Spy Story by Len Deighton

Saturday, on Sunday morning, advertising men and a sports car club. Alongside the pub there is the mews. At the mews’s far end a gate opens onto the entirely unexpected house and garden that Foxwells have owned for three generations.
    It was hard to believe that this was central London. The trees were bare, and sapless roses hung their shrunken heads. A hundred yards up the drive there was a large house just visible in the winter gloom. In front of it, well clear of the London planes, the gardener was burning the last of the fallen leaves. He raked the fire with great apprehension, as a man might goad a small dragon. A billow of smoke emerged and fierce embers crackled and glowed red.
    â€˜Evening, sir.’
    â€˜Evening, Tom. Will it rain?’ I went round and opened the car door for Marjorie. She knew how to operate it for herself, but when she had her hair up she liked to be treated like an elderly invalid.
    â€˜There’s snow up there,’ said Tom. ‘Make sure your anti-freeze is in.’
    â€˜I forgot to drain it out last year,’ I said. Feeling neglected, Marjorie put her hands in her pockets and shivered.
    â€˜That’s cruel,’ said Tom. ‘She’ll rust.’
    Ferdy’s house sits on two acres of prime London building land. It makes the apples he grows in the orchard an expensive delicacy, but Ferdy is like that.
    There were cars already there: Ferdy’s Renault, a Bentley and an amazing vintage job: bright yellow, perhaps too ostentatious for Al Capone but certainly big enough. I parked my Mini Clubman next to it.
    I hesitated for a moment before ringing the bell. These intimate little dinner parties of the Foxwells were planned with the special sort of skill that his wife gave to everything she did. Committees devoted to musical charities, societies for new music and, according to Ferdy, a trust that restored old organs. But in spite of such gags, Ferdy gave some of his time and money to the same charities. I knew that dinner would be followed by a short recital by some young singer or musician. I knew too that the performance would be Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven or Bach, because Ferdy had vowed never again to have me at one of the evenings the Foxwells dedicated to twentieth-century music. It was a disbarment for which I was eternally thankful. I guessed that the other guests that I saw at these dinners had similarly disgraced themselves by contributing to the discord.
    Ferdy and Teresa were in deadly earnest about these musical soirées: they’d put me under real pressure to get me into my second-hand dinner suit. It made me look like a band leader waiting for a return of the nineteen thirties, but twice I’d gone along wearing my dark grey suit, and Teresa had told a mutual friend that I was a man delivering something from Ferdy’s office – and she’d felt obliged to ask me to stay – democracy in action. I mean, I like the Foxwells, but everyone has their funny little ways. Right?
    I pressed the bell.
    Marjorie liked the house. She had an idea that one day, when we grew up, we’d be living in plastic and hardboard scaled-down versions of it. She stroked the door. It was set into an elaborate sea-shell canopy. On each side of it there was a lighted coach lamp. The burning leaves scented the night air. The Notting Hill traffic was no more than a soft purr. I knew that Marjorie was storing this moment in her memories. I leaned close and kissed her. She clutched my arm.
    The door opened. I saw Ferdy, and behind him his wife Teresa. Out spilled the tinkles of music, laughter, and ice-cubes colliding with Waterford glass. It had everything, that house: suits of armour, stags’ heads and gloomy portraits. And servants with lowered eyes who remembered which guests had hats and umbrellas.
    There is a particular type of tranquil beauty that belongs to the very very rich. Teresa Foxwell had grown-up children, was on the wrong side of