The dossiers got another momentary pat. ‘You were good: bloody good.’
Past tense, Charlie noted. ‘So?’
‘You’ve still got something to contribute. By teaching others.’
‘ Teaching!’
‘Not the manual stuff: there are staff colleges for that. Or your insubordination, either. There’s no place for that in the sort of service the Director-General and I envisage. I want you to teach selected officers what isn’t in the manuals…’ She allowed herself a smile: one tooth crossed slightly over the other in the front. ‘You’re so very proud of being a survivor. Instruct the new people how to survive, as you did for so long.’
Charlie was listening, of course – to every word – but his mind was way ahead of what she was saying. Over, he realized: his operational life was over, being ended right here with matter-of-fact efficiency by a woman who considered him an anachronism. A dinosaur. The hollowness was still there but different now: it was an empty helplessness, at having taken away from him something he never thought he’d lose. Charlie had never liked feeling helpless.
‘I’m not sure I’d be any good at it.’
‘You’ll have to learn,’ she said, impatiently.
‘I could decline?’ suggested Charlie, who never in his life had refused any assignment, because the job was not one in which a person could refuse.
She pushed the files to one side of the desk, with further impatience. ‘In which case you could be assigned to Records: see a lot of boxes and folders like these. Or Archives. Same job except that the boxes and folders are older. Or department or safe-house security, the sort of thing usually allocated to retired military personnel. You’ve probably met a few of them in the past.’
He had, Charlie remembered. Upright, polished-booted men in gate-houses or hallway cubby-holes, trying to imbue a meaningless existence with a sense of urgency, automatically calling everyone ‘sir’ and standing to attention. Charlie had actually thought of them as dinosaurs. ‘Or I could retire, if you’ve no further use for me.’
‘You haven’t been listening!’ she said, curtly. ‘I didn’t say we’ve no further use for you. The opposite. I said you still had something to contribute. You’re not eligible for retirement, which we wouldn’t accept in any case. I also said I want you in a position I can control. I’m not risking you as a wild card: offering yourself as some sort of commentator on intelligence on television or in newspapers, like all those supposed experts who emerge whenever espionage becomes newsworthy and don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.’
Charlie opened his mouth to argue her wild-card nonsense, but changed his mind because there wasn’t any point: she wasn’t going to be persuaded to any opinion other than her own. Instead he said: ‘I thought Henry Wilberforce got slavery abolished in the 1800s.’
Patricia Elder gave another of her heavy sighs. ‘I’ve told you what your new role is to be in this department.’
There was no point in arguing. He had to take it: give himself time to think. It didn’t necessarily have to be permanent: Director-Generals and deputies with new-born theories came and went, so there was always the chance of recovering. ‘Selected officers?’
She nodded. ‘On a one-to-one basis. They will have graduated from all the usual instructional courses: this is going to be something beyond the normal…’ There was another frigid smile. ‘You tell me how long it will take to pass on your particularly special expertise.’
He couldn’t teach instinct: how to know that something was wrong, without anything apart from a feeling on which to base that judgement. ‘It’ll depend, upon your selected officers.’
‘You’ll like your first apprentice. He’s good.’
‘I wouldn’t consider liking him!’ said Charlie, instantly.
‘That was thoughtless,’ she apologized at once. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’
‘I’ll operate from here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s hope it works,’ said Charlie, rising to leave.
‘It’s got to work,’ said the woman, as if she were affronted by the suggestion of failure. ‘And it was William.’
Charlie stopped at the door. ‘What?’
‘The Member of Parliament who campaigned against slavery in the 1800s. It was William Wilberforce. Not Henry.’
Charlie had been worried she wouldn’t respond. He smiled and said: ‘Well done.’ Her face tightened, in belated realization. Not much of a victory, decided Charlie. But something at least. He was a schoolmaster now: schoolmasters knew things like that.
At her control post at the apex of the triangle Julia Robb scarcely looked up as he left. Bugger you, too, thought Charlie.
Miller personally poured the tea, offering it across his desk to the woman. ‘How did it go?’
‘As I intended,’ she said, which was a slight exaggeration.
‘He’s got to do the job properly. Believe in its importance.’
Patricia Elder shook her head. ‘His feeling is against me. I’ve read everything that’s ever been written about the man. Know him. He’ll do the job, to the very best of his ability. And it’s a pretty damned good ability. He out-argued me, a couple of times.’
‘Everything set up with Gower?’
The woman nodded this time. ‘I’ve fixed the meeting.’
‘Let’s hope it works,’ said the Director.
Patricia Elder laughed, abruptly. ‘That’s what Charlie said. It was interesting, listening to him. His views about the future of intelligence are exactly the same as ours.’
‘I hope he doesn’t think we’re fools.’
‘Of course he does! How can he think otherwise?’ She paused. The conversation about Charlie Muffin was over. ‘Is Ann coming up from the country?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘So am I.’ Increasingly Patricia Elder was regretting the absolute commitment she’d made to their relationship, neglecting and finally abandoning other friends and acquaintances until Peter was the only person she had now. There was nothing she could do about it: nothing she wanted to do about it. He’d make the decision. She was sure he would. Dear God how much she wished he’d make it soon.
Five
John Gower bet himself she’d say something by the third crossroad and lost, because they’d gone through the frustration of hay-hauling tractors and school-pool Volvos and were five miles up the motorway towards London before Marcia finally spluttered and broke into laughter. ‘I just couldn’t believe it!’
‘She’s old-fashioned!’ Gower said, defensively. He didn’t really think of his mother as old-fashioned. Not old at all.
‘It was like something out of a Noel Coward play, creeping from bedroom to bedroom!’ Marcia protested.
‘I’m sorry.’
Marcia Leyton felt reassuringly for his hand. ‘I’m just playing with you! It was a wonderful weekend. And I like her…’ There was a pause. ‘Do you think she liked me?’
Gower accelerated past a crocodile of lorries and said: ‘I know she did.’ It had been the first time his mother had met Marcia: he wasn’t sure which of the three of them had been more anxious.
‘You don’t sound convinced,’ Marcia said, wanting more.
‘I am,’ said Gower, honestly. ‘She loved you.’ He coasted into the cruising lane, looking across at her. They had the sun-roof open: a stray flick of blonde hair had escaped from beneath her headscarf but was blowing backwards so she wasn’t bothering to restrain it. Her face, devoid of make-up, shone in the morning light: she wasn’t looking back but staring straight ahead, so that he could see her sharp, nose-tilted profile. He guessed many girls – probably all girls – with such perfect features would have intentionally sat as she was sitting now, displaying themselves for admiration. But not Marcia. She was the most exquisitely beautiful girl he had ever known, but someone completely and ingenuously unaware of it. He found it difficult to believe she loved him as much as she said she did; it was like stealing, taking something that didn’t belong to him by right.
His weekend for meeting her parents had been a month before, and much more difficult than the one just past, even though he and Marcia had not stayed in the family house because it had too few bedrooms: Marcia’s much younger, electronically crazed brother lived in one computer cave and her father’s bed-ridden sister was regally suspended in the other spare room in a miasma of disinfectant and lavender perfume. Marcia’s father, a retired bank inspector, had spent most of the time trying to initiate a debate about the intricacies of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and European monetary union. The mother had baked a cake with nuts in it and Gower didn’t like nuts. He was worried his ignorance of finance and small appetite at tea had been misunderstood as lack of interest.