"Don't seduce this one, will you, John?" the Master called from the fireplace. "It's so difficult to find a maid who's even half way competent, no matter what you pay them." He lowered himself into a stiff wing chair. "Have you met them yet?"
"No, but we're trying to arrange a little get-together. With somebody from Bonn as well."
"In the hope that they'll pay for it all."
"That's perhaps too much to hope for, Master. But West Germany has to accept that she is really a nuclear power already, with those thousands of tactical warheads stored on her soil and sheltering behind the American atomic sword ever since NATO began."
"You aren't proposing that the Germans get their own nuclear weapons, are you?"
"No, Master. Not this year."
The Master made a long reflective humming noise. The maid came back with a coffee tray, a decanter of port and a box of Jamaican cigars. They had been Havanas when the Master still smoked. She poured coffee for them both, then the Master waved her away with a hand that went on nodding like a forgotten metronome.
"You'll help yourself to anything you want, John? And you know where to find the whisky." He sipped plain black coffee. "It isn't being forbidden things that's really so bothersome, it's discovering that you don't want them any more. I'm not sure what would be a vice, at my age. I suppose if I were still a believer I'd have the consolations of blasphemy… Are you going to propose anything specific to our Parisian targeteers?"
"I have one or two ideas that we've been discussing in committee and with the chiefs of staff. Nothing I've published, but I've been thinking along these lines for some time now…" Tyler selected a cigar, the end was already cut. "The problem is to find something that the Russians will believe in. I don't think they're going to believe that we can inflict damage of quantity on them. We have to find a way to inflict damage of quality."
"Ce n'est pas la quantité qui compte, mais la qualité… It translates well." He hummed tunelessly for a time. "But you're getting into muddy waters, John."
"We're small fish now, Master. It's the pike who likes a clear stream."
The Master said nothing more, so Tyler went and poured himself a glass of port. Before he sat down again, he lifted one of the heavy green velvet curtains at the window. The sky had cleared to a hard star-sparkled black, as clear as the desert night in the old days… Below, the small court was filled with rich deep snow under the blue lamplight. Just a single track of footprints went diagonally across it, and he felt a shiver of fear, but then decided it must be some young don exercising his new rights to get his feet wet across the lawn. He let the curtain fall again.
"It's going to be a cold night, Master."
"I'm sure you're right. And none of this has gone before the Cabinet, I assume?"
"I don't think targetting policy has ever been a Cabinet affair. But it's been raised at the Cabinet committee on defence, so I understand."
"Where you don't get any missionaries from Education or Social Services." He put his coffee cup down very carefully. "And you say it's fifteen years."
"What was, Master?"
"Since the French formed their first nuclear strike force."
"More than that."
"Nothing happens and yet it all goes by so quickly. When I was up as an undergraduate, in a single term you could fall in and out of love, discover a new poet and change your political views completely… all in eight weeks… John, I suppose you want me to keep this to myself?"
"We'd prefer the meeting not to be mentioned, but if we do get a targetting policy, we'll have to let it get out for it to have any deterrent effect."
"So I'm just a leaky old pump that you're priming." The great body quivered with his own joke. "Take some more coffee, John. What do they say is behind this business of that Czech girl defector?"
On the south coast, the snow lay thinner and patchier, but the wind came off the grey sea like a frozen scythe. Maxim and Chris tramped the pebble bank at the top of the beach, their feet shifting and sliding, stopping to pick up the smoothest stones and fling them into the waves. Hunger, sex and throwing stones into water were the three primitive drives that had made the human race what it is, Maxim decided.
At ten years old, Chris had grown sideways as much as upwards: he was now a miniature Welsh fly-half. Indeed, there was something of the original Celts about his long dark hair and his pale skin – but the eyes, when he turned a sudden direct stare on you, were the golden-dark of Jenny's.
And he mustn't know, Maxim thought. I must see only him in his own eyes, nobody else.
"Daddy," Chris asked, "when are you going back to London?"
"When somebody rings up. When they want me."
"Is it very secret, what you're doing?"
"Not very, no," Maxim said glibly. "I'm there to answer military questions – if I can. And all military things are at least partly secret."
"Do you see the Prime Minister all the time?"
"Not to speak to. He's around, but I usually work to one of his private secretaries, George Harbinger. I don't think you'd better mention his name around school, by the way."
"Of course I won't." Chris hunched his shoulders~ in the inevitable plastic rally jacket – and trudged on, frowning over what he would say next. "Daddy – what sort of aeroplane was Mummy in when she crashed?"
"A Short Skyvan. Very square-shaped, twin engines, twin tails, high wing, fixed undercarriage… don't you know it?"
Chris nodded; he could identify most modern aircraft from the swamp of books and magazines in his bedroom. "I thought it was a Skyvan."
"Why did you ask, then?"
"Some of the boys at school… they said they didn't believe Mummy was really dead, that she'd just gone away and left us. I thought if I could be sure what aeroplane it was, they'd believe me."
I will kill those boys, Maxim thought. One by one I will pick them up and beat their little heads to a pulp and then it won't matterwhat they believed…
He realised how fast he was walking, crunching ahead of Chris at a Rifle pace. He slowed. It isn't cruelty, he thought, it's just that a broken marriage is something all these kids know about, and death is something that only happens on TV. Particularly in a blown-up aeroplane. He stopped and threw three stones, trying to cut them through the crests of the breaking waves.
"I saw the aeroplane crash," he said in a flat voice.
"Yes, Daddy," Chris said. "So you're quite sure she won't comeback?"
If they were here Iwould kill them, for giving Chris such a terribly false hope.
"No," he said. "No chance. It's just you and me."
He put his arm around the boy's shoulders and they walked back through a gap in the ramshackle bathing huts onto the pebble-strewn seafront road and Maxim's car.
After a while, Chris asked: "Do you have to keep on taking exams in the Army?"
"Yes – them, or something like them."
"Ugh."
"Well, you could always become a tramp, or even go into the Air Force."
"Daddy!"
They were laughing by the time they reached Maxim's parents' house. There was a message to ring George.
15
The Massons' bungalow was a rambling affair thrown together by a speculative jerry-builder just after the First World War. It had been built for summers of tennis, cocktails and open sports cars. Under the snow, fifty years later, it looked like a group of Army huts that had melted together. Maxim drove cautiously up the thirty yards of driveway, already squashed into rutted ice by other vehicles. At the top there were four parked cars and a plain van. He just squeezed into a space beside the rickety wooden garage that was two cars long instead of wide. Odd, that.
It was also odd that there didn't seem to be a front door, just frenen windows that had curtains drawn across them. But a uniformed policeman hurried out of a kitchen door wanting identification. Maxim took time finding his ID card, looking around at the perfect snow on the tennis lawn, at the bulging laurels and evergreen shrubbery.