Charity. Len Deighton
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house.’
‘Yes, of course. I’ll show you later, Bernard. You can sit in her if you want.’ He led the way through a doorway that had been cut through a side wall of the original house to gain direct entrance from the garage.
‘That frost last night,’ he said as he opened the door into his carpeted drawing-room. ‘I think it may have killed the eucalyptus trees. I’ll be shattered if they go – after all the love and labour and money I’ve spent on them.’
‘Where’s Mummy?’
‘I have a tree expert coming this afternoon. They say he’s the man Prince Charles uses.’
‘Where’s Mummy?’
‘She’s resting. She gets up in the small hours and does all that yoga malarkey. Huh! And then she wonders why she gets tired.’
‘She says it’s doing her good,’ said Fiona.
‘Six o’clock is far too early. She runs the bath and that wakes me up,’ said David, ‘and then I sometimes have trouble getting off to sleep again.’ He slapped his hands together. ‘Now for elevenses, or would you prefer a real drink?’
‘It’s too early for me,’ said Fiona, ‘but I’m sure you can persuade Bernard to join you.’
‘No,’ I said. It was a culture trap. England’s holy ritual, of halting everything to sit down and drink sweet milky tea at eleven o’clock in the morning, would be marred by a dissenter guzzling booze, or even coffee.
‘I’ll order tea then,’ said David, picking up a phone and pressing a button to connect him to one of his many servants. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked, and having elicited the name of a servant he instructed: ‘Tell cook: morning tea for three in the Persian room. My usual – toasted scones and all that. And take tea to Mrs Hutchinson: Earl Grey, no milk, no sugar. Ask her if she’s going to join us for lunch.’
‘How lovely to be home again,’ said Fiona. I know she only said it to appease her father, but it made me feel as if I’d never provided a proper home for her.
‘And you are not looking too well,’ her father told Fiona. Then realizing that such remarks can be interpreted as criticism added: ‘It’s that damned job of yours. Do you know what you could be earning in the City?’
‘I thought they were firing people by the hundred after the crash last year,’ she said.
‘I know people,’ said David, nodding significantly. ‘If you wanted a job in the City you’d be snapped up.’ He leaned towards her. ‘You should come to the health farm with us tomorrow. Five days of rest and exercise and light meals. It would make a new woman of you. And you would meet some very interesting people.’
‘I have too much urgent work to do,’ said Fiona.
‘Bring it with you; that’s what I do. I take a stack of work, and my tiny recording machine, and do it away from all the noise and commotion.’
‘I have a meeting in Rome.’
He shook his head. ‘The life you people lead. And who pays for it? The poor old taxpayer. Very well then, it’s your life.’
‘The children are still studying?’ Fiona asked him.
It was not just her way of changing the subject. She wanted me to hear the wonderful things her parents were doing for our children. On cue, her father described the highly paid tutors who came to the house to give my children additional lessons in mathematics and French grammar, so that they would do well in their exams, and be able to go to the sort of school that David went to.
When the tea-tray came, everything was placed on the table before Fiona. While she was pouring the tea David divested himself of his coveralls to reveal a canary-coloured cashmere sweater, beige corduroy trousers and tasselled loafers. He spread himself across a chintz-covered sofa and said: ‘Well, what have you done with poor little Kosinski?’
Since David was looking at me as he said it, I replied: ‘I haven’t seen him for ages.’
‘Come along! Come along!’ said David briskly. ‘You’ve locked him up somewhere and you’re giving him the third degree.’
‘Daddy. Please,’ said Fiona mildly while pouring my tea.
Pleased that his provocation had produced the expected note of exasperation from his daughter, he chuckled and said: ‘What are you squeezing out of the little bugger, huh? You can confide in me; I’m vetted.’
He wasn’t vetted, or in any way secure, and he was the last man I would entrust with a secret of any importance. So I smiled at him and told Fiona that I wanted just one sugar in my tea and yes, a toasted scone – no, no homemade strawberry jam – would be lovely and promised that it wouldn’t spoil my appetite for lunch.
‘I flew to Warsaw to see him,’ said David, flapping a monogrammed linen napkin and spreading it on his knee. ‘Just before Christmas; at five minutes’ notice. No end of bother getting a seat on the plane.’
‘Did you?’ I said, inserting a note of mild surprise in my answer, although I had been shown a surveillance photo of him and Kosinski there at that time.
‘He told me that Tessa was still alive.’
I watched Fiona’s reaction to this startling announcement; she just shook her head in denial and drank some tea.
‘It was a ruse,’ I explained. ‘He probably believed it but it was just a cruel attempt to exploit him.’
‘And exploit me,’ added David. He accepted a buttered scone from Fiona and nibbled at it as he thought about his visit to his son-in-law.
‘Yes, and to exploit you,’ I agreed, although it was hard to imagine how even the wily tricksters of the Polish security service would find ingenuity enough for that. ‘Now he is working for us. I don’t know any more than that.’
‘Don’t know or won’t tell?’
Fiona got to her feet, looked at the ceiling as she listened, and said: ‘I believe the French lesson is ending.’
‘Yes,’ agreed David, after punching the air in order to expose his gold wrist-watch to view and see the time. ‘She doesn’t give us a minute of extra time. The French are all like that, aren’t they?’
Reluctant to censure French venality in such general terms, Fiona said: ‘I’ll just go and say hello to her, and ask her how they are coming along.’ Clever Fiona; she knew how to escape. It must have been something she learned while working with the KGB. Or with Dicky Cruyer.
‘Fifteen pounds an hour she costs me,’ David confided to me. ‘And she has the nerve to add on travelling expenses from London. The trouble is I can’t get anyone from the village. You need the authentic seizième arrondissement accent, don’t you, huh?’
I drank my tea until, from somewhere upstairs, I heard Fiona trying out her Paris slang on the lady teacher. She hit the spot judging from the sudden burst of hearty feminine laughter that followed the next exchange.
I faced David and ate my scone, smiling between bites. We both sat there for a long time, silent and alone, like a washed-out picnic party, under dripping trees, waiting for the thunder to stop.
Having finished my scone before my host I got up and went to the window. David came and stood alongside me. We watched Fiona tramping across the snowy garden. The teacher was with her, and hand-in-hand with the children they inspected the snowman. The snow had retreated to make icy-edged white islands into which the children deliberately walked. Billy – coming up to his fourteenth birthday – considered himself far too old to be building snowmen. He had supervised the building of this one on the pretext that it was done solely to entertain some local infants who had been at the house for a tea party the previous afternoon. But I could tell from the way they were acting that both Billy and his younger sister Sally were proud of their elaborate snow sculpture.