fully – I am looking for a block of superbly restored Victorian mansion apartments with resident porterage, which ought to have surprised me because diplomatic staff like to cluster round their mother ship, which in Renate’s case would have meant the German Embassy in Belgrave Square. But even in Helsinki, where she had been the number two in their Station to my number two in ours, she had insisted on living as far – and she would say as free – from the diplomatic ratpack – Diplomatengesindel – as she could decently get.
I enter Primrose village. A holy stillness reigns over the pastel-painted Edwardian villas. Somewhere a church bell tolls, but only timidly. A brave Italian coffee-bar owner is cranking down his striped awning and its groans rhyme with the echo of my footsteps. I turn right, then left. Belisha Court is a grey-brick pile on six floors and occupies the dark side of a cul-de-sac. Stone steps lead to an arched Wagnerian portico. Its black double doors are closed against all comers. The superbly restored apartments have numbers but no names. The only bell-button is marked ‘Porter’ but a saucy handwritten note wedged behind it reads ‘Never on Sundays’. Entry is by keyholders only and the lock, surprisingly, is of the pipe-stem variety. Any Office burglar would have it open in seconds. I would take a little longer but I have no pick. Its fascia is scratched from constant use.
I cross to the sunny side of the cul-de-sac and pretend an interest in a display of children’s clothes while I watch the reflection of the double doors. Even in Belisha Court some tenant must need an early-morning jog. Half the double door opens. Not for a jogger but for an elderly couple in black. I surmise they are on their way to church. I let out a cry of relief and hasten across the road to them: my saviours. Like an utter fool I have left my keys upstairs, I explain. They laugh. Well now, they did it to themselves only – when was it, darling? By the time we part they are hurrying down the steps still chuckling to each other and I am heading along a windowless passage to the last door on the left before you get to the garden door because, as in Helsinki so in London, Renate likes a large ground-floor apartment with a good back exit.
The door of number eight has a polished brass flap for letters. The envelope in my hand is addressed For Reni only and marked private. She knows my handwriting. Reni was what she liked me to call her. I slip the envelope through the flap, crash the flap open and shut a couple of times, press the buzzer and hurry back along the corridor into the cul-de-sac, left and right into the High Street, pass the coffee shop with a wave and a ‘hi’ for its Italian owner, across the street, through an iron gateway and up on to Primrose Hill, which rises before me like a parched, tobacco-coloured dome. At the top of it an Indian family in bright colours is trying to fly a four-sided giant kite but there’s hardly wind enough to stir the arid leaves that lie around the solitary bench I select.
*
For fully fifteen minutes I wait, and by the sixteenth I have all but given up. She’s not there. She’s out running, she’s with an agent, a lover, she’s off on one of her cultural jaunts to Edinburgh or Glyndebourne or wherever her cover requires her to show her face and press the flesh. She’s frolicking on one of her beloved beaches on Sylt. Then a second wave of possibility, potentially a lot more embarrassing: she has her husband or a lover in residence, he snatched my letter from her hand and he’s coming up the hill to get me: except at this point it isn’t the vengeful husband and lover, it’s Renate herself marching up the hill, fists punching across her stocky little body, short blonde hair bouncing to her stride, blue eyes blazing, a miniature Valkyrie come to tell me I’m about to die in battle.
She sees me, switches course, kicking up puffs of dust in her wake. As she approaches, I stand up out of courtesy but she sweeps past me, plonks herself on the bench and waits, glowering, for me to sit beside her. In Helsinki she had spoken reasonable English and better Russian, but when passion seized