“But obviously not friends or other relatives?”
“Absolutely not. If you are successful after Sisby, and the panel decides to recommend you for employment, then we would have a conversation with your mother to let her know the situation.”
“What is Sisby?”
“The Civil Service Selection Board. Sisby, as we call it. If you are successful at this first interview stage, you will go on to do Sisby in due course. This involves two intensive days of intelligence tests, interviews, and written papers at a location in Whitehall, allowing us to establish if you are of a high enough intellectual standard for recruitment to SIS.”
The door opens without a knock and the same woman who brought in my tea, now cold and untouched on the table, walks in. She smiles apologetically in my direction, with a flushed, nervous glance at Lucas. He looks visibly annoyed.
“I do apologize, sir.” She is frightened of him. “This just came through for you, and I felt you should see it right away.”
She hands him a single sheet of fax paper. Lucas looks over at me quickly and proceeds to read it.
“Thank you.” The woman leaves and he turns to me. “I have a suggestion. If you have no further questions, I think we should finish here. Will that be all right?”
“Of course.”
There was something on the fax that necessitated this.
“You will obviously have to think things over. There are a lot of issues to consider when deciding to become an SIS officer. So let’s end this discussion now. I will be in touch with you by post in the next few days. We will let you know at that stage if we want to proceed with your application.”
“And if you do?”
“Then you will be invited back here for a second interview with one of my colleagues.”
As he stands up to leave, Lucas folds the piece of paper in two and slips it into the inside pocket of his jacket. Leaving the recruitment file on the table, he gestures with an extended right arm toward the door, which has been left ajar by the secretary. I walk out ahead of him and immediately begin to feel all the stiffness of formality falling away from me. It is a relief to leave the room.
The girl in the neat red suit is standing outside waiting, somehow prettier than she was at two o’clock. She looks at me, gauges my mood, and then sends out a warm broad smile that is full of friendship and understanding. She knows what I’ve just been through. I feel like asking her out for dinner.
“Ruth, will you show Mr. Milius to the door? I have some business to attend to.”
Lucas has barely emerged from his office: he is lingering in the doorway behind me, itching to get back inside.
“Of course,” she says.
So our separation is abrupt. A last glance into each other’s eyes, a grappled shake of the hand, a reiteration that he will be in touch. And then Philip Lucas vanishes back into his office, firmly closing the door.
3
At dawn, five days later, my first waking thought is of Kate, as though someone trips a switch behind my closed eyes and she blinks into the morning. It has been like this, on and off, for four months now. Sometimes, still caught in a half dream, I will reach for her as though she were actually beside me in bed. I try to smell her, try to gauge the pressure and softness of her kisses, the delicious sculpture of her spine. Then we lie together, whispering quietly, kissing. Just like old times.
Drawing the curtains, I see that the sky is white, a cloudy midsummer morning that will burn off at noon and break into a good blue day.
All that I have wanted is to tell Kate about SIS. At last something has gone right for me, something that she might be proud of. Someone has given me the chance to put my life together, to do something constructive with all these mind wanderings and ambition. Wasn’t that what she always wanted? Wasn’t she always complaining about how I wasted opportunities, how I was always waiting for something better to come along? Well, this is it.
But I know that it will not be possible. I have to let her go. Finding it so difficult to let her go.
I shower, dress, and take the tube to Edgware Road, but I am not the first at work. Coming down the narrow, sheltered mews, I see Anna up ahead, fighting vigorously with the lock on the garage door. A heavy bunch of keys drops from her right hand. She stands up to straighten her back and sees me in the distance, her expression one of unambiguous contempt. Not so much as a nod. I push a splay-fingered hand through my hair and say good morning.
“Hello,” she says archly, twisting the key in the lock.
She’s growing her hair. Long brown strands flecked with old highlights and trapped light.
“Why the fuck doesn’t Nik give me a key that fucking works?”
“Try mine.”
I steer my key in toward the garage door, a movement that causes Anna to pull her hand out of the way like a flick knife. Her keys fall onto the gray step and she says fuck again. Simultaneously, her bicycle, which has been resting against the wall beside us, topples to the ground. She walks over to pick it up as I unlock the door and go inside.
The air is wooden and musty. Anna comes through the door behind me with a squeezed smile. She is wearing a summer dress of pastel blue cotton dotted with pale yellow flowers. A thin layer of sweat glows on the freckled skin above her breasts, soft as moons. With my index finger I flick the switches one by one. The strip lights in the small office strobe.
There are five desks inside, all hooked up to phones. I weave through them to the far side of the garage, turning right into the kitchen. The kettle is already full and I press it, lifting two mugs from the drying rack. The toilet perches in the corner of the narrow room, topped by rolls of pink paper. Someone has left a half-finished cigarette on the tank that has stained the ceramic. The kettle’s scaly deposits crackle faintly as I open the door of the fridge.
Fresh milk? No.
When I come out of the kitchen Anna is already on the phone, talking softly to someone in the voice that she uses for boys. Perhaps she left him slumbering in her wide, low bed this morning, the smell of her sex on the pillow. She has opened up the wooden doors of the garage so that daylight has filled the room. I hear the kettle click. Anna catches me looking at her and swivels her chair so that she is facing out onto the mews. I light a cigarette, my last one, and wonder who he is.
“So,” she says to him, her voice a naughty grin, “what are you going to do today?” A pause. “Oh, Bill, you’re so lazy… ”
She likes his being lazy, she approves of it.
“Okay, that sounds good. Mmmm. I’ll be finished here at six, maybe earlier if Nik lets me go.”
She turns and sees that I am still watching her.
“Just Alec. Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.”
Her voice drops as she says this. He knows all about what happened between us. She must have told him everything.
“Well, they’ll be here in a minute. Okay. See you later. Bye.”
She turns back into the room and hangs up the phone.
“New boyfriend?”
“Sorry?” Standing up, she passes me on her way into the kitchen. I hear her open the door of the fridge, the minute electric buzz of its bright white light, the soft plastic suck of its closing.
“Nothing,” I say, raising my voice so that she can hear me. “I just said, is that your new boyfriend?”
“No, it was yours,” she says, coming out again. “I’m going to buy some milk.”
As she leaves, a telephone rings in the unhoovered office, but I let the answering machine pick it up. Anna’s
