to Charles and Susan Hamilton, an elderly couple whose family had been in the Valley for four generations. In the seventeen years that Amelia had lived in Chalke Bissett, she had exchanged no more than a few words with either of them.
It was cold to be standing outside after the warmth of the car and Amelia took the house keys from the pocket of her coat, switching off the burglar alarm once she had stepped inside. Her weekends usually adhered to a strict routine. She would switch on the Channel Four news, prepare herself a large gin and tonic with a slice of cucumber, find the ingredients to make a simple supper, then run a bath into which she poured oil from one of the three dozen bottles lining the shelves of her bathroom, all of them birthday and Christmas gifts from male colleagues at SIS who routinely gave books and booze to men and overpriced soap products to their female counterparts.
There was plenty of ice in the freezer, lemons in a bowl on the kitchen table. Amelia fixed the gin, sliced the cucumber and drank a silent toast in celebration of her husband’s absence from the house: Giles would be in Scotland for the long weekend, earnestly researching a withered branch of his breathtakingly tedious family tree. Solitude was something almost unknown to her now and she tried to savour it as much as possible. London was a constant merry-go-round of meetings, lunches, cocktail parties,
connections
: at no point was Amelia alone for more than ten minutes at a time. For the most part she relished this lifestyle, her proximity to power, the buzz of influence, but there had been an increasingly bureaucratic dimension to her work in recent months that had frustrated her. She had stayed with SIS to
spy
, not to discuss budget cuts over canapés.
She lit a fire, went upstairs to run the bath and took a tub of homemade pesto from the freezer, setting it to defrost in the microwave. There was a pile of post beside the cooker and she flicked through it with one ear on the television news. Amid the bills and postcards were two copies of the Chalke Bissett magazine and three stiff-backed ‘At Home’ invitations to drinks parties in the county that she immediately co-opted as kindling for the fire. By eight o’clock, Amelia had changed into a dressing-gown, checked her emails, poured a second gin and tonic and found a packet of spaghetti in the larder.
That was when the telephone rang.
17
The envelope had borne a Parisian postmark and was addressed to
Mrs Joan Guttmann, c/o The Century Club, 7 West 43rd St, New York, New York
.
It had been forwarded by the club to Guttmann’s apartment on the Upper West Side and brought up to the fourteenth floor by Vito, the doorman on whom Joan relied for everything from weather reports to grocery deliveries.
The letter had been written in English.
Agence Père Blancs
Rue la Quintinie, 147
Paris 75015
France
Dear Mrs Guttmann
It is with the deepest regret that I must inform you of the deaths of Mr Philippe Malot and Mrs Jeannine Malot, who have passed away while on vacation in Egypt.
The next of kin has recently made contact with our agency, as a result of a clause inserted in the Last Will & Testament of his late father. In accordance with the terms of our arrangement, the agency has therefore taken the decision to contact you.
Should you wish to take this matter further, I suggest that you either write to me at our Paris address or telephone me at a time convenient to you. Allow me to say that, according to the terms of French law, you are under no obligation to do so.
Yours, cordially
Pierre Barenton (Secretary)
Joan Guttmann had dialled the number.
18
The Stone Age answering machine picked up. Amelia heard her own voice, faded and scratched through repeated playbacks. The caller did not hang up, but remained on the line, and Amelia was startled to recognize the voice of Joan Guttmann, now surely in her early eighties, leaving a croaky smoker’s message:
Amelia,
It was cold to be standing outside after the warmth of the car and Amelia took the house keys from the pocket of her coat, switching off the burglar alarm once she had stepped inside. Her weekends usually adhered to a strict routine. She would switch on the Channel Four news, prepare herself a large gin and tonic with a slice of cucumber, find the ingredients to make a simple supper, then run a bath into which she poured oil from one of the three dozen bottles lining the shelves of her bathroom, all of them birthday and Christmas gifts from male colleagues at SIS who routinely gave books and booze to men and overpriced soap products to their female counterparts.
There was plenty of ice in the freezer, lemons in a bowl on the kitchen table. Amelia fixed the gin, sliced the cucumber and drank a silent toast in celebration of her husband’s absence from the house: Giles would be in Scotland for the long weekend, earnestly researching a withered branch of his breathtakingly tedious family tree. Solitude was something almost unknown to her now and she tried to savour it as much as possible. London was a constant merry-go-round of meetings, lunches, cocktail parties,
connections
: at no point was Amelia alone for more than ten minutes at a time. For the most part she relished this lifestyle, her proximity to power, the buzz of influence, but there had been an increasingly bureaucratic dimension to her work in recent months that had frustrated her. She had stayed with SIS to
spy
, not to discuss budget cuts over canapés.
She lit a fire, went upstairs to run the bath and took a tub of homemade pesto from the freezer, setting it to defrost in the microwave. There was a pile of post beside the cooker and she flicked through it with one ear on the television news. Amid the bills and postcards were two copies of the Chalke Bissett magazine and three stiff-backed ‘At Home’ invitations to drinks parties in the county that she immediately co-opted as kindling for the fire. By eight o’clock, Amelia had changed into a dressing-gown, checked her emails, poured a second gin and tonic and found a packet of spaghetti in the larder.
That was when the telephone rang.
17
The envelope had borne a Parisian postmark and was addressed to
Mrs Joan Guttmann, c/o The Century Club, 7 West 43rd St, New York, New York
.
It had been forwarded by the club to Guttmann’s apartment on the Upper West Side and brought up to the fourteenth floor by Vito, the doorman on whom Joan relied for everything from weather reports to grocery deliveries.
The letter had been written in English.
Agence Père Blancs
Rue la Quintinie, 147
Paris 75015
France
Dear Mrs Guttmann
It is with the deepest regret that I must inform you of the deaths of Mr Philippe Malot and Mrs Jeannine Malot, who have passed away while on vacation in Egypt.
The next of kin has recently made contact with our agency, as a result of a clause inserted in the Last Will & Testament of his late father. In accordance with the terms of our arrangement, the agency has therefore taken the decision to contact you.
Should you wish to take this matter further, I suggest that you either write to me at our Paris address or telephone me at a time convenient to you. Allow me to say that, according to the terms of French law, you are under no obligation to do so.
Yours, cordially
Pierre Barenton (Secretary)
Joan Guttmann had dialled the number.
18
The Stone Age answering machine picked up. Amelia heard her own voice, faded and scratched through repeated playbacks. The caller did not hang up, but remained on the line, and Amelia was startled to recognize the voice of Joan Guttmann, now surely in her early eighties, leaving a croaky smoker’s message:
Amelia,
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