Len Deighton - Spy Sinker

'Happy?' he called suddenly.

She nodded. It wasn't a lie: everything was relative. She was as happy as she could be in the circumstances. Harry sat lounging knee-bent at the stern – head turned, arm outstretched, elbow on knee, fingers extended to the tiller – looking like Adam painted on the Sistine ceiling. 'Very happy,' she said. He beckoned to her and she moved to sit close beside him.

'Why can't it always be just like this?' he asked in that forlorn way that her children had sometimes posed similarly silly questions. She would never understand him, just as she had never been able to understand Bernard. She would never understand men and the way their minds could be both mature and selfishly childlike at the same time.

'Ever been to the Danube Delta? There is a vast nature reserve. Ships – like floating hotels – go right down the Danube to the Black Sea. It would be a wonderful vacation for us. Would you like that?'

'Let me think about it.'

'I have all the details. One of the heart men at the Charité took his wife: they had a great time.'

She wasn't listening to him. She was thinking all the time of the recent brief meeting she'd had with Bernard. They had met in a farmhouse in Czechoslovakia and Bernard had urged her to come back to him. It should have made her happy to see him again, but it had made her feel inadequate and sad. It had reawakened all her fears about the difficulties of being reunited with her family. Bernard had changed, she had changed, and there could be no doubt that the children would have changed immensely. How could she ever be one of them again?

'I'm sorry, Harry,' she said.

'About what?'

'I'm not good company. I know I'm not.'

'You're tired: you work too hard.'

'Yes.' In fact she'd become worried at her lapses of memory. Sometimes she could not remember what she had been doing the previous day. Curiously the distant past was not so elusive: she remembered those glorious days with Bernard when the children were small and they were all so happy together.

'Why won't you marry me?' he said without preamble.

'Harry, please.'

'As a resident of the DDR you could get a divorce with the minimum of formalities.'

'How do you know?'

'I explored it.'

'I wish you hadn't.' If he had talked to a lawyer it might have drawn attention to her in a way that was undesirable.

'Fiona, darling. Your husband is living happily with another woman.'

'How do you know?'

'I saw them together one evening. I almost stumbled into them in the crush at Waterloo Station. They were catching the Epsom train.'

'You recognized them?'

'Of course. You showed me a photo of him once. The woman with him was blonde and very tall.'

'Yes, that's her.' It hurt like a dagger in the heart. She'd known, of course, but it hurt even more when she heard it from Harry.

'You know her?' he said.

'I've met her,' said Fiona. 'She's pretty.'

'I don't want to make you miserable but we should talk about it. It's madness for us to go on like this.'

'Let's see what happens.'

'You've been saying that since the time we first met. Do you know how long ago that is?'

'Yes. No… A long time.'

'Living without you is Hell for me: but being separated from me doesn't make you miserable,' he admonished her, hoping for a contradiction, but she only shrugged. 'We haven't got much time, Fiona.'

She kissed his cheek. 'Harry. We are happy enough this way. And we have lots of time.' It was the same conversation they'd had many times before.

'Not if we were to start a family. Not much time.'

'Is that what you want?'

'You know it is. Our children, Fiona. It's everything I want.'

'You'd come and live here?' She was testing him now.

'I lived here before.'

'That's not the same thing as living here permanently,' she said.

'Do I hear a discordant note in the Marxist harmony?'

'I'm stating a fact.'

'You don't have to be defensive, honey.'

'You said you were a Marxist,' she reminded him. It was unfair to remind him of something he'd said only once, and that in a heated argument.

'Yes. I said I was a Marxist. I was a Marxist a long time ago.' The sail began drumming.

'But no longer?'

He pulled the mainsheet to adjust the sail before turning his head to answer. He was a good sailor, quick and expert in handling the boat and everything else he did. 'I asked myself a question,' he said.

'And?'

'That's all. Marxism is not a creed for those who question.'

'No matter what the answer? Is that true?'

'Yes. Whatever the answer: one question gives birth to another. A thousand questions follow. Nothing can sustain a thousand questions.'

'Nothing? Not even love?'

'Don't mock me.' They were near the shore now: all forest, no sign of people anywhere. 'Ready about!' said Harry in the flat voice he used when commanding the boat.

Stepping carefully she went forward, released the front sail and watched him as he swung the tiller. The boom crashed across the boat as they passed through the wind and instinctively he ducked his head to avoid it. She pulled in the jib and set the front sail before going back to sit down.

'Do you ever play let's pretend?' he said as he settled back on the seat. It was another aspect of his childishness. Flying planes was childish too: perhaps he'd joined the Communist Party as some silly adventure.

'No,' she said.

'I do. Sitting here, just the two of us in the boat, cruising across the Muggelsee, I pretend that you are an alluring Mata Hari and that I am the heroic young fellow in your spell who has come to rescue you.'

She said nothing. She didn't like the drift of this conversation but it was better to see what came of it.

'Pursued by black-hearted villains, the other shore is safety: a place where we'll live happily ever after, and raise our family.'

'Sounds like A Farewell to Arms ,' said Fiona without putting too much enthusiasm into the idea. 'Did you ever read that?'

'The journey across the lake to Switzerland. Hemingway. Yes, I did it for my high school English. Perhaps that was where I got it.'

'The woman dies,' said Fiona. They get to Switzerland but the woman dies in hospital.' She turned to look at him and he seemed so utterly miserable that she almost laughed.

'Don't make jokes,' he said. 'Everything is perfect.' She hugged him in reassurance.

Yes, everything had been perfect for Harry. It was easy for him. But Fiona was coming near to the end of her resources. She was desperately depressed, even out here on the lake with a man who loved her. Depression, she'd found, was no respecter of logical truth; it was some dark chemical cloud that descended upon her at random and reduced her to jelly.

It was no good telling herself that it was nonsense. She'd given up her children and her marriage. Was she being paranoid to think that Bernard would have completely poisoned the children's minds against her by now? She had run away, why wouldn't they be hurt by such rejection? How could she hope to become wife and mother again?

The children were the most terrible sacrifice she had made, but there were other wounds too. She had lost friends and family who now despised her as a traitor. And what was it all for? She had no way to judge the results, or the contribution she'd made. She'd begun to suspect that she was the lamb slaughtered at the altar of Bret Rensselaer's ambition. Bret's wounds were corporeal: his reputation intact. Bret Rensselaer was the winner. So were Silas and the D-G. Three old men had sent her here: and those three would be the victors. What did they care about her? She was expendable: as useful and as readily discarded as a Kleenex tissue.

Fiona was the loser: Fiona, her husband and her children. They would never recover from what she had done. Was any political – or as Bret so liked to have it: economic – victory worth it? The answer was no.