The Long Room (19 page)

‘Mum,’ Helen had said, ‘it’s me. And everything is fine now, everything is fine. I’ll see you tomorrow. Jamie will drive up on Christmas Eve. Yes, I’ll take the train.’

Was that a break or a small sob he heard in Helen’s voice? No, she sounded happy. That man pulls the wool over her eyes time and time again; if ever he thinks that she may see him clearly, he clouds her vision anew, a hobgoblin painting the juice of magic herbs upon her sleeping eyelids to make her madly dote. Oh God, will the only way to end this be by slitting Greenwood’s throat?

When he had written his report, he put it in an envelope to give to Rollo later and then he asked Louise if he might claim his extra hour at lunch today. He told her that he had to be back by two o’clock, but, if licensed to leave a little early, would be able to do his Christmas shopping. She gave her permission and would have liked to hear where he was going and what was on his list but he pretended not to hear the enquiry implicit in what she said. Before he went out, having made sure that the people nearest him had their headphones on and could not overhear, he made a call to
VULCAN
’s doctor. The same obstructive receptionist who had spoken to
VULCAN
last week answered the telephone. Stephen told her he was a neighbour and concerned that the old man was seriously ill. Could the doctor please go round today?

‘We are very busy’, the woman said, ‘because it’s Christmas.’

‘I know that. But he’s on his own and very poorly.’

‘If it’s an emergency, you need to call an ambulance.’

‘It’s not that bad as yet but he does need to see a doctor. He needs medicine, I think.’

Reluctantly the receptionist agreed to put
VULCAN
on the
list. ‘What’s your name, please?’ she asked.

‘Michael Bennet-Gilmour,’ Stephen said on the spur of the moment, for no reason at all.

Outside, the day was strangely still and lightless. Stephen took the long way, through Shepherd Market and down Hertford Street toward the park, allowing himself more time for planning. He had no clear idea of what to look for when he got to the shop but if Helen did her shopping there, it must stock things she liked. In previous years he had not needed to give any thought to Christmas presents; he had always bought his mother a scarf from Marks and Spencer and, for whichever colleague he had happened to draw in the listeners’ lottery, a bottle of wine. This time he was going to be more imaginative. He pulled his overcoat tightly round him and clasped his arms against the cold. From the bare branches of a tree a flock of starlings flew and swirled like cinders in the milk-white sky.

Harvey Nichols loomed over the street with its curving corner like the prow of a ship. It was another world inside: thickly scented, busy, brightly lit and very hot; a bizarre cathedral. For a moment Stephen felt like a refugee inside it but he knew he did not look like one, in his gentleman’s coat and brightly polished shoes. He straightened his back. The entrance he had taken into the shop had led to counters piled with lipsticks and scent bottles; lights glinted off the glass, the varnishes, the colours, the painted ladies and their smiles. He inspected the rank of bottles closest to him; they were prettily shaped and bore intriguing names – Shalimar, Mitsouko, Vol de Nuit – and he considered buying one of them. He knew Helen’s scent – the scent of freshness, of rose petals after rain, of falling snow, and a deeper element within it, a trace of musk – like lost Titania’s
– but he did not know its name. He picked up a bottle and held it to his nose: the liquid inside smelled sweet and heavy, like violet creams; it would be quite wrong for Helen.

He wandered through the ground floor of the shop, past racks of scarves and leather gloves displayed on severed hands, bags and shoes and things to be worn in women’s hair, until he came to jewellery. She walks in beauty, like the night; she doth teach the torches to burn bright; fairer than the finest gold she needs no adorning. And yet, to see the look in her eyes, surprised by diamonds.

Diamonds at first appeared to be not at all expensive. Hoops of them on gilt and silver were hanging on a plastic tree beside a till. Seeing Stephen eyeing them, a shop assistant asked if she could help.

‘Are they real?’ he asked.

‘Yes, real diamanté. Four or five worn together look very elegant.’

Not quite sure, Stephen drifted towards a counter where the shiny things were in locked cases, and the price tags reversed so that he could not read them. Earrings, bracelets, chains of varying thicknesses and lengths; he had never looked at jewellery before. Most of it struck him as too glittery but there was one piece that stood out: a flower and crescent moon of gold and tiny pearls, with a diamond at its centre. ‘May I look at that one?’ he asked of a male assistant, who unlocked the case and reverentially plucked it out. ‘We also do the chains,’ he said. Stephen peered at the little label. It cost a lot of money.

‘For your wife, sir?’

Stephen imagined the pearls on Helen’s skin, nestling on her breastbone, and he answered: yes.

With the pendant and a fine gold chain wrapped and in his pocket, Stephen turned to finding a present for his mother. Did she actually own any jewellery other than the wedding ring and the watch she always wore? He couldn’t really remember. There was a little drawer in her dressing table in which she kept some beads and a pin or two but nothing of any value. What would she say if he were to give her real gold? That he shouldn’t have wasted his money on her, of course. Had it been sad to be a woman whom no man imagined wearing pearls against her skin? He returned to the girl with the diamonds and chose for Coralie a brooch in the shape of a flying swallow.

Now Christophine. Nothing on the ground floor of this shop was likely to meet Louise’s rules on budget but Stephen was enjoying himself and didn’t feel like going anywhere else. It was a real pleasure, this extravagance of love. He went back to the part of the shop where scarves were sold and spent time admiring the softness and the colours of them, running them through his fingers, finding for Christophine a square of silk in swirling peacock blues.

He had a little time to spare. On an impulse he took an escalator to the second floor. It delivered him into the midst of improbably miniature clothes, in white and blue and pink. There was a lacy cardigan with fasteners of ribbon on display. It looked too small for any human creature but the label on the hanger said that it would fit a child aged between 0 and 3 months. He supposed that Charlotte’s niece, being quite new and having been so ill, must be very tiny.

He walked the quick way back to the Institute, his shopping bag in hand, stoking the warmth in his heart to keep it going.
He would need it as insulation against Rollo. The prospect of the Cube was loathsome. Had Rollo said ‘conference’ or ‘meeting’? Conference possibly, but that would be of a piece with his usual self-importance. Stephen was also looking ahead with a certain amount of dread to the evening with Alberic. Why had he not made his excuses yesterday, in that awkward encounter in the Fox and Grapes? What had seemed last Friday like a generous burst of spontaneity now promised nothing but embarrassment. He hardly knew the man. What would they find to talk about for an entire evening? And anyway, where was he supposed to meet him? He was positive that Alberic had specified the Festival Hall but last night he had definitely said the Wigmore instead. Perhaps the man was mad. Shouldn’t he forget the whole absurd idea?

Rollo had brought a sandwich and a cup of coffee with him to the Cube, which reminded Stephen that he had eaten nothing since a slice of toast at breakfast. He was alone but said that his Director was planning to join them later. ‘We have concerns,’ he added.

Stephen gave him the envelope with the report from the weekend and watched him read. Rollo was good at staying expressionless, and he took his time. When he had finished, he breathed in deeply and breathed out. Then he studied Stephen closely. Stephen looked away, but spoke to break the tension. ‘Why does
PHOENIX
sometimes speak to his mother in Italian?’

‘Because she speaks it, I suppose. She’s from Argentina.’

‘Don’t they speak Spanish there?’

‘Yes, of course they do,’ Rollo said impatiently. ‘
PHOENIX
speaks that too. But evidently some people from Argentina
speak Italian. I don’t know why, I just know that they do. He has family connections there.’

‘Well that would explain his raven hair.’

‘What?’

Stephen realised his mistake at once. ‘Oh it’s nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s a quote. From Beckett, Samuel. I was only joking.’

‘Please don’t. We need to stay focused here. Let’s go through all this carefully again. The wife was absent from the flat for several hours, and during that time the subject only left it once?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you don’t know where he went?’

‘No.’

‘Where did she go?’

‘To church, I think, but I don’t know what she might have done afterwards; she wasn’t talking to the subject when she got back.’

‘Why not?’

‘They had a fight. It says there. They are always fighting. It is not a happy marriage.’

‘That is not my impression.’

‘Excuse me, but you don’t know what they are like when they are on their own. I see it all the time with married couples: one thing in public, quite another behind their own front doors.’

‘But they will be together at Christmas?’

‘For the barest minimum of time. He’s leaving as soon as he can, as it says there, at crack of dawn on Boxing Day.’

‘When the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even. It’s a quote.’

Rollo read the report to himself a second time and began to eat his sandwich. Ham and cheese. Stephen watched him as he
ate, his working jaw, his straight white teeth. ‘The Boxing Day meet,’ he said at last.

‘Absolutely,’ Stephen said.

‘That will be the twenty-seventh as a matter of fact – Monday. I may be there too, at Harcourt Mill.’

‘I don’t shoot myself,’ said Stephen.

‘Vienna?’

‘That sounded likely.’

‘May I listen to that call that you reported?’

‘Absolutely. Oh no, wait a moment, damn, I think I’ve already sent that one out for wiping and re-use. Well, I’m sure I have. I’m sorry.’

If he was irritated by the answer, Rollo Buckingham didn’t show it. ‘Vienna,’ he said again.

Stephen had known that mention of Vienna would ignite a reaction. Everybody knew that enemy operatives, banned from travelling freely outside London, preferred to meet their agents in the cities of nearby countries in which neither they nor the agent would be known to the local trackers. Paris, Brussels, Lyon, yes of course, but Vienna – convenient for Czechs, Yugoslavs, Hungarians and East Germans – was particularly favoured. ‘Will you be able to follow
PHOENIX
there?’ he said to Rollo.

‘I don’t know yet. There is something here that does not square with what I know from my other sources.’

Just as Stephen was opening his mouth to ask what sources Rollo meant, Binks pulled open the door. ‘Frightfully sorry to disturb, but Rollo, there’s a message from Sub-director Six for you. He’s frightfully sorry but his other meeting is overrunning. He’ll call you when he gets back and will fix a time for a conference
later on. But it could be a bit late. He is frightfully sorry.’

‘Thanks, Binks. We’ll be finished in a minute,’ Rollo said. ‘Stephen, when will you be able to finish Monday’s take?’

‘Now. I mean this afternoon.’

‘Good. Well then, we can fit in a meeting with the sub-director at close of play today.’

‘Actually, I can’t stay late today, it’s not possible. I have another engagement. I am meeting a friend, we are going to a concert and I’d have no way of letting him know if I was going to be late.’

Now Rollo does look irritated. His lips tighten into a straight line but ‘Tomorrow then,’ is all he says.

Tomorrow? But yesterday Jamie Greenwood drove his wife to Liverpool Street in time for the 9.47 train to Woodbridge. Afterwards, Stephen supposed, he went to work. The flat stayed empty through the day, bereft of Helen. A barren place, a cold expanse of nothingness, as is anywhere and any time without her. Not knowing when she will come home, how shall he survive this time, these hollow days of desolation? She leans her head against the grimy window of the train and, in the fields she travels through, the cattle and sheep, the stalks of corn, form a guard of honour and salute her. The winter trees bow their bare branches in homage to her beauty. The train takes her further and further away and, because she is not here, there is no purpose in today. Stephen listened to the tapes of Monday but he didn’t need to; he could have predicted that there would be nothing to report.
PHOENIX
came home late that night, alone. No one telephoned him and he did not say a word.

Coralie was at her kitchen table wrapping Mr Fisher’s gloves. She had decided on a green pair this year, to make a change from blue or brown. To wrap up a parcel nicely was not as easy as it had been when her knuckles were less swollen but she did like the finished effect. She had already wrapped the jumper she had bought for her son. That jumper had been in her chest of drawers for weeks, hiding beneath her own clothes – not that Stephen would ever have thought to look. Every morning, as she was rootling around for a vest or a petticoat, she gave it a little stroke. It was gorgeous. So soft, so luxurious. She had made a special journey by taxi and train to Oxford just to buy it. Since he had started that job in London, her son had become very fussy about clothes. It was funny, that. He had never shown any sign of caring how he looked when he was at school. Mind you, of course he wore a uniform all day. Coralie approved of uniforms; great levellers they were, apart from looking smart. Just look at any soldier, any FANY. Spencer had never seemed as handsome in civilian clothes as he had when he was in the Army. Anyway, that jumper was one she’d seen being modelled in a magazine, it was in a feature called ‘Get the
Brideshead
Look’, which had also helpfully listed stockists. Stephen had a look of that Sebastian, only not so blond or girlish. Nor as susceptible to dangerous temptations, she must hope. No, of course not, he was a sensible boy. But it was a bit of worry that he didn’t seem to have made many new friends in London. It never sounded very sociable, that office. Where else do you meet people except in the place you work? Well, he’d never been the sort of child who goes round in a great big happy gang; more of a loner, really, maybe a little shy, or maybe choosy. At school, though, there had been his good friend
Giles. She must remember to ask Stephen if he was planning to meet up with Giles during the festive season. Perhaps he’d care to come to tea? With a bit of notice, she could always rustle up some more mince pies. She’d like to see him again herself, now he’d got so famous. But just talk about girlish looks! Him in his tight white satin and his eyes made up like a geisha’s. Speaking for herself, she’d go for Jeremy Irons any day. Although he’d probably make even more of a fuss about his cufflinks than her Stephen. Do you suppose it might put the girls off, dressing like an old gent in wartime when today’s boys all went round in jeans? For her part, she really couldn’t be bothered about what to wear, as long as she was warm and decent. Life was far too short.