‘Shocking really, all what they’ve been up to,’ Gaunt chanted, talking ahead of him and letting the sound carry backwards. ‘Peter Aldock, he’s my stringer, see, he’s got a brother in Hanover, used to be with the Occupation, married a German girl and opened a grocer’s shop. Terrified he was for sure: well, he says, they all know my George is English. What’ll happen to him? Worse than the Congo. Hullo there, Padre!’
The Chaplain sat at a portable typewriter in a small white cell opposite the telephone exchange, beneath a picture of his wife, his door wide open for confession. A rush cross was tucked behind the cord. ‘Good morning, John then,’ he replied in a slightly reproving tone which recalled for both of them the granite intractability of their Welsh God; and Gaunt said, ‘Hullo there,’ again but did not alter his pace. From all around them came the unmistakable sounds of a multi-lingual community: the lonely German drone of the Head Press Reader dictating a translation; the bark of the travel clerk shouting into the telephone; the distant whistling, tuneful and un-English, that seemed to come from everywhere, piped in from other corridors. Turner caught the smell of salami and second breakfasts, of newsprint and disinfectant and he thought: all change at Zurich, you’re abroad at last.
‘It’s mainly the locally employed down here,’ Gaunt explained above the din. ‘They aren’t allowed no higher, being German.’ His sympathy for foreigners was felt but controlled: a nurse’s sympathy, tempered by vocation.
A door opened to their left; a shaft of white light broke suddenly upon them, catching the poor plaster of the walls and the tattered green of a bilingual noticeboard. Two girls, about to emerge from information Registry, drew back to let them by and Turner looked them over mechanically, thinking: this was his world. Second class and foreign. One carried a thermos, the other laboured under a stack of files. Beyond them, through an outer window protected with jeweller’s screens, he glimpsed the car park and heard the roar of a motor-bike as a despatch rider drove off. Gaunt had ducked away to the right, down another passage; he stopped, and they were at the door, Gaunt fumbling with the key and Turner staring over his shoulder at the notice which hung from the centre panel: ‘Harting Leo, Claims and Consular’, a sudden witness to the living man, or a sudden monument to the dead. The characters of the first two words were a good two inches high, ruled at the edges and cross-hatched in red and green crayon; the word ‘Consular’ was done a good deal larger, and the letters were outlined in ink to give them that extra substance which the title evidently demanded. Stooping, Turner lightly touched the surface; it was paper mounted on hardboard, and even by that poor light he could make out the faint ruled lines of pencil dictating the upper and lower limits of each letter; defining the borders of a modest existence perhaps; or of a life unnaturally curtailed by deceit. ‘Deceit. I’d have thought I’d have made that plain by now.’
‘Hurry,’ he said.
Gaunt unlocked the door. As Turner seized the handle and shoved it open, he heard his sister’s voice on the telephone again and his own reply as he slammed down the receiver: ‘Tell her I’ve left the country.’ The windows were closed. The heat struck up at them from the linoleum. There was a stink of rubber and wax. One curtain was slightly drawn. Gaunt reached out to pull it back.
‘Leave it. Keep away from the window. And stay there. If anyone comes, tell them to get out.’ He tossed the embroidered cushion on to a chair and peered round the room.
The desk had chrome handles; it was better than Bradfield’s desk. The calendar on the wall advertised a firm of Dutch diplomatic importers. Turner moved very lightly, for all his bulk, examining but never touching. An old army map hung on the wall, divided into the original zones of military occupation. The British was marked in bright green, a fertile patch among the foreign deserts. It’s like a prison cell, he thought, maximum security; maybe it’s just the bars. What a place to break out of, and who wouldn’t? The smell was foreign but he couldn’t place it.