Room. She had watched with pride as Mattie had gone forward to receive from his sovereign the medal of the Order of the British Empire. She thought it right, on this autumn morning, when the leaves cascaded across the road from the plane trees in the park, to wear the same clothes as on that day. Mattie would have approved, and he would have liked the way that she held herself.
She took her place a few yards from the doorway and there was a fine spit of rain at her back, and behind her the traffic streamed on Birdcage Walk. The girls were on either side of her. They were sentries positioned to protect their mother.
Not that Harriet Furniss was in need of protection. There would be no choke in her voice, no smear on her cheek.
She had been a Service wife, and now she was a Service widow. She understood very clearly what was expected of her.
She thought that the Director General had aged, that his retirement had not given him a new lease of life. His morning coat seemed too large and his throat had thinned.
'It was kind of you to come.'
It was he who had insisted on Mattie's immediate retirement.
'To pay my respects to a very gallant gentleman, Mrs Furniss.'
She knew that he had resigned from the Service on the day the report of the internal inquiry had reached Downing Street.
'You're looking well.'
'Good of you to say so… I've a little to occupy me…
I shall remember your husband with nothing but admiration.'
It gave her strength to see his fumbling walk towards the parade ground, the man who had sent her Mattie to his doom.
She had made it clear that she had wanted none of them to make the journey from London for the funeral. The funeral, three weeks earlier, had been family and in Bibury, she had insisted on that. Two hard years they had been, from the time that he had come home to her to the time of death and release from his personal agony. Two wretchedly hard years they had been as the will to survive had ebbed from Mattie. The new Director General stood in front of her. His face was a little puffed as though he ate too much too often at lunchtime.
'Most fittingly done, Mrs Furniss.'
'It was as Mattie would have wanted, I think.'
'We miss him very much at Century.'
'As he missed being there, desperately.'
'They still talk about his run, it was a magnificent memory for us all. He's not forgotten.'
'I expect that Iran Desk is substantially changed.'
'Well, yes, very changed. Now that we have the Embassy back in Tehran we are much more efficient.'
'I think Mattie understood.'
'Should you have any problem… well, you wouldn't hesitate, I hope.'
'Mattie would never have left us in difficulties.'
The new Director General nodded. She thought that she would have gone on the streets, put her daughters into a workshop, before she would have gone back to Century to plead hardship. All so different now. In the last months of his life Mattie had fumed at the exchange of diplomats, the reopening of relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran. They had angered him, insulted him. She had seen those wounds on his body, she had forced herself to look at them when he was bathing and pretended that she saw nothing, and she had raged in her mind each time she saw our people and their people shaking hands on the television screen. She had no line into Century for gossip because Flossie Duggan had gone the same week that her Mattie had been brought back to her, nor did she want a line. The wind caught at her hair and she pushed it decisively back. There was a surge of men past her, faces that she did not know. She imagined them to be from the Century desks, and from the administrative departments, and few caught her eye, most avoided her gaze. Henry Carter stood in front of her, and he held a trilby across his chest. It was Henry Carter who had come down to Bibury a week after he had first brought Mattie home and who had gone out into the garden with him to report that Charlie had been killed on the Iranian border. And Mattie had never spoken the name of Charlie Eshraq, would never even let the girls refer to him, from that day to the day of his slipping, passing, going.
'So good to see you, Henry. Are you still…?'
'Alas, Mrs Furniss, no longer. I have a part-time job with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the mail-order section. I get the tea towels out, and the nesting boxes.'
'Was anything achieved, Henry, that spring, by any of you?'
'Desperate question, Mrs Furniss. My opinion, it's better to believe that so much mayhem led to something positive, don't you think?'
And he was gone, before she could press him. He almost ran. They were almost all gone from the church now, and the music had stopped. There was a middle-aged man standing a few feet in front of her, making no move to come towards her. He wore an old raincoat that was too small for him and that was gathered in tight lines across his stomach, and the half moon of his hair blew untidily in the wind. He met her gaze, he stared back at her. He was an intruder, she was sure of that, but she could not place him. She straightened her back.
'Do I know you?'
'I'm Bill Parrish.'
'Have we met?'
'I came once to your house, bit more than two years ago.'
'You'll have to excuse me, I don't recall the occasion…'
'I'm fulfilling a promise to a friend, Mrs Furniss. He's abroad and can't be here. Me being here is closing a file, you might say that it's shutting up shop. A very nice service, Mrs Furniss.'
She watched them all go. The old Director General was waving down a taxi, flourishing his umbrella at the driver. The new Director General was climbing into the black limousine Henry Carter was arguing down the street with a traffic warden across the bonnet of an old car. Bill Parrish was striding purposefully towards Whitehall. She let the girls link their arms through her elbows. Had anything been at achieved? Was there something positive? She hated them all. every last one of them who were now hurrying away to escape from the contact with the life and death of Maine Furniss.
