18
GWYNETH GROANED when the alarm went off, and didn’t bother to check what time it was. She had perfected the art of falling back to sleep within minutes of Giles leaving the room. He always took a shower the night before, and laid out the clothes he would need in his dressing room so he wouldn’t have to turn on the light and disturb her.
He glanced out of the window overlooking Smith Square. His car was already parked outside the front door. He didn’t like to think what hour his driver had to get up to be sure he was never late.
Once Giles had shaved and dressed, he went down to the kitchen, made himself a cup of black coffee, and devoured a bowl of cornflakes and fruit. Five minutes later he picked up his suitcase and headed for the front door. Gwyneth only ever asked him one question when he was going away: how many days? Two, he’d told her on this occasion, and she’d packed accordingly. He wouldn’t even have to check before he unpacked in Berlin, because he knew everything he needed would be there.
His first wife had been a whore, while his second turned out to be a virgin. Giles tried not to admit, even to himself, that he would have liked a subtle combination of both. Virginia in the bedroom, and Gwyneth everywhere else. He often wondered if other men had the same fantasies. Certainly not Harry, who was even more in love with Emma than he’d been on the day they married. Giles envied that relationship, although that was something else he would never admit, even to his closest friend.
“Good morning, Alf,” said Giles as he climbed into the back of the car.
“Good morning, minister,” replied his driver cheerily.
Alf had been Giles’s driver since the day he’d become a minister, and he was often a better source of information about what was happening in the real world than most of his Cabinet colleagues.
“So where are we off to today, sir?”
“East Berlin.”
“Rather you than me.”
“I know how you feel. Now, what have you got for me?”
“The election will be in June, probably the eighteenth.”
“But the press are still predicting May. Where are you getting your information?”
“Clarence, the PM’s driver, told me, didn’t he?”
“Then I’ll need to brief Griff immediately. Anything else?”
“The foreign secretary will announce this morning that he’ll be standing down from the cabinet after the election, whatever the result.”
Giles didn’t respond while he considered Alf’s casually dropped bombshell. If he could hold on to Bristol Docklands, and if Labour were to win the general election, he must be in with a chance of being offered the Foreign Office. Only problem: two ifs. He allowed himself a wry smile.
“Not bad, Alf, not bad at all,” he added as he opened his red box and began to look through his papers.
He always enjoyed catching up with his opposite numbers across Europe, exchanging views in corridors, lifts, and bars where the realpolitik took place, rather than in the endless formal gatherings for which civil servants had already drafted the minutes long before the meeting was called to order.
Alf swept through an unmarked entrance onto runway three at Heathrow and came to a halt at the bottom of the boarding stairs that led up to the aircraft. If Giles didn’t retain his seat in the cabinet after the election, he was going to miss all this. Back to joining baggage queues, check-in counters, passport control, security checks, long walks to the gate, and then an endless wait before you were finally told you could board the plane.
Alf opened the backdoor and Giles climbed the steps to the waiting aircraft. Don’t get used to it, Harold Wilson had once warned him. Only the Queen can afford to do that.
Giles was the last passenger to board and the door was pulled closed as he took his seat in the front row, next to his permanent secretary.
“Good morning, minister,” he said. Not a man who wasted time on small talk. “Although on the face of it, minister,” he continued, “this conference doesn’t look at all promising, there could be several opportunities for us to take advantage of.”
“Such as?”
“The PM needs to know if Ulbricht is about to be replaced as general secretary. If he is, they’ll be sending out smoke signals and we need to find out who’s been chosen to replace him.”
“Will it make any difference?” asked Giles. “Whoever gets the job will still be phoning reverse charges to Moscow before he can take any decisions.”
“While the foreign secretary,” the civil servant continued, ignoring the remark, “is keen for you to discover if this would be a good time for the UK to make another application to join the EEC.”
“Has De Gaulle died when I wasn’t looking?”
“No, but his influence has waned since his retirement last year, and Pompidou might feel the time has come to flex his muscles.”
The two men spent the rest of the flight going over the official agenda, and what HMG hoped to get out of the conference: a nudge here, a wink there, whenever an understanding had been reached.
When the plane taxied to a halt at Berlin’s Tegel airport, the British ambassador was waiting for them at the bottom of the steps. With the help of a police escort, the Rolls-Royce whisked them across West Berlin, but came to an abrupt halt when it reached Checkpoint Charlie, as the Western Allies had dubbed the wall’s best-known crossing point.
Giles looked up at the ugly, graffiti-covered wall, crowned with barbed wire. The Berlin Wall had been raised in 1961, virtually overnight, to stop the flood of people who were emigrating from East to West. East Berlin was now one giant prison, which wasn’t much of an advertisement for Communism. If it had really been the utopia the Communists claimed, thought Giles, it would have been the West Germans who would have had to build a wall to prevent their unhappy citizens from escaping to the East.
“If I had a pickax…” he said.
“I would have to stop you,” said the ambassador. “Unless of course you wanted to cause a diplomatic incident.”
“It would take more than a diplomatic incident to stop my brother-in-law fighting for what he believes in,” said Giles.
Once their passports had been checked, they were able to leave the Western sector, which allowed the driver to advance another couple of hundred yards before coming to a halt in no-man’s-land. Giles looked up at the armed guards in their turrets, staring down grim-faced at their British guests.
They remained parked between the two borders, while the Rolls-Royce was checked from the front bumper to the boot, as if it were a Sherman tank, before they were eventually permitted to enter East Berlin. But without the assistance of a police escort, it took them another hour before they reached their hotel on the other side of the city.
Once they had checked in and been handed their keys, the golden rule was for the minister to swap rooms with his permanent secretary so he wouldn’t be troubled by call girls, or have to watch every word he said because his room would certainly be bugged. But the Stasi had caught on to that ruse and now simply bugged both rooms.
“If you want to have a private conversation,” said the ambassador, “the bathroom, with the taps running, is the only safe place.”
Giles unpacked, showered, and came back downstairs to join some Dutch and Swedish colleagues for a late lunch. Although they were old friends, it didn’t stop them pumping each other for information.
“So tell me, Giles, is Labour going to win the election?” asked Stellen Christerson, the Swedish foreign minister.
“Officially, we can’t lose. Unofficially, it’s too close to call.”
“And if you do win, will Mr. Wilson make you foreign secretary?”
“Unofficially, I have to be in with a chance.”
“And officially?” asked Jan Hilbert, the Dutch minister.
“I shall serve Her Majesty’s Government in whatever capacity the prime minister thinks fit.”
“And I’m going to win the next Monte Carlo Rally,” said Hilbert.
“And I’m going back to my suite to check over my papers,” said Giles, aware that only debutants sat around drinking just to end up spending the next day yawning. You had to be wide awake if you hoped to catch the one unguarded revelation that often made hours of negotiating worthwhile.
* * *
The conference opened the following morning with a speech by the East German general secretary, Walter Ulbricht, who welcomed the delegates. It was clear that the contents had been written in Moscow, while the words were delivered by the Soviets’ puppet in East Berlin.
Giles leaned back, closed his eyes, and pretended to listen to the translation of a speech he’d heard several times before, but his mind soon began to wander. Suddenly he heard an anxious voice ask, “I hope there’s nothing wrong with my translation, Sir Giles?”
Giles glanced around. The Foreign Office had made it clear that, although every minister would have their own interpreter, they came with a health warning. Most of them worked for the Stasi, and any unfortunate remark or lapse in behavior would undoubtedly be reported back to their masters in the East German Politburo.
What had taken Giles by surprise was not so much the concerned inquiry made by the young woman, as the fact that he could have sworn he detected a slight West Country accent.
“Your translation is just fine,” he said, taking a closer look at her. “It’s just that I’ve heard this speech, or a slight variation of it, several times before.”
She was wearing a gray shapeless dress that nearly reached her ankles, and that could only have been purchased off the peg from a comrades’ cooperative store. But she possessed something you couldn’t buy at Harrods, luxuriant auburn hair that had been plaited and wound into a severe bun, to hide any suggestion of femininity. It was as if she didn’t want anyone to notice her. But her big brown eyes and captivating smile would have caused most men to take a second look, including Giles. She was like one of those ugly ducklings in a film that you know will turn out in the last scene to be a swan.
It stank of a setup. Giles immediately assumed she worked for the Stasi, and wondered if he could catch her out.
“You have a slight West Country burr if I’m not mistaken,” he whispered.
She nodded and displayed the same disarming smile. “My father was born in Truro.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I was born in East Berlin. My father met my mother when he was stationed here with the British Army in 1947.”
“That can’t have been met with universal approval,” suggested Giles.
“He had to resign his commission, and he then took a job in Germany so he could be with her.”
“A true romantic.”
“But the story doesn’t have a romantic ending, I’m afraid. More John Galsworthy than Charlotte Bront?, because when the wall went up in 1961, my father was in Cornwall visiting his parents and we’ve never seen him since.”
Giles remained cautious. “That doesn’t make any sense, because if your father is a UK national you and your mother could make an application to visit Britain at any time.”
“We’ve made thirty-four applications in the past nine years, and those that were answered all came back with the same red stamp, rejected.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Giles. He then turned away, adjusted his headphones and listened to the remainder of the welcoming speech.
When the general secretary finally sat down an hour and twelve minutes later, Giles was one of the few people in the room who was still awake.
He left the conference chamber and joined a subcommittee to discuss the possible lifting of certain sanctions between the two countries. He had a clear brief, as did his opposite number, but during the meeting he had the distinct impression that his interpreter was including the occasional observation that came from the Stasi, and not from the minister. He remained skeptical and cautious about her, although when he looked her up on the briefing notes he saw that her name was Karin Pengelly. So it seemed she was at least telling the truth about her heritage.
Giles soon became used to being followed around by Karin as he moved from meeting to meeting. She continued to pass on everything said by the other side, without the expression on her face ever changing. But Giles’s responses were always carefully worded, as he still wasn’t sure whose side she was on.
At the end of the first day, Giles felt the conference had yielded some positive results, and not least because of his interpreter. Or was she simply saying what they wanted him to hear?
During the official dinner held at the Palast der Republik, Karin sat directly behind him, translating every word of the interminable, repetitive speeches, until Giles finally weakened.
“If you write a letter to your father, I’ll post it to him when I get back to England, and I’ll also have a word with a colleague in the immigration office.”
“Thank you, Sir Giles.”
Giles turned his attention to the Italian minister sitting on his right, who was pushing his food around the plate while grumbling about having to serve three prime ministers in one year.
“Why don’t you go for the job yourself, Umberto?” suggested Giles.
“Certainly not,” he replied. “I’m not looking for early retirement.”
* * *
Giles was delighted when the last course of the endless meal was finally served and the guests were allowed to depart. He said good night to some of the other delegates as he left the room. He then joined the ambassador and was driven back to his hotel.
He picked up his key and was back in his suite just after eleven. He’d been asleep for about an hour when there was a tap on the door. Someone obviously willing to ignore the Do Not Disturb sign. But that didn’t come as a surprise, because the Foreign Office had even issued a briefing note to cover that eventuality. So he knew exactly what to expect and, more important, how to deal with it.
He reluctantly got out of bed, pulled on his dressing gown, and went to the door, having already been warned that they would try to produce a lookalike of his wife, but twenty years younger.
When he opened the door he was momentarily stunned. Before him stood the most beautiful blonde, with high cheekbones, deep blue eyes, and the shortest leather skirt he’d ever seen.
“Wrong wife,” said Giles once he’d recovered, although he was reminded why he had fallen so hopelessly in love with Virginia all those years ago. “But thank you, madam,” he said as he took the bottle of champagne. He read the label. “Veuve Clicquot 1947. Please pass on my compliments to whomever. An excellent vintage,” he added, before closing the door.
He smiled as he climbed back into bed. Harry would have been proud of him.