We pull up outside the Hilton on Connecticut Avenue.
‘Here,’ she says, leans towards me and stretches out her arm. For just a second I’m not sure what her intentions are, until she unclips the ID from my jacket pocket. ‘I’d better take that. I’ll pick you up at 6 p.m. tomorrow and we’ll go through some details.’
‘I’m seeing my kids in the morning,’ I tell her.
‘How do you get along with their mother?’
‘I don’t. She doesn’t exactly make it easy for me.’
‘Give her hell,’ she says with a grin.
It’s a brilliantly clear and cold morning, and the sky is a luminously bright blue. I haven’t had much sleep but force myself to run a few miles, dropping into Rock Creek Park to get off the streets. When I run in England, I see no one. Here there’s a steady stream of joggers and bikers in the latest running gear, and I feel distinctly shabby by comparison. Everything they wear is new. In my crumpled T-shirt and three-year-old trainers with holes beginning to show at the toes, I’m definitely not up to local standards. There are men dressed head-to-toe in body-hugging Lycra, women in pink tracksuits with their dogs, and octogenarians with miniature dumb-bells, which they lift as they trot along. Husband-and-wife teams tow their babies behind their bicycles in prams with suspension systems and disc brakes. I feel as though I’ve strayed into the recreation area of an insane asylum.
After a shower back at the hotel I pick up the phone with a familiar sense of dread and call my ex. The phone is answered by her new husband, to whom good luck. He’s civil and has the annoying habit of saying ‘Stand by’ when asking me to hold the line. I ask to speak to my older daughter.
‘Stand by,’ he says. He’s too stupid to realise I’ve been standing by for years. But it’s not my daughter who comes on the line.
‘Hello, Anthony,’ says my ex with scarcely disguised contempt. ‘You said you would call at ten.’
‘Sorry about that. I’m a bit jet-lagged, actually.’
‘Well that’s alright,’ she says. ‘We’re used to your excuses. But in future lateness is unacceptable. You may think you can swan in from England and expect everyone else to change their plans, but from now on you’re going to have to modify your behaviour.’
‘I just want to see the girls for a few hours,’ I say.
‘Well if you’re not here by eleven you won’t find us.’
The line goes dead. As much as I try, every time, to prepare myself for this kind of treatment, it never fails to have the intended effect.
Half an hour later I’m at the front door of their house in Chevy Chase, thanking God it’s Sunday and the traffic has allowed me to reach the house in time. I ask the taxi to wait because I don’t want to get into an argument, which I will inevitably lose. There’s a silver Mercedes SUV and a convertible BMW in the driveway beside the perfect lawn.
I kneel as the girls run out and throw themselves at me, nearly knocking me over. They’ve both grown since I saw them in the summer and I can hardly believe how changed they are. The sight of them brings a lump to my throat but I daren’t let my feelings show. I’m being watched from the doorway by their mother, who glowers at me as if there’s a tramp in the driveway.
‘Jesus. You look like you’ve been in a bar brawl. That’s not an appropriate impression to give in public.’
‘Yes, it does hurt, actually. Thanks for asking.’
‘Make sure you’re back by three. We’ve given up a family afternoon for this. And no sugar. They’re not allowed candy, whatever you may think is alright in England.’
There’s no response I can give to any of this, so we pile into the taxi.
‘Alright, girls, where to? We can go to China to see pandas, buffalo racing in India, or we can go to the North Pole and hunt reindeer. Or if you’re both very good, we can go and have waffles with maple syrup and loads of whipped cream.’
There’s a chorus of approving giggles at the suggestion. We head for a diner and repeat the usual ritual of waffles and hot chocolate. I watch them eat, and the sight fills me with joy. But the thought that they’re growing up so far from their father is like a knife in me at the same time. We catch up on news about the pond which we built together the previous summer. There’s now a family of newts, the tadpoles have turned into frogs, the goldfish are fattening up and there’s a big duck with a red beak from the farm across the road who comes and has a morning wash, but the last time he came the pond was frozen over so he slipped and fell on his duck bottom and couldn’t figure out what was happening. The goldfish, all of whose names they both remember, will be too fat to fit in the pond by the time I next come to America to see them, I say.
‘Did you catch the mouse?’ asks the younger. I’d forgotten about the mouse.
‘I caught him and put him in the garden,’ I say. ‘But he came back. He prefers his home behind the kitchen cupboards. But maybe we can catch him again when you next come to England and train him. Think mice can learn the violin?’ She giggles.
‘Mummy says you only come to America on business,’ says the older one.
This is crushing news because it’s so untrue. I’ve never been to America on business, with the exception of this trip, which is hardly business. I can’t bring myself to say their mother is lying to them.
‘Well, perhaps Mummy doesn’t know everything. I always come to America to see you both because I love you and I miss you. And, well… because you can’t get such amazing waffles in England.’
We walk south a few blocks, hand in hand, to the zoo, where we seek out the animals we know from the Just So Stories. They stand inches from an elephant, peer wide-eyed at the snakes in their glass enclosures and make faces at a white-cheeked gibbon.
The penguins steal the show.
It’s cold and we make for the diner for a top-up of hot chocolate. It’s only when we’re on the way home again that I realise one of the girls has lost a mitten. There’ll be hell to pay but there’s no time to retrace our steps. A renewed feeling of dread replaces that of joy as we return to the house.
‘Typical,’ snarls their mother from the far side of the front door. ‘I can’t leave them with you for a single afternoon without something going wrong.’ I do not know what drives this cruelty. I don’t contest it because the girls are looking up at me, wondering whether they should say goodbye, and their faces waver between smiles and expressions of concern.
‘By the way,’ says their mother, ‘there’s riding camp for two weeks in August. You can see them for the last week of the month and we can do make-up time the following summer.’
‘I only have three weeks with the girls this summer. It’s my only chance to have a proper holiday with them. I can’t fly them to England for just a week. I don’t think it’s a good idea.’
There’s a tightening of her jaw and a renewed look of contempt.
‘Fine. If that’s how selfish you want to be. I shouldn’t have expected anything different from you. We can make things difficult too.’
I have no reply to this, so I kiss the girls goodbye, and they step beyond the threshold under their mother’s arm and disappear. Then, as I’m walking back to the taxi, the door opens again and the two of them race out to me for a final hug.
There is a strategy, I’ve discovered, to manage the feeling of devastation I experience when I leave my kids. I put my mind on something different and force it to stay there until the feeling subsides. There’s a radiating sensation of grief in my chest which I know will pass if I let it run its course. I need in the meantime to get back to another world where my feelings cannot be allowed to run riot. As the taxi rolls back to the hotel past the manicured lawns of the perfect homes of Chevy Chase, I force myself to the meeting I’ll be having later with Grace. I wonder what level of clearance she’s been authorised to read me onto. I’ve had top secret clearance since Seethrough reinstated me with the Firm, but it doesn’t mean I’m automatically cleared for what the Americans call an SCI or sensitive compartmented information, or for SAPs – special access programmes, like the Predator missions, the very existence of which is classified.