The Spy Game Read Online Free PDF Page B

warm close up to him.
     A little later Peter came in too, and the other side warmed also.

I have never come to Berlin before. In forty years I somehow never found the time.
    I Peter came here as soon as he began to travel, a hunched student on a rail pass, and when he got home he spoke of the divided
     city's scars and its lack of beauty yet he seemed to have preferred it to Paris or Amsterdam or Rome. He was drawn back repeatedly
     in those years and again later, after the Wall came down. He made an effort to come and see me just after that, invited himself
     for a weekend as he had not done in years and brought me what he said was a piece of the Wall as a present. (And that was
     just what it was, a chunk of graffitied concrete, and I have no idea where it has got to. Perhaps my husband has thrown it
     away by now. My husband is a tidy man and has no place for what has no function.)
    'I don't know what you expect to find,' my husband said when I told him I was planning this trip. 'It was all a very long
     time ago.'
    * * *
    It takes getting used to, travelling alone. Life seems at some moments blank, as there is no one to share it with, and at
     others strangely vivid. Being without habit, husband, family becomes all at once like being without a skin, senses bared to
     every impression, to the sunlight, the morning, the bus ride from the airport, the confusion of catching a tram, buying and
     punching a ticket in a place where you do not speak the language. At least the hotel was not hard to find. I checked in and
     took up my case but did not unpack it and only sat there for a while on the bed. It is a tolerable room, more spacious than
     I might have expected, and it smells fresh. I have taken the bed closest to the window. The other one by the wall I will leave
     untouched. If it is clear that I have not used it then perhaps they will not have the bother of changing the sheets.
    I shall leave sightseeing for tomorrow. It is lucky that the route of the bus from the airport passed by so many of the famous
     sites. I have at least glimpsed the new dome of the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden, Alexanderplatz. I know
     where these things are.
    This first evening I thought I should stick to the streets by the hotel. I walked until I came to a triangular platz with
     trees and cafés about it. No one was sitting at the tables outside as there was a biting wind. The cold was getting to me
     even as I was walking, but with so many cafés and restaurants it was hard to choose where to stop. It was some time later
     that I found this one, a place much like any other with a menu board outside on the pavement, but a couple were just leaving,
     and the door they held open seemed like an invitation. The restaurant is cosy and there is white linen on the table, and lentil
     soup.
    I have a book to read. Isn't that what lone women are supposed to do when they travel: read books propped open with knives
     at restaurant tables? The Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West, the 1965 edition updated with chapters on the spy cases of the Sixties: Philby, Burgess and Maclean, Blake,
     Vassall, Profumo, the Portland Ring. I particularly mean to read the chapters about the Portland case, about Houghton and
     Gee and Lonsdale and the Krogers. I shall not begin to read it with concentration until later when I am back in the hotel
     room. Here in the restaurant the book is just for cover.

I t was the story of the Krogers that people were to remember long after everything else about Portland was forgotten. Houghton
     and Gee were understandable if despicable. Lonsdale was a Russian and a professional. The secrets they traded became obsolete.
     The Krogers re-mained an enigma.
    What was interesting about them was the completeness of the lie they lived. In person, they entirely convinced. They seemed
     perfectly nice, middle class, trustworthy, classifiable, the sort of people others liked: Helen and Peter, the nice New Zealand
     couple,