VALERIE CARTER
transcribed tape interview
I remember that night well.
My father came home, poured himself a whisky as usual and then forgot to drink it.
On those nights when he stayed late at the office I used to have hot soup ready for him, a sort of pot au feu with plenty of the vegetables he liked in it. When I brought the soup out of the kitchen that night I saw that his drink was still on the side table. He was at the window staring down at the street.
‘I feel like Comrade Skriabin,’ he said.
I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I just told him to eat the soup while it was hot.
He came over to the table and sat down. Then he looked up and gave me one of his small apologetic smiles. ‘Unless I’m completely off my head,’ he said, ‘I think that I was followed when I left the office tonight. Two men in a Fiat One-Two-Five. I think they’re still outside. See if you can spot them, will you, Val?’
Now I know my father is sometimes silly, mostly when he’s been drinking; but he’s anything but stupid and certainly not fanciful. I’m not saying that he isn’t neurotic, Mr Latimer. For instance, this thing he has about calling you Mr L. That’s defensive. He thinks that if he calls you by your whole name that will somehow give you an advantage over him. He’s done that with other people he’s envied. Oh yes, I’m sure he envies you. He admires your books for one thing. You see, I love my father, but I don’t think I have many illusions about him. He’s a kind, clever, unhappy man who can be funny and delightful one moment and unbelievably awful the next. But even when he’s awful he’s still sane. He may have a vivid imagination, but he doesn’t see things that don’t exist.
So I went to the window and looked into the street.
Our apartment is on the third floor, as you know, but you can’t see all the street below unless you open a window and lean out. It was a cold night and I didn’t want to do that, so I just pressed my nose against the glass.
I could see enough. There was a Fiat parked a little way along across the street. That wasn’t remarkable, of course; there were other cars parked there, too, most of them belonging to people in the apartments opposite. I could just see a bit of the roof of my father’s Renault, which was parked directly below near our portecochère. As I looked down, I saw a man walk by the Renault and cross the street going towards the Fiat. He was wearing a felt hat and a dark overcoat. I couldn’t see his face, naturally, but I noticed that although he appeared to walk slowly he took very long strides. When he reached the Fiat he opened the door on the passenger side and got in. With the opening of the door the interior light went on for a moment and I caught a glimpse of the gloved hands of a man in the driver’s seat. Then the engine started and the headlights were switched on.
‘They’re going,’ I said and told him what I had seen.
My father went on with his supper. ‘Can you get the number?’ he asked.
The Fiat was moving away now. ‘No, but I think it’s a Fribourg plate.’
‘That’s the one,’ he said.
I went over and sat down facing him.
‘How do you know they were following you?’ I asked.
‘Pure chance.’ He shrugged. ‘I happened to notice that car when I left the office because it was illegally parked outside the bank on the corner. I thought of the long walk I had to reach my car, and in an uncharitable moment hoped that a policeman would come along and give the fellow a ticket. There was no policeman around, of course, but I kept oil hoping. As I walked away I could still see him, you see, reflected in the shop windows. Then, just as I turned the corner, I saw his passenger get out and start walking the way I was going.’
He broke a piece of bread and ate some more of the soup.
‘I didn’t think any more about it until I was walking across the bridge. Then that same car with the Fribourg plates passed me going north, the way I was going. Travelling quite fast he was. But not for long. As I turned off up the hill to St Gervais I saw that he’d parked again. He didn’t get out, just sat there. That made me think of the passenger he’d dropped and wonder which way he’d gone. You see I was getting curious about this fellow by then. When I reached my car I didn’t start up immediately. Instead, I looked in the rear-view mirror. What I saw was interesting. I’d just walked along that stretch of road and none of the cars left there had had lights on. Now there was one with lights on. I couldn’t be sure that it was the Fiat, of course – it was just two lights. But then a man came from the sidewalk and got in beside the driver. That I saw clearly.’
‘Because the interior light went on when the door opened?’
‘That’s right. How did you guess?’
‘Because the same thing happened before they drove off just now.’
‘They were behind me all the way home,’ he said. ‘I thought at one moment of making a detour to see if they really were following me or if I was only imagining it, but I didn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, I knew that I wasn’t imagining it.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Besides, if I’d started making detours they’d have known I’d spotted them. You know, if it hadn’t been for that illegal parking outside the bank I wouldn’t have spotted them, I wouldn’t have noticed a thing.’
‘But why? And who could they be?’
‘That’s what I’ve been trying to figure.’ He got up and retrieved his drink from the side table. ‘I’ve got this far. Someone wants to know where I live. I’m not in the phone directory at this address, so I’m followed when I leave the office. When I lock my car and enter this building they wait a few minutes outside, then one of them comes across and checks the names on the mailboxes. Mission accomplished, they leave.’ He downed the drink. ‘Who are they? What do they want? I haven’t a clue. It can’t be the police or anyone connected with them. I’m registered at the Bureau des Etrangers. The police know where I live and all about me.’ He pushed his empty glass across. ‘Freshen it up for me, will you, Val?’
‘All right.’ He was obviously very tired and I always tried to get him to go to bed early when he’d been working late. In the ordinary way I would have cleared the table then, washed the dishes, said good night and gone to my room. He usually went to his own soon after. But that night I didn’t think he would. When he had things on his mind he was more likely to stay up and go on drinking.
I, too, had things on my mind.
I poured another drink and took it over to him. ‘Who is Comrade Skriabin?’ I asked.
That was when he told me about the SESAME bulletins.
I had always hated Intercom. Writing that poisonous nonsense week after week, month in, month out, did something to my father. Oh, I know he didn’t believe a word of what he wrote and that it was all done tongue in cheek. That was the way he excused it to himself. He would sometimes argue, too, that what he was doing for that old horror Novak was no worse than playing Tartuffe for an audience of half-wits; but he never argued it with much conviction, not with me at any rate. The truth was that for him Intercom became a way of thumbing his nose at the world, and in the end he grew to enjoy it, but at the expense of his self-respect.
I was glad when the General died and it looked as though Intercom was finished. Naturally, I realised that my father might have a hard time finding another job. That was why I suggested the translation-bureau idea. I was sure that it could be made to work, and at least he would be his own master. It wasn’t journalism, of course; but then neither was Intercom unless you were prepared to give the word a new degraded meaning. When he told me about this man in Munich who was prepared to buy Intercom and wanted it to go on as before, I felt sick.
But not as sick as I felt when he told me about the SESAME bulletins on the night he was followed. I had known from the first that, in their dealings with this Arnold Bloch person, Dr Bruchner and my father had been guided by little more than wishful thinking. What I had not realised until then was that they really knew absolutely nothing about the man.
I didn’t sleep well that night. Next day I took a copy of the Skriabin bulletin with me to the university library and did some work on it.
The first thing to establish, it seemed to me, was the merit, or lack of it, of the technical description of the seismograph. If it consisted of serious, original information, then N. V. Skriabin was certainly in trouble; if, on the other hand, it was merely a pageful of pretentious rubbish, then the ‘hiatchet job,’ as my father called it, wasn’t going to do much damage to anyone.
I found out that ‘variable reluctance’ was a magnetic phenomenon and that it had indeed been applied in the design of some types of seismographs or seismometers. Such designs were associated mainly with the name of an American seismologist, H. Benioff, and variable-reluctance instruments were widely used. They were not, however, normally regarded as portable. Their weight was usually in the region of two hundred kilograms. Since the instrument described in the bulletin had a weight of only seventy kilograms, and since the method used to achieve this reduction in weight was specified in detail, I concluded that the technical material could well be genuine. I was able to check up, too, on the Russian geophysicist who had been credited with the design. He was certainly genuine and highly respected.
With N. V. Skriabin I had more difficulty. There was nothing in the seismological literature about him.
That didn’t surprise me. A member of a Soviet trade mission might well have technical knowledge, but he was unlikely to be a scientist of the kind whose name appears in the indices of scientific journals. He was clearly a specialist of some kind; but the Soviet government doesn’t publish lists of their departmental personnel as freely as some other countries, and such lists as are available generally cover only the senior bureaucrats. I couldn’t find him in any of the lists we had. As I didn’t know what his speciality was – it could have been anything from herring fishery to machine tools – I knew that I would get no further on my own. If I wanted a lead I would have to go to a diplomatic source. In the end I called up a friend in the library of the UN European office at the Palais des Nations and told him a lie. I told him that we had had an inquiry from a foreign consulate-general about N. V. Skriabin of the Soviet trade mission in Oslo and asked if he could help me.
‘That’s funny,’ he said; ‘we had an inquiry here about that man a few days ago. Ours wasn’t from a consulate-general, though, it was from the counsellor of a foreign embassy in Bern. Who is the consul-general?’
This man in the UN library was, I say, a friend. In fact we’d been students together and one year he’d taken me to concerts. It had been one of those things for a while. Then we had found that we were in basic disagreement – about Bartók or sex, I can’t remember which now – and had called it off. We were still on good terms, though, and I very nearly told him the truth; but then I thought that I had better not.
‘It was a confidential inquiry,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘Well, so was ours, but I suppose there’s no harm in my telling you how we replied. I can remember most of it, I think. Skriabin, Nikolay Viktorovich, is fifty-eight and a graduate of the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature. He joined the Party in thirty-two and later entered the Soviet diplomatic service. During the Hitler war he served in the army. Security duties of some kind. He has one order of Lenin, two orders of the Red Banner and one order of Survorov, second class. Something like that anyway. I may have got the numbers wrong. In recent years he has served, diplomatic service again, in Stockholm, the Hague, Brussels and Copenhagen. His highest diplomatic rank has been that of First Secretary. His appointment to the Oslo trade mission was made last year. Doesn’t sound as if he’s done very well lately, does it?’
‘In fact with a record like that it’s highly probable that he is no longer a diplomat and hasn’t been one for years. The informed guess here is that he is an officer of the Foreign Directorate of the Soviet Committee of State Security, otherwise known as the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti, or KGB, and that this trade-mission appointment is just another cover. Judging from the decorations he has, his rank is probably equivalent to that of colonel. He’d be quite an important person, a resident director most likely.’
‘Oh.’
‘I wouldn’t pass the KGB thought on to your consulate-general. Better let them work that one out for themselves.’
‘Yes. Thank you. I’m grateful to you.’
He asked me to have dinner later that week, and to get rid of him I agreed. I forgot about the dinner date, I’m afraid, because so many other things had begun happening by then. At the time, though, I just wanted to think about what he had told me.
You see, Mr Latimer, it was all very confusing – confusing to me anyway. I had been sure from the start that my father had the wrong idea. He had decided that this man Skriabin was some poor, wretched underling who had been cajoled by Bloch into selling technical secrets and that Bloch, having got the secrets, had chosen to betray him through Intercom rather than pay him off. I couldn’t see that. I mean, if you’re getting technical or trade secrets from someone, secrets you hope to make money out of, you might cheat the person you got them from by informing on him to his employers, but you wouldn’t publish the secrets as well. That would be silly. Now that I knew that Skriabin wasn’t a poor, wretched underling, things were even sillier. If you’re Bloch the double-crossing promoter, you don’t publish information of value to your competitors; and if you’re Bloch the proud new owner of anti-communist Intercom, you certainly don’t publish the name of a potential KGB defector so that the Russians can whisk him back to the Soviet Union before he gets away. So none of it made sense.
I couldn’t make up my mind whether to tell my father what I had found out about N. V. Skriabin or not. I decided to wait and see what kind of a mood he was in.
The private researches I had been doing that day had put me behind with my normal work in the library, so I was late home. When I got there I found that we had guests. I saw their overcoats and hats lying on a chair in the hall when I opened the outer door.
I didn’t go in immediately. It was rare for us to have unexpected guests – the Swiss prefer to order their social lives with a certain formality – so I concluded that these were foreigners. The overcoats and hats had no apparent nationality and the murmur of voices from the living room was indistinct, but there was an attaché case beside the coats that looked American, and one of those soft leather carrying bags that professional photographers use for their cameras. Both case and bag had Air France cabin baggage tags on the handles. Americans from Paris perhaps.
I had had a tiring day. I hoped to God that my father, inclined over drinks to become too hospitable, wouldn’t invite them to stay to dinner. I went to my room and ran a comb through my hair before presenting myself.
One of them was tall, the other short. The short man was doing the talking when I went in.
‘But isn’t all this hard-line stuff a bit old hat these days?’ he was saying. ‘I mean …’
Then he saw me, broke off and got to his feet.
He was a plump, hair-receding forty with a round fleshy face, an Edgar Allan Poe moustache and heavily lidded eyes. His complexion was what my father would call flounder-belly beige. He wore a dark business suit and a Charvet tie the colour of Squashed beetroot. He cocked his head slightly and gave me a toothy smile.
When my father turned towards me I saw that he had his suppressed white-rage look. That was some comfort, I knew at once that these particular guests would not be asked to stay to dinner. On the other hand, he was quite capable of plying them with more drinks simply in order to keep them there until he had decided which would be the most wounding method of insulting them.
He made a ceremony of the introductions.
‘Ah, Val dear –’ he kissed me lightly on the cheek, a thing he never does when we are alone – ‘this is Mr Goodman. His accomplice in crime, there –’ he pointed his glass at the tall man gangling awkwardly by the sofa – ‘is Mr Rich. Gentlemen, my daughter Valerie.’
I received an ‘Enchanté, Mademoiselle’ from Mr Goodman and a baritone ‘Miss Carter’ from the accomplice.
I said, ‘Good evening.’
‘Mr Goodman and Mr Rich are Americans,’ my father went on, ‘and they have come all the way from the Paris bureau of World Reporter magazine. They are making a study – I beg their pardon, an In-Depth Study –’ his tone supplied derisory capitals – ‘of the international personalised intelligence services. And they actually believe that I may be able to help them. So they are interviewing me. Or rather Mr Goodman is interviewing me, while Mr Rich, the photographer of the party, fingers his camera hopefully and looks for openings. Isn’t that exciting, my dear?’
He made it sound as if they were assaulting him.
‘Very exciting,’ I said. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’
‘No, no, Val.’ He pressed me into a chair. ‘I’d like you to stay. Mr Rich would, too, I can see. You are so much prettier to look at than I am, and he is after all a photographer, an artist. Eh, Mr Rich? As for Mr Goodman, I’m sure he won’t mind an addition to his audience.’
‘Delighted,’ said Mr Goodman.
‘Yes.’ My father gave him a grim smile. ‘Mr Goodman plumbing the depths of his subject is really worth listening to. As long, that is, as you remember that depth is a relative term and that our Mr Goodman takes his soundings with nothing longer than a chewed toothpick.’ He spat out the last two words quite venomously.
Mr Goodman chuckled and glanced at Mr Rich. ‘See what I mean?’ he said. ‘I told you. There’s no mistaking Theo Carter’s style. Trenchant, hard-hitting, with club in one hand and rapier in the other – pure Intercom. He writes it all. Always has done. Every word. Isn’t that right, Miss Carter?’
‘I thought that it was my father you were interviewing.’ I went across to the Side table and poured myself a glass of Dézaley.
He ignored me from then on.
‘How about it, Theo? The whole letter is your work, right?’
‘I edit it, yes.’
‘That wasn’t quite what I asked, but never mind. Let’s go back to the General for a moment. Did he okay every story that went in?’
‘Of course not. There was an editorial policy. I carried that policy out, applied it. I still do.’
‘I want to come to that. Just let’s get just this thing clear. The policy was always hard-line anti-communist. Right?’
‘Right’
‘And hard-line anti-Administration, too, eh?’
‘You know the General’s history as well as I do.’
‘Anti-Administration, is that your answer?’
‘Yes.’
‘But never anti-American?’
‘You asked me that before. You’re repeating yourself, Mr Goodman.’
‘Tell me again, Theo.’
I had thought at first that what had so annoyed my father was Mr Goodman’s calling him ‘Theo’; now I saw that there was more to it than that; there was Mr Goodman’s hectoring manner. This was not just a journalist conducting an interview; this was an interrogator with a suspect, an inquisitor seeking out heresy.
I wondered what Mr Rich thought of his companion’s technique. He was sitting on the sofa, absently stroking the strobe light pack lying beside him. He had scarcely touched his drink. He was lean and quite good-looking in a nondescript way; older than Mr Goodman clearly, but certainly a great deal healthier. There was a copy of Réalités on the table in front of him and he stared down at it, frowning slightly as if the cover design puzzled him. His attitude reminded me suddenly of a play-reading I had attended a few days earlier; it had been of a new translation into French of the Philoctetes and I had noticed the translator sitting with his head down and frowning in the same way as he listened to the actors reading the lines.
‘But there have been changes lately, haven’t there, Theo?’
‘Of ownership, yes. Of policy, no.’
‘Oh come on, Theo.’ Goodman’s teeth were showing and his eyes had narrowed. ‘Come on, don’t give me that.’
My father stood up. ‘You asked me a question, Mr Goodman. I gave you an answer. You’re supposed to be a professional reporter. Why don’t you behave like one?’
He came over to pour himself another drink. I was still standing by the side table and I could see that he was trembling. There was nothing suppressed about his anger now. I took the glass from his hand.
‘I’ll do it.’
‘Thank you, Val. Just one,’ he added distinctly; ‘these people will be leaving in a minute.’
Goodman gave a little whistle. ‘Now that’s not very friendly, Theo. We’ve only just started.’
My father walked back to him. ‘You may have just started, but I’m just about through,’ he said. ‘You invited yourself here. Okay, so now I’m inviting you to get the hell out.’
Goodman threw up his hands in mock amazement. ‘All I asked was a question.’ He appealed to Rich. ‘Did I say something I shouldn’t?’
Rich shrugged. ‘Maybe Mr Carter doesn’t want to tell about his new owner,’ he said; ‘maybe he’s under orders.’
‘Yeah, maybe.’ Goodman nodded gravely. ‘Is that it, Theo?’
‘You haven’t asked me about the new owner,’ my father retorted, ‘so why should you think I don’t want to tell you about him?’
‘That’s true. Okay, let’s talk about Arnold Bloch. Have I got that name right, Theo? B-l-o-c-h? That’s how Dr Bruchner gave it to us.’
For some reason the mention of Dr Bruchner seemed to shake my father. He sat down again.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said.
‘And he’s in Munich?’
‘He has an office there.’
‘German?’
‘He speaks German.’
‘Then he’s German. Right?’
‘Why don’t you ask him?’
‘We’re asking you, Theo.’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never met him.’
‘Ah-hah!’ Goodman affected wide-eyed wonder. ‘Man of mystery, eh?’
‘If you want to make him a man of mystery, go ahead. As an industrial PR man he could probably use the publicity. Good for business.’
‘That’s what he is, is he? A PR man?’
‘I just said so. Aren’t I speaking plainly?’
‘We want to get it straight, Theo.’
It had become ‘we’ not ‘I’ with Mr Goodman now, I noticed. I gave my father his fresh drink. I had made it a strong one.
‘So it’s Bloch who’s responsible for the new Intercom policy. That right?’
For a moment I thought that my father was going to throw the drink at him. If he had had anything other than a drink in his hand I think he would have thrown it. As it was he put the glass down carefully and waited before he spoke.
‘For the last time,’ he said quietly, ‘and I mean for the last time, there is no new policy. Mr Bloch likes Intercom the way it is, and he wants it to stay that way.’
‘Okay. So Arnold Bloch is an absentee landlord and you’re the guy who’s minding the store. Right, Theo?’
‘Right.’
‘Then maybe we can get down to a couple of specifics.’ Goodman pulled a small notebook from his pocket and flicked it open. ‘On November fifteen you ran a story about the test flights of the new FG one-one-five fighter-reconnaissance plane and some teething troubles they were having with it.’
‘Yes.’
‘Was that in line with Intercom editorial policy?’
‘It was.’
‘Handing NATO troubles to the Russians on a plate?’
‘No. Exposing inefficiency and negligence so that a potential weakness isn’t allowed to become a real and present danger.’
‘I see.’
And then my father made a mistake. ‘Anything anti-American about that?’ he asked.
‘Ah then, you do see the point, Theo.’
‘What point?’
‘The point of our asking about this particular story. No, there’s nothing anti-American or un-American about exposing inefficiency and negligence. We do it all the time, don’t we? But do we also give aid and comfort to the enemy by supplying him with chapter and verse in the shape of a list of contractors and subcontractors on the secret list? No sir, we do not. Not if we’re still the old Intercom, known and loved by every crackpot in the Congress. Let’s move on, Theo.’ He flicked another page of the notebook. ‘November twenty-two. Story about trouble with Soviet rocket missile fuels. What was your angle on that one?’
I knew that he was talking about the second SESAME bulletin now and my heart was in my mouth; but my father almost smiled as he answered. He didn’t even seem angry any more.
‘Wasn’t it obvious?’ he said. ‘Bad news for their side is good news for ours. We’re entitled to some encouragement, I think.’
‘Did you write that story, Theo?’
‘No, I did not’
‘But you said you always wrote the whole newsletter.’
‘No, Mr Goodman. I didn’t say that, you said it. I said that I edited the newsletter.’
‘Then who did write that story, Theo? Where did you get it?’
My father got to his feet. ‘All right, Mr Goodman,’ he said, ‘the ball game’s over. I’d like to be charitable. You could be too stupid or ignorant to know that you can’t ask a question like that and expect to get a responsive answer. But though I know you’re stupid, I’m damned certain you’re not ignorant So from now on all the answers are going to be the same – no comment, get out.’
Goodman smiled. ‘Cool it, Theo. No need for the editorial high horse. I’ll put the question another way.’
‘If my daughter weren’t here I’d tell you where you could put the question. How you put it doesn’t interest me. The answer is still no comment. Now get out. Both of you.’
There was a silence. It was Rich who moved first. He got to his feet, picked up his camera and put the carrying strap of the strobe light pack over his shoulder.
My father watched him with a sardonic smile. ‘Know how to work that thing?’ he asked.
Rich did not answer for a moment; then he said, ‘Thanks for the drink, Mr Carter,’ and walked out into the hall.
To my surprise Goodman immediately rose and, without even a glance at my father, followed.
I hesitated, then went after them. Rich already had his overcoat on and was putting the camera in the carrying bag. I went past them and opened the front door.
Goodman was ready first. ‘Good night, Miss Carter,’ he said. ‘Pleasure meeting you.’
It hadn’t been a pleasure meeting him, so I said nothing. In any case he was already on his way down the stairs.
Rich’s departure was slower. ‘Thanks,’ he said; ‘we could have seen ourselves out.’ But then, in the doorway, he paused and said something else.
‘Tell your father to be careful, Miss Carter.’
‘Of what, Mr Rich?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s an unhealthy world and there are some people in it who never take “no comment” for an answer. Tell him that. Good night, Miss Carter.’
He was gone then. I shut the door and went back to the living room.
My father was pouring himself another drink.
‘That photographer just said …’ I began.
He cut me short. ‘I know. I heard. And he’s no more a photographer than I am.’
‘What is he then?’
‘Wasn’t it obvious? Central Intelligence Agency. One of the CIA’s golden boys. A spook. A bogeyman. It stuck out a mile. Bloody impertinence.’
‘Was that why you asked him if he knew how to work a camera? I thought you were just being rude.’
‘Rude? You call that rude? What about them? The oldest gag in the world and they thought they could pull it on me. And with a punk like Goodman to front for them. It’s insulting.’
‘You mean that Mr Goodman isn’t from the World Reporter magazine?’
‘No, of course I don’t mean that. He’s on the magazine all right. They wouldn’t be that clumsy. No need to be anyway. Lots of the newsmen string along with the CIA and do little chores for them. But Goodman! And a photographer for Pete’s sake! Gossip-column stuff. Whoever heard of an in-depth interview by a news-magazine reporter being conducted with a photographer present? Even Goodman knew how fishy that was. When he called me at the office he didn’t mention any photographer.’
‘Did he know your home address?’ I asked.
That gave him pause. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I see. You’re thinking about that business last night. Let me think. No. What Goodman wanted was to come to the office. I told him that it was press day and that we wouldn’t be able to hear ourselves speak. I suggested that he came here and gave him the address. I thought then that it was going to be a more sociable occasion.’
‘So all we need to know now is why the Central Intelligence Agency suddenly wants to ask you questions. Has it ever happened before?’
‘No. They’ve been mad at us plenty of times, of course. But that’s always been because we’ve made what they called “unnecessary work” for them, checking out the bees in the General’s bonnet. This is different.’
He sat down wearily. ‘Okay, Val. No need to push it. I’m not stupid. We know why.’
‘The SESAME bulletins?’
‘What else?’
So then I told him what I had found out about N. V. Skriabin.
When I had finished he said ‘Oh, God’ and reached for more whisky.
I went into the kitchen. It was too late by then to cook properly, so I started reheating the pot au feu. After a bit my father came in and stood watching me while I chopped vegetables to add to the soup.
He was a little drunk by then, as I’d known he would be – not silly drunk, but prepared to be whimsical.
I didn’t mind. That night I felt like getting drunk myself. He leaned against the refrigerator.
‘You know what, Val?’ he said. ‘You know what we’re doing?’
‘No.’
‘Well, most people, people like Goodman for example, when they have a problem they make an in-depth study of it. Right?’
‘Right.’ I had heard the word too much that evening and was beginning to dislike it.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Now we’re different. We’ve got a problem. But do we make an in-depth study of it? We do not. With us it’s an out-of-depth, study.’ He paused. ‘And just for laughs,’ he added slowly, ‘there’s another SESAME bulletin in the issue that went out today.’
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.
My father went away then and a few moments later I heard him fumbling with the door of the bathroom.