Free The Quality of Mercy by David Roberts Page B

untrue.
    As they were leaving the stuffy little basement, he caught sight of a face he knew. It was Stuart Rose. He was sitting alone staring at Mandl and Putzi. As Edward started to climb the narrow stairs up to street level, Rose turned and looked at him. He was smiling but it was not a pleasant smile. He raised a glass to his lips as though drinking a toast. Edward nodded but did not feel like making conversation. It had been a long evening and it might not yet be over.
    He found a taxi in Soho Square and they were driven to Claridge’s, neither saying more than a few words to one another. It was almost two o’clock when they reached the hotel but the bar was still open. Joan begged him to have a nightcap and he did not feel he could leave her without being sure she was all right.
    ‘What about your husband?’ he asked when they barman had given them cognac in ridiculously large balloons. ‘When will he come back?’
    ‘Not tonight. He and Putzi will take a couple of whores back to their rooms.’
    Edward was shocked. ‘Does he often do that?’
    ‘He’s not interested in sex with me,’ she said flatly, her voice cloudy with cigarette smoke. ‘I told you before, I’m just a useful possession. Anyway, it makes him feel good which means he leaves me alone. He thinks himself a Teufelskerl – the devil of a fellow.’
    ‘I could find you a place to stay,’ he said uncertainly.
    She smiled for the first time that evening and raised a hand to stroke his cheek. ‘That is good of you but it would not be sensible. It would cause trouble for you, for your government perhaps, and certainly for me. I have to get my child out of Austria – or must I now say Greater Germany?’
    ‘Have you got anyone at home who would help you? Is there a nanny or a servant you trust?’
    ‘My little girl’s nanny would do anything I asked but she’s seventy-five – she was my nanny also, you understand. She could not do anything that needed . . .’
    ‘I understand.’
    ‘Have you an idea?’ she inquired, sounding almost eager.
    ‘I have the beginnings of one – a wild scheme but it might just work.’
    ‘Tell me.’
    ‘Not yet. I have to think things through. Are you to be at Broadlands next weekend?’
    ‘Yes. Mandl is to meet some navy friend of Lord Louis’ – something to do with selling the gun I told you about.’
    Edward noticed she almost always referred to her husband as Mandl, as if she did not know him well enough to call him by his first name.
    The bar was closing so he said goodbye, shaking hands formally as though a kiss might alter their relationship.
    He got back to Albany after three and went straight to bed. ‘I’m much too old for late nights,’ he told himself as he brushed his teeth. The following morning he said it again feeling the fur on his tongue and the ache in his head.

4
    One of the few disadvantages of being single, Verity decided as she twirled in front of the mirror, was that she had no one to tell her she looked good in a new dress. Although she went for months not thinking about what she wore, in London she tended to splurge in all her favourite shops. It was true that Vienna had its temptations, unlike war-torn Madrid. For a start, taxis were cheap – just fifty groschen for most journeys. At Zwieback’s, the department store in the Kärntnerstrasse, you could buy almost anything. The shoes were particularly seductive and she had bought several pairs at Coyle and Earle in the Karlsplatz, while for the hats she loved she went to Habig’s . . . but all these were still in her apartment in Vienna so, of course, it was incumbent on her to buy more in London.
    She could hardly go to dinner in Eaton Place in some old thing she’d bought a year before, she said to herself. As she had often argued – though never fully convinced herself – you didn’t need to be dowdy just because you were Communist. In London, she liked the restrained luxury of Bond Street. She loved Schiaparelli