But the idea that they’d frame me for embezzlement was a new one. It would wipe me out, of course. No one would employ me if they made something like that stick. It was a nasty thought, and even worse was that throwaway line about getting to me through my father. How could they get to me through my father? My father didn’t work for the Department any more. My father was dead.
I drank more champagne – fizzy wine is not worth drinking if you allow the chill to go off it – and finished the bottle before closing my eyes for a moment in an effort to remember exactly what Jim had said. I must have dozed off. I was tired: really tired.
The next thing I knew the stewardess was shaking me roughly and saying, ‘Would you like breakfast, sir?’
‘I haven’t had dinner.’
‘They tell us not to wake passengers who are asleep.’
‘Breakfast?’
‘We’ll be landing at London Heathrow in about forty-five minutes.’
It was an airline breakfast: shrivelled bacon, a plastic egg with a small stale roll and UHT milk for the coffee. Even when starving hungry I found it very easy to resist. Oh well, the dinner I’d missed was probably no better, and at least the threatened diversion to sunny Manchester had been averted. I vividly remembered the last time I was forcibly flown to Manchester. The airline’s senior staff all went and hid in the toilets until the angry, unwashed, unfed passengers had been herded aboard the unheated train.
But soon I had my feet on the ground again in London. Waiting at the barrier there was my Gloria. She usually came to the airport to meet me, and there can be no greater love than that which brings someone on a voluntary visit to London Heathrow.
She looked radiant: tall, on tiptoe, waving madly. Her long naturally blonde hair and a tailored tan suede coat with its big fur collar made her shine like a beacon amongst the line of weary welcomers slumping – like drunks – across the rails in Terminal Three. And if she did flourish her Gucci handbag a bit too much and wear those big sunglasses even at breakfast time in winter, well, one had to make allowances for the fact that she was only half my age.
‘The car’s outside,’ she whispered as she released me from the tight embrace.
‘It will be towed away by now.’
‘Don’t be a misery. It will be there.’
And it was of course. And the weathermen’s threatened snow and ice had not materialized either. This part of England was bathed in bright early-morning sunshine and the sky was blue and almost completely clear. But it was damned cold. The weathermen said it was the coldest January since 1940, but who believes the weathermen?
‘You won’t know the house,’ she boasted as she roared down the motorway in the yellow dented Mini, ignoring the speed limit, cutting in front of angry cabbies and hooting at sleepy bus drivers.
‘You can’t have done much in a week.’
‘Ha, ha! Wait and see.’
‘Better you tell me now,’ I said with ill-concealed anxiety. ‘You haven’t knocked down the garden wall? Next door’s rose beds …’
‘Wait and see: wait and see!’
She let go of the wheel to pound a fist against my leg as if making sure I was really and truly flesh and blood. Did she realize what mixed feelings I had about moving out of the house in Marylebone? Not just because Marylebone was convenient and central but also because it was the first house I’d ever bought, albeit with the aid of a still outstanding mortgage that the bank only agreed to because of the intervention of my prosperous father-in-law. Well, Duke Street wasn’t lost for ever. It was leased to four American bachelors with jobs in the City. Bankers. They were paying a handsome rent that not only covered the mortgage but gave me a house in the suburbs and some small change to face the expenses of looking after two motherless children.
Gloria was in her element since moving in to the new place. She didn’t see it as a rather shabby semi-detached suburban house with its peeling stucco and truncated front garden and a side entrance that had been overlaid with concrete to make a place to park a car. For Gloria this was her chance to make me see how indispensable she was. It was her chance to get us away from the shadow of my wife Fiona. Number thirteen Balaklava Road was going to be our little nest, the place into which we settled down to live happily ever after, the way they do in the fairy stories that she was reading not so very long ago.
Don’t get me wrong. I loved her. Desperately. When I was away I counted the days – even the hours sometimes – before we’d be together again. But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t see how ill-suited we were. She was just a child. Before me her boy-friends had been schoolkids: boys who helped with logarithms and irregular verbs. Sometime she was going to suddenly realize that there was a big wide world out there waiting for her. By that time perhaps I’d be depending on her. No perhaps about it. I was depending on her now.
‘Did it all go all right?’
‘All all right,’ I said.
‘Someone from Central Funding left a note on your desk … Half a dozen notes in fact. Something about Prettyman. It’s a funny name, isn’t it?’
‘Nothing else?’
‘No. It’s all been very quiet in the office. Unusually quiet. Who is Prettyman?’ she asked.
‘A friend of mine. They want him to give evidence … some money they’ve lost.’
‘And he stole it?’ She was interested now.
‘Jim? No. When Jim puts his hand in the till he’ll come up with ten million or more.’
‘I thought he was a friend of yours,’ she said reproachfully.
‘Only kidding.’
‘So who did steal it?’
‘No one stole anything. It’s just the accountants getting their paperwork into the usual chaos.’
‘Truly?’
‘You know how long the cashier’s office takes to clear expenses. Did you see all those queries they raised on last month’s chit?’
‘That’s just your expenses, darling. Some people get them signed and paid within a week.’ I smiled. I was glad to change the subject. Prettyman’s warnings had left a dull feeling of fear in me. It was heavy in my guts, like indigestion.
We arrived at Balaklava Road in record time. It was a street of small Victorian houses with large bay windows. Here and there the fronts were picked out in tasteful pastel colours. It was Saturday: despite the early hour housewives were staggering home under the weight of frantic shopping, and husbands were cleaning their cars: everyone demonstrating that manic energy and determination that the British only devote to their hobbies.
The neighbour who shared our semi-detached house – an insurance salesman and passionate gardener – was planting his Christmas tree in the hard frozen soil of his front garden. He could have saved himself the trouble, they never grow: people say the dealers scald the roots. He waved with the garden trowel as we swept past him and into the narrow side entrance. It was a squeeze to get out.
Gloria opened the newly painted front door with a proud flourish. The hall had been repapered – large mustard-yellow flowers on curlicue stalks – and new hall carpet too. I admired the result. In the kitchen there were some primroses on the table which was set with our best chinaware. Cut-glass tumblers stood ready for orange juice, and rashers of smoked bacon were arranged by the stove alongside four brown eggs and a new Teflon frying pan.
I walked round the whole house with her and played my appointed role. The new curtains were wonderful; and if the brown leather three-piece was a bit low and so difficult to climb out of, with a remote control for the TV, what did it matter? But by the time we were back in the kitchen, a smell of good coffee in the air, and my breakfast spluttering in the pan, I knew she had something else to tell me. I decided it wasn’t