Len Deighton - Spy 07 - Faith by Faith

Author:Faith [Faith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

I’ve often suspected that my father-in-law had sold his soul to the devil.

How else could he have arTanged that everything he wanted came so easily to him? I was unpacking the bag that Mona had hidden in the back of the car, and selecting a tie and shirt suitable for the sort of dinner party David liked to give, when I heard a car arrive. I looked out of the window in time to see the driver of a very muddy Range Rover holding a door open and helping the Falstaffian figure of Silas Gaunt as he climbed laboriously out of the front passenger seat. Silas was wearing a short, military-style khaki waterproof. On his head he had a floppy-brini fisherman’s hat of checked cloth.

Trying to describe Silas Gaunt’s role in the Secret Intelligence Service would be like trying to describe Irving Berlin’s role in the history of popular music. Gaunt had lived a long time and had seen the British Secret

Service through thick and thin. Mostly thin; there hadn’t been much thick; some said it had been nothing but one disaster after another. Now Silas was retired to “Whitelands,” his farm in the Cotswolds, but the influence lie still wielded ensured that few major decisions were made in London Central without Silas’s blessing.

Silas was seated at the end of the dinner table. There was little alternative, for his girth and his gestures precluded him from fitting in between other guests. Once in position, he assumed the demeanor of host as he ordered the other guests to pour the wine or pass the vegetables and commanded their silence when he related one of his anecdotes. Instead of the country tweeds that were his uniform, he seemed to have gone to a great deal of trouble for this rare excursion into the outside world. He was wearing a dark pin-stripe suit, whose seams had succumbed at places to the weight he’d added since buying it. He had a (lark blue pullover that I knew had been knitted for him by his adoring housekeeper, Mrs. Porter. Now it was beginning to become unraveled at the hem. His shirt was freshly washed and pressed but the overall effect was marred by his worn and well-fingered necktie, its repeat pattern the neat coat of arms of some school or college he’d attended.

David was at the other end of the table. He was wearing a dark blue worsted

Savile Row three-piece with a pink poplin shirt and a very brightly colored necktie. Perhaps he’d forgotten about the clamorous behavior for which

Uncle Silas was famous, for David never entirely relaxed, and he quickly instructed the girl waiting at table to move some of the more valuable items of china and cut glass, so they were not within radius of Silas’s exuberant gesturing.

There were other guests at the dinner party: a retired insurance tycoon, the owner of ten racehorses, and his magistrate wife. A son of a duke, looking down-at-heel as sons of dukes are expected to

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