A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [9]
Drawing the curtains I see that the sky is white, a cloudy mid-summer morning that will burn off at noon and break into a good blue day.
All that I have wanted is to tell Kate about SIS. At last something has gone right for me, something that she might be proud of. Someone has given me the chance to put my life together, to do something constructive with all these mind wanderings and ambition. Wasn’t that what she always wanted? Wasn’t she always complaining about how I wasted opportunities, how I was always waiting for something better to come along? Well this is it.
But I know that it will not be possible. I have to let her go. Finding it so difficult to let her go.
I shower, dress and take the Tube to Edgware Road, but I am not the first at work. Coming down the narrow, sheltered mews, I see Anna ahead of me, fighting vigorously with the lock on the garage door. A heavy bunch of keys drops from her right hand, jingling like sleigh-bells. She stands up to straighten her back and sees me in the distance, her expression one of unambiguous contempt. Not so much as a nod. She rests her hands on the backs of her hips and tilts backwards fractionally, flattening her breasts. I push a splay-fingered hand through my hair and say good morning.
‘Hello,’ she says archly, leaning forward again, twisting the key in the lock.
She’s growing her hair. Long brown strands flecked with old highlights and trapped light.
‘Why the fuck doesn’t Nik give me a key that fucking works?’
‘Try mine.’
I steer my key in towards the garage door, a movement which causes Anna to pull her hand out of the way like a flick knife. Her keys fall on to the grey step and she says fuck again. Simultaneously her bicycle, which has been resting on the wall beside us, topples to the ground with a metal clatter. She walks over to pick it up as I unlock the door and go inside.
The air is wooden and musty. Anna comes through the door behind me with a squeezed smile. She is wearing a summer dress of pastel blue cotton dotted with pale yellow flowers. A thin layer of sweat glows on the freckled skin above her breasts, soft as moons. With my index finger I flick the switches one by one. The strip lights in the small office strobe.
There are five desks inside, all hooked up to phones. I weave through them to the far side of the garage, turning right into the kitchen. The kettle is already full and I press it, lifting two mugs from the drying-up rack. The toilet perches in the corner of the narrow room, topped by pink rolls of Andrex. Someone has left a half-finished cigarette on the cistern which has stained the ceramic. The kettle’s scaly deposits crackle faintly as I open the door of the fridge.
Fresh milk? No.
When I come out of the kitchen Anna is already on the phone, talking softly to someone in the voice that she uses for boys. Perhaps she left him slumbering in her wide, low bed, the smell of her sex on the pillow. She has opened up the wooden doors of the garage so that daylight has filled the room. I hear the kettle click. Anna catches me looking at her and swivels her chair so that she is facing out on to the mews. I light a cigarette, my last one, and wonder who he is.
‘So,’ she says to him, her voice a naughty grin. ‘What are you going to do today? Oh Bill, you’re so lazy…’
She likes his being lazy, she approves of it.
‘Yeah, OK, that sounds good. Mmmm. I’ll be finished here at six, maybe earlier if Nik lets me go.’
She turns and sees that I am still watching her.
‘Just Alec. Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.’
Her voice drops as she says this. He knows all about what happened between us. She must have told him everything.
‘Well, they’ll be here in a minute. OK. See you later. Bye.’
She turns back into the room and hangs up the phone.
‘New boyfriend?’
‘Sorry?’ she says with heavy sarcasm, standing up and passing me on her way into the kitchen. I hear her opening the door of the fridge,