A Spy by Nature (2001) Read online

  ‘That was Fort,’ she says, breezing back into the kitchen a few moments later. ‘He says hi. Jesus, those fucking vehicle alarms.’

  She wouldn’t ordinarily say ‘fucking’ unless she’d had a few drinks.

  ‘I know, I heard it.’

  ‘What’s the point of them, anyway? Nobody pays any attention when they go off. They don’t prevent car crime. Everybody just ignores them. You wanna coffee or something? I’m making myself one.’

  ‘Instant?’

  ”Fraid so.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘You’re such a snob about coffee, Alec.’

  ‘Nescafe is just an interestingly flavoured milk drink. You shouldn’t tolerate it. I’m going for a pee, OK?’

  ‘You do what you have to, sweetie.’

  The bathroom is at the far end of the apartment, through the sitting-room and down a long passage which passes the entrance to the flat. The bathroom door is made of light wood with an unoiled hinge which squeaks like a laughing clown when I open it. I walk in and slide the lock. There is a mirror hung above the sink and I check my reflection, seeing tiny pimples dotted along my forehead which can’t look good in the stark white light of the kitchen. The rest of my face is blanched, and I push out my lips and cheeks to bring some colour back into them. Once a little red flush has appeared I go back outside.

  Walking towards the sitting-room I steal a look through the door of their bedroom, which Katharine has left open after her shower. This is the most basic sort of invasion, but it is something I have to do. There are clothes, shoes and several issues of the New Yorker strewn on the floor. I walk further inside, my eyes shuttling around the room, taking in every detail. There is a fine charcoal sketch of a naked dancer on the wall above the bed, and a discarded bottle of mineral water by the window.

  I go back out into the corridor and hear the distant running of water at the kitchen sink. Katharine is washing up. There is another bedroom further down on the right-hand side of the passage, again with its door open. Again I look through it as I am passing, prying behind her back. An unmade bed is clearly visible on the far side, with one of Fortner’s trademark blue shirts lying crumpled on the sheets. An American paperback edition of Presumed Innocent has been balanced on the window sill and there are bottles of cologne on a dresser near the door. Is it possible that they are no longer sharing a room? There are too many of Fortner’s possessions in here for him simply to have taken an afternoon nap.

  I go back outside and walk quietly back to the first bedroom. This time I notice that the bed has only been slept in on one side. Katharine’s creams and lotions are all here, with skirts and suits on hangers by the door. But there are no male belongings, no ties or shoes. A photograph in a gilt frame by the window shows a middle-aged man on a beach with a face like an old sweater. But there are no pictures of Fortner, no snaps of him arm-in-arm with his wife. Not even a picture from their wedding.

  On a side table I spot a heavy, leather-bound address book and pick it up. No noise in the corridor. The alphabetized guides are curled and darkened with use, each letter covered in a thin film of dirt. I check the As, scanning the names quickly.

  AT&T

  Atwater, Donald G.

  Allison, Peter and Charlotte

  Ashwood, Christopher

  AM Management

  Acorn Alarms

  No Allardyce. That’s a good sign.

  To B, on to the Cs, then a flick through to R. Sure enough, at the bottom of the third page:

  Bar Reggio

  Royal Mail

  Ricken, Saul

  with his full address and telephone number. I have to get back to the kitchen. But there is just time for M.

  M&T Communications

  Macpherson, Bob and Amy

  Maria’s Hair Salon

  Milius, Alec

  Suddenly I hear footsteps near by, growing louder. I shut the book and place it back on the table. I am turning to leave when Katharine comes in behind me. We almost collide and her face sparks into rage.

  ‘What are you doin’ in here, Alec?’

  ‘I was just…’

  ‘What? What are you doing?’

  I can think of nothing to say and wait for the wave of anger in her eyes to break over me. In the space of a few seconds, the evening has been ruined.

  But something happens now, something entirely artificial and against the apparent nature of Katharine’s mood. It is as if she applies brakes to herself. Had I been anyone else there would have been an argument, a venting of spleen, but the fury in her quickly subsides.

  ‘You get lost?’ she asks, though she knows that this is unrealistic: I have been to the bathroom in their flat countless times.

  ‘No. I was snooping. I’m sorry. It was an intrusion.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she replies, moving past me. ‘I just came to get something to wear. I’m kinda cold.’

  I leave immediately, saying nothing, and return to the sitting-room. When Katharine comes back - some time later - she is wearing thick Highland socks and a blue Gap sweatshirt beneath her dressing gown, as if to suppress anything which I may earlier have construed as erotic. She sits down on the sofa opposite me, her back to the darkening sky, and fills the silence by reaching for the CD player. Her index finger prods through the first few songs on Innervisions and Stevie comes on, the volume set low.

  ‘Oh, that’s right,’ she says, as if ‘Jesus Children of America’ had prompted her. ‘I was going to fix some coffee.’

  ‘I’m not having any,’ I tell her as she leaves the room, and even that sounds rude. She does not reply.

  I should knock this on the head, do it now. I follow her into the kitchen.

  ‘Listen, Kathy, I’m sorry. I had no right to be in your bedroom. If I caught you looking around my things, I’d go spastic.’

  ‘Forget about it. I told you it was OK. I have no secrets.’

  She tries to smile now, but there is no hiding her annoyance. She is clearly upset; not, perhaps, by the fact that I was in her room, but because I have discovered something intimate and concealed about her relationship with Fortner which may shame her. I do not think she saw me with the address book. Leaning heavily on the counter, she spoons a single mound of Nescafe into a blue mug and fills it with hot water from the kettle. She has not looked directly at me since it happened.

  ‘I need you to know that it doesn’t matter to me, what I saw.’

  ‘What?’

  Katharine stares at me, her head at an angle, tetchy.

  ‘I think every married couple goes through a stage where they don’t share a room.’

  ‘What the hell makes you think you can talk to me about this?’ she says, straightening up from the counter with a look of real disappointment in her eyes.

  ‘Forget it. I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, Alec, I can’t forget it. How is that any of your business?’

  ‘It’s not. I just didn’t want to leave without saying something. I don’t want you thinking that I know something about you and Fort and that I’m jumping to conclusions about it.’

  ‘Why would I think that? Jesus, Alec, I can’t believe you’re being like this.’

  We have never before raised our voices at one another, never had a cross word.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said anything.’

  ‘No, you’re right. You shouldn’t have. If I asked you personal stuff about Kate you wouldn’t like it too much, would you?’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘Was it? Does it feel that way? No. No it doesn’t. These things are our most private…’

  I put my hands in the air defensively, moving them up and down in a gesture of contrition.

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘Jesus,’ she says, a rasp in her voice. ‘I don’t wanna argue with you like this.’

  ‘Neither do I. I’m sorry.’

  Silence now, and the edge suddenly goes out of our rush of talk. We are left facing one another, q
uiet and spent.

  ‘Let’s just sit next door,’ she says, turning to pick up her coffee. ‘Let’s just forget all about it.’

  We go into the sitting-room, the breath of the fight still around us. Stevie is singing - ridiculously - ‘Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing’. Katharine flops down into one of the sofas and clutches her mug in both palms. She has the most beautiful hands. Eventually she says:

  ‘I hate fighting with you,’ as if we have done it many times before.

  ‘Me too.’

  I sit down on the sofa opposite hers.

  ‘Can we talk about it?’

  She emphasizes the word ‘can’ here as if it were a test of character. I do not know how to respond except with the obvious:

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About Fortner.’

  His name balloons out of her as if he were sick.

  ‘Of course we can. If you want to.’

  Her voice is very quiet and steady. It is almost as if she has prepared something to say.

  ‘We - Fortner and I - haven’t shared a bed for more than a year. For longer than you’ve known us.’

  My pulse skips.

  ‘I’m sorry. I had no idea.’

  I regret saying this immediately.

  ‘We’ll work it out,’ she says hopefully. ‘I just can’t be beside him in a bed right now. It’s not anyone’s fault.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’re just kind of going through this thing where we’re not attracted to one another.’

  ‘Or where you’re not attracted to him?’

  She looks up at me, acknowledging with a softened expression that this is closer to the truth.

  ‘Have you talked about it? Does he know how you feel?’

  ‘No. He thinks he’s moved into the spare room because I can’t stand his snoring. He has no idea it’s because I don’t want to sleep with him.’

  A brief quiet falls on the room, the lull after a sudden revelation. Katharine drinks her coffee and plays with a loose thread on her dressing gown.

  ‘There’s some history to it,’ she says softly, still staring into her lap. ‘When I met Fort I was very vulnerable. I’d just come out of a long-term relationship with a guy I’d met in college. It had ended badly and Fort offered me the kind of support that I needed.’

  ‘Was he a rebound?’

  Katharine doesn’t want to admit this either to herself or to me, but she says:

  ‘I guess so. Yes.’

  She looks up at me and I can only hope that my face looks receptive to what she wants to say.

  ‘Before I’d even really thought about it we’d gotten married. Fort had been hitched before - kids, divorce, the usual pattern - and he really wanted to make it work this time. He hasn’t had access to his children for more than ten years. But I was still kind of hung up on this guy and Fortner knew that. He’s always known it.’

  She takes a deep, almost stagey breath.

  ‘I wanted to have kids, to make a family like I’d known it growing up, but he was reluctant to start again. Fort’s daughters are your age, you know, and he doesn’t think it’s fair on children to become a parent when you’re close to fifty. But I didn’t agree with him. I thought he didn’t want to have kids because he didn’t really love me. That was the state my mind was in. And after my father died, I thought there was something almost reverent about being a parent, like if you had the chance to be one you shouldn’t throw that away. Maybe you felt that too after your Dad passed away. But I was… I was…’

  She is suddenly tripping over her thoughts, too scared to hear them come out.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Alec, you can’t ever tell him that I told you this. OK? There’s only a handful of people in the world that know about it.’

  ‘You can trust me.’

  ‘It’s just I wanted children so badly. So I did a terrible thing. I tricked Fort into getting us pregnant. I stopped using my contraception and then when I got pregnant I told him.’

  ‘How did he react?’

  ‘He went crazy. We were living in New York. But Fort, you know, he’s totally against termination so he agreed that I could keep her.’

  There’s only one possible outcome to this story, the worst outcome of all.

  ‘But I lost her. Three months in, there was a miscarriage and…’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Katharine’s face is an awful picture of despair. In an attempt to appear resilient, she is struggling to bury tears.

  ‘Well what can you do, huh?’ she says, with a shrug of her shoulders. ‘It was just one of those things. I was paying the penalty for deceiving him.’

  ‘Is that how you see it? Divine retribution?’

  ‘It gives me a sort of comfort to see it that way. Maybe it isn’t true. I don’t know. Anyway, pretty soon after that, work brought us here to London; but it’s never been the same between us. Never. We just have the friendship.’

  ‘He’s Misstra Know-It-All’ comes on the stereo system, a song I like, and it distracts me. What I should properly be feeling now is a sense of honour at being made privy to the secrets of their marriage, but even as Katharine is relating the most intimate history of her relationship with Fortner, my mind is caught between the loyalty demanded of friendship and a growing desire to take advantage of her vulnerability. When she is speaking I have tried to look solely at her eyes, at the bridge of her nose, but every time she has looked away I have stolen glimpses of her calves, her wrists, the nape of her neck.

  ‘You’ve repaired that?’

  ‘It’s a slow process. I’d been very honest with Fortner about how I’d gotten pregnant. I’d told him that it was a deliberate act on my part. That was a mistake: it would have been better to lie, to blame the Pill or something. It would have been better to say it was an accident. But somehow I wanted him to know, like an act of defiance.’

  ‘Sure, I can see that.’

  ‘It’s so good having someone who understands,’ she says. ‘I mean, you’ve had your heart broken, you’ve been through some tough times. You know how all this feels.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I say, nodding. ‘But not to the extent that you’ve been through it.’

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ she says. She is attempting to come out of her contemplative mood into something more positive. ‘In a lot of ways, I’m lucky. Fort’s great, you know? He’s so smart and funny and laid-back and wise.’

  ‘Oh yeah, he’s great.’

  ‘Hey,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thanks for listening. Thanks for being there for me when I needed you.’

  ‘That’s all right. Don’t mention it.’

  In a single fluid movement she stands up and crosses the room to where I am sitting, crouching down low on her thick Highland socks. And before I have had time to say anything she has wrapped her arms around my neck, whispering ‘Thank you, you’re sweet’ into my hair. The weight of her is so perfect. I put my hand lightly on her back.

  She stops hugging first and withdraws. Now we are looking at one another. Still on her haunches, Katharine smiles and, very softly, touches the side of my face with her hand, drawing her fingers down to the line of my jaw. She lets them linger there and then slowly takes her hand away, bringing it to rest in her lap. There is a look in her eyes which promises the impossible, but something prevents me from acting on it. This is the moment, this is the time to do it, but after all the thought-dreams and the longings and the signals coding back and forth between us, I do not respond. And before I have even properly thought about it, I am saying:

  ‘I should get a cab.’

  It was pure instinct, something defensive, an exact intimation of the correct thing to do. I could not spend the night with her without jeopardizing everything.

  ‘What, now?’ she says, leaning backwards with a relaxed smile which disguises well any disappointment she may be feeling. ‘It isn’t even eleven o’clock.’

  ‘But it’s late. You’l
l want to -‘

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  I don’t want to offend her, so I say:

  ‘You want me to stick around?’

  ‘Sure. Relax. I’ll fix us a whisky.’

  She gives my knee a squeeze and I simply can’t believe that I have just let that happen. Just kiss her. Just give in to what is inevitable.

  ‘OK, then, maybe just a quick one.’

  She stands slowly, as if expecting me at any moment to pull her down towards me on the sofa. Just the action of her moving releases that exquisite scent as she turns and walks into the kitchen. I hear Fortner’s frozen Volvic falling into glass tumblers, then the slow glug-glug of whisky being poured on to ice. The noise of her moving quietly around on the polished wooden floor fills me with regret.

  ‘You have water in it, don’t you?’ she asks, coming back in with the drinks.

  ‘Yes.’

  She hands me a glass and sits down beside me on the sofa.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ she says, taking a sip of her whisky straight away. It is as if she has plucked up the courage for a big subject while she was next door.

  ‘Of course.’

  Tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, she tries to make the question sound as easygoing as possible.

  ‘Are you happy, Alec? I mean really happy?’

  The question takes me by surprise. I have to be very careful what I say here.

  ‘Yes and no. Why?’

  ‘I just worry about you sometimes. You seem a little unsettled.’

  ‘It’s just nerves.’

  ‘What d’you mean nerves? What about?’

  It was a mistake to say that, to speak of nervousness. I’ll have to shift the subject, work from memory.

  ‘I was joking. It’s not nervousness exactly. I’m just in a constantly fraught state because of Abnex.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of the pressure to do the best job that I can. Because of the feeling of being watched and listened in on all the time. Because of the demands Alan and Harry put on me. All that stuff. I’m so tired. It’s so easy to get locked into a particular lifestyle in London, a particular way of thinking. And right now all I seem to worry about is work. There’s nothing else.’