‘It depends on the situation.’
‘I don’t expect that should put you off, if you’re a real journalist. Come up and see me tomorrow morning — but not too early — suite 104, the Gritti.’
Hawn glanced at Logan. ‘He’s not thinking of having me bumped off, is he?’
‘Well, not right away,’ Robak said. ‘Bad for public relations.’
Logan stood grinning between them, as Hawn and Anna shook hands; and again Hawn wondered where he had seen Robak before. The memory irked him like a piece of grit in his shoe.
He was still puzzling over it, as he followed Anna through the revolving doors, when he heard the pad of feet behind him, turned and saw Pol waddling towards him, his huge body balanced on tiny black-slippered feet.
‘Monsieur Hawn! I regret that I have not more time to talk with you. Because, you see, I, too, am interested in your theory — from a more impartial point of view, shall we say? I have a rather personal interest in the crimes of the Nazis. I will not detain you now, except to say that I also have my theories. May I suggest that you both join me for dinner tomorrow night — the Antico Martini, at 8.30?’
Hawn lay beside Anna under the single sheet, and in the cool darkness he could just distinguish her fine-boned profile against the spear of lantern-light through the curtains. Even after eighteen months it still puzzled him how a girl of such character, intelligence and obvious good looks could have progressed no further than the dingy catacombs of the London School of Economics, where she worked as a senior researcher.
They had met not there, but in the Public Record Office in Kew, where Hawn had been hacking assiduously at the deafening wall of silence surrounding the Rhodesian oil sanctions: while Anna had been delving into the industrial history of the Suffragette Movement. Hawn had followed his well-proven experience that libraries — along with art galleries — are the most propitious places for ensnaring the opposite sex. Soon he was meeting her for a regular drink in the local pub.
She was an earnest girl, quiet, undemanding; and while she was rarely high-spirited, he never found her dull. At first this had worried him: he suspected that it might be simply because he knew so little about her — that this air of secrecy might be lethally compounded by her subtle but firm refusal in those first weeks to go to bed with him. When she finally did, her attitude was equally puzzling: a mixture of gaucheness and carnal passion that both disturbed and stimulated him.
To his dismay, he became fascinated by her. For if he could find any real fault in her — and he had a cruel and practised eye where women were concerned — it was her complete self-possession, her lack of any need of protection.
She had moved into the roomy chaos of his flat off Notting Hill; and soon, without aggression or any trace of ulterior motive, had restored it to a place of order. She offered him stability and calm; she cooked superbly, and without complaint; entertained even his most abominable friends; and afterwards she was a luxurious, uncomplicated lover. Only two conditions did she extract from him: that he cut down his habitual drinking, and that he was faithful to her. To his surprise, Hawn found himself complying.
He could not remember exactly how or when the break, or suspension, of their relationship had come. He had been growing increasingly restless on his newspaper, where he had now risen to fill a senior desk job: he was no longer the brave trooper in the field, but the commanding officer at basecamp. He had asked for six months’ paid leave, and had been granted it, together with the option of a further six months, unpaid.
A respectable publisher had advanced him enough to carry him comfortably over this period; but a worm of puritanism had persuaded him to seek out the barren solitude of the Italian hills — to escape from his work, the clatter of typewriters, spiked stories, coming back in mid-afternoon over-fed, burping with too much Hock-and-Seltzer from the cavern of El Vino. And escape from Anna — from coming back too late from the office, to have his apologies shrugged off while she warmed up the evening’s dinner which they often ate in bed.
He looked at her now, at the innocent curve of her neck in the half-darkness. ‘Are you asleep, angel?’
‘No.’
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘You.’
‘Anything I should know?’
‘Nothing that’ll hurt you. You’ve lost weight. You look younger. How are the Medicis?’
‘Coming along, slowly. I’m going to have to get back to London soon — spend some time in the British Museum. I haven’t got enough reading material out in Tuscany, and my Italian’s not up to the local archives.’
‘Tom, stop fooling yourself. You’re not an academic. If you were, you’d have stayed on at Cambridge. You’ve got a good enough degree. But you wanted excitement — the dirt and adventure of Fleet Street and Algiers and Saigon. You’re an adventurer. Or you were.’
‘You make me sound as though I’ve just castrated myself. You want me to go back to Fleet Street?’
‘Only if you want to. But you said yourself what happens to old journalists — they don’t even fade away, they just finish writing up Wills and Weather, or drift into public relations — like that fool Logan, only he’s a full-blooded professional who actually enjoys it. You’re not that sort, Tom. What was it you once said to me? That the most exciting moments of your life have been to watch the wing of your plane dipping over a city at war? That’s what you
