'We've been over this before,' she said. 'Please, Richard! There's no need to rehash it...let's just say goodbye and have done with it. Would you take my bag out to the car, please?'
Blade, as near as he ever came to sulking, slid into a pair of trousers and, barefooted, his huge torso glinting in the moonlight, carried her bag out to the Minx.
Zoe was very deft about it. It was, Blade was to think later, almost as though she had rehearsed it.
She did not cling, nor did she give him an opportunity for further argument She kissed him lightly on the cheek, said 'Ta, darling,' in the south country style, legged it gracefully into the Minx, tugged down her brief skirt, and was gone.
Blade watched the red dot of the Minx's taillight vanishing down the lane. It swerved behind a yew hedge and was gone. He listened as the little car purred on, halted at the blacktop road, turned left and took off in a burst of speed. She would take the blacktop into Bridport and then hit the arterial road for London.
Ta, Zoe.
He went back into the cottage, tossed the trousers off to one side, and stretched out on the bed again. It was somehow too large now, and too empty. Her fragrance lingered in the room like a delicate ghost.
Blade lit a new cigarette and stared at the ceiling. After a moment he began to curse, softly, barely moving his lips, making a liturgy of it He ran the gamut and felt slightly better.
Couldn't be helped, he told himself. Absolutely nothing to be done about it A job was a job. Duty was duty. Both came before private indulgence, even in love.
There, of course, was the rub. Blade was an honest man and he had never been able to tell Zoe - what she most wanted to hear - that he loved her. That he wanted to marry her.
Toward the end she had been most brutally candid.
'You disappear for weeks, months on end, Richard, and there is never an explanation. You go without warning... you come back without warning. Suddenly you appear and I'm supposed to welcome you back and take up just where we left off. Just like that! It won't work, Richard. Not with me... not any more.'
It was useless to try to explain. Bound by his oath, and by the Official Secrets Act, Blade couldn't even explain that he couldn't explain. He took refuge in silence. And in cajolery - and in sex.
Even sex failed in the end.
'I'm a normal woman, Richard. I want to be married. I want a family and a home and reasonable security. Most of all I want to know where my husband is...at least most of the time. Even more important - I want to know that my husband is coming home. That I'll see him again. I don't know what you do, Richard, and I've never pried, but I doubt that you can truthfully reassure me about that - that you will be coming home! Whatever you do, I have the feeling that it is dangerous. More than a feeling, a certainty. Can you deny it?'
Blade couldn't.
'I love you with all my heart,' Zoe had said, 'but love isn't enough. Not for me. So after this weekend, Richard, I'm not going to see you again.'
And now the weekend had gone and so had Zoe.
Blade's mood was such that he was glad when the phone rang next morning and J, after the usual affable preliminaries, 'requested' his presence in London. Blade locked up the cottage, tossed his bags into the MG and took off with a roar, glad to be on the move.
J was waiting for him in the little office in Copra House, deep in the grimy environs of the City. Blade, much to his amazement, had found a parking place on Bart Lane and, after an hour with J, he and the older man drove to the Tower in the MG.
J did most of the talking during the drive, rattling on in the effete Establishment tones that concealed a shrewd brain. Blade was busy trying to digest all that he had heard just now. Operation X-Dimension had status, official status, and the fullest backing of the PM himself. Blade could not see that it changed matters very much - it was he, alone, who still had to go out there and face whatever must be faced. Alone.
'I'll look after your car, dear boy,' said J. 'Leighton doesn't know how long you'll be gone this time - or if he does know he won't tell me. In any case I'll take care of everything. You're not to worry.'
Blade gave him a sour smile. J was nervous. More so than Blade, by far, and talking nonsense to relieve his tension.
The procedure at the Tower was the same. Burly guards escorted them past the site of the old Water Gate and down many stairs to a large bronze-fronted elevator. There Blade and J said goodbye.
J patted his shoulder. 'See you soon, dear boy. I hope it's a ripping adventure this time.' The old man's false teeth glinted at Blade. 'But keep in mind that it's more than an adventure now - it's for England! Goodbye, Richard.'
Blade stepped into the elevator, the bronze door sighed shut behind him, and he fell away into the depths of the Tower. The car fell so fast that he felt a little sick. This labyrinth beneath the Tower was all new work. New and top, top secret. Blade himself had not known of it until a few months before.
Lord Leighton was waiting for him in the brilliantly lighted foyer. The little hunchback in the white smock smiled with tobacco stained teeth as Blade left the car. The elevator shot up again.
His Lordship shook Blade's big hand. He peered into Blade's face with small yellow eyes stained red from lack of sleep. 'I suppose J has told you of our new status?'
Blade said that J had told him.
Leighton nodded, then lurched away in his tortured, crablike walk. It seemed to Blade that the little cripple's hump was larger, but that was nonsense. He followed Leighton along the path he had walked twice before, through the computer room where the consoles clicked and hummed about their recondite affairs.
Leighton waved a claw-like hand at the computers. 'A million pounds!' He chuckled. 'That means all new equipment, Richard. These are already obsolete.'
