Further along, then. At this rate he would soon reach the place where the actual meeting was scheduled. But that was not for another quarter of an hour (and of course they would be on time; although that was a purely academic virtue now).
It had been a cutting of some kind up which he had originally scrambled finally, and down which he had descended later, so far as he could remember; it might even be the same cutting. There had been a dead German in it, half-way up, on whom he had nearly trodden, and a row of dead Rangers at the top. He could have joined them that night, quite easily: it had happened to a good many of them that day, and probably more than half those who had survived had died in a thousand other ways in the thousands of days since then; he was really doing no more now than joining that majority, bowing to their vote.
dummy2
And here was that cutting, surely. But, most annoyingly, there was a young French couple tightly embracing each other at the head of it, the girl's long legs pale in the grass, the man's hand on her breast. That wouldn't suit his contact at all! But, then, that hardly mattered.
Rather than disturb the couple, even though the climb-down taxed his strength considerably, he negotiated the steep side of the cutting, until he came breathlessly to the bottom of it, close to the edge of the cliff again. Only when he reached it, he felt a stab of pain under his ribs as he saw the steepness of the other side, which he now had to ascend; and as he tried to catch his breath the thought came to him: Why not here, then?
Once again he explored the cliff-edge. There was, at last, a perfectly clean drop: the pebbles and boulders were perhaps fifty feet below him.
But was that enough?
He stared down, suddenly fascinated by what he had never seen in daylight, remembering the torchlight glimpses of wrecked equipment and dead men's boots protruding from under blankets on that same margin between the cliff and the sea.
Did he really want to die? It had seemed so easy and so logical, these past few days - why did it seem so difficult now?
He looked out towards the darkening horizon. He had done everything that they had asked of him, even down to that meeting with the Englishman. They would keep their promise now - of that he was sure. So why not -
He heard a shout behind him, and turned towards it in surprise.
The young Frenchman was running down the cutting towards him -
'M'sieur! M'sieur!'
The old man glimpsed the girl higher up, smoothing down her rumpled skirt as she looked around her. The skirt had a floral pattern, and she was wearing a white sleeveless blouse.
And she was dark-haired, and although he couldn't see her face clearly he was sure that she was pretty. And he was suddenly overwhelmingly glad that the young man was coming to rescue him.
He opened his mouth to say something, without quite knowing what he was going to say.
But the young man caught his arm fiercely before he could speak, and swung him round dummy2
so that he was facing the grey blankness of the sky. Then he had no more time at all as the young man broke his back expertly and propelled him outwards over the cliff.
1
Elizabeth examined herself dispassionately, first close-up in the large mirror over the washbasin, and then cap-a-pied in the full-length mirror on the wall to her left, beside the window.
As usual, the splendid view from the window diverted her attention away from herself. It was so much better than the forbiddingly administrative outlook from her own office, which was on what Paul referred to as 'the Lubianka side'. In fact, the ladies' room as a whole was better than her office, in view and size and furniture, as well as in the fragrant cleanliness which Mrs Harlin required. The very existence of such a palatial ladies' room, catering for the needs of only two ladies, had to have originated in some architectural accident or plumbing exigency. But it nevertheless also inhibited her from complaining about her own broom-cupboard office: no one could accuse a department with a ladies'
room like this of sexism.
She returned to the consideration of herself. No one, either, could quarrel with that hair or that figure, or the clothes. It was the face which was the problem.
The door opened behind her, and she caught a glimpse of Mrs Harlin's head and shoulders in the mirror before she turned.
'Oh - there you are, Miss Loftus!' Mrs Harlin always addressed her formally, even in the sanctuary of the ladies' room, as though they were on camera there too.
Elizabeth smiled gratefully, almost honestly, as to an important ally in the game of life.
'Oh, Mrs Harlin - ' she touched her hips lightly ' - is this really right for me? What do you think?'
The question sucked Mrs Harlin fully into the ladies' room, her duty momentarily forgotten. Instead, her official face became sisterly-motherly, as it always did on appeal. 'Is it washable?'
'So they say. But it was a tremendous bargain,' lied Elizabeth, sorting her real questions into the right order, but holding back from them.
'It's a beautiful dress - quite beautiful.' With her widow's pension as well as her salary, Mrs Harlin wasn't short of a buck (as Paul was wont to observe so coarsely), but she also had a dummy2
natural dress-sense almost as infallible as Madame Irene's. So what gave this ploy substance was that her advice was always genuinely worth having.
'But the colour, Mrs Harlin - this shade of green?' Elizabeth held steady. 'For me?'
'Oh… yes, Miss Loftus - ' Mrs Harlin's eye swept upwards inexorably ' - with your hair.
And that sculptured style is so becoming.'
She had almost managed to miss the face, thought Elizabeth, turning back to the mirror.
That face - that damned hereditary face, which had somehow contrived to jump back more than two centuries on the maternal side, skipping women who had usually been handsome and recently even beautiful, to reproduce exactly the features of the eighteenth-century Varney who had been an Admiral of the Blue in the West Indies and whose oil-painted features - brutal chin, buck-teeth and arrogant nose - no doubt off-put visitors to the National Portrait Gallery now as much as they had once done his crew, and probably his Franco-Spanish enemies too.
'Do you really think so?' Well, all that money and art could do - her money and the combined art and advice of Madame Irene and Monsieur Pierre - had been done, and would have to do.
She leaned forward, pretending to check her eye makeup ('The Eyes - they are Mademoiselle's best feature'). 'Is the Deputy-Director in yet, Mrs Harlin?' she inquired casually.
'Yes, Miss Loftus.' The nuance of disapproval was because of the eye make-up: Mrs Harlin was old-fashioned there. 'I was about to say - to remind you -that your appointment with him is due now, and that he's already asking for you.'
'Oh yes?' Elizabeth transferred her attention to her cheek-bones. The object of Madame Irene's strategy, so far as she could decipher from the euphemisms, was to draw attention away from Admiral Varney's salient features. Some hope! 'Is he?' She knew Latimer was in the building, having observed his well-scraped Vauxhall in the underground car park and squeezed her beloved Morgan in as far away as possible from the area in which he might manoeuvre it subsequently. But that hadn't been the car which really worried her, nevertheless. 'Is anyone else in?'
'Anyone else?' It wasn't quite an improper question, yet Mrs Harlin knew that Elizabeth's present assignment did not involve direct liaison with anyone else in Research and Development other than Chief Superintendent Andrew, who (as they both knew) was up on some embattled miners' picket line in Yorkshire until Saturday, pretending to throw rocks at his fascist colleagues. But when it came to business Mrs Harlin was properly close-mouthed.