Toward three in the afternoon, she saw a single figure strolling purposefully toward her from across the plain. Watching him as he approached, she saw that he was lean and tall, clad in a black raincoat and a hat. He had smooth easy movements and carried a walking stick, which he did not use.
She recognized his gait when he was a hundred yards from her. Peter Whiteside. Laura waited. Then a few minutes later, he was close enough so that she could see his face. Then his smile. Then his eyes. He wore the regimental tie that she recognized from her father.
"Laura… my dear Laura," he said. He embraced her as they met.
"I knew you would find me, Peter," she said.
"Find you? Find you? Of bloody course I'd find you. My top female dispatched to America. Gets married without my blessing. Mad at me still, I'd wager." His eyes shone.
"Peter, I-"
"Don't deny it. I can tell," he said, making light of it. "When a girl doesn't write back to me, I can take a hint as well as the next man."
"The flowers were lovely," she said. He looked blank for a moment and she added, "At the wedding. The roses."
"Oh, yes. Yes. The wedding. I'm so glad." He held out an arm, shifting a folded Telegraph to his other side. "Walk with me," he offered.
She took his arm and they proceeded. Laura noticed that Peter, like her father, had aged since she had last seen him. And she noticed too that the grass was still damp, despite the day's sun. A typical Londoner out for a hike: Peter had worn the wrong shoes.
They covered several hundred meters, moving in no particular direction at all, when Laura took the initiative. "I want you to tell me about my husband," she said.
A shrewd smile crept across Peter Whiteside's face. It merged with the lines near his mouth, nose, and eyes and for a split second gave him the appearance of an aging harlequin.
"You have it backward, Laura, dear," he said indulgently. "It is I who should be asking you about your husband."
"You had something against him," she said. "I could tell by your reaction. You kept asking for details. Every letter you wrote you wanted to know about him. I asked my father, too. When he returned to England after the wedding, you were all over him with questions."
"My, my," Peter continued. "I have raised a clever little girl as my spy."
Laura stopped walking, stopping Peter Whiteside with her.
"Peter, don't withhold information from me."
"Laura, it's you who have the information. I've never met your husband."
"I want to know why his family was on your list," she said.
Whiteside held her gaze with his.
"The Fowlers are a prominent family," Whiteside said. "That's all. Influential. That's what all the names on your list are. Influential American families. That's all you were reporting to me. Very simple, very white intelligence."
"Peter, you're lying to me." She felt his uneasiness.
"There's really nothing I can tell you, Laura."
"You didn't deny that you're lying to me," she said. "Is that because you don't wish to lie a second time?"
"Laura, there's nothing for me to say. Listen to me carefully. There's nothing I can say. I'm certain that you're a much better judge of Stephen Fowler than I. He's your husband."
"I want to know why his family was on your list," she said again.
"I'm sorry, Laura. I have nothing to tell you."
"You're such a bore, Peter," she snapped. "All right, then. I'm going back to America in a week. When I arrive I intend to tell my husband that British Secret Service was investigating his family."
She turned and felt his hand on her arm. It was very firm and very insistent, much stronger than she had imagined it could be.
"Laura, you'll do no such thing!" he said.
"And why not, Peter? You tell me! Why not?"
"You insist you don't know?" His anger rose to equal hers.
"I know nothing!"
"Very well, then," he snapped back, accepting her challenge. "The man you married happens to be an agent of the Soviet Union. Hence, the so-called humanist Christian ruminations which we've all been treated to in print. And hence, if you'll forgive my liberties, his secretive nature and his day-to-day ramblings from one American city to another."
For a moment entire new panoramas of deceit opened to Laura: her husband was a wealthy rebel who did nurture a suspiciously Marxist heart; he had traveled the world a bit in the years before she knew him and sometime must have turned his eyes eastward to the "Russian experiment." Her mind rambled: he had women, or worse, one woman, somewhere else, and them, or her, he truly loved; and there was no wonder that he did not sleep with her anymore-the passion had never really been there in the first place. His marriage, like everything else, was a deceit.
Then she rejected all of it. "That's the most monstrous lie I've ever heard in my life," she said.
"Think so?"
“Yes.”
"Then prove me wrong." He bit off the words. A cloud covered the sun and Peter Whiteside stolidly held forth on Salisbury Plain, quoting from memory his file on the Fowler family.
Stephen Fowler had been pink, Whiteside insisted, as long ago as his undergraduate days at Princeton. "It was during the Depression, don't forget," Whiteside said, "and that brought a lot of bright young men to some rather radical conclusions."
Capitalism had failed both the nation and the Fowler family, Whiteside clipped along, and young Stephen sought an explanation. A student of history and political science, he wished symmetry in his solution. Marxism offered it in generous doses. There was further the romanticism of the era as well as the intellectualism. Stephen obviously thrived upon both as an undergraduate of Princeton and a divinity student at Yale.
"He traveled abroad and would have you believe he was in England and France," Whiteside concluded. "Which he was, for a while. But we suspect he made the pilgrimage. The pilgrimage," Whiteside repeated for emphasis. "All the way to the Kremlin wall and mother Russia itself. At that time he offered his services to Stalin's government and the offer was accepted. What he's doing in America now, I don't know, Laura. Whether he's an active agent or simply a pulpit propaganda pusher is another question, too. I don't know. We don't know. I'd wager even money that the American authorities themselves haven't the faintest clue as to what Stephen Fowler is up to. And to some degree it might not even matter. It doesn't even mean the man is evil or even any more dishonest than the rest of us. God knows, if Hitler steps another inch in any direction, we'll all be praying for the blood-thirsty Bolshevik army to step in and pin down fifty panzer divisions along the Vistula. Stephen's your husband and I hope you're happy. But you wanted to know, Laura. So I've told you."
Peter Whiteside gently released her arm. He wore an expression that begged her forgiveness. Her own thoughts conflicted in more ways than they came together. And there was something very awkward and very terrible about the whole moment. For several seconds she lived and breathed in limbo. She was terribly shaken and knew it.
Yet, beneath this all, there was Stephen. Her Stephen. What right did these men like Peter, with the agencies of government behind them, have prying into the beliefs of a New Jersey minister?
“Do you have any proof as to what you’re saying, Peter?” she asked.
“Proof?” he repeated. “Sadly, no. Just theory, and we know an American fitting his description --
Laura rallied and interrupted. "I curse you and all those like you, Peter," she said in remarkably civil tones. "Whatever my husband believes, it is his right to believe it. He's done nothing to you or anyone else, has he?"
Whiteside answered softly. "Not that we know."
"Then stay away from him. Let him live his life. For all I know, people like you are the reason he has to behave as he does."
She turned to walk away from him, but his hand was on her arm again. "Just one condition, Laura," Peter Whiteside said.