A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [37]
‘Could you tell me a little bit about the two of you?’
‘We broke up over six months ago.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she says, and then, with sudden horror, I remember the lie to Liddiard. ‘I was led to believe that she was your girlfriend.’ She looks down at her file, staring at it in plain disbelief. Mistakes of this kind do not happen. She moves awkwardly in her seat and mutters something inaudible.
It was a throwaway deceit: I only did it to make myself appear more solid and dependable, a rounded man in a long-term relationship. He asked for her full name, for a date and place of birth, so that SIS could run a check on her. And now that the vetting process is over they want to square their deep background with mine. They want to know whether or not Kate will make a decent diplomatic wife, a spy’s accomplice. They want to hear me talk about her.
My left hand is suddenly up around my mouth, squeezing the ridge of skin under my nose. It is almost funny to have been caught out by something so crass, so needless, but this feeling quickly evaporates. The humiliation is soon total.
Out of it, I knit together a shoddy retraction.
‘I’m sorry. No, no it’s my fault. I’m sorry. We just… We just got back together again, about three months ago. Secretly. We don’t want anybody to know. We prefer things to be private. I’m just so used to telling people that we’re not back together that it’s become like a reflex.’
‘So you are together?’
‘Very much so, yes.’
‘But no one else knows?’
‘That’s correct. Yes. Except for a friend of mine. Saul. Otherwise, nobody.’
‘I see.’
There is a disappointment in the tone of this last remark, as if I have let her down. I feel ten again, a scolded child in the headteacher’s study.
‘Perhaps we should talk about something else,’ she says, turning a page on my file.
I have to rescue this situation or the game is up.
‘No, no. I’m happy to talk about it. I should explain. Sorry. It’s just that after we broke up I never spoke about it to anyone. No one would have understood. They might have tried to, but they would never have understood. They would have put things in boxes and I didn’t want that. It would have trivialized it. And now that we are back together both of us have made a decision to keep things between ourselves. So we’re used to lying about it. Nobody else knows.’ An uneasy pause. ‘This must sound childish to you.’
‘Not at all.’ I may have got away with it. ‘But can I ask why you broke up in the first place?’
This is expressed in such a way that it would be easy for me not to answer the question. But my sense of embarrassment at having been caught out by Stevenson is substantial and I do not want to refuse her request.
‘Largely on account of my selfishness. I think Kate grew tired of the fact that I was always withholding things from her. I had this insistence on privacy, a reluctance to let her in. She called it my separateness.’
There is suddenly a look of deep satisfaction in the lined wise eyes of Stevenson. Separateness. Yes. A good word for it.
‘But you don’t have a problem with that any more?’
‘With privacy? No. Not with Kate at least. I’m still an intensely private person, but I’ve become far more open with her since we got back together.’
This emphasis on privacy could even work in my favour: it is in the nature of intelligence work.
‘And why did you want to give the relationship a second chance? Do stop me if you think I’m being unduly intrusive.’
‘No, no. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. I wanted to try again because I started thinking about the future. It was that simple. I looked around and thought about where I wanted to be in ten years’ time. The sort of life I wanted to have. And I realized I’d thrown away the best chance I had of a kind of happiness.’
Stevenson nods encouragingly, as if this makes absolute sense to her. So I continue.
‘It’s one of the cliches of breaking up, but you simply don’t know how much you love something until it’s taken away from you. I’m sure you come across this