Free Spy Sinker by Len Deighton

Bernard couldn't keep a secret. His head buzzed with them. But this was too close to home. It was something that she had to do herself without Bernard's help.
    'I suppose you know that they have given me this direct emergency link with a case officer?' She said it in a soft and suggestive voice that would have well suited the beginning of a fairy story told to a wide-eyed and attentive audience of five-year-olds.
    'I do,' he said. He turned and gave her a patronizing smile. The sort of smile he gave all women who aspired to be his comrades. 'And it's a fine idea.'
    'Yes, it is. And I shall use that contact. If you or Chesty or any of those other blundering incompetents in the Trade Delegation contact any of the people round me with a view to checking, or any other stupid tricks, they'll have their balls ripped off. Do you understand that, Martin?'
    She almost laughed to see his face: mouth open, pipe in hand, eyes popping. He'd not seen much of that side of her: for him she usually played the docile housewife.
    'Do you?' she said, and this time her voice was hard and spiteful. She was determined that he'd answer, for that would remove any last idea that she might have been joking.
    'Yes, Fiona,' he said meekly. He must have been instructed not to upset her. Or perhaps he knew what the Centre would do to him if Fiona complained. Lose her and he'd lose everything he cherished.
    'And I do mean stay away from Bernard. You're amateurs; you're not in Bernard's league. He's been in the real agent-running business from the time when he was a child. He'd eat people like you and Chesty for breakfast. We'll be lucky if he's not alerted already.'
    'I'll stay away from him.'
    'Bernard likes people to take him for a fool. It's the way he leads them on. If Bernard ever suspected… I'd be done for. He'd take me to pieces.' She paused. 'And the Centre would ask why.'
    'Perhaps you're right.' Pretending indifference, the man got to his feet, sighed loudly and looked out of the window over the net curtain as if trying to see the road down which the messenger would come.
    It was possible to feel sorry for the old man. Brilliant son of a father who had been able to reconcile effortlessly his loudly espoused socialist beliefs with a lifetime of high living and political honours, Martin had never reconciled himself to the fact that his father was an unscrupulous and entertaining rogue blessed with unnatural luck. Martin was doggedly sincere in his political beliefs: diligent but uninspired in his studies, and humourless and demanding in his friendships. When his father died, in a luxury hotel in Cannes in bed with a wealthy socialite lady who ran back to her husband, he'd left Martin, his only child, a small legacy. Martin immediately gave up his job in a public library to stay at home and study political history and economics. It was difficult to eke out his tiny private income. It would have been even more difficult except that, at a political meeting, he encountered a Swedish scholar who persuaded him that helping the USSR was in the best interest of the proletariat, international socialism and world peace.
    Perhaps the cruellest jest that fate had played upon him was that after seeing his father thrive in the upper middle-class circles into which he'd shoved his way, Martin – educated regardless of expense – had to find a way of living with those working classes from which his father had emerged. His rebellion had been a quiet one: the Russians gave him a chance to work unobserved for the destruction of a society for which he felt nothing. It was his secret knowledge which provided for him the strength to endure his austere life. The secret Russians and, of course, the secret women. It was all part of the same desire really, for unless there was a husband or lover to be deceived the affairs gave him little satisfaction, sexual or otherwise.
    From the household next door there came the sudden sound of a piano. These were tiny cottages built