J made a more gracious exit. Even tried, in some measure, to explain Leighton's rudeness.
"He is very tired, sir. And he is in constant pain. He..."
The PM waved it away. "No matter. No matter at all. If I had his brain I daresay I would be insufferable. Just get on with it. Luck to you. But if this is a hoax, any sort of flummery, then God help us all. I am as committed as you are." He picked up the sheaf of papers from the table. "These go into the fire tonight, as soon as you leave."
As J was leaving the PM called after him. J turned.
"I should like," said the PM, "to meet this Richard Blade one day. When the time is right. He must be quite a man, this dimensional wanderer. Rather makes space walking seem like a Boy Scout Drill, doesn't it?"
J nodded and smiled. "It does, sir. And Richard is indeed quite a man. Good night, sir."
Richard Blade was, at the moment, a man who was losing his girl. They had just made love for the last time. To Blade, forewarned of the termination of the affair, the lovemaking had been especially bittersweet He did not want to lose Zoe. There was a distinct possibility that he was in love with Zoe. There was no doubt at all that Zoe was deeply in love with him.
Which was why she was leaving him.
They were in the cottage in Dorset, near the tiny village of Burton-Bradstock. The air was sweet with hawthorne and rose and wild thyme, somewhere a last sleepy cuckoo called, and the moon was a high silver scythe over an amethyst Channel. Blade lay on the wide bed, still rumpled from their lovemaking, and watched Zoe dress. She was determined to drive up to London tonight.
Blade wore only a pair of white shorts. His body, so recently drained, was at ease, if not his mind, and he looked like a huge brawny tanned cat against the white sheet. He was well over six feet and built in proportion, with an awesome symmetry about him, so perfectly in scale, that a stranger did not realize how massive the shoulders, how oaken the thighs, until a stranger had occasion to see, or to feel, Blade in action. Zoe, who was an amateur artist and something of a connoisseur of bodies, had painted him many times in the nude. They had done many things in the nude, he and Zoe, and now she was leaving him.
Blade did not doubt for an instant that she meant it. Zoe was like that. She meant things she said, especially things she said in the tone she had just used with him.
He watched idly as she pulled on long black stockings and gartered them high on her firm white thighs. Zoe had a milky skin that never tanned. She stayed out of the sun and in consequence was always a little like a glistening alabaster goddess. Blade wondered, not for the first time, if women - decent women like Zoe - understood the aphrodisiac effect of black on white. He supposed not. Women, he had read, did not respond to psychological stimuli as readily as men. With them it was more a matter of touch, of tactile stimulation. Blade sighed and dismissed the new urge that was rising in him. Zoe wasn't going to let him touch her. Not any more. Not ever again.
Zoe slipped a gossamer pair of panties up her long legs and over the white garter belt. She leaned forward - Blade was getting a double image in the mirror on the dressing table - to fit her small pointed breasts into the cups of her brassiere. Blade felt an almost physical pain. New desire, bound to be thwarted now, began to gnaw at him.
"Zoe."
She slipped a blue linen frock over her head and straightened it. She picked up a silver backed brush and began doing things to her hair. She was watching him in the mirror.
Blade reached for a pack of cigarettes on the bedside table. He lit one, expelled smoke, and said again: "Zoe."
She was doing her mouth with a brush. She never used a stick. Doing that red moist mouth that he had kissed so many times.
Zoe dabbed at her mouth with a tissue. "Yes, Dick?"
"You've really thought this out? You know what you're doing? You really want to leave me this way?"
Her smile was a phantom in the mirror. "Yes. Yes. And no. I have thought it out, I do know what I'm doing, and I do not want to leave you."
Blade frowned. "That's women's logic, which means no logic at all. You love me and you don't want to leave me. But you are going to leave me. That's more than a mere man like me can understand."
Zoe twisted her leg to contemplate her stocking. Her lovely mobile face, with the generous mouth and wide set eyes, was impassive. She kept her face averted because she did not want Blade to see the sheen of tears in her eyes. Ladies, and Zoe was most distinctly a lady, did not cry at moments like this.
"We've been over this before," she said. "Please, Richard! There's no need to rehash it...let's just say goodbye and have done with it. Would you take my bag out to the car, please?"
Blade, as near as he ever came to sulking, slid into a pair of trousers and, barefooted, his huge torso glinting in the moonlight, carried her bag out to the Minx.
Zoe was very deft about it. It was, Blade was to think later, almost as though she had rehearsed it.
She did not cling, nor did she give him an opportunity for further argument She kissed him lightly on the cheek, said "Ta, darling," in the south country style, legged it gracefully into the Minx, tugged down her brief skirt, and was gone.
Blade watched the red dot of the Minx's taillight vanishing down the lane. It swerved behind a yew hedge and was gone. He listened as the little car purred on, halted at the blacktop road, turned left and took off in a burst of speed. She would take the blacktop into Bridport and then hit the arterial road for London.
Ta, Zoe.
He went back into the cottage, tossed the trousers off to one side, and stretched out on the bed again. It was somehow too large now, and too empty. Her fragrance lingered in the room like a delicate ghost.
Blade lit a new cigarette and stared at the ceiling. After a moment he began to curse, softly, barely moving his lips, making a liturgy of it He ran the gamut and felt slightly better.
Couldn't be helped, he told himself. Absolutely nothing to be done about it A job was a job. Duty was duty. Both came before private indulgence, even in love.
There, of course, was the rub. Blade was an honest man and he had never been able to tell Zoe - what she most wanted to hear - that he loved her. That he wanted to marry her.
Toward the end she had been most brutally candid.
"You disappear for weeks, months on end, Richard, and there is never an explanation. You go without warning... you come back without warning. Suddenly you appear and I'm supposed to welcome you back and take up just where we left off. Just like that! It won't work, Richard. Not with me... not any more."
It was useless to try to explain. Bound by his oath, and by the Official Secrets Act, Blade couldn't even explain that he couldn't explain. He took refuge in silence. And in cajolery - and in sex.
Even sex failed in the end.
"I'm a normal woman, Richard. I want to be married. I want a family and a home and reasonable security. Most of all I want to know where my husband is...at least most of the time. Even more important - I want to know that my husband is coming home. That I'll see him again. I don't know what you do, Richard, and I've never pried, but I doubt that you can truthfully reassure me about that - that you will be coming home! Whatever you do, I have the feeling that it is dangerous. More than a feeling, a certainty. Can you deny it?"
Blade couldn't.
"I love you with all my heart," Zoe had said, "but love isn't enough. Not for me. So after this weekend, Richard, I'm not going to see you again."
And now the weekend had gone and so had Zoe.
Blade's mood was such that he was glad when the phone rang next morning and J, after the usual affable preliminaries, "requested" his presence in London. Blade locked up the cottage, tossed his bags into the MG and took off with a roar, glad to be on the move.
J was waiting for him in the little office in Copra House, deep in the grimy environs of the City. Blade, much to his amazement, had found a parking place on Bart Lane and, after an hour with J, he and the older man drove to the Tower in the MG.