Samson 05 - Hope by Len Deighton

Author:Len Deighton
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-04-16T01:17:39+00:00

7

Fletcher House (SIS annexe), London.

‘Your wife loathes me,’ said Gloria. ‘She won’t be happy until I am fired.’

‘No,’ I said. I’d had no warning that she was going to track me down to the other side of Oxford Street and burst into this miserable little office, hugging a parcel, her face filled with indignation and despair.

‘And I say yes,’ she said.

I remembered the way Gloria always said ‘your wife’ as if Fiona existed only by means of the status our marriage conferred upon her. ‘You’re imagining it,’ I said. In wishful and stupid desperation I added, ‘I’m not sure she even knows about us.’

Gloria glared at me for a moment and then said, ‘I’m not completely bonkers,’ spitting out the words with anger that made me flinch. Of course I had gone too far. Gloria no doubt needed reassurance of some kind, but there was no way that her self-deception would extend to believing that Fiona didn’t know that, after she’d gone away, I’d fallen foolishly and irretrievably in love with this beautiful girl, about the way we’d set up house, and the way in which Gloria had loved, cared for and enchanted the children.

‘I’m sorry.’ I worried what she would do next. She was cuddling a large white polystyrene box in her arms. I wondered if she’d brought it to throw it at me, and if so what it might contain.

‘You’re a smooth talker, Bernard. Perhaps that’s why I fell for you in the first place. You’re a smooth talker and I’m the most gullible woman in the world.’

Some of the initial rage seemed to have gone out of her and she stood there looking at me, silent as if trying to think of the next thing she’d planned to say. She was dressed in a long suede coat and fur hat; an outfit that suited her so well that it was the image of her that returned to my mind when I thought of her. A great ball of fur like a clown’s fright wig. She’d never taken off that hat during the entire night that we spent together waiting in the hospital, worrying about little Billy’s bronchitis. It was a long time ago but I remembered it vividly. Brown roll-neck sweater, brown wool skirt, pale leather ankle boots and that crazy hat. No one could have taken Billy’s plight more to heart, than she did. She paced up and down, I remember, disappearing into the toilet so that I wouldn’t see her crying.

‘What a spooky place to work. I’ve never been here before.’ She’d tracked me to Fletcher House, a Departmental annex building lost in the confusion of offices and cheap dress factories behind Tottenham Court Road. A neo-Georgian building of dull red brick with Portland stone, it dated from the early Thirties and followed the design that the government then favored for Britain’s telephone exchanges.

‘I’m not working here permanently; just for a few days while Dicky talks to the surveyors and looks at the library and so on.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.