The Trinity Six

Chapter 22

Gaddis bumped into Josephine Warner in the car park. She was unlocking a black Volkswagen hatchback and putting a Waitrose carrier bag on the back seat. She might not have seen him if Gaddis hadn’t waved and shouted ‘Hi!’ across a line of parked cars. He was halfway through a cigarette, having abandoned yet another attempt to quit, and stubbed it out on the ground.

‘Hello. Doctor Gaddis, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ he said. He came towards her, looking at his watch. ‘You already going home?’

He privately hoped that she was. Peter still wasn’t answering his phone and he had given up on going to Winchester. He was at a loose end, feeling restless, and might invite her out to lunch.

‘Not home,’ she said. ‘Just popping to Richmond to pick up a colleague. I’m the new kid on the block, so they’ve got me running errands.’

She looked at him, a quiet appraisal, and Gaddis was certain that he detected the faintest trace of an invitation in her eyes. Then he thought of Holly and wondered why the hell he was succumbing to a car park flirtation with an archivist from Kew. No good was ever going to come of it.

‘Thanks again for the Will,’ he said, taking a step back.

‘Was it useful?’ Instinctively, she had moved forwards, following him. A wind kicked up, sharp and autumnal. Warner held loose strands of hair away from her face as she said: ‘I read your Bulgakov biography. Are you writing a new book?’

This took him by surprise. She had appeared indifferent earlier in the morning, showing no indication that she even knew who he was. ‘You did? Why? Were you stuck for something to read on the Trans-Siberian? Killing time in prison?’

She smiled and said that she had loved the book and Gaddis felt the awful, shallow thrill of a woman’s flattery. If he was honest with himself, within moments of seeing her at the reception desk he had wanted to pursue her, just as he and Natasha had pursued other lovers during their marriage. Why had they done it? Their behaviour had fractured the relationship irreparably. And yet he would happily go through the very same process again with this woman whom he did not know, jeopardizing something promising with Holly. Perhaps the distraction of an affair would take his mind off Crane and Neame. In which case — walk away. The book was far more important. But he found that he wanted to keep talking to her, to see where the conversation led them.

‘A boyfriend put me on to The Master and Margarita at Oxford,’ she said, stepping beyond the Volkswagen so that they were now no more than a metre apart. ‘In fact I think he plagiarized most of your book for his dissertation.’

‘There’s a good Russian department at Oxford,’ Gaddis said, noting the cool, gliding reference to a past lover. ‘I haven’t seen you here before.’

‘I just started. Part-time. Finished my PhD in June.’

‘And you couldn’t stand being away from archives and librarians?’

‘Something like that.’

What followed, in the next few minutes, was an exchange as commonplace as it was predictable. Gaddis said that he was heading back to Shepherd’s Bush and Josephine Warner, seizing on this, happened to mention that she lived ‘just around the corner’ in Chiswick. Gaddis then found a way of suggesting that they should get together for a drink one night and Warner enthusiastically agreed, supplying another inviting gaze as she offered her mobile number in exchange for his. It was a first dance, a step on the road to the possibility of seduction, with both parties playing their roles to practised perfection.

Gaddis gave it forty-eight hours before telephoning to arrange to meet for a drink. Josephine sounded pleased to hear from him and encouraged the idea of meeting up for dinner. He suggested a restaurant in Brackenbury Village and, three nights later, they were ensconced at a candlelit table, working their way through a bottle of Givry. He was surprised by the candour of their conversation, almost from its first moments.

‘Let’s just say that my love life is complicated,’ Josephine told him, before they had even ordered their food, and Gaddis had felt obliged to reveal that he, too, had been ‘seeing someone for the last month or so’. It was obvious to both parties that they were sizing one another up. Gaddis was not one of those people who believed that a platonic friendship between a man and a woman was impossible, but he was also realistic enough to know that he and Josephine hadn’t agreed to meet solely for the pleasure of discussing historical archives. She was continuously and discreetly flirtatious all night and he returned the compliment, trying as best he could to ease her towards a second date. As the meal progressed, he began to think that she was almost too good to be true: quick-witted, funny and sharp, and able to talk engagingly on seemingly any subject, from cricket to Tolstoy, from Seinfeld to Graham Greene. She was also astonishingly beautiful, but without an apparent trace of vanity or self-regard. Every now and again, as if sensing his attraction, Josephine found a way of reminding Gaddis that there was a more-or-less permanent boyfriend lurking in the background of her life, but these reminders served only to convince him that she was looking for a way out of the relationship.

‘He’s asked me to marry him twice,’ she said, spinning spaghetti on her fork.

‘And you keep saying no?’

‘I keep asking him to give me more time.’

She asked him why his own marriage had ended, which was a subject Gaddis had avoided with Holly for a considerable time, but there was something in Josephine’s open, trusting spirit which encouraged him towards full disclosure.

‘Neither of us was suited to it,’ he said. ‘Marriage put bars around us, restrictions which we weren’t prepared to respect.’

‘You were unfaithful?’

‘We were both unfaithful,’ he said, and was grateful when Josephine turned her attention to Min.

‘And you said that your daughter lives in Barcelona?’

‘Yes. With her mother. And a boyfriend that I do my best to…’

‘Torture?’

Gaddis smiled. ‘Tolerate.’

‘But it’s complicated?’

‘Past a certain point, everything becomes complicated, don’t you think?’

They ordered a second bottle of wine and Gaddis talked of his frustration at missing out on Min’s formative years. He said that he tried to go to Spain ‘at least once a month’, but that it was difficult for Min herself to come to London because she was still too young to fly unaccompanied by an adult. He revealed that, from time to time, he would discover one of her toys stuck behind the sofa, or a single pink sock hidden at the bottom of a laundry basket. He might have added that there had been nights when he had found himself curled up on Min’s bed in the house, sobbing into her pillow, but that was a revelation for a fifth or sixth date; there was no point in entirely dismantling the image he was trying to project of a robust and civilized man.

Pudding came and finally they talked about his research at Kew. It was, out of necessity, the only point in the evening when Gaddis lied outright, claiming that he was preparing a lecture on the activities of the NKVD during World War II. The truth about Edward Crane was a secret that he could share only with himself; it certainly could not be trusted to Josephine Warner. He mentioned the possibility that his research might take him to Berlin.

‘There’s a contact there who I’d like to talk to.’

‘Somebody who was working for the Russians during the war?’

‘Yes.’

Josephine straightened the napkin in her lap.

‘My sister lives in Berlin.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Moved there two years ago. I still haven’t been to visit.’

Looking up from his plate, with a mixture of surprise and delight, Gaddis realized that Josephine was presenting him with the opportunity to invite her to Germany.

‘Maybe I should look her up when I go over,’ he suggested.

‘She’s trouble,’ Josephine replied and Gaddis was sure that he caught a flash of jealousy in her eyes.

However, this proved to be the high tide of their flirtatious rapport. By eleven o’clock, Gaddis had paid the bill and they had walked north towards Goldhawk Road, where Josephine’s behaviour changed markedly. Within seconds she had flagged down a cab, aware perhaps that they were both a little drunk, both attracted to one another and, in different circumstances, might easily have succumbed to a late-night pavement clinch.

‘I had fun tonight,’ she said, ducking into the back seat after kissing Gaddis cursorily on the cheek.

‘I enjoyed it, too,’ he replied, surprised by how quickly Josephine had cut off the romantic possibilities of the evening. He concluded that she was returning to the ‘complicated’ love life that she had referred to at the beginning of dinner.

‘Got to be up at five,’ she explained and waved briefly through the rear window of the cab as it pulled away towards Chiswick. Gaddis had known dates like this before and wondered if he would see her again. She had promised to ‘dig up’ a photograph of Edward Crane at Kew, but they had crossed a professional and personal boundary tonight and he suspected that she would pass the job to a colleague, to avoid any unnecessary complications. Perhaps he was being unduly pessimistic, but there had been something in Josephine’s manner as they walked away from the restaurant which had seemed to shut down any possibility of a relationship. Throughout the meal, she had been unquestionably seductive, raising oblique prospects of further meetings — movies, lunches, even Berlin — but that playfulness had disappeared once he had paid the bill. It was a pity, because he liked her. Walking home through a criss-cross of dimly lit residential streets, he realized that it had been a long time since a woman had crept under his skin like Josephine Warner.