” he reassured her, gesturing for her to enter. “This is quite convenient. I was doing nothing.” Actually, he thought, I was doing something. I was thinking about my life and how I need to meet a woman, and lo and behold … But that could not be said, of course; like most of our thoughts, William reflected, which can be thought but not said.

The visitor stretched out a hand. “Angelica Brockelbank.”

William shook her hand. It was soft to the touch. “Of course.” Angelica Brockelbank?

“Would you like tea?” he blurted out. Tea was so convenient. Not only was it an appropriate and immediate response to any crisis - 'Sit down and I'll put the kettle on' - but it was also a tool for social stalling. Tea would allow this encounter to proceed to the next stage, which William hoped would be the stage of discovering who Angelica Brockelbank was.

But then it came back. Angelica Brockelbank - of course! She had run the bookshop next to William's first wine shop in Notting Hill, a good fifteen years ago. They had seen a certain amount of one another and then, when William had moved to larger premises, they had lost touch. She had been beautiful then, but William had been married at the time - as had she - and had admired her from a respectable distance. He wondered now whether she was still married, and whether there might just be a chance … He hardly dared think about it.

“It's wonderful to see you again, Angelica,” he said with renewed confidence. “After all those years. How's the bookshop doing?”

Angelica, who had sensed that William was having trouble placing her, looked relieved. “That's very much in the past, I'm afraid. Actually, I closed it fairly soon after you moved. It didn't make much, you know, and I decided to get a job. Something with a salary.”

“Understandable,” said William. “Business is all very well, but …”

“Yes. A salary is a salary.”

He led her into the kitchen and filled the kettle with water. “And your husband?” He had only met her husband a few times and could not remember his name. Rick?

“Dick and I are divorced,” said Angelica. “Utterly amicably. And we're still very good friends.”

“It's so much better that way,” said William. “It's ghastly when people fight. And they so often do, don't they?”

Angelica nodded. “We just decided that we were friends but not lovers. It was as simple as that. He remarried - a German doctor, a radiologist, who's charming - and it's worked out very well for everybody.” She paused. “You would have thought that a radiologist would see through him, but there we are. And you? I was sorry to hear …”

“Yes,” said William. “It was very sudden. Poor Barb.”

He wondered how she had heard about it. He was not aware of their having any mutual friends, but London was a village in spite of its size - people could humanise even the largest of cities.

“And your son?” Angelica asked.

“Eddie.”

“Yes, of course.”

She waited for him to answer. “Eddie's fine,” he said. “He stayed here until about six months ago. He was one of those offspring who find the parental home so comfortable that they're disinclined to leave.”

Angelica nodded sympathetically. “I gather that it happens.”

“Eddie found somebody,” William went on. “A rather nice woman, in fact. They're together. She has a place in the Windward Islands and they spend half the year there.”

“What a dream,” said Angelica. “Six months in the Windward Islands. How very fortunate.”

William nodded. Eddie did not deserve his good fortune, he felt; if Fate was going to allocate either of them a place in the Windward Islands, surely it should be to him, rather than to Eddie? But he knew that this was not the way Fate operated; she handed out her benefits according to a scheme that was beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. Perhaps the Greeks, he decided, had a better understanding of the world in predicating the existence of entirely arbitrary, capricious gods; such gods would take no account of hard work or public service when allocating places in the Windward Islands.

William switched on the kettle and took two cups out of the cupboard above the sink. “And you?” he asked. “What are you up to these days?”

He hoped that the answer to the question might reveal the reason for this unexpected, though welcome, call. She could hardly just have dropped in, particularly after fifteen years; people rarely did that in London - not any more.

“I'm working for the government,” said Angelica. “After I closed the bookshop, I answered an advertisement in the papers. A job in information processing.”

William wondered what information processing was. The trouble with job descriptions like that was that they frequently disguised something much more mundane. There used to be clerks, until they were abolished and became … what had clerks become? Perhaps they had disappeared altogether.

“It was at GCHQ,” Angelica continued. “You must know the place.”

William did. Government Communications Headquarters was a vast building outside Cheltenham, a place that bristled with aerials, even if mainly metaphorical ones, and hummed with electronic activity. So information processing in ordinary English was eavesdropping.

“How interesting,” he said. “Monitoring radio traffic.”

Angelica smiled. “Yes. Or the equivalent. I hadn't intended to get into that line of things, but it was a regular job and I wanted to get out of London for a while. And I found I really enjoyed it.”

William agreed that it must be interesting. But what qualifications, he wondered, did Angelica have for the job? Or was a job at GCHQ like a place in the Windward Islands - allocated with no regard to desert?

“They took me because of my degree in Russian,” Angelica said. “I don't know if you were aware that I studied Russian at university.”

William was not.

“Well, I did,” said Angelica. “I went to St Andrews. Russian was quite a popular subject in those days. I didn't use it very much, of course - not when I was running the bookshop. But then it came in very handy when I went to GCHQ.”

“It would,” said William, picturing Angelica at a desk, in headphones, in front of a crystal radio, a frown of concentration on her brow.

“And then I was transferred,” Angelica continued. “Back to London. To MI6.”

William thought that he had misheard her. “MI6?”

“Yes,” said Angelica calmly. “Intelligence work. But of a different sort.”