The Contract Read Free Page A

a medal if anyone could think up the wording of the citation.
    No talking in the car. George following his headlights and concentrating because they had now left the main roads and were into the rabbit warren of lanes that threaded the Surrey hills. Carter resting and far into his seat and with his eyes closed and his breathing even. Willi Guttmann peered through the dirty glass of the side window and out into the night's blackness.
    Willi thought of a girl called Lizzie. He thought of a bar called the Pickwick where the decor was English and where she sat at a stool and bought him drinks that were warm and unfamiliar and that burned his throat, and where her friends gathered and the talk was noisy and happy.
    He thought of visits to the cinema after Conference had finished in the afternoon and where moist fingers were held before the rush to be back inside the Residence doors before the last sitting for supper. He thought of the night after the girl who shared a one-bedroomed box of a flat with Lizzie had flown back to England for a job interview and he had been invited back for a toasted cheese sandwich and coffee. He thought of loving Lizzie through the snow carpeted months of February and March in a Swiss city where the idyll had lasted until the meeting when he had seen the strained eyes and the pale cheeks that warned of her day's weeping. He thought of her telling him she was late, had never been late before, and was he going to walk out on her, was he flying back to Moscow at the end of the month. He could not fight a girl in anguish, could not pull the wings off a fallen butterfly. And his father should not know. His father who was an old man and who had caused him no pain should hear only of an accident. Grief was less lasting than the shame of having reared a traitor. There was no retribution that they could bring against the father of a drowned son, no loss of privileges.
    He thought of Lizzie with the soft, warm mouth. Lizzie with her arms around his neck in the sitting room of the home of the British Consul.
    Lizzie in tears as the Englishman had said that she could follow in three weeks or four to England. Gentle, darling, sweet Lizzie.
    The car swung off the tarmac lane and the lights caught at high iron gates that had been opened and a squat lodge house, and the wheels ground on shallow gravel, and high trees dwarfed them, and thickset bushes spilled over the edge of the driveway. He saw the house, its pale stone bright in the lights, before George swung the wheel and braked viciously so that the man beside him started and grunted and was awake.
    Before Willi could feel for the handle, George was out and opening the door and after he had stood for a moment and tried to see about him there was a hand on his elbow and he was guided towards a porch where a dull lamp shone.
    'Mrs Ferguson said she'd leave some cold cuts out, Mr Carter,' George said as he ferreted in his pocket for the front door key.
    'You go along with George, Willi. There's something to eat for you, and he'll show you where you're sleeping. I expect you'll want a good hot bath too . . .'
    The boy walked across the polished floor of the hall, past the painting of a stag at bay, past a wide table on which was set a vase of bright daffodils, past an oak staircase and a panelled wall. Behind him he heard a door close and when he turned he could no longer see Carter. George pushed him forward towards another door. He had lost something, felt bereft, because the last link with Geneva had been taken from him.
    George sat him down at a table with a blue plastic cloth over it and took the metal cover off a plate displaying a yellowish piece of chicken and three curled slices of ham.
    'I expect Mrs Ferguson didn't think we'd be so late,' George said.
    Willi felt the tang of the lake water in his mouth, behind his teeth. He was very tired, his eyes hurt and his knees trembled, and a kaleidoscope of memories from far back and far away burned in his