In a year or so she would scuttle off back to the West and Hubert Renn would be left to face the music: Stasi interrogations were not gentle. They would be bound to suspect that he was in league with her. She hated the thought of what she was doing to him. It made her feel like a Judas, but that of course is exactly what she was. Bret had warned her that these conflicting loyalties were stressful but that didn't make them any easier to bear.

When she got home, to one of the coveted apartments in the wedding cake blocks that line Frankfurter Alice, she sat down and thought about the conversation for a long time. Finally she began to understand something of Renn's motivation. Just as the Russians could not fathom the way in which some Europeans could be staunch capitalists but rabidly anti-American, Fiona had not understood the deeply felt anti-Russian feelings that were a part of Hubert Renn's psyche. Renn, she was later to discover, had seen his mother raped by Russian soldiers and his father beaten unconscious during those memorable days of 1945 when the commander's Order of the Day told the Red Army 'Berlin is Yours'. And later she was to hear Hubert Renn refer to his Russian 'friends' by the archaic and less friendly word 'Panje'.

She washed a lettuce and cut thin slices from a Bockwurst. It was the fresh fruit she missed so much: she still couldn't understand why such things were so scarce. She had found a privately owned baker near the office and the bread was good. She'd have to be careful not to put on weight – everything plentiful was fattening.

It was an austere little room well suited to reflection and work. The walls were painted light grey and there were only three pictures: an engraving of a Roman emperor, a sepia photo of fashionable ladies circa 1910 and a coloured print of Kirchner's Pariser Platz. The frames, their neglected condition, as well as the subject matter, suggested that they had been selected at random from some government storage depot. She was grateful for that human touch just the same. Her bedroom was no more than an alcove with a hinged screen. The old tubular-framed bed was painted cream and reminiscent of the one she'd slept in at her boarding school. There were many aspects of life in the DDR – from the endless petty restrictions to the dull diet – that reminded her of boarding school. But she told herself over and over that she had survived boarding school and so she would survive this.

When she went to bed that night she was unable to sleep. She hadn't had one night of sound natural sleep since coming over here. That terrible encounter with Bernard had been a ghastly way to start her new life. Now every night she found herself thinking about him and the children. She found herself asking why she'd been born with a lack of the true maternal urge. Why had she never delighted in the babies and wanted to hug them night and day as so many mothers do? And was she now being acutely tortured by their absence because of the way she had squandered those early years with them? She would have given anything for a chance to go back and see them as babies again, to cuddle them and feed them and read to them and play with them the nonsense games that Bernard's mother was so good at.

Sometimes, during the daytime, the chronic ache of being separated from her family was slightly subdued as she tried to cope with the overwhelming demands made upon her. The intellectual demands – the lies and false loyalties – she could cope with, but she hadn't realized how vulnerable she would be to the emotional stress. She remembered some little joke that Bret had made about women adapting to a double life more easily than a man. Every woman, he said, was expected to be a hooker or matron, companion, mother, servant or friend at a moment's notice. Being two people was a simple task for any woman. It was typical Rensselaer bullshit. She switched on the light and reached for the sleeping tablets. In fact she knew that she would never return to being that person she'd been such a short time ago. She had already been stretched beyond the stage of return.

Whitelands, England. June 1983.

'No, Dicky, I can hear you perfectly,' said Bret Rensselaer as he pressed the phone to his ear and shrugged at Silas Gaunt, who was standing opposite him with the extension earpiece. Dicky Cruyer, German Stations Controller, was phoning from Mexico City and the connection was not good. 'You've made it all perfectly clear. I can't see any point in going through it again. Yes, I'll talk to the Director-General and tell him what you said. Yes. Yes. Good to talk to you, Dicky. I'll see what I can do. Goodbye. Goodbye.' He replaced the handset and sighed deeply.

Silas Gaunt put the earpiece in the slot and said, 'Dicky Cruyer tracked you down.'

'Yes, he did,' said Bret Rensselaer, although there had been little difficulty about it. The Director-General had told Bret to visit Silas and 'put him in the picture'. Bret had left the Whitelands telephone number as his contact, and Mrs Porter – Gaunt's housekeeper – had put the call from Mexico through to the farm manager's office.

Having thanked the greenhouse boy who'd run to get them, Silas, wearing an old anorak, muddy boots and corduroy trousers tied with string at the ankles, led the way – ducking under the low door – out to the cobbled yard. Bret was being shown round the farm.

'I don't encourage guns any more,' said Silas. 'Too damned hearty. Those gigantic early breakfasts and mud all through the house. It became too much for Mrs Porter and to tell you the truth, too much for me too. Anglers are not so much trouble: quieter, and they're gone all day with a packet of cheese sandwiches.'

Silas swung open the yard gate and fastened it again after Bret. The fields stretched away into the distance. The harvest would be gathered early. The field behind the barn would be the first one cut and flocks of sparrows, warned by the sound of the nearby machinery that the banquet would not be there forever, were having a feed that made their flight uncertain as they swooped and fluttered amongst the pale ears.

It was a lovely day: silky cirrus torn and trailed carelessly across the deep blue sky. The sun was as high as it could get, and, like a ball thrown into the air, it paused and the world stood still, waiting for the afternoon to begin.

As they walked along they kept close to the hedge so that Silas could be sure it had been properly trimmed and weeded. He grabbed ears of unripe wheat, and with the careless insolence of the nomad, crushed them in his hand, scattering chaff, husk and seed through his splayed fingers. Bret, who had no interest in farms or farming, plodded awkwardly behind in the rubber boots that Silas had found for him, with a stained old windbreaker to protect his elegant dark blue suit. They went through a door set in the tall walls that surrounded the kitchen garden. It was a wonderful wall, light and dark bricks making big diamond patterns that were just visible under the espaliered fruit trees.

'I am not convinced that it was a wise move to send both Dicky Cruyer and Bernard Samson to Mexico City,' said Bret, to resume the conversation. 'It leaves us somewhat depleted, and those two seem to fight all the time.'

Silas pointed to various vegetables and said he was going to start a little rose garden next year and reduce the ground given to swedes, turnips and beetroots. Then he said, 'How is Bernard taking it?'

'His wife's defection? Not too well. I was thinking of making him take a physical, but in his present paranoid state he'd resent it. I guess he'll pull out of it. Meanwhile, I'll keep an eye on him.'

'I have no experience as an agent in the field,' said Silas. 'Neither have you. I can think of very few people in your building who know what's involved. In that respect, we are like First World War generals, sitting back in our chateau and sipping our brandy, and subjecting the troops to nastiness that we don't comprehend.'