interest for her. Her eyes and her mind and her memory continually returned to the Insight article. She could not bear to turn to page eighteen for a fuller account. There was sufficient on the front page — her father and Aubrey involved in some sordid sexual triangle in Berlin with the wife of a sought-after Nazi war criminal…?
Lurid, melodramatic — attested to by a former intelligence agent in Berlin, someone who knew the protagonists well. Now living in retirement on Guernsey, so the article claimed. Sexual jealousy, rage, quarrels, despair, hatred, violence.
She understood the emotions. Her own sexual experience confirmed that it was possible; emotions in riot and disorder, passion amounting almost to madness. Her father could have died in such circumstances. Aubrey could have had killed him over a woman. It was so much more convincing, so much more real than the world of callous treasons and betrayals, of politics and intelligence work and the Cold War. And it made more sense than person or persons unknown. The latter seemed like a senseless and more contemporary piece of violence such as the two and a half lines in the extreme left-hand column of the front page, accorded to an old woman's death at the hands of muggers.
Margaret's loss had begun in 1951, and she knew she had never recovered from it. It was as if she had contracted some childhood disease as an adult when the consequences were much more serious, even fatal. Her mother had deluded her for five years, and when the truth dawned and could no longer be avoided, her mother went slowly and utterly mad and killed herself. Margaret had found herself abandoned in a way she could not have imagined possible. Since that moment of the skull grinning from the newspaper, held in some German workman's hands, she had been completely and utterly alone. Rich eventually, by report beautiful, intelligent, possessed of energy and a capacity for work and enjoyment — but solitary, isolated, bereaved; alone.
Until Paul. Father-lover-husband Paul. Paul, in unholy, unforgiveable alliance with her father's murderer. After more than thirty years he had appeared and now had removed himself from her. For that, for the deception of hope followed by betrayal, she could never forgive him.
She let the paper fall to the carpet. She sniffed loudly, sitting erect — she remembered her mother doing the same, in the same stiffly defiant posture and now she realised that she, too, had been fending off painful realities. She would not cry again. She would, instead, finish her toast.
The Handel was solemn, like a pathway into grief, so she left her chair and switched it off. The transistor radio — which Paul never used to listen to music, always preferring his stereo equipment in the study — was on the dark Georgian oak sideboard. Apart from the small dining-table, it was the only piece of furniture in the alcove that constituted their breakfast area. The wood gleamed like satin, like a mirror. Her fingers touched it. It was carved, narrow-legged, three-drawered; a piece her father had acquired before the war. Almost everything — everything with any pride of place — had been collected by her father. She felt herself to be only another of his possessions, one of the prize pieces. Her father still owned her, even now, when she possessed his furniture and his money.
She returned to her chair. The toast broke and crumbled under the pressure of her knife. There was sticky marmalade on her fingers. Her eyes became wet—
The telephone rang.
She looked up from her plate, startled and almost as if rebuked for her poor table manners. She stood up and removed the extension receiver from the wall, flicking her hair away from her cheek before holding the telephone to her ear.
'Yes?' Only as she spoke did she realise it might be someone she did not wish to speak to, a friend appalled and considerate because of the article and whose sympathy was unwanted. Then she heard Paul's voice.
'Margaret — are you all right?' he asked breathlessly, as if she had been the one endangered.
'Paul—!' she blurted in reply. 'Are you all right?' The Valium headache tightened in her temples. She had taken the tablets in her misery, but in her fear, too. He had talked of danger—
'Yes, I'm all right. I'm in London, I must see you…'
Her exhalation of relief, the trembling of her body, the lump in her throat all transformed themselves, the instant after she knew he was alive and safe, into an angry echo of her recriminations. Paul was still Aubrey's ally.
'Have you given it up?' she demanded.
'What—? I haven't found out the truth, if that's what you mean. Darling, can I come and see you, talk to you?'
'No, Paul—'
'Margaret, I have to!'
'You're in London, you must have seen—?'
'I have seen. It's nonsense — utter nonsense.'
'It isn't!'
'You don't know Aubrey—!' Massinger protested. Stephens, the butler, opened the door, hesitated for an instant, then discreetly withdrew. Margaret could hear her own breathing, as well as the noise of a passing car. Then only the noise of the distance between herself and her husband. He was still speaking, still protesting Aubrey's innocence, but she could hear more clearly the whisper of the static and its measurement of distance. 'You don't know Aubrey, darling, or you'd never believe that nonsense.' There was a false, urgent attempt at jocularity; it was garish and ugly, like too much rouge on a wrinkled cheek. 'You can't take that seriously…' Then, 'Darling? Are you there?'
'Yes, I'm here,' she replied wearily, staring at the blank wall. 'You're safe, you say? You'll be safe now?'
'No,' he said softly.
'What do you mean?'
'What I mean. I'm in too deep now. Whether I like it or not, I'm in. I've aroused — interest.' He sounded grim. There was a tone she had not heard before in his voice; something that belonged to his past, to that world he had once shared with Aubrey — the great, stupid, heroic, filthy game of spying. He was demanding she take it seriously. To him, it was far more real than the idea that people could kill for love, out of sexual jealousy or desire.
'Oh, God…' It was expressed in a shuddering sigh, as a protest.
The grinning skull. In her world, people could die for the change in their handbags or for the desire they could not satisfy or have reciprocated; in Paul's world, people died because they intrigued, they turned over stones, they desired the truth. The skull; her father's grinning bones.
'Let me see you,' he pleaded.
'No!' She could not — yet she wanted him to be safe; above all, safe. 'You must talk to Andrew Babbington — you must! Tell him you're in danger — please talk to him!'
'I can't — Margaret, I simply can't talk to anyone about this.'
'Then leave me alone!' she wailed, thrusting the receiver away from her, clattering it onto its rest on the wall, leaning her head against it as her body slumped. The receiver joggled off and the telephone purred. Paul had evidently rung off. The tears coursed down her cheeks. She stared at her future mirrored on the blank wall of the alcove.
'I must ask you, Mr Hyde, if you have any suggestions as to how we are to capture your Colonel Petrunin?' Miandad's tone was reproving, even recriminatory.
'What the hell else could I do?' Hyde protested sullenly, I squatting on his haunches, his back pressed against the wall of the earthen-floored, chilly room. The pale blue of the sky was visible through the lattice-work of the broken roof. 'You know damn well he had me by the short and curlies.' Hyde stared into Miandad's face. It was evident that the Pakistani, too, was recollecting Mohammed Jan's words; his ultimatum. The Pathan chieftain had stood over them, tall in the firelight as their discussions ended, and he had spoken to Miandad in Pushtu. Hyde had recognised the trap in the Pathan's tone, even before Miandad translated.
'He will take you to the border, and across it. He will help you, show you where to find your Colonel Petrunin, and he will show you all the difficulties. In return for his help, you will guarantee to capture the Russian and to hand him over to the justice of Mohammed Jan and his tribe. This will pay for the deaths of his sons. It is the Pathan code of Pushtunwali, where the vendetta is the highest loyalty. Mohammed Jan asks you to choose — to go or to stay. Do you understand, Mr Hyde? Do you know what this means? If you want his help, you must promise him the capture of Petrunin.'
All the while, Mohammed Jan had stood over them, immobile as a carved figure, the long Lee Enfield rifle
