(I haven’t forgiven her for the thing with the baby and the sacrificial altar.)
Mo uncoils slightly. “Well,” she says, “that’s all I can say for now.” Her eyes swivel sidelong. “This is no place to talk shop.” Even though it’s a canteen in a regional headquarters building of a top secret agency, loose lips are discouraged outside meeting rooms or warded offices. “Especially about this morning’s stink bomb.”
Uh-oh: I see where this conversation is going. “Well, I’ve been doing a bit of thinking,” I admit, then pause to polish off my bruschetta.
“Thinking is dangerous, Bob.” There’s a drip of my wife’s old, dry affection there, under all the stress-bunny anxiety and borderline PTSD.
“Do you want to make another go of it?” It slips out without my thinking it consciously, and I freeze, watching her freeze as she watches me right back. Her expression is haunted. (I think that’s the right word for it.)
“We can’t go back to the way we were,” she says, but there’s uncertainty and regret there, so I push, hoping I’m not trying too hard—
“What about the spare room? We could clear it out and put a really heavy-duty ward on it—” The spare room in our house is a joke. Officially it’s a bedroom, but this being London, that needs clarifying as “bedroom two, suitable for small child or gerbil.”
Mo’s lips thin. “It’s too small, unless we throw out a bunch of junk, and even then … not viable, love. Anyway, it’s not safe for you to move back in: what if you sleepwalk while I’m going to the bathroom in the night?”
“But you’re an Auditor, dammit! That’s hardly defenseless, I should be afraid of you—”
I manage to stop myself before I can say anything inexcusable.
Mo shakes her head. Around the canteen I see people pointedly ignoring the married couple raising their voices in the corner. It’s as if we’ve got our very own invisibility field. “No, Bob,” she says tiredly, “mutually assured destruction is not a reasonable basis for a marriage. Sooner or later one of us will get overstressed, there’ll be an argument, and it’ll be the kind of domestic that starts with thrown crockery and levels up to grenade launchers. Only we don’t max out at ‘high explosives, handle with care’ anymore. This isn’t Mr. & Mrs. Smith. We’ve got to find a better way.”
“Do you have any ideas?” I ask.
She gives me a guarded look that screams nothing up my sleeve, nothing to see here, then goes back to digging in her salad. I watch her in frustration. Presently she says, “On the subject of your being the Eater of Souls, I want to do some digging in the archives, follow up a couple of loose ends. There’s nothing else exactly like it but maybe TEAPOT…” She trails off into thoughtful silence, then pauses. “In the meantime, we could try counseling? See if that shakes something loose.”
“Counseling.” I know the word but I don’t know what it means, at least not at a gut level. “Um. What? I mean, why? It’s not like”—I swallow—“I still love you.”
“Yes, I know.” She puts her fork down and reaches across the table for my hand. I have an unaccountable feeling that I somehow said the wrong thing, although I’m not sure how. “But that’s not why marriages end, is it? At least, not always. A lot of the time it’s because one or both partners have gotten into ways of behaving that the other can’t live with, or because one or both are going through a period of personal growth and the other isn’t keeping up or isn’t on the same track, or because they’re both stressed out. And that last one applies to us like nothing else. We’ve hit an impasse. It’s not even about us both sleeping with a loaded gun under the pillow. Metaphorical loaded gun … It’s the responsibility, Bob. We need to talk about me being an Auditor and you being what you are and it just isn’t happening and the longer we leave it the worse the pressure will get, and even if we find a way to live together we’ll end up squabbling because of the stress.”
I don’t understand exactly what she thinks we need to talk about, but maybe that’s half the problem. So I nod and try to look as if I understand, because listening is half of the solution. “Going to need a security-cleared counselor.”
She raises a warning finger. “Not Pete.”
“Friends don’t make friends debug their marriage?”
“Correct—not if they want to stay friends, anyway. And we don’t have enough of them.” She takes a deep, shuddering breath and suddenly I wonder just how much this conversation has taken out of her. Has she been lying awake at nights, rehearsing its script endlessly, the way I have? “I’m glad you’re taking this so well.”
“Hey”—I reach for a lighthearted quip but the quiver is empty—“I’m glad you still want to try.”
“Let me see if I can find a suitable counselor first, then thank me.” She pushes her tray back, only half-eaten, and gives me a tired smile. “I don’t want to go on this way.”
“Neither do I.” I stand up. “So let’s not.”
*
One of the problems associated with inheriting a new and senior position by virtue of the law of necromantic succession—that is, dead man’s shoes—is that I am now expected to work at executive level. In a regular government agency I’d be in a Senior Civil Service grade, and if this was a private sector organization I’d be a vice president. If you’re the janitor and the stores cupboard is bare, you shrug and blame your manager; if you’re the VP in charge of Facilities and the stores cupboard is bare, you are responsible and you just fucked up by failing to organize resupply. I actually have—this is quite terrifying—signing authority and a budget line all of my very own. It’s terrifying because I can use it whenever I feel like it, except that I’ve got to keep Accounts in the loop, on pain of being taken aside for a quiet word by the SA himself if I screw up. On the other hand, being able to sign a hotel bill on my own cognizance after a hard day’s work stabbing chupacabras in Belize is like a breath of fresh air-conditioning.