He was halfway through when he heard a loud voice beyond the door speak his name. He froze, one of the secret papers still in his hand.
‘Fitzgerald’s not in his office.’ It was the deep voice of his superior, Archie Hubbold. ‘I’ve come down to the Registry, you know my office phone isn’t working. I have mentioned it.’ David realized Hubbold was talking to the porter on the Registry telephone, speaking, as he always did to non-administrative staff, as though to a half-witted child. ‘Are you sure you saw him come in?’ He heard a couple of grunts and then, ‘All right. Goodbye.’ There were a few dreadful seconds of silence before he heard, faintly, Hubbold’s footsteps padding away.
There was a chair by the desk and David sat down. He forced himself to be calm. Hubbold occasionally came in to work at weekends, and the porter must have told him David was in. He must have gone to David’s office, then come down to the Registry to telephone.
He had to get back to his room fast; finding him absent, Hubbold would probably have left a note. He would have to tell him he had been in the toilet; Hubbold was too fastidious to look for someone in there. Moving as rapidly as he could, David replaced the remaining papers in the files. He always liked to double-check everything was in order but there wasn’t time now. He re-tagged the papers from the High Commissioners’ file and then, with a deep breath, unlocked the door, stepped out, and locked it again.
Back in the office, Hubbold had indeed left a note for him. Heard you were in. Could I have a final look at the HC file please. AH. David put the file back under his arm and hurried out, walking rapidly up the stairs to Hubbold’s office on the floor above.
Archie Hubbold was a short, stocky man with thinning white hair. Thick glasses magnified his eyes, making his expression unreadable. He and David had moved to the Political Division at the same time, three years ago. It had been a sideways move for David, though he was overdue for promotion. But David knew that although he was regarded as reliable and conscientious he was thought to lack the spike of ambition. Hubbold, though, had relished his promotion to Assistant Under-Secretary. He was vain, pompous and pernickety, but sharp and watchful, too. When policy issues were discussed, like many in the Service he enjoyed paradoxes, playing one view off against another.
David knocked on Hubbold’s door. A deep voice called, ‘Enter,’ and he forced himself to smile casually as he went in.
Hubbold waved his junior to a chair. ‘So you’re working overtime as well.’
‘Yes, Mr Hubbold. Just wanted to check all was well on the agenda. I got your note. Sorry, I was in the gents.’ David patted the file under his arm. ‘You wished to see this?’
Hubbold smiled generously. ‘If you’ve been checking it over, I’m sure it’ll be all right.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small silver box, tapping two little spots of brown powder onto the back of his hand. Many senior civil servants liked to cultivate some personal eccentricity, and Hubbold’s was that he took snuff, like an eighteenth-century gentleman. He sniffed quickly, then sighed with mild pleasure and looked at David. ‘You mustn’t make a habit of weekend work, Fitzgerald. What will your wife think of us, keeping your nose to the grindstone all the time?’
‘She doesn’t mind now and then.’ Hubbold had met Sarah at a couple of office social functions. He had been there with his own wife, a brash, tactless woman who had hogged the conversation, to her husband’s obvious annoyance.
‘Spending time together is de bene esse of a good marriage, you know.’ Hubbold, like so many in the Civil Service, loved peppering his conversation with Latin tags.
‘Yes, sir,’ David answered, an unintended coldness coming into his voice.
Hubbold said, in a more formal tone, ‘There’s a meeting we’ve been asked to arrange. A bit delicate. Some of the SS officials at the German embassy want to meet with appropriate staff from South Africa House, to look at whether aspects of apartheid might be useful in organizing the Russian population. I wonder if you could arrange that tomorrow. It’s just bilateral liaison, low-level at this stage. Keep it quiet, would you?’
David thought he saw a flicker of distaste cross Hubbold’s face when he mentioned the SS. But he had no idea where Hubbold stood politically, if anywhere; anybody politically suspect had been weeded out of the Civil Service years ago, along with the Jews. Civil servants had always discussed politics between themselves in a detached, superior way but these days they tended to avoid even the hint of commitment to anything at all unless speaking with friends they trusted.
‘I’ll speak to the South Africans tomorrow.’ He left, his hands shaking slightly as he walked down the corridor.
He arrived home just before six. Sarah was sitting knitting in front of the fire. He held out a large bunch of Michaelmas daisies he had bought from a stall on the way home. ‘Peace offering,’ he said. ‘For last Sunday. I was a pig.’
She got up and kissed him. ‘Thanks. Good afternoon’s tennis?’
‘Not bad. I left my kit to be washed there.’
‘How’s Geoff?’
‘All right.’
‘You look tired.’
‘Just the exercise. What was the film like?’
‘Very good.’
‘It’s getting foggy out.’ He hesitated. ‘How was Irene?’
‘She’s all right.’ Sarah smiled. ‘We saw some Jive Boys in Piccadilly, and that got her going a bit.’
‘I can imagine.’ The two of us speak so stiffly now, he thought. On an impulse, he said, ‘Look, why don’t we re-wallpaper those stairs?’
Her body seemed to relax with relief. ‘Oh, David, I wish we could.’
He hesitated, then said, ‘Somehow I’ve felt – if we did it then we might come to forget him.’
She came across and hugged him. ‘We won’t ever forget. You know that. Never.’
‘Perhaps everything’s forgotten, in time.’
‘No. Even if one day we managed to have another baby, we’d never forget Charlie.’
David said, ‘I wish I believed in God, could believe Charlie still existed, in some afterlife.’
‘I wish that too.’
‘But there’s only this life, isn’t there?’
‘Yes,’ she said. She smiled bravely. ‘Only one. And we have to do the best we can with it.’
Chapter Five
FRANK SAT LOOKING THROUGH the window at the grounds of the mental hospital, the sodden lawn and empty flowerbeds. It had been raining since early morning, hard and steady. The drug they gave him, the Largactil, made him feel calm and sleepy most of the time. In the Admissions Block he had been on a large dose, but after he was stabilized and had moved to a main ward, they reduced the dose and in his mind now the periods of dull calmness were sometimes broken by violent flashes of memory: the school; Mrs Baker and her spirit guide; how his hand had become crippled. He suspected he was getting used to the drug, lessening its effect, but he did not want to go back on a larger dose because he needed his mind to be clear enough to keep his secret.
He had come into a little side room off the main ward that Monday morning, the quiet room as it was called, partly because the other patients frightened him, and also to get away from the overwhelming smell of cigarettes. Frank had never smoked. At school he knew he couldn’t dare join the other boys smoking behind the boiler room; tobacco had passed him by like so much else. The patients were constantly wheedling the staff for tobacco, a Woodbine or just a dog-end. The hospital ceilings were all brown with it. He sat in an armchair, which, like all the hospital furniture, was huge, old and heavy. His right hand hurt, as it often did when it rained, pain coursing through the two damaged fingers, shrunken and claw-like.