Charity

‘Daddy. Please,’ said Fiona mildly while pouring my tea.

Pleased that his provocation had produced the expected note of exasperation from his daughter, he chuckled and said: ‘What are you squeezing out of the little bugger, huh? You can confide in me; I’m vetted.’

He wasn’t vetted, or in any way secure, and he was the last man I would entrust with a secret of any importance. So I smiled at him and told Fiona that I wanted just one sugar in my tea and yes, a toasted scone – no, no homemade strawberry jam – would be lovely and promised that it wouldn’t spoil my appetite for lunch.

‘I flew to Warsaw to see him,’ said David, flapping a monogrammed linen napkin and spreading it on his knee. ‘Just before Christmas; at five minutes’ notice. No end of bother getting a seat on the plane.’

‘Did you?’ I said, inserting a note of mild surprise in my answer, although I had been shown a surveillance photo of him and Kosinski there at that time.

‘He told me that Tessa was still alive.’

I watched Fiona’s reaction to this startling announcement; she just shook her head in denial and drank some tea.

‘It was a ruse,’ I explained. ‘He probably believed it but it was just a cruel attempt to exploit him.’

‘And exploit me,’ added David. He accepted a buttered scone from Fiona and nibbled at it as he thought about his visit to his son-in-law.

‘Yes, and to exploit you,’ I agreed, although it was hard to imagine how even the wily tricksters of the Polish security service would find ingenuity enough for that. ‘Now he is working for us. I don’t know any more than that.’

‘Don’t know or won’t tell?’

Fiona got to her feet, looked at the ceiling as she listened, and said: ‘I believe the French lesson is ending.’

‘Yes,’ agreed David, after punching the air in order to expose his gold wrist-watch to view and see the time. ‘She doesn’t give us a minute of extra time. The French are all like that, aren’t they?’

Reluctant to censure French venality in such general terms, Fiona said: ‘I’ll just go and say hello to her, and ask her how they are coming along.’ Clever Fiona; she knew how to escape. It must have been something she learned while working with the KGB. Or with Dicky Cruyer.

‘Fifteen pounds an hour she costs me,’ David confided to me. ‘And she has the nerve to add on travelling expenses from London. The trouble is I can’t get anyone from the village. You need the authentic seizième arrondissement accent, don’t you, huh?’

I drank my tea until, from somewhere upstairs, I heard Fiona trying out her Paris slang on the lady teacher. She hit the spot judging from the sudden burst of hearty feminine laughter that followed the next exchange.

I faced David and ate my scone, smiling between bites. We both sat there for a long time, silent and alone, like a washed-out picnic party, under dripping trees, waiting for the thunder to stop.

Having finished my scone before my host I got up and went to the window. David came and stood alongside me. We watched Fiona tramping across the snowy garden. The teacher was with her, and hand-in-hand with the children they inspected the snowman. The snow had retreated to make icy-edged white islands into which the children deliberately walked. Billy – coming up to his fourteenth birthday – considered himself far too old to be building snowmen. He had supervised the building of this one on the pretext that it was done solely to entertain some local infants who had been at the house for a tea party the previous afternoon. But I could tell from the way they were acting that both Billy and his younger sister Sally were proud of their elaborate snow sculpture. It wouldn’t last much longer. A slight thaw had crippled it so that it had become a hunch-backed figure, glazed with the icy sheen that had formed upon it overnight.

‘Everybody respects her,’ said David.

‘Yes,’ I said. It was true that everyone respected Fiona, but how significant it was that her father should claim that. Even her mother and father didn’t really love her. Their love, such as could be spared, had been lavished on Tessa, the younger sister, the eternal baby. Fiona had too much dignity, too much achievement, too much of everything to need love in the way that most people need it.

My memory went back to the day that I first met Fiona’s parents, and to the briefing she provided for me as we drove down here to see them in my old Ferrari. It was my final outing in that lovely old lady. The car was already sold, the deal settled, and the first instalment of the money deposited in my bank. The money was needed to buy Fiona an engagement ring with a diamond of a dimension that her family would judge visible to the naked eye. Tell them you love me, she had advised. It’s what they will be waiting to hear. They think I need someone to love me. I told them that. I would have told them anyway. I did love and never stopped loving her.

‘You love her,’ said David, as if needing to hear me say it again. ‘You do: I know you do.’

‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘I love her very much.’

‘She bottles everything up inside,’ he said. ‘I wish I knew what went on inside her head.’

‘Yes,’ I said. Many people would have liked to know what went on inside Fiona’s head, including me. From what I knew, even the KGB agent – Kennedy – who had been assigned to seduce her, and monitor her thoughts, had failed. He’d fallen for her instead. The wounding fact was that Fiona had taken that sordid little adventure seriously. She’d fooled him of course. She hadn’t betrayed her role as a double-agent working for London because Fiona was Fiona – a woman who would no more reveal her innermost thoughts to her lover than she would to her father, her children or her husband.

I watched her with my children; this woman who had bowled me over and from whom I would never escape, this remote paragon, dedicated scholar and unfailing winner of every contest she entered. She might even emerge as the victor in the bitter contest for power in the Department. I suppose my feeling for her was founded upon respect as well as love. Too much respect and not enough love perhaps, for otherwise Gloria would never have turned my life upside down. Gloria was no fool but she was not wise; she was sizzling and street-smart and perceptive and desperately in love with me. I was torn in half: I found myself in love with two women. They were entirely different women but few people would find that an adequate explanation. I told myself it was wrong but it didn’t make the dilemma less excruciating.

‘That cloud base: it never gets really light these days,’ said David, turning away from the window and sitting down. ‘I hate winter. I wanted to get away to somewhere warm but there are things here that I must do myself. You can’t trust anyone to do their job properly.’

I chose a chair and sat down opposite him. It was a lovely room, the sort of comfortable family retreat that is only found in England and its country houses. So far this room had escaped the ‘face-lifts’ that David had inflicted on so much of the house. The furniture was a hodgepodge of styles; a mixture of the priceless and the worthless. The Dutch marquetry cabinet, and the collection of Lalique glass displayed inside it, would have fetched a fortune at auction. Next to it there were two battered sofas that had only sentimental value. A lovely William and Mary marquetry mirror reflected an ancient stained and frayed oriental carpet. The log fire made crackling sounds and spat a few sparks over the brass fire-irons. The yellow light of the flames made patterns on the ceiling and lit up David’s face. ‘He tried to murder me, you know,’ he said, and turned to look out of the window as if his mind was entirely given to his family in the garden. ‘George,’ he added eventually.

‘George?’ I didn’t know what to say. Finally I stammered: ‘Why would he do that? He’s family.’

David looked at me as if declining to respond to a particularly offensive joke. ‘It makes me wonder what really happened to Tessa.’ He went and stood by the window, his hands on his hips.

‘George didn’t kill your daughter, David. If that’s what you are driving at.’

‘Then why try to poison me?’

Again I was speechless for a moment. ‘Why do you think?’ I countered.

‘Always the police detective, aren’t you, Bernard?’ He said it with a good-natured grunt, but I knew he had long since categorized me as a government snooper. He said society was rife with prying petty officials who were taking over our lives. Sometimes I wondered if he wasn’t right. Not about me, but about the others.

I made a reckless guess: ‘Because you suspected him? Because you accused him of being a party to his wife’s death?’

‘Very good, Bernard.’ He said it gravely but with discernible admiration. ‘You’re very close. Go to the top of the class.’

‘And how did George react?’

‘React?’ A short sharp bitter laugh. ‘I just told you; he tried to kill me.’

‘I see.’ I was determined not to ask him how. I could see he was bursting to tell me.

‘That’s one of my walking-sticks,’ he said suddenly. Following his gaze I saw that out on the snowy lawn Billy was patching up the snowman with fresh snow and had removed the snowman’s walking-stick while doing it. I wondered if David was going to lay claim to the snowman’s hat too. ‘I didn’t know they wanted my stick for that damned snowman.’

Billy and Sally patted more snow on to the snowman’s belly. I suppose the thaw had slimmed it down a little.

Turning back to me, David said: ‘In Poland, I complained of a headache and George gave me some white pills. Pills from a Polish package. I didn’t use them of course.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course not.’

‘I’m not a bloody fool. All written in Polish. Who knows what kind of muck they take … even their genuine aspirin … I’d sooner suffer the headache.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I brought them back with me. Not the packet, he’d thrown that away; or so he said.’

‘Back to England?’

‘See that little cherry tree? I buried Felix, our old tom-cat, under it. The poor old sod died from one of those tablets. I didn’t tell my lady wife, of course. And I don’t want Fiona to know.’

‘You think the tablet did it?’

‘Three tablets. Crushed up in warm milk.’