'Thank you, but I am sure it will be very satisfactory'
'And how many will you be?'
'Eight in all. It is for our family. Some are coming from abroad.'
'Well, it'll be a bit of a squash. Only four bedrooms — did I say that?'
'It is not a problem. I think it will be excellent.'
The farmer's wife said quickly, 'And that will be, for a month, eleven hundred pounds, paid in advance.'
A young man was left sitting in the car that had brought the girl. She would have been pretty, with a good figure under her jeans and light windcheater and striking dark hair to her shoulders, but for those hideous injuries. They went inside, and the farmer's wife fussed through the details of the kitchen and its appliances, the room hot water, the bedrooms and their linen, the dining room, crockery and cutlery stores, but she thought the girl only vaguely interested, which surprised her.
'It's ideal,' the girl said. She was at the doorway, gazing out over the fields and the emptiness of the Bedfordshire farmland. She would have heard rooks calling and the engine of Bill's distant tractor. 'So quiet, perfect for my family.'
'And if you don't want quiet, Luton's only five miles…Either my husband or I will pop down and do the grass, see that you're settled.'
'No need. We'll do it. You can forget we're here. We will enjoy looking after your lovely cottage. We'll see you when we leave.'
'You're sure?' She had enough to be getting on with at the farmhouse, and Bill did on the land, not to come down the quarter of a mile on the side track to cut the grass.
'Absolutely sure, thank you.'
The deal was done. The girl was driven away up the long, bumpy track to the main road.
Only when she had gone, and the farmer's wife had gunned her Land Rover, did she realize that she was ignorant of the girl's name and had no address for her. But she did have a letting for a month when there were no other takers for Oakdene Cottage, and eleven hundred pounds in fifty-pound notes rammed into her trouser hip pocket. She wondered why an Asian family should wish to stage a reunion in such a remote corner of the county, but only for a moment. Then she was considering how to prioritize eleven hundred pounds in cash, none of it for declaring.
He looked up from his screen. Its content rarely held him after his lunch break. After his two sandwiches and an apple, taken in a plastic box to the park at the back of the building, he was usually enveloped in tiredness. Now he was wondering — as his mind wandered — whether he could slip down to what he called 'the heads', lower himself on to the lavatory seat and get in a ten-minute doze that would help him through the remainder of his working day.
Dickie Naylor scowled.
The bloody woman was eyeing his territory already. Through the open door of his cubicle, he saw that Mary Reakes was gazing into his space, and he fancied he recognized covetousness in that look. Not that his cubicle had much to offer: a desk with a screen on it, a fishing-line tangle of cables beneath, his upright swivel chair, a lower upholstered seat for a visitor, a floor safe alongside two filing cabinets that each had a padlocked bar running vertically over the drawers, a side-table with a coffee machine and a couple of plastic water bottles. There was precious little else, except wall charts of holidays to be taken by the few staff who answered to him, and the roster for their night-duty obligations, a photograph of a cricket team proudly holding up a pathetically small silver cup and one of his wife in the garden, pictures of sour-faced bearded men were pinned to a board.
She would have to wait. After that evening, at the end of a dreary, damp April day, the cubicle would be the work home of Dickie Naylor for eleven more working days. Then she could have it — was welcome to it. On that Friday evening, two weeks away, he would carry his few personal items out of the cubicle, swipe his card for the last time at the main door, then hand it to the uniformed staff for shredding. He would walk away along the Embankment — sniff for a last time at the tang of the river — from the building that was officially known as Thames House, occasionally Box 500, and to him was Riverside Villas. The new regime in the carpeted suites of upper-floor offices, grander temples than his cubicle, would have marked down the title 'Riverside Villas' as a sign of an old man's disrespect for the modern world that was shortly to be shot of him. To them, it was a fine block and commensurate with the Service's fledgling importance as a front-line arm of the War on Terror. To Dickie Naylor it was a pretentious edifice.
When he went, closing the door on his cubicle, he was damned sure that Mary Reakes — who was destined to succeed him as head of section — would be on his old ground before he had reached the Underground station. But, until then, he would make her wait, right to the minute of his last departure.
She was half his age. She had sexless bobbed hair, her face was half masked by powerful spectacles, and she dressed in black trouser suits. She had a degree, which he did not, and…She did not look away. She held his eyes and challenged him. Her attitude was clear: he was a 'veteran', his shelf-life had expired and the sooner he was gone the better. The word 'veteran' would not have slipped her tongue with either affection or respect. 'Veteran' meant worthless, an impediment to progress…He smiled sweetly to her through the open door.
He had never been, and he could recognize it, the brightest star in the heavens. At best he had been conscientious, a dogged plodder, and he had probably risen a grade higher in the hierarchy than his abilities warranted. He had been thought of as a 'safe pair of hands'.
In two weeks he would see in his sixty-fifth birthday; then retirement to Suburbville in Worcester Park. There, he was Richard to his neighbours — but at Riverside Villas he was Dickie to all, from the director general on high to the basement garage guards at the bottom of the pecking order. He had long valued the familiarity as a badge of trust from the tribe he belonged to.
In the dog-days of a career that had run since his recruitment to the Service on New Year's Day 1968, he could not look back on those thirty-nine years of fielding the material that crossed his desk and point to any single moment when his intervention had altered the flow of events, which was ample cause for the resentment he harboured as Mary Reakes peered through his wide-open door, raked her eyes over his ground, the clock ticked and his work role ebbed.
He had been given, in the chaotic days after Nine-Eleven, a small department to run that was intended to search for an impending attack on the United Kingdom by foreign-based, overseas-born suicide-bombers. Down the corridor a huge, expanded section dealt with the domestic-based threat, but he presided over a backwater. And after eleven more working days he would preside over nothing.
There had been few in the crematorium chapel. And fewer had come along afterwards to the garden room of the pub. Most of the patients from the nursing-home who had attended the service had ridden back by minibus in time for lunch.
He was there because his mother had made the arrangements. He had told her that he had an hour free but no longer because after that he was rostered for evening duty. He stood close to her, and when she moved among the twenty or so who had walked from the chapel after the curtains had closed during the last quick three-verse hymn, he followed her.
His mother was a small, neat woman and David Banks towered over her.
If she had not made the arrangements, the gathering would not have happened; he owed it to her to be there — it was a son's loyalty. But the family had long split, he knew no one, and he had been by far the youngest in the chapel and was now in the garden room. He hovered a half-step behind his mother, as if he needed to guard her and she was his Principal. It was his way, not purposely but from instinct and training, to watch over her; it was unlikely that he realized his gaze played over the faces of the elderly who murmured quietly as though one of them, in a best but now poorly fitting dark suit, might threaten her. She had never remarried after his father had died and he tried to see her as often as work permitted, but it was not often enough. She lived a hundred miles from London on the Somerset and Wiltshire borders and he was locked into a life in the capital. For the last three and a half years men of his professional skills had been larded with overtime requirements and extra duties.