Widgett was a distinguished professor at All Souls and the author of forty books and more than eight hundred articles on various Middle Eastern topics including The Sinister West: The Arab Mind and the Double-Edged Sword of Technology, Lawrence of Arabia and the Junior Suite: The Bedouin Ideal and Urban Hospitality and The Arabian Diaspora: Yesterday and Tomorrow.
She spent a couple of hours online, reading what she could find of his work, then got dressed for a February day. It felt weird putting on tights, boots and a coat, but she kind of liked it. She glanced out of the window. The shadows were still there. She moved to the back of the flat, climbed out of the bedroom window and down the fire escape, scrambled over the wall of Dale’s garden downstairs, went through the post office and came out on the busy main road of Primrose Hill. There was no sign of anyone following her. Whoever they were, they weren’t very good.
Brooks’s was the sort of place which still didn’t admit ladies, unless accompanied by a member, and offered three-course meals with savories as dessert. It had a porter’s lodge at the entrance, a black and white tiled floor and a real coal fire in an ornate Victorian fireplace. A doorman with a nicotine-lined face and a worn waistcoat and tails showed her up to the library.
“Professor Widgett is right over here, miss,” he said. The room was silent apart from the ticking of a grandfather clock. Four or five old men sat on the worn leather armchairs behind copies of the FT or the Telegraph. There was another coal fire, an ancient globe, walls covered in books and a lot of dust. Ooh, I’d like to take a cloth and a bottle of Pledge to this lot, Olivia thought.
Professor Widgett got to his feet. He was immensely tall and old. He made her think of lines in a poem she’d learned at school: “Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin.” Widgett’s skull was almost visible beneath his translucent, papery skin and the pattern of blue veins at his temples. His hair was all but gone.
The second he started to speak, though, Olivia was reminded of how ridiculous is the urge to patronize the old. Widgett was no kind, jolly old gentleman. As he spoke, she saw in his face the ruin of the beautiful roué he must once have been: the full, sensuous lips, the mesmerizing blue eyes—mocking, roguish, cool. She could see him galloping on a camel, scarf wrapped round his head, firing on some nineteenth-century desert fort. There was something theatrical about him: almost camp, but distinctly heterosexual.
“Tea?” he said, raising one eyebrow.
Professor Widgett’s serving of the tea reminded her of someone doing a classroom chemistry experiment. It was such a performance: milk, tea strainer, hot water, butter, cream, jam. She suddenly realized why the English so loved their tea. It gave them things to fiddle with when they were bringing up other things which might stray into the difficult area of emotion and instinct. “Ahm . . . that too strong for you? Drop more hot water?” Professor Widgett huffed and harrumphed between enquiries about her take on the Arab world, which seemed strangely irrelevant to a travel piece on diving off the beaten track. What had been her experience of the Arab world? What, in her view, was the motivating factor behind the jihad? Had she ever found it odd that there was no piece of technical equipment in general Western use—no TV, no computer, no car—which was manufactured by an Arab country? Little more milk? Let me top up the pot. Did she think it a result of an Arabic disdain for manual labor or a product of Western prejudice? Was it, did she feel, an ineradicable source of Arab resentment of the West, given the Arabs’ insatiable urge to use and own the new technology? Drop more milk in that? Sugar lump? Ever had a love affair with an Arab? Oh my God, this stuff is like cat’s piss. Let’s get the waiter over for another pot.
“Professor Widgett,” she said, “did Sally Hawkins contact you, or did you contact her and ask her to contact me?”
“Terrible actress, isn’t she?” he said, taking a sip of tea. “Absolutely appalling.”
“Are you from MI6?”
He took a bite of scone, scanning her with cool, insolent blue eyes.
“A bit clumsy, my dear,” he drawled in his slightly camp way. “Traditionally, one waits for the spook to pop the question.”
He drank some more tea and ate some more scone, scrutinizing her. “So,” he said. He leaned forward dramatically, putting his bony old hand on hers, and said in a stage whisper, “Are you going to help us?”
“Yes,” she whispered back.
“You’ll have to come now.”
“Where to?”
“Safe house.”
“How long for?”
“Don’t know.”
“I thought those were your people watching outside my flat.”
“Yes. It’s the others I’m worried about.”
“Oh, I see,” she said, composing herself for a minute. “What about my things?”
“Things, Olivia, things. One must never allow oneself to become attached to things.”
“I quite agree. But, still, there are things I’ll need if I’m going to come.”
“Make a list. I’ll have someone”—he waved his hand vaguely—“fetch the ‘things.’ ”
“Why didn’t you take me in at the airport and save all this trouble?”
“Operational blunder, darling,” he said, getting to his feet.