That was a new line. Usually it was: ‘I’m afraid I’ve behaved rather unkindly,’ or: ‘I’m afraid you’re not going to be pleased.’ This time, however, Amelia had opted for the enigma of her past.
‘Your childhood?’
She dabbed her face with a napkin, swallowed a prawn cracker.
‘Not my childhood, exactly. My teenage years. My early twenties.’
‘You mean Oxford?’
‘I mean Tunisia.’
And so it came out. The story of her affair with Jean-Marc Daumal; the birth of their child; the boy’s adoption by Philippe and Jeannine Malot. Giles’s curry arrived but he found that he could not eat it, so great was his sense of shock and near-revulsion. The first ten years of his marriage to Amelia had been a prolonged nightmare of fertility tests, of third trimester miscarriages, of interviews with adoption agencies which had offered the shattering verdict that Giles and Amelia Levene, despite their impeccable professional and personal credentials, were considered too old to take on the responsibility of caring for a young child. And now here was Amelia calmly informing him that, at the age of twenty, she had given birth to a healthy baby who had surfaced in Paris more than thirty years later to steal her heart and to draw her away from him still further. Giles wanted, for the first time in his life, physically to assault a woman, to send the whole edifice of their sham and sexless marriage crashing to the ground.
But Giles Levene was not the demonstrative type. He lacked physical courage and he hated making a scene. If he had been a more self-analytical man, he might have acknowledged that he had married Amelia because she was emotionally stronger than he was, intellectually at least his equal, and his social passport to the high tables that would otherwise have been denied him. Taking a sip of his white wine and a first mouthful of curry, he found himself saying: ‘I’m glad you’ve told me this’ and thought how much his own conciliating voice sounded like his father’s. ‘How long have you known?’
‘About a month,’ Amelia replied, and took his hand across the tablecloth. ‘As you can imagine, I don’t know how I’m going to work things out with the Office.’
This astonished him. ‘They don’t know?’
Amelia chose her words carefully, as though picking out the chillies in a stir-fry. ‘I decided never to tell them. I didn’t want it on my record. I thought it would affect any chances I had of making a success of my career.’
Giles nodded. ‘Obviously nothing turned up during the vetting process.’
‘Obviously.’ Amelia felt the need to expand. ‘The adoption was arranged through a Catholic organization in Tunis. They had links back to France, but my name was never recorded in the paperwork.’
‘Then how did François find you?’
More out of habit than calculation, Amelia decided to protect Joan Guttmann’s identity.
‘Through a friend in Tunis who helped me during that period.’
Giles leaped to a conclusion. ‘The boy’s father? This Jean-Marc?’
Amelia shook her head. ‘No. I haven’t seen him for years. In fact, I’m not sure he even knows that François exists.’
As the meal progressed, Giles’s temper subsided and Amelia told him of her plans eventually to bring her son to London. They had talked about it at the hotel in Tunisia. With his parents murdered, François felt that he no longer had much of a life in Paris and would welcome a change of scene.
‘What about his friends?’ Giles asked. ‘Is there a wife, a girlfriend? A job?’
Amelia paused as she recollected all that François had told her.
‘He’s never had a serious relationship. You might call him a bit of a loner. A rather melancholy soul, if I’m honest. Prone to the odd mood swing. Not unlike his father, in fact.’
Giles wasn’t interested in pursuing this line of enquiry and asked how Amelia was going to clear things with SIS.
‘I think the best thing is to present him as a fait accompli. It’s hardly a sackable offence to have given birth to a child.’
Giles saw how proud she was to have uttered these words and felt the revulsion again, the returning sense of his own miserable isolation.
‘I see. But they’ll want to know that he’s the real thing.’
It was the closest he could come to wounding her. Amelia reacted as though he had spat in her food.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Well, surely they’ll want to vet him? You’re about to become the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, Amelia. They can’t have a cuckoo in the nest.’
She pushed her plate away from her, a sound of crockery meeting glass.
‘He’s mine,’ she said, hissing the words as her napkin hit the table. ‘They can test him all they fucking want.’
38
The cab driver dropped Kell at a three-star hotel en route to the Gare Saint-Charles. He bid the Americans goodbye, handed a twenty-euro note to Harry, waved away Penny’s objections that he was paying ‘way too much’, then stood on the pavement with his bags while taking a non-existent call on his mobile. Turning to face the oncoming traffic, Kell looked carefully for vehicles pulling over, of possible watchers on foot or bike, for furtive movements of any kind, all the time reciting some favourite lines from Yeats into the receiver to give the impression of an ongoing conversation. When he was satisfied that there was no apparent threat, he walked into the hotel, booked himself a bed for the night, rode the lift to the third floor and unpacked his bags in a room that smelled of detergent and stale cigarettes.
Claire’s message still scratched at him like the bite on Harry’s arm, a calculated insult to his pride, to his fidelity. Richard Quinn, the hedge fund bachelor with two ex-wives and three sons at St Paul’s, was the primary weapon in Claire’s extra-marital armoury, a background threat to whom she would turn whenever Kell looked like leaving her on a permanent basis. Richard knew of Kell’s background in MI6 and plainly viewed it as an affront to his ego, as though Her Majesty had made a grave error of judgement in failing to recruit him into the Secret Service some thirty years earlier. Now fifty-five and rich beyond imagination, he regularly tried to lure the newly single Claire to five-star hotels in Provence and Bordeaux, whenever his so-called ‘professional interest in wine’ took him overseas. In an unguarded moment, returning from one such trip to Alsace, Claire had begged Kell for forgiveness and confessed that she found Quinn ‘boring’.
‘Then why the hell do you fuck him?’ Kell had shouted, to which his estranged wife, so shattered by unhappiness, had replied: ‘Because he is there for me. Because he has a family.’ Kell could summon no adequate response. The logic of her grievances was so chopped, her despair so wretched and apparently incurable, that he had simply run out of ways to console her. Quinn could no more give her a child than any of the other men she had turned to in her desperate promiscuity; the infertility was hers, not his. Kell loved her more deeply than perhaps he had ever said, but had reached the conclusion that their only viable future lay apart. The thought of such a failure, the thought of divorcing Claire, was enervating.
His mobile was ringing. Only a handful of people had the number.
‘Stephen?’
The accent was unmistakable.
‘Madeleine. How nice to hear your voice.’
‘Of course!’ It sounded as though she was calling from a residential street. Kell heard the wasp buzz of a passing moped, the larger echo of the city. ‘So you would like to meet for dinner, as we talked about? Are you free? I can take you to have la bouillabaisse.’
‘Sounds great. I’d love to. I’ve just checked into a hotel …’
‘… Oh, which one? Where are you?’
Kell told her, because he had no choice in the matter. Luc and his pals would now have a fix on his position and would surely lose no opportunity in taking another crack at Kell’s laptop. Though he was certain that the computer could not incriminate him, he would have to carry it with him and remove anything sensitive from his room whenever he left the building.