‘Yes, well.’ He shifted position to lean on the edge of her desk, instead. ‘One doesn’t want to appear too intrusive. Besides, I was wanted upstairs. Quite a scandal, we had. I was just telling Jenny. But come, first things first – what’s this Deacon chap like?’
‘Very nice. Very pleasant. A gentleman.’
‘Ah, then he’ll be odd man out here,’ Roger said. He grinned. ‘What else?’
‘I don’t know anything else. He’s only just arrived. I haven’t had much time to analyse his character.’
‘No need to be sarcastic.’
Jenny, from her desk across the office, said, ‘Well, I’ll trade you your new man for Spivey, Regina.’
‘No, thank you. I’ve had him.’
‘How on earth could you stand it?’ the girl asked.
‘I couldn’t.’ Calmly sorting through the morning’s mail, she said to Roger, quite as if she didn’t care, ‘What sort of a scandal did you have upstairs, then?’
‘Ah.’ Roger didn’t often gossip. For him to be doing it now meant the news must be something uncommonly interesting. ‘Well,’ he said, settling in, looking round to make sure that they couldn’t be heard, ‘the old man nearly gave poor Garcia the sack. It seems there’s something of a shortage in the petty cash. The old man was reviewing the books at the weekend and found things were short by a few hundred pounds. That’s why he had Garcia up this morning, called him on the carpet. And Garcia said he knew about the shortage; that he’d noticed it some months ago and watched it growing larger, but that he couldn’t account for it being there. Which of course was an unlikely story, but the more the old man raged and shouted, the more Garcia held his ground, and they had it out in Spanish, and at last the old man told him, fine, they’d start again from scratch, but if the money should fall short again, then,’ he slashed his throat from ear to ear with one neat finger. ‘Anyhow, Garcia demanded a new petty-cash box, with new keys, so I’d imagine that will end his troubles.’
Jenny asked him, ‘You don’t think he did it?’
‘My darling girl, if an accountant wants to rob his company, he’d be far more creative about it, and he’d likely steal more than a few hundred quid.’
Regina agreed. ‘Who, then?’
She already had her suspicions, but she wanted to see whether Roger might share them. He did. With a quirk of one eyebrow, he asked them, as teacher to pupils, ‘Well, who kept the petty cash before Garcia?’
Jenny said, ‘Mr Emmerson, wasn’t it? I know he left not long after I started, but—’
‘And who did Mr Emmerson – and his keys, presumably – go home with every Friday night, for dinner?’
‘Who?’ Jenny asked.
Roger looked at Regina. She said, ‘Have you said anything to Mr Reynolds?’
‘Heavens, no. No, I dislike Spivey as much as the next person, but I know better than to cross him, or accuse him without evidence. He’s slippery – he can slide around the issue and come out unscathed, and next you know, your head is on the chopping block, instead of his. Just look what became of our poor young American friend.’
Jenny lowered her head, and Roger, as though suddenly realising what he’d said, turned and started to say something to her, but just then the outer door opened and closed with a wind-driven bang, and the inner door opened and they were no longer alone.
Roger cheerfully greeted the man who came in. ‘Ah, Vivian. Just the man I was looking for.’
Vivian Spivey hunched out of his overcoat, shaking the remnants of rain from its folds as he hung it on the rack beside the door. ‘Oh? Why is that?’ He took his hat off with one long, thin, hand – an undertaker’s hand, Regina thought – and turned his long, thin face to Roger for an answer. His eyes were cold and empty of emotion.
Roger straightened from Regina’s desk. ‘Mr Reynolds had some questions about the number of barrels coming over on the next shipment. Do you have a moment to go over the manifests?’
‘Yes, all right, then. Come on through,’ Spivey told him, impatient.
The office seemed more airless without Roger to enliven it. Regina glanced over at Jenny, who was silently cranking a fresh sheet of paper into her typewriter, and she wondered if she ought to say something herself, as Roger had intended to, to comfort the younger girl, but in the end she thought it best to let the matter lie.
It was none of her business. Not that Roger wasn’t right – Spivey probably had been at the bottom of the young American’s fall from grace. It hadn’t been a secret that the two men had disliked each other, and she’d witnessed more than one occasion on which Spivey had manoeuvred to have somebody he didn’t like removed from their position.
She was glad he hadn’t managed to remove Manuel Garcia. But she knew the Spaniard wasn’t in the clear, just yet. He’d have to watch his back. And so, she thought, would Andrew Deacon.
There was a sense, that New Year, of a turning of the tide; a sense the war might soon be over, and the world restored to… well, if not to normal, then to something rather better than it was at present. The optimism caught, and spread. The first few weeks of January, nearly all the talk around the office was about the much-anticipated Allied landings – when they’d likely come, and where.
‘Perhaps Spain,’ Spivey said, and his glance at Garcia was pure condescension. ‘They wouldn’t meet with much resistance there, I’m sure.’
Garcia, without looking up, reminded everybody in the room that Spain was neutral. ‘We do not fight this war.’
‘No, but you’re in it, just the same. There’s no such thing as being neutral,’ Spivey said. ‘Everyone, in time, comes down on one side or the other.’
Garcia raised his head. ‘We have had our own years of war, in Spain. I fought then. I fought my countrymen, my brothers, and I learnt it is not always so easy to distinguish these “sides”, as you call them, from one another, or to know which one is right.’
Deacon, watching silently as always, made no comment, but Regina thought that in his eyes she saw a new respect and liking for Garcia. After that, she noticed Deacon always stopped to say good morning to Garcia, and to exchange a few words, from politeness. That was how the two men each discovered that they shared a love of gardening. Regina overheard them once discussing some elusive wildflower by its Latin name.
‘But yes, I know where this is growing,’ Garcia was saying. ‘Not far to the north, I will show you. I go there on Sundays, to paint.’
Deacon’s eyebrows rose in interest. ‘You’re a painter?’
‘Not a good one. It is only, how do you say it, my hobby. My wife would say I use it to escape the house, and her.’ He smiled.
Regina hadn’t seen Garcia smile much. It made him look a very different person; not so driven.
Deacon’s smile was not so great a transformation, but she liked it, all the same. She found that she looked forward to it every morning, just as she looked forward to his quiet, undemanding presence, calming at the centre of her day.
Reynolds, also, appeared quite approving of Deacon. Three times now he’d had him to parties, and once to an Embassy lunch, introducing him round. And on one remarkable occasion he’d asked Deacon if he’d mind escorting Jenny to the theatre. That had caused some tongues to wag around the office. Reynolds had never asked anyone other than Roger Selkirk to stand in for him with Jenny, and the fact that he’d asked Deacon showed a great degree of trust.
It was clear that the significance of this had not escaped their higher-ups. The messages for Deacon came more thickly now, and then one Friday afternoon word came that he should clear his next day’s calendar, as JL Cayton-Wood would send a car for him at breakfast. Regina knew this because, when he got the message, Deacon called her to his office.
He looked thoughtful. ‘Are you busy at the moment?’ That was what he always said when she came in, no matter how pressing his own concerns might be, as though he didn’t want to cause her inconvenience.
She assured him no, she wasn’t.
‘Good. Please
, do sit down. I wondered, could you tell me what you know about Jack Cayton-Wood?’
She sat, and frowned a little. ‘Well, I haven’t met him often. I know my father does do business with him, now and then. Nearly everyone dealing with exports and imports in Lisbon must do business, at some time, with Mr Cayton-Wood. He virtually controls the harbour here – there is not much that can happen at the docks without his knowing and approving.’
‘And how long has he been doing this?’
‘A year, perhaps a little more. The man who held that job before him died, you see, quite suddenly, and Cayton-Wood had friends in the right places, so I understand. He is quite young, some think, to have such power, but before this he already was a military officer. He fought under Montgomery in North Africa. El Alamein.’
‘Is that how he injured his leg?’
‘Yes. It will never heal, I’m told. So he was discharged, and came here, to Lisbon.’
Deacon took this in, and then he asked her, ‘Do you like him?’
‘He is very well respected.’
‘That’s not what I asked.’
She said, honestly, ‘No, I don’t like him. I don’t know why I don’t, but there it is.’ She wouldn’t have spoken so plainly to anyone else, but with Deacon it seemed that he truly did want her opinion. In this instance, she couldn’t help thinking he shared it.
She never did know where he went with Cayton-Wood, that Saturday, or what the men discussed. Her Alvaro, who was with them, said only that they’d spent the afternoon just north of Lisbon, in the spa town of Caldas da Rainha, where the hot sulphur springs had for centuries soothed, even healed, those in need. Cayton-Wood, Alvaro told her, took the waters for his leg. But Alvaro said little else, and Deacon, when she saw him in his office Monday morning, said less still.
He looked as though his thoughts were troubled. He’d turned his chair so that his gaze fell full upon his wedding photograph, and he was sitting there in silence, staring, so absorbed he didn’t seem to hear Regina coming in. She set his coffee quietly beside him, on the desk.
She asked, ‘Is everything all right?’
He didn’t answer right away, but as she watched, his eyes turned with an effort from the portrait and he smiled shortly. ‘Thank you for the coffee.’
He was thinking of his wife, she knew. But there was in his eyes a certain sadness that she didn’t understand.
He said, ‘I’m told that you’re engaged to Alvaro Marinho, from the Embassy.’
‘That’s right.’
‘He seems a very nice young man. A good man.’
‘Yes, he is.’
‘When will you marry?’
‘We do not yet know. This war…’
‘Ah, yes. This war.’ He turned his face away, to look once again at the leather-framed portrait. ‘What our lives might have been, were it not for this war.’
She followed his gaze, to the lively green eyes of his redheaded wife, and she couldn’t help asking, ‘Are you sure she wouldn’t be happier here?’
He said gently, ‘It isn’t a question of happiness. She’s much better off where she is. No, we must think first of those whom we love, not ourselves, and try always to do what is best for them.’
Saying the words aloud seemed to resolve something for him. Taking a sheet of stationery from his desk drawer he wrote four brief lines across it in his neatly slanting script, and signed it. Then he folded it and slipped it in an envelope. ‘Here,’ he said, writing a name on the envelope, ‘could you please see that this gets delivered to the Hotel Rosa, in Caldas da Rainha?’
Regina glanced at the name on the envelope as he handed it over; it meant nothing to her. ‘Of course.’
She knew she should have mentioned that delivery, and the name of the man whom the message had gone to, when she made her weekly report…but she didn’t. It didn’t seem right, somehow, spying on Deacon. Passing along things that Roger and Spivey and Manuel Garcia said, well, that was one thing. But Deacon was in the same business that she was – invading his privacy just seemed improper.
And so, the next week, when she learnt he’d been invited to Garcia’s home for dinner, she didn’t put that detail in her report either.
She was, though, like everyone else at the office, amazed. Roger, stopping by her desk the next day after lunch, to chat, was keen for information. ‘Did he tell you what the wife was like? I’ve never so much as glimpsed Manuel’s wife, myself. I’m not even sure she exists.’
‘She exists.’ Regina smiled. ‘She telephones him now and then.’
‘Ah, so you’ve never seen her either? How very interesting.’ He looked towards Deacon’s office. ‘He’s not in, is he?’
‘Mr Deacon? No, he’s gone to see a painting.’
‘Well, that’s inconvenient.’ Roger’s eyes danced mischief. ‘I shall have to have him round to my house for dinner, I suppose, if I want to learn anything.’
‘Wouldn’t it be simpler to invite Mr Garcia?’
‘I have, darling. He didn’t accept. I don’t remember the excuse he used. The problem is, you see, he’s Spanish, and the Spanish and we English have a thing. I don’t know that they’ve ever really forgiven us for that Armada business.’ He leant on her desk, arms folded. ‘And now, of course, it’s wolfram, and this Monreale affair.’
Regina stopped her filing for a moment to look up at him. ‘What’s that?’
‘Monreale, my dear. He’s Consul for the new Fascist republic the Italians have set up for themselves, at Salo. Franco’s allowed him to open an office in Madrid, for passports, and the Allies are protesting. And last week in the House of Commons Eden said he’d warned the Spanish government to stop supplying wolfram to the Axis…’
‘What is wolfram?’
‘Tungsten, some call it. A black ore that’s used as an alloy to harden steel – that makes it a strategic export, in a war. Anyhow, the Spanish have apparently been warned there might be quite grave consequences if they keep up the supply. Needless to say, they’re not terribly fond of us, just at the moment. So I don’t imagine Garcia would want to come over for dinner,’ he said, summing up. ‘No, I’m better off trying your nice Mr Deacon.’
That afternoon, Regina said to Deacon, ‘Roger’s going to ask you to dinner.’
‘Oh, yes? Why is that?’
She smiled. ‘I gather he’s planning to pump you for information on Mr Garcia. He’s like an old woman, he likes to know everyone’s business.’
‘It’s a wonder no one tried persuading him to work intelligence,’ said Deacon. ‘It would have saved them the bother of bringing me over, not to mention the expense.’
‘It was considered once.’
‘But?’
‘They didn’t think him suitable.’
‘Not because he was a homosexual, surely? It’s common knowledge, isn’t it? That would make him immune to blackmail.’
‘No, it wasn’t that. He drinks,’ she said. ‘Sometimes too much. And he’s been known to use cocaine. He is a good man, but his habits make him vulnerable.’
‘I see.’ He thought a moment, then he asked, ‘What does he drink?’
‘Scottish whiskey.’
‘Then I shall enjoy having dinner with Roger,’ said Deacon, head bending again to his work. ‘One couldn’t get whiskey at all in New York.’
Regina Marinho smiled now, in remembrance. Pouring out a second cup of tea for each of us, she said, ‘I did so like him. He was like a breath of clean air, in those offices. Really, I’d have worked for him for ever, if they’d let me. But of course, they didn’t let me.’
She had never been to Deacon’s flat. She’d never had a reason to, but Alvaro was ill today, and it was Saturday, and there had been a message from New York, and she’d been ordered to deliver it.
The house was in the Lapa district, not far from the Embassy, along a narrow sidestreet that fell steeply to the harbour. Deacon had the third-floor flat. His windows had a dizzy view across the jumbled red-tiled roofs th
at hugged the hill below. To the east a wall of dark cloud rose above the water, but the sun was bright against it, and the specks of wheeling seabirds were a blinding white.
Regina watched the birds and waited patiently while Deacon decoded the message, in case he should need to send back a reply. This was a different code, not meant for her eyes, nor for anyone else at the Embassy. Deacon had gone to the next room to do the decoding; she didn’t know what key he used.
It wasn’t her concern. She only knew what she was meant to know, and nothing more. But she could not resist, this first time being here in Deacon’s flat, the urge to wander round and see what details of his life she might discover.
The flat had come furnished, she knew, and the sofas and tables and curtains were simple and spare. One armchair had been moved from its deeply indented place on the carpet to a new spot near the window, and the smoking-table at its side was weighted by a stack of books – the one on top a novel by the author Nevil Shute, the next below it a collection of the poems of Rupert Brooke.
She was looking to see what the other ones were when a knock at the door interrupted.
Deacon heard it too. He came through from the back room and warned her to silence, then motioned for her to change places with him, ushering her into the back room and closing the door between them as he went to find out who had knocked.
Regina saw the single bed, the chest of drawers, and realised that the only thing more damning to her character than being found in Andrew Deacon’s flat would be to be found in his bedroom. With that in mind, she kept close to the door, so that if it were suddenly opened she could at least try to stay hidden behind it.
She heard a man’s voice, angry. Cayton-Wood. His walking stick stabbed at the floor with each step as he entered the sitting room. ‘…shockingly poor judgement,’ he was saying.
Deacon’s voice calmly replied, ‘I was told I might use my discretion.’
‘Discretion!’
‘Garcia invited me. I saw no harm in accepting.’
‘You ought to have cleared it with us first. With me.’