I wanted nothing to do with it all, of course. What did it matter to me what this Burgess fellow had said about the British SIS on the tape? I’d never cared much for the English. In two wars against Germany I’d seen how they were capable of fighting to the last American. And yet in spite of my commendable moral stance on the subject of Harold Hennig, there was a part of me that wanted to see this vile man brought down, and for good. I liked the old man and I think he liked me. If I could help him defeat a blackmailer like Hennig then that would be some kind of payback for what he’d done to Irmela and, in a smaller way, to me.

“I don’t think so, Mr. Maugham. But I’ll be happy to partner you in this rubber. That’s the least I can do. But in return you can do me a favor and say hello to a lady friend of mine who’s keen to meet you. She’s a writer, too.”

“All right. I’ll be glad to. If she’s a friend of yours.”

“So, tomorrow, when Hebel gives me the tape, I’ll bring it straight here to the villa and you can listen to it and decide what to do then. And if you think I can still be of service to you—well, let’s wait until tomorrow, shall we?”

—

After telling my story I got back in the car and went away with a hole inside me where before a heart and stomach had once been coexisting. That’s the thing about the past; it never quite belongs as much to the past as you think it does. I hadn’t thought about Irmela or her unborn child in a long time, but I still bitterly regretted their passing. The idea that I could have talked about them both with impunity now seemed risible. Time hadn’t healed anything, and I think people who say time makes things better really don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. For me, it was an inoperable tumor that I’d managed to ignore for more than a decade; but the tumor was still there. Probably it was going to stay with me until I died.

You could say I was feeling a bit sorry for myself and perhaps I was also a little drunk because instead of driving straight home I somehow found myself ignoring the lobster pot where I lived and heading out of town and up the hill toward Anne French’s villa. I told myself that if you spend enough time around homosexuals, you begin to feel the need to redress the balance with the company of a congenial woman. It’s not much of an excuse for what I was doing but I couldn’t think of a better one.