Floris soaps and bath preparations he’d had freighted from London in the pouch to thank her for the Bolshoi but decided to invest earlier. Hopefully.
Ann wasn’t, in fact, a particularly good cook and she’d tried too hard, which made it worse. She hadn’t marinated the meat sufficiently and it had obviously been tough before she started and she added the cream to the stroganoff too soon and it was on the point of turning.
‘Fabulous!’ said Brinkman. ‘Next time show me how to do it!’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.
‘Would I lie?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Would you?’
He laughed. ‘If I had to. But here I don’t’
‘How often, elsewhere?’
‘All the time,’ he parried. She was in a funny mood and he wondered why. ‘How’s Eddie?’ he asked. It wasn’t too soon; it was an obvious question.
‘He called me today,’ she said, immediately brightening. ‘But it wasn’t a good line. He seems OK.’
‘How long’s he going to be away?’ That was another obvious question.
‘He’s not sure,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’
Big, thought Brinkman. Eddie Blair was on to something big. ‘Wouldn’t have thought he’d stay away for too long,’ coaxed Brinkman.
‘The embassy have been very good,’ she said. ‘I think he can have as long as he likes.’
What the hell did that mean? She’d have been given a cover story, of course. He’d already decided that. ‘Why didn’t you go with him?’ he tried.
Ann smiled at him, sadly. She was using him, she decided: so he deserved some sort of explanation. ‘I don’t think it would have been a very good idea for the wife of the second marriage to go back and get involved with the wife of the first, do you?’
Brinkman knew about the divorce, of course. They’d made no secret of it, during the increasing friendship, and he’d guessed it anyway because of the obvious age differences. It would have made an easy cover for Blair to get back to Langley. He said, ‘Battlefield, eh?’
‘Oh no,’ said Ann. ‘Ruth’s super.’
Brinkman thought that if the circles got much tighter he’d disappear up his own ass. ‘So why didn’t you go back with him?’ he persisted. In an effort to make it seem a casual remark he picked up the bottle, adding to her wine.
‘It just wouldn’t have been a good idea,’ she said positively.
Time to lean forward and time to lean back, he thought. So now it was time to lean back. Instead he said, ‘Even if Ruth’s super, it can’t have been easy.’
Important things – like wars and history changing events and the revelation of secrets that shouldn’t be revealed – never have important beginnings. When they are looked at and examined impartially, later, the trigger is invariably inconsequential, so inconsequential it’s difficult – sometimes impossible – to believe something so insignificant could cause such a reaction. Brinkman had been pressing, certainly, but it wasn’t a considered question; he was filling in, actually, keeping the talk on the same track while he tried to determine upon another route to take him to the destination he sought.
‘Christ, it hasn’t been bloody easy!’ erupted Ann and with the floodgates abruptly opened everything poured out. She told him about her first meeting with Blair in London, when he was attached to the Grosvenor Square embassy and she had been a junior research assistant at the Foreign Office, just six months down from Cambridge. How she’d liked Ruth and initially actually been amused at Blair’s Texas mannerisms – ‘all John Wayne and howdy’ – and how he’d been the only friendly face she’d known at another reception, British this time and without Ruth, within a month. How it had been a boring event she intended to leave early and when he said he was going, too, it had seemed a good idea to have another drink at a bar he knew just off Sloane Street, which was on her way home anyway. How that’s all it had been, a friendly drink but how he’d called her, to suggest lunch, and she’d agreed, curious and flattered – but positively not interested – even though she found him worldly and comfortable to be with. Funny, too. He’d always been very funny, in those days. The realisation came as she talked, more an internal reverie than a conversation: he wasn’t funny any more, not like he had been then, not like the time when he’d been telling stories so interesting and so amusing that she’d driven herself up rather than go to the bathroom when she should have done and he’d suddenly made her laugh so much that she couldn’t stop it happening and peed her pants. Brinkman sat unspeaking and receptive, like a fisherman who’d put himself in precisely the right spot on the running tide that would bring the fish in, trawling with a net so fine that not even a minnow would get through. He topped her glass again and Ann talked on. About the guilt of the affair and the decision to be honest and how Ruth had behaved -’super’ was a frequent word – and how guilt wasn’t easy to get used to, ever. Any more than Moscow was easy to get used to, ever. Brinkman had known about her irritations, because she’d hinted at them before and they were the sort of irritations that a lot of Western embassy staff had and he hadn’t considered them any more important than that, frustrated anecdotes of frustrated problems of frustrated people, the normal cocktail party conversation. At cocktail parties there was always exaggeration, no one willing to concede their disappointment was less than anyone else’s but as he listened Brinkman became aware that what Ann was saying wasn’t cocktail party – or dinner party – Smalltalk but something causing her genuine unhappiness. He let her purge herself, trying to see the catch as it went into the net, not sure he wasn’t wasting his time but conceding that fishing was a time-wasting exercise anyway. He tried throwing in a lure occasionally, but she didn’t bite.
‘It’s Moscow,’ she said. ‘I know it’s Moscow. Anywhere else wouldn’t have been so difficult.’
‘Doesn’t Eddie like it?’ said Brinkman, attempting a brighter bait.
‘It’s very important for him here: it’s his career. He’s very good at what he does.’
So what’s he doing now! thought Brinkman. ‘Maybe it’ll be better when he gets back,’ said Brinkman, more direct than he had so far been.
She frowned at him, confused. ‘Why should it be?’
Tangled in his own line Brinkman said, ‘I thought maybe he might have gone back to discuss what happens next.’
Ann’s frown stayed. ‘I told you, it’s a family thing.’
‘So you did,’ said Brinkman. ‘Wasn’t thinking.’
‘It would be wonderful, though, to know there was another posting,’ said Ann, retreating into the reverie.
‘Where would you like?’ said Brinkman.
‘Anywhere but here!’ she said, suddenly vehement. ‘If there were an embassy at the North Pole I’d happily swop it for here.’
Momentarily – but only just – putting aside his personal interest, Brinkman decided that Ann was one very unhappy lady. Because of their professional contact he supposed he was closer to Blair than to his wife and thought Blair might have mentioned it at some time, because they didn’t always talk shop. Maybe Blair didn’t know. Brinkman thought that unlikely: he was a perceptive guy. ‘It’s not that bad,’ he said.
‘Not for a man,’ she said, still intense. ‘Not for you. You’ve got something to do.’
Brinkman hadn’t thought about it until now but he conceded things couldn’t be all that good for her, stuck here with nothing to do. Maybe he was lucky, not being married. He said, ‘You won’t be here forever.’
‘That’s what I tell myelf every morning when I wake up and every night before I go to sleep.’
Was it Moscow? he wondered. Or had she made it Moscow, transferring the pain of other things and blaming a difficult city? What other things? He’d never been aware of any strain between her and Eddie and he’d been with them enough times to think he would have noticed, if there had been. Had he got it wrong then? Had Eddie genuinely gone back to Washington for something to do with his first wife? What was it she’d said? – I don’t think it would have been a very good idea for the wife of the second marriage to get involved with the wife of the first, do you? Something like that. Things like that had happened before. But she’d said something else. Ruth’s super . She wouldn’t have said that – certainly not in her present mood – if anything like that was happening. The circle was getting tighter and tighter, he thought. ‘What does Eddie say?’ he asked outright.
‘He’s busy,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t be right to bother him.’
‘You told me! ’ said Brinkman, throwing the inconsistency at her.
Ann looked at him in sudden surprise. ‘Yes, I did, didn’t I?’ she said. She actually blushed and Brinkman
