‘You can take me home. I’m very tired...’
When the car had gone the silence returned and Kale moved his stiffening legs. He glanced upwards and saw a small face pressed against one of the lit windows on the first floor watching through the bars the lights of the car as it travelled back down the hill towards the housing estate below. Suddenly he felt the cold, felt a pain in his legs and the numbness of his fingers. He no longer stood apart from himself. The face at the window was only a shadow, a small head silhouetted against the light behind it. A small hand came up and pressed against the pane before sliding slowly, hopelessly, down to the sill. Kale knew with a frightening certainty that this was the child that had seen him in the house at the Rue de Pavie.
Still he did not move. Another figure appeared in the room. A nurse. She came to the window and the child turned and they both moved away from view. Several more minutes passed before the nurse reappeared at the window and drew the blind so that the light behind showed only around the edges. Then the light went out.
It may have been after midnight, he was uncertain, when the last lights went out and the house and its grounds lay in darkness. For the last hour his attention had been riveted to the child’s window. He had been surprised to see the blind rise slowly to reveal the paleness of her face in the light reflected from the snow below. For a moment she had vanished again and then returned with a chair to sit motionless, staring into the dark, her head pressed against the window. He had found himself thinking about her. Alone in the world without parents, without love, separated from others by something in her head, something that set her apart, condemned to exist in the loneliness of her own strange world. There was an affinity between them. Her life was no more, no less, than his had been, than his life was now. There would have been a saving of much pain if some stranger with a gun had brought an end to his life thirty years ago. No loss. No-one to suffer. But, he knew, he was only seeking some virtue in what was to be done. A justification. Such a bitter irony. He had never needed it before.
Now, with all the lights gone, he could no longer see her at the window. But she was still there, he knew. He moved his stiff limbs and felt for the gun in his pocket. The cold of the barrel burned his fingers. With a heavy resolution he began up the steps to the terrace. It was time.
Her skin was burning as though with a fever. Occasionally she moved her forehead on the glass so that it was cold again. She did not feel sleepy. She would wait at the window, she had decided, until Bannerman’s car returned. Maybe tomorrow, or the day after. She wanted to see the car come up the driveway. She wanted to see him standing in the snow. Perhaps he would glance up and see her at the window and wave. And perhaps she would smile and wave back. It might be difficult, but she wanted him to know. She wanted him to know all the things she couldn’t tell him. Why was she so drawn to the cold blue eyes? Maybe it was what she saw behind them.
The lights of the city twinkled and shone in the valley below in seemingly random patterns. He was out there somewhere. Doing what? Did he think about her as she thought about him? Of course not. Her reasoning was clear and sound. She constituted only a tiny fraction of his life, of his thoughts. It was only in the great void of her own existence that he was so important to her, filling the emptiness, bringing light into the darkness. There was no reason why he should think of her at all. And yet he had come here, and he had felt something for her, something that he too was unable to express. He would come again. Had he not told her he would?
The house had been in darkness for some time now. The others would be asleep. The doctors, the nurses, the other children who all seemed like mirror-images of herself. Prisoners within themselves, prisoners in this house whose windows were barred.
She gave a slight start as a door slammed somewhere in the depths of the house. Not everyone was asleep. A light came on downstairs, throwing a broad wedge of light out across the snow on the terrace. Something was moving down there, something dark and hunched that froze as it was caught in the sudden light. The shadow of a man fell away from the house, long and thin. A face turned up towards the window, sickly pale, almost whiter than the snow. The child did not move. The muscles and skin tightened across her face and throat. It was a face she knew, a face in which she saw fear, bitterness, anger. She saw the eyes clearly as they had met hers and recognized the same hunted look as she had seen in the Rue de Pavie. Then the light went out and she could no longer see him, but she knew he was still there. And she knew what he had come for.
III
The night was empty and yet still young. Bannerman had dropped Sally outside a block of tenement flats in an old part of town. She had not asked him up, returning alone to an empty flat. He sat for a few minutes in the car and watched her light go on three floors up. Her mood was so unpredictable. Someone must have hurt her very badly.
He remembered the girl from tele-ads, the night that he finally had taken her to bed. ‘Please don’t!... Will it hurt? Oh, please be gentle.’ He had been clumsy, inexperienced, and it had hurt so that she sobbed for nearly an hour afterwards, and he had been stricken by the blood that soaked the sheets. It was a moment spoiled by youth, by ignorance and fear. It was the final disillusionment of the angry years. Nothing in his life had been sacred since. It was a night when he should have grown up. But that was not to come for more than six weeks after, when she came to him one night after work and told him that she carried his child.
Even then he had not learned. It was ironic that it was she who would teach him, that it was she who had learned more quickly than he.
Bannerman lit a cigar and pulled the car away from the kerbside. A curtain on the third floor fluttered and a face appeared momentarily at the window. But he did not see it. He glanced at the time. It was not yet nine, and he recalled the crumpled card in his pocket and drew it out. He stopped the car under a lamp-post and held the card in the light. ‘Her Majesty’s Minister for Foreign Affairs extends an invitation... Nine p.m., Restaurant Noir in the Rue des Bouchers.’ He rummaged in the glove compartment and found an indexed street map. The Rue des Bouchers was only about a hundred metres from the Grande Place where he had sat that morning under the yellow awning enjoying the winter sunshine. He allowed himself a grim smile and slammed the glove compartment shut. It was about time he began stirring things up.
The Restaurant Noir was set back from the street. Thick red curtains hung on rings from a polished brass rail. The name was written in scroll, gold on black, above the window, and the menus were displayed in two glass-fronted cases ostentatiously mounted on elaborate imitation gas lamp standards on either side of the door. They were expensive menus. You did not eat here unless you had a fat wallet. Doubtless HMG could afford it. After all, it was in a good cause. Wasn’t it? What price the goodwill of the press? A commissionaire in maroon uniform and gold-braided cap held the door open for him and he stepped inside, his feet sinking into a thick red carpet.
The muted sound of voices, of knives and forks on plates, of bottles brushing the lips of glasses, came softly through from the dining-room. It was set behind stained glass scenes of mediaeval knights and gracious ladies mounted in a carved wooden framework. An arched doorway led through from the subdued light of the reception hall into the slightly less subdued light of the dining room. Another door opened into an adjoining bar where the voices were less muted.