The Envoy (9 page)

Kit stroked her hair and wiped away her tears. ‘Maybe, Jennie, maybe some day.’ If only, he thought, if only that were true. If Britain ever tried to become a neutral country Washington would sell off sterling and wreck the economy.

Jennifer finished drying her eyes and handed the handkerchief back to Kit. ‘I’m all right now. Sorry, I was silly.’

‘You’re not silly. But maybe we shouldn’t complain about US Foreign Policy. It’s the fucking family business. The company profits paid our school fees and bought your first party frock.’

Jennifer smiled. ‘I thought our money came from bootlegging and body snatching.’ The smile faded. ‘It’s so frustrating –
nothing
changes anything. If Brian’s project fails, the Americans will just move their own H-bombs into Britain. Won’t they?’

Kit didn’t answer. This outcome was precisely what Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers intended – and his job was to help bring it about. ‘I wish,’ said Kit in a half whisper, ‘that I could just run away.’

‘Why don’t you? How could I help?’

‘I haven’t said this to anyone. A few years ago I wanted to quit the service, but Dad convinced me to stay. He said that if all the sane sensible people left, the asylum would end up completely in the hands of the lunatics. I thought that he was exaggerating, but I now know there are people making nuclear policy this very day who in any other walk of life would end up heavily sedated on a high security ward swapping cigarette butts with lobotomised child murderers.’ The awful thing, thought Kit, was that his father had been right. He had to stay in government service: you could only change things – or make things
less bad
from inside. It was a bitter birthright. ‘You know what, Jennie, we pay the price for being different.’

‘Different from what?’

‘From other American families – those no-neck oafs who chase the dream from one coast to the other. The ones who just graze and get fat and have brats that graze and get even fatter. We’re not like that – we’re professional players.’

‘I don’t want to be.’

‘You can’t escape, Jennie, you’re chained to the gun carriage.’

‘That’s what Dad used to say every time we had to pack up and follow him to Manila or Panama or Guatemala.’ Jennifer paused.

‘You want something from me, Kit, what is it?’

‘I want you to spy on your husband.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Very.’

‘You really want me to spy on Brian?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re actually looking at me – the first time this evening.’

Kit knew what she meant. He was notorious for avoiding eye contact. He had been often told off for it during his training: they said it made an agent look shifty and furtive. He looked away again.

‘I can’t believe you’re serious. I couldn’t,’ she said, ‘do anything like that. You know so little about women. No wonder you don’t have a girlfriend.’

‘You think I don’t like girls.’ Kit reddened. He could tell that Jennifer was looking at him in a strange way. He felt her leg press against his under the table; she was teasing, taunting. Then her leg was gone: maybe it was an accident.

‘Have you ever recruited a woman spy before?’

‘No.’

‘That’s obvious. You need lessons. So let’s start again, why oh why would a happily married woman – very much in love with her husband …’

Kit tried not to flush. He wondered if she was trying to hurt him on purpose.

‘… why would such a woman be tempted to spy on her spouse?’

‘Because her husband is a scientist in charge of a nuclear research project that could result in the death of her own unborn child among millions of other victims – and cancers and genetic deformities for the lucky survivors.’ Kit looked at his cousin. ‘Sorry, Jennie, that sounds really corny.’

‘No, Kit, you sound sane.’ Jennifer leaned forward and touched her cousin’s hand. ‘Listen, I know how serious the situation is – but I just want peace – for myself.’

‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I was wrong for asking. Pretend it didn’t happen.’

‘Don’t apologise. I hate the thing on Orford Ness. I want it to go away – but I can’t betray my husband. Now I sound corny.’

‘Corny, but sincere.’ He paused. ‘Damn, I’d almost forgotten – I’ve got a present for you.’ Kit got up, returned with a package wrapped in brown paper and handed it to Jennifer. ‘I don’t think the bookseller in Charing Cross realised how valuable this is.’

Jennifer cut the string and folded back the paper. ‘
The Portrait of a Lady
.’ She leaned forward to kiss Kit. ‘You know this is my favourite novel.’

‘And a first edition too. The dealer had two of them – but I’m being selfish and keeping the other one for myself.’

Jennifer caressed the book and the leather binding. ‘It’s priceless.’

‘You know, Jennie, I was just thinking, these first editions are so rare, they would make ideal code books.’

‘Stop it, Kit. Can’t you just appreciate a rare book as a thing of beauty?’

‘Codes are beautiful too. When you worked in the cipher
section
, did you ever use the polyalphabetic tri-graph?’

‘Yes, but I can’t remember how they work?’

‘Dead simple – and the perfect code too, totally unbreakable if you haven’t got the decryption key.’

‘Are you still trying to recruit me?’

‘Not really, but I remember how much you liked cipher work.’

‘I always liked decoding – it cleared the brain. I can just about remember the polyalphabetic – you used it with one-time pads.’

‘That’s what you are
supposed
to use. The trouble with
one-time
pads is that they kind of give the game away. Ordinary Joes don’t walk around with flash paper pads containing randomly generated letters in groups of four. If the local ‘
policie
’ find one of those in your possession, it’s off to the torture chamber. Ergo, I prefer books – provided they have at least three hundred and sixty-six pages.’

‘One for each day of the year.’

‘You’d make an excellent spy.’

‘So page one is your encryption code for 1 January.’

‘No, that’s too obvious. It’s better to begin the year with a date that’s only known to the agent and his handler – say, when one of them lost his or her virginity.’

‘The date would only be secret if they lost their virginities with each other.’

Kit smiled. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. So, as far as we’re
concerned
, we’d better find another date. When’s the baby due?’

‘The beginning of September.’

‘Good, so page one of
The Portrait of a Lady
will be 1 September. But if we were encoding a message for today we would need to know how many days have passed since 1 September – our New Year’s, so to speak.’

Jennifer fetched a calendar from the dresser and counted. ‘Two hundred and three.’

‘Good, let’s go to page 203 and find our encryption key.’ Kit found the page and laughed. ‘How serendipitous.’

‘What does it say?’

‘“She would do the thing for him, and he would not have waited in vain.”’

Jennifer smiled. ‘Sometimes I think you’re the devil.’

‘No, but he pays my salary. Now, let’s say that one of the “jays” was caught in flagrante with the French
assistante
at St Ignatius School for Boys.’

‘Unlikely.’

‘True, but all the more reason to send a secret message to the Curia Generalizia. My job now is to encrypt the name of the unfortunate Fifi.’

‘Mademoiselle La Touche.’

‘That’s the one. To encode FIFI, I use the first four letters on our page of the day which are SHEW.’ Kit took a notebook and pencil from his coat pocket. ‘There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet, which means that F is five.’

‘You’re wrong, F is the sixth letter.’

‘No, my dear,
you
are wrong. You forgot that A is zero – so B is one and F ends up five. A lot of recruits make that mistake. At any rate, when you encrypt, you add the letters – S, eighteen plus F, five equals twenty-three and the twenty-third letter is X. Likewise, H plus I equals fifteen or P, E plus F becomes J – but after that we have a problem, W plus I comes out as thirty.’

‘And there isn’t a thirtieth letter of the alphabet.’

‘Which means you have to loop back to the beginning – A is twenty-six, B is twenty-seven, therefore thirty is E.’ Kit wrote down the figures to demonstrate the calculation.

Jennifer looked at the notebook. ‘The encrypted message you send me would be XPJE.’

‘Exactly.’

‘How do I decrypt to discover the name of the poor La Touche girl?’

‘You subtract the key – SHEW – from the encrypted message. In other words, X, twenty-three minus S, eighteen becomes five or F.’

Jennifer took the pencil. ‘But when E, four has W, twenty-two deducted you end up with minus eighteen.’

‘When you have a minus sum, you have to add twenty-six, thus minus eighteen becomes eight.’

‘And letter eight is I – and that makes FIFI! This is fun!’

‘Good. The beauty of the polyalphabetic cipher is that the encryption code changes every day.’

‘What happens when you run out of pages?’

‘We choose another book –
Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina
, say.’

‘I prefer Isabel Archer, she didn’t commit adultery.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘She wasn’t like that, Isabel was a good girl.’ Jennifer stroked the novel. ‘I do love this book.’ She opened it to the last page and read, ‘“She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path …”’ Jennifer looked up. ‘But the ending is left up in the air. The book doesn’t tell us where Isabel’s “straight path” is heading.’

‘I think I know.’

‘No, Kit, you don’t know.’

‘Let me help you clear things away.’

Just as Kit was about to go off to the guest bedroom, Jennifer said, ‘What do you want?’

He looked at her. She was facing him squarely. There was nothing coy or seductive in her stance: it was completely open and honest. Kit looked away; he was frightened. ‘I … I don’t know.’

‘I wish I could help you.’

Kit knew that he had said the wrong thing, that he had missed something and that it wasn’t going to come around again.

When Jennifer spoke again, her voice had changed. ‘I might send you a few messages just to see if the cipher works. At least, I can
play
at being your spy.’

When Kit woke he could hear Jennifer bustling about in the kitchen. He looked at his watch: it was just after six. He hoped it was like that when Brian was there too. He hated the thought of her lingering in bed to please him. Why, he thought, do men wake up with erections: the dawn hard-on? Were they visited by succubi and incubi who teased them in the dark watches of the night? As he dressed he tried to remember his dream: something about Jennifer’s oldest brother. Not just rescuing him and getting him to the airfield in time, but actually digging up the body and bringing it back to life. There were different versions of the dream before – but they always ended the same. The brother, Peter, always went floppy and dead again – like an inflatable dinghy with a bad leak – before he could get him back to Jennifer. If he could only get Peter home in time, Jennifer could pump him up again. Kit wondered if it had something to do with early morning erections. It all seemed Freudian as hell.

Kit washed, dressed and went to the kitchen. A big kettle was gurgling on the Rayburn and toast was browning under a gas grill. ‘I believe,’ said Jennifer, ‘that you’ve become a tea drinker.’

‘Yes, I’ve gone native. I go to soccer games too.’

‘Goodness, they might have to reclassify you as an indigenous personnel.’

‘We try to blend in with the locals.’

‘Whom do you support?’

‘I haven’t decided yet. I went to see Queen’s Park Rangers play Ipswich, and I much preferred Ipswich. Maybe I could watch them when I come up here. What about Brian?’

‘He’s a Manchester United fan – tribal loyalty.’

‘I can’t stand them.’

Jennifer poured the tea. ‘Isn’t it odd, a couple of Americans like us talking about English soccer teams?’

‘Proletarian sport is one of the nicest things about their
culture
. I could become obsessed by it.’

‘Kit, when you say things like that you sound an even worse snob than you are.’

‘I must change.’

‘Damn.’

‘What’s wrong, Jennie?’

‘No eggs.’

‘I don’t need an egg.’

‘But I insist. I won’t be long – the man at the end of the lane keeps hens. Five minutes.’

Before he could protest, Jennifer was gone. But as soon as she was out of the house, Kit was searching the marital bedroom. He checked all the drawers for documents, diaries or address books. Not a thing. He went to the wardrobe and searched the pockets of Brian’s suits and jackets, but there was nothing other than old ticket stubs and petrol receipts. He then began to check the chest of drawers where Jennifer kept her things. He opened the top drawer: it was where his cousin kept her stockings and
underwear
. He gently extracted articles of the most intimate lingerie and buried his face in the fine silk. He wanted to breathe the most private and secret essences of Jennifer into his lungs, but there was so little time.