The Road Between Us (48 page)

He opens the door, signs for a large parcel and carries it through to his study. Here he sits down cross-legged on the floor and opens it to find it is from the nursing home.

At the top of the box is a pair of slippers. Underneath these is a leather motorcycle helmet. Placing this carefully on the floor he reaches for his father’s kimono. Next he comes to a tightly folded newspaper cutting. It shows the photograph that his Taliban guards had taken of him holding up a copy of the
Daily Telegraph
. Scrawled across it, in his father’s hand, are the words ‘Call F’, followed by a number.

He continues searching, for what he does not know. Here is a cigar box full of letters tied with ribbon. The writing on the
envelopes is Gothic. Here an RAF tie, a khaki armband with the words ‘Official War Artist’, a collar stud, a cravat, an exhibition catalogue, a cap badge depicting a guinea pig with wings, an old and scratched pair of binoculars, and a silver hip flask engraved with the letters ‘HR’. He opens it and sniffs. Whiskey. Of course. And here is a collection of paintbrushes tied with an elastic band, some pencils and a carrier bag full of paint tubes, mostly used, carefully rolled, solidified. Paint had been his father’s lifeblood, he thinks. Now it is dry and hard.

Though his father’s possessions are spread out around him on the floor, the box is still not empty. He lifts out a copy of the ‘Wolfenden Report’ on homosexual offences, 155 pages long and published in 1957. It is stained with coffee-cup rings. There is a bookmark halfway through: a newspaper cutting about an inquest into the death of Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park codebreaker. It reports how a verdict of suicide had been recorded after he bit into a poisoned apple in imitation of Snow White.

Paperclipped to this is a sepia photograph. It shows two men bending slightly to kiss the same woman on what looks like VE Day, judging by the flags and the crowds doing a conga behind them in Trafalgar Square. All three look to be in their mid-twenties. The men are in profile, as one kisses the woman’s right cheek, the other her left. Because the faces of the men are at exactly the same height it gives the illusion that they were about to kiss each other when the woman popped up between them. She is staring straight at the camera, laughing. There is a cigar in the corner of her mouth and she is wearing an army officer’s cap that is too big for her and seems to belong to the uniformed man on her left. Edward recognizes her, and him. They are his mother and father. He doesn’t recognize the other man, a civilian in a suit whose face is partly obscured by the trilby he is wearing.

He puts it on the floor and takes out a picture frame from the box. It contains a black and white photograph of the same man holding a baby. Next to him is his father aged about fifty, judging by his thinning hair and paunch. His sideburns date the photograph
to the Swinging Sixties, as does his striped jacket, open-neck shirt and the silk scarf he is wearing instead of a tie. He has his arm around the shoulder of a boy holding a football. Edward guesses that the boy is about ten and wonders for a moment if it is him. No, he is sure it isn’t.

Wondering when the photograph was taken, he opens up the back and feels a skid of pain as he pushes at the rusting clips with his fingernail. He presses with both thumbs to ease the glass out of the frame. There is a tourist postcard of Eros in Piccadilly Circus. It is in colour and looks as if it dates back to the 1950s. There is nothing written on the back of this except the small type of the caption across the bottom: ‘Eros came to symbolise the cult of beauty for the Aesthetic Movement of Oscar Wilde, William Morris and Aubrey Beardsley.’

Under this is what looks like the back of the photograph, and handwritten on it is the word ‘Anselm’. What does it mean? Is it a name? He peels it out of the frame and realizes it is written on the back of a second photograph tucked behind the first. He turns the second photograph over and sees it is of two young men laughing and raising their glasses in a toast. One of them is in RAF uniform. It is his father again. How handsome he looks. Who is he with? Whoever it is, he is handsome, too. They look about the same age.

Is this Anselm?

The sound of the word has purchase. Where has he heard it before? Anselm … Answer … Anselm … Answer. Was this what his father had been saying? He studies Anselm’s face in the photograph. It looks familiar. He then compares it to the man holding the baby in the other photograph and the man with his arm around the woman in Trafalgar Square on VE Day.

The same.

Edward continues sifting through the contents of the box. Here is his father’s Croix de Guerre and the thin silver flower of the George Cross stuffed carelessly into the same presentation box. And here in a random pile is a dog-eared copy of
The Waste Land
, a
polished Sam Browne belt, motorcycle goggles, a pack of Horniman’s Quick Brew Tea, a Comet typewriter ribbon, a bar of Sunlight soap in a sun-faded packet, a receipt for dinner from the Chelsea Arts Club (10s. 6d.) … And this … a yellowing cutting from the
Baltimore Sun
about the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp. It is little more than a photograph and caption.

He holds it up to the light and realizes the photograph is of his father again and that he is carrying what looks like a concentration camp victim into a hospital. He looks at the face of the victim. Then he looks at the photograph marked ‘Anselm’ and then at the photograph of the three people in Trafalgar Square. The same. The same. The same.

His thoughts are interrupted by the sound of keys turning in the front door. He looks up distractedly and, realizing it is Hannah coming home, lowers his gaze once more to the photograph in his hand.

Who are you, Anselm? What were you to my father? And what kind of a name is Anselm? Is it German? Why didn’t my father talk about you?

He fans the photographs out on the desk and stares at them in frustration. What use are they without captions? Without names? Without dates? Photographs are only meaningful when they come with memories.

The doorbell rings again. He can feel his neck muscles tightening. Why won’t they all go away? Leave me alone?

Hannah must be upstairs with her headphones on. He feels too tired to answer it himself, to find out what the world wants from him today. Perhaps it is the police, he thinks. Perhaps they have worked out the secret of my heart and given it a label. That cold and clinical word.

He can hear the letterbox flap being opened. ‘It’s Niall. Northy, are you there?’

He doesn’t want to talk to Niall. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone.

His chest expands with inhaled breath. Of what had he been
thinking just now, before the doorbell rang? He is finding it hard to concentrate, as if silt in his mind has been stirred with a stick and is now swirling chaotically.

The old man at the funeral had mentioned a second trial after the war.

He thinks he knows who Anselm is now. Thinks he understands why his father never mentioned him.

III

THE PERMANENT UNDERSECRETARY DOES NOT LOOK UP WHEN HE
hears the knock at the door. Instead he continues chewing his gum, wincing at the ulcer that seems to be burning a hole in his stomach. There is another knock and this time a mandarin enters tentatively without waiting to be asked in.

‘Something you should be aware of, Sir Niall: the
Guardian
are running a story tomorrow about Friedrich Walser, the German financier. They’ve been trying to reach you for a comment.’

He has the PUS’s attention now.

‘Why me?’

‘Your name has come up on Wikileaks. I don’t know the details.’

‘Bad?’

‘I didn’t get the impression that it was good.’

‘Can we take out an injunction?’

‘Too late. The Twitter monkeys are all over it.’

Niall’s hair has flopped over his forehead, and he now presses it back using the tips of his fingers, his hand as stiff as that of a tailor’s dummy. ‘Where is the Foreign Secretary?’

‘Out of reach until later.’

‘Thank you. Did the
Guardian
leave a number?’

The mandarin hands over a Post-it note.

When the door closes, Niall remains motionless as he weighs his options. Plausible deniability? Damage limitation? After a minute,
the movement-sensitive, energy-saving light above his head clicks off. A further minute passes as he sits in the gloom, then the phone rings several times before he reaches for it, and the recessed ceiling lights come back on.

The caller has hung up. Niall pushes back his chair and walks over to a filing cabinet, taps in a security code and removes a slim dossier marked ‘confidential’.

It contains his own handwritten minutes of a one-on-one meeting he had held with Walser in this very building. They are more contemporaneous notes than minutes. At Walser’s request, there had been no one else present, no secretaries, no civil servants. Walser had said that day that he knew about Niall’s friendship with Edward. He had heard from a reliable contact of his at Al Jazeera that the group behind the kidnap had issued a ransom demand of three million dollars and provided ‘proof of life’. Walser knew the British government couldn’t be seen to pay it, but there was nothing stopping him paying it, he said. Indeed he was prepared to go to Waziristan – if it was true that that was where the group was based – to oversee the transaction personally.

To this day, Niall wonders why he declined Walser’s offer. After all, he had been right. Officially, the Foreign Office could not condone the payment of ransoms. Unofficially, it condoned them all the time, so long as the hostage’s family raised the money.

Niall turns to the only other sheet in the dossier, a handwritten letter from Walser dated shortly after Edward’s release. ‘I’m glad our mutual friend is back safely,’ it reads. ‘Please make no mention of our discussions. Yours, FW.’

Niall stares at the letter with his head cocked and asks himself why he had taken the credit for Walser’s good deed. He considers his options again, more calmly this time. It might be possible to argue that he took ‘ownership’ of this issue in order to set a precedent for future FCO negotiations with the Taliban. Or he could say he did it to preserve Walser’s anonymity. Yes, that might work better. Walser couldn’t risk being seen as a go-between, or a Taliban sympathizer, especially as he was a Muslim convert.

For now though … Niall purses his lips as he holds the letter over the shredder. He turns it on and watches almost with curiosity as his hand feeds the paper in, followed by the minutes. After watching them disappear he returns to his desk, moves his mouse to bring his computer out of sleep and does a search of the dropbox he and Walser used to leave emails for one another, in draft form only so that they didn’t leave an electronic trail once sent. When a dozen come up with the letters FW in the subject field, he highlights them all and presses the delete button.

He now takes a sheet of Foreign Office headed notepaper and hand-writes a letter of resignation. If he times things well, the Foreign Secretary won’t accept it. He seals the letter and places it in a drawer on top of a black folio-sized notebook. Edward’s memoir. He takes it out and, as he smooths his hand over its cover, he curses himself for having worried needlessly about its contents. Perhaps it is not too late to slip it back where he found it, in Edward’s bathroom.

He now stares in an unfocused way at his ‘me wall’ – framed photographs of himself shaking hands with foreign dignitaries including the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and Hillary Clinton. The phone rings again.

‘Hi, it’s Martin Cullen from the
Guardian
. You helped set up my interview with Edward Northcote.’

‘Oh yes, hi, did you get what you needed?’

‘Yes, that’s all subbed and ready to go to press. I was ringing about another story I’m working on. Are you aware that your name has come up on the Wikileaks website?’

Niall feels his stomach knotting. Remains silent.

‘According to US diplomatic cables, the CIA were listening in on your negotiations with the Taliban. It seems you knew Edward Northcote was alive and being held hostage as far back as 2006, which was when a ransom was first demanded …’

‘We absolutely did not know he was alive at that time. We had no proof. None whatsoever.’

‘But you were given proof in 2011, when the kidnappers sent
you a video in response to your official declaration that he was dead … And that was when Friedrich Walser approached you and offered to pay the ransom anonymously.’

Niall’s throat has gone dry.

‘And you turned him down.’

‘It is the policy of the British government …’ Niall coughs. His voice is as thin as a reed. ‘It is the policy of the British government never to pay ransom money to kidnappers.’

‘When Mr Walser threatened to go public about your unwillingness to save Mr Northcote you relented and paid the ransom with his money, through an offshore account he had set up.’

Niall swallows.

‘You then took the credit for Mr Northcote’s release and, as a reward, you were given the job of Permanent Undersecretary … Do you have any comment?’

Niall puts the phone down and stares at it until the light in the ceiling goes off again. As he opens the drawer once more, the light comes back on and he reaches for a brandy bottle, pours himself a large glass, drinks it down in two gulps and pours a second. He presses his fingertips to the hollows of his temples, then he touches his intercom button.

‘Can you cancel my appointments for the rest of the day. I’m going to see Edward Northcote. And can you ask my driver to be ready in five minutes.’

Hannah opens a bottle of Verdicchio, sniffs the cork and pours herself a glass. She then roasts some peppers under the grill. When they are blistered she takes them out and, after peeling them, slices them lengthways before adding capers, garlic and parsley. She cracks an egg on the rim of a bowl next, reaches for a second one and stops in mid-air.

The doorbell is ringing. She looks up at the kitchen clock and sighs. So much for her quiet night in, she thinks. Just her, a bottle of wine, an omelette and a box set of the second series of
The Killing
. She puts the wine back in the fridge and wipes her hands
on her apron as she walks to the front door. The bell rings again. As she reaches for the latch she hesitates. Takes off the apron. Looks down at the grey-marl, cable-knit stockings she had been trying on before she started cooking. They are held up above her knees by black bows and they still have the price tag attached. Too late to change out of them now. As she reaches for the latch she holds back a sigh.