‘My mother told me about Englishmen,’ said Caterina. She raised her hand in a gesture more appropriate to an Italian market than to an English drawing-room. And now her voice, too, carried an inflection of her birth ties. ‘You don’t have to have something to feel guilty about!’ Her voice was high and almost shrill. ‘Don’t you understand that? Guilt is like pain – it hurts just the same whether it’s real or imagined!’
‘I’ll have to think about that,’ I said defensively.
‘You think about it, then. I’ll go and fetch William.’ She pushed the silk cosy down over the teapot to keep the tea warm while she was gone. But she did not go. She kept her hands round it and stared into the distance. Or perhaps she was staring at the silver-framed photo of her brother Marius, the young priest who’d died in that carbolic-smelling basement. Suddenly the sun stabbed into the room. It wasn’t real sun, there was no warmth in it, and precious little colour. It spilled over the embroidered traycloth like weak lemon tea, and made a rim round Caty’s hair.
They were both like their mother, these Baroni girls. Even as children they’d looked more like visiting townspeople than like village kids. Tall and slim, Caty had that sort of ease and confidence that belied the indecision she expressed.
‘I won’t stay here,’ she said, as if her thoughts had raced on far beyond our conversation. ‘My sister wants me to help with her boutique in Nice. With the money I get from the house, we could start another shop, perhaps.’
The sun’s cross-light scrawled a thousand wrinkles upon her face, and I was forced to see her as she was, instead of through the flattering haze of my memories. Perhaps she read my thoughts. ‘I’m getting old,’ she said. ‘Steve’s getting old, too, and so are you.’ She smoothed her hair, and touched the gold cross that she wore.
She was still attractive. Whatever kind of post-natal exercises she’d done after Billy’s birth had restored her figure to that of the trim young woman Steve had married. She used just sufficient make-up to compensate for the pale English winters she’d endured for so long. Her nails were manicured, and long enough to convince me that she didn’t spend much time at the sink, and her hair was styled in the fashion that requires frequent visits to the hairdresser.
She smoothed the striped silk pants across her knee. They were stylish and tailored. She looked like an illustration that American Vogue might run if they ever did an article about English crumpet. I wondered if she spent many elegant afternoons sitting by the log fire in her fine clothes, pouring herself lemon tea from a silver teapot.
‘Do you know what I think?’ she said.
I waited a long time and then I said, ‘What do you think, Caty?’
‘I don’t believe you just bumped into Steve. I think you were sent after him. I think you are still working for the Secret Service or something – just like in the war. I think you are after Steve.’
‘Why would anyone be after him, Caty?’
‘He’s changed,’ she said. ‘You must have noticed that yourself. I wouldn’t be surprised what he was mixed up in. He has this sort of schizophrenia and an obsession with secrecy. I don’t know if you get like that in the Secret Service, or whether the Secret Service choose that sort of man. But it’s hell to live with, I’ll tell you that.’
‘I think you still love him,’ I said.
‘You’ve always hero-worshipped him,’ she said. ‘He was your big brother, wasn’t he? You just can’t imagine that some boring little housewife like me would have the effrontery to be glad to get rid of your wonderful Steve Champion. Well, I am glad. I just hope like hell that I never see him again, ever.’
I don’t know how she expected me to react, but whatever she expected, I failed her. I saw a look of exasperation. She said, ‘I tried, believe me, I tried very hard. I even bought new things and wore false eyelashes.’
I nodded.
‘I thought Steve had sent you … to get William.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘He’ll stop at nothing to get him. He told me that. But I’ll fight him, Charles. You tell Steve that. He’ll never get William from me.’
She picked up Billy’s favourite toy rabbit and went to the door. She looked back at me as if I was a Solomon who would decide Billy’s future. ‘If I thought he would be happy with Steve, I wouldn’t mind so much. But William is not like his father – he’s a gentle child and easily hurt.’
‘I know he is, Caty.’
She stood there for a moment, thinking of things to say, and not saying them. Then she went out of the room.
I saw her as she passed the window. She was wearing a riding mac and a scarf over her head. She had Billy’s rabbit under her arm.
4
That Champion’s Master File had been brought from Central Registry was, in itself, a sign of the flap that was in progress. It was seldom that we handled anything other than the Action Abstracts and they were a three-hour task. This Master would have stacked up to a five-feet-tall pile of paperwork, had the Biog, Associative, Report, Vettings and year by year Summaries been put one upon the other.
The papers had yellowed with age, the photos were brittle and dog-eared. The yellow vetting sheets were now buff-coloured, and the bright-red Report dossier had faded to a brownish-pink.
There was little hope of discovering anything startling here. The continuing triple-A clearance, right up to the time that Champion stopped reporting to the department, was in itself a sign that men more jaundiced than I could ever be had given Champion a clean bill of health. Since then the department had shown little interest in him.
I looked at his Biographical entries. Champion’s father, a Welsh Catholic, had been a senior lecturer at the Abbasiyah Military Academy, Cairo. Young Champion came back to England to attend public school. From there he won a place at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. For a boy who grew up to table-talk of tactics, battles and ballistics, Sandhurst was a doddle. Champion became an under-officer, and a well-remembered one. And his scholarship matched his military expertise: modern history, four languages and a mathematics prize.
It was Champion’s French-language skills that earned for him a secondment to the French Army. He went the usual round of military colleges, the Paris Embassy, Maginot Line fortresses and Grand General HQ, with occasional glimpses of the legendary General Gamelin.
Champion had only been back with his regiment for a matter of weeks when a War Office directive automatically shortlisted him for a Secret Intelligence Service interview. He was selected, trained and back in France by 1939. He was just in time to watch General Gamelin’s defence system surrender to the Nazis. Champion fled south and became ‘net-officer’ for what was no more than a collection of odds and sods in the unoccupied zone. His orders were to stay clear of the enthusiastic amateurs that London called their Special Operations Executive, but inevitably the two networks became entangled.
It was Champion who greeted me in person that night when I landed from the submarine at Villefranche. I was assigned to SOE but Champion kidnapped me and got it made official afterwards. If I’d gone up to Nîmes as ordered, my war service would have ended two or three months later in Buchenwald.
But Champion used me to sort out his own network and I stayed with him right up to the time the network crumbled and Champion was taken prisoner. Eventually he escaped and was flown back to London. He got a DSO and a new job. Even before D-Day, Champion was assigned to peacetime network planning. He demanded choice of personnel, and got it. His first request was to have me as his senior assistant. It wasn’t easy for me now to look at Champion’s file with an objective eye.
When you read old files, you realize how the paperwork itself decides the progress of an