We waited. One day, two days, Thursday, Friday. We talked and we waited. The sun shone and the colours in the landscape began to turn a little, hints of yellow and red creeping over the trees on the hill. And for part of each night we slept together, came to know each other in that way, carefully and without stress, giving to this part of our relationship a substance, a reality which we could give to little else in our routine.
The man came each morning, saying little to us, but ever helpful and considerate. With Mrs Grace we had an equally formal relationship. Though this became slightly warmer in the face of her great goodwill towards us. I was surprised at the efforts she made in this way: they were so obviously genuine, as if she really valued our friendship, and was appalled at the turn events had taken. Helen, who had remarked on this same fragile regret and had continued therefore to trust her, let the twins go out with her. And the two children were perfectly happy in what they considered a marvellously continuing game.
At night a car came and parked next to the garage in the laneway. We watched the news on television which told us nothing. We listened to some records; a military march which Helen somehow liked. I skipped through a biography of Earl Alexander of Tunis and made even shorter work of one on Montgomery. The photographs were interesting: I liked the guns especially. We had Campari sodas in the heat before lunch and at six o’clock. The man had got the bottle in the town for us. And we drank less whisky later on.
We lit a fire on the second evening, just to see what it was like, and watched the seasoned beechwood flame and crackle, and ate next to it with a bottle of wine. The man got that for us too, half a case: Chambolle Musigny, ’66. Obviously expense was no object in this KGB operation.
We had time — and nothing to do but occupy and entertain each other in it. And wait. And I thought how, if I had tried to prepare such a situation — with any woman — how very difficult it would have been: and how practically impossible — these happy arrangements in an isolated hideaway — with another man’s wife and children. And it was good to be so lucky — at least in this, that I had Helen, and that we could share each other so sharply and well, as if in the last days of an affair, for we didn’t and couldn’t think of any future.
The affection and the love between us was, no doubt, all too easily nurtured — for it was contrived, a creation quite outside the dictates of ordinary life. As it had been for her with Flitlianov, and Graham, so it was now with me. And I regretted that: the excitement of the intermittent or the absent, the illicit or stolen, and all the little deaths that come with long familiarity between two people.
In what was in one way a brief and perfect situation, with wife and family, I saw very clearly how this perfection might continue in a future I couldn’t think about. I experienced in those days all the vitality of love in an affair that had no future, and all the familial gifts of a marriage that had no existence. So that as we did things together — played with the children, read them stories, handled objects about the house, listened to the march, drank wine, made love — I felt myself feeding on a precisely limited number of iron rations which, when finished, would result in our deaths.
But we were never sad, locked in that place, doing so much, free all day. Like children on holiday, we created a sense of euphoric innocence and limitless adventure around us, in everything we did, so that the least act took on immense relevance and things that were important became invested with magic.
Our life up there in the hills became a succession of glittering emblems of sanity, gaiety and repose: both of us free from pain in the certainty of the present and the acceptance of an end — poised in full life for once, committed to that alone, for there were no other promises we could make, and no future we could betray each other in.
On the third morning, Mrs Grace spoke to us.
The weather had held marvellously, an Indian summer. The children were on the swings, the man pushing them. Afterwards, he’d taken off his coat and wandered round the garden, head in air, hands on hips, savouring the world.
We were in the kitchen, tidying breakfast, Mrs Grace pondering the larder cupboard.
‘Don’t bother cooking anything,’ Helen said. ‘We’ll have a salad for lunch.’
‘Yes. I brought some tomatoes.’
‘Do you want to take the children out this morning?’
Mrs Grace turned with a tin of vichyssoise in her hand, put it down by the sink, then went to the window. While she was still looking out at the man she said, ‘I can take them away altogether, if you like.’
I looked up from the paper. They were still arguing about the ring-road. ‘You can’t do anything with them here,’ Mrs Grace went on. ‘And you’re going to have to get away, aren’t you?’ She turned towards us, her big, fine face at ease now, as it had been when I’d first met her. We said nothing, spellbound, waiting for some truth, or a trap, not knowing which.
‘You may not believe me — but I don’t want to be part of this.’
‘But you are,’ I said, annoyed, interrupting her, choosing the trap rather than the truth. ‘You’re the stringer here, must have been for years. You’re not going to throw all that up. What would they do to you? Do you really expect us to believe —’
She interrupted me. ‘No, I don’t. But I’ve made my mind up.’
‘Why don’t you get out on your own, then?’ Helen asked in a much easier voice.
‘Because I can help. I don’t know all the details of this plan, and I don’t want to. But I do know that if I don’t take the children away, they wilclass="underline" and hold them as hostages in case you don’t do exactly as you’ve been told. They spoke to me last night. They want to take them next time I bring them out, sometime over the weekend, just before you start your job on Monday in Oakley Park.’
‘What about your job?’ I asked. ‘The cause. You’ve not been sitting here in Cheltenham for thirty years without some sort of belief in it all.’
‘I’ve plenty of belief in it all. But not in using children. Belief stops there.’
‘I thought the end always justified the means?’
She laughed. ‘Not in this case.’
‘How do you know? This “case” might be the most important ever — for you people.’
‘Perhaps. But I don’t know that. I’ve not been told.’
‘Need you have been? I thought communism was a dictatorial creed. You did what you were told.’
‘Yes, I used to do as I was told — until yesterday.’
‘Now you’ve set yourself above the party?’
‘Yes,’ she said quite simply, staring at me coldly. ‘Yes, I have.’
Helen and I were silent, looking at each other. The cries of the children were suddenly loud in the garden, and we heard them well, and then Helen said, ‘I believe you. What do you want to do? You must be protected as much as the twins.’
‘Well, I’ll take them out tomorrow afternoon — but not to the rendezvous we’ve arranged. I’ll take them to a hotel I know, just outside the town. And wait for you. I’m not going to take any messages to your people in Intelligence here. Not that. You must do all that when you get out.’
‘How?’ I asked. ‘As soon as you miss your appointment with them tomorrow they’ll be down on us like a ton of bricks.’
‘You must get out of here before that — before three o’clock. It shouldn’t be too difficult. They won’t be expecting you to run — without the children. They’ll be completely off guard.’