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fault of her own, had blown the gaff about her, and rendered her useless in the job she’d been doing. She hadn’t wanted to take a humdrum desk job in the familiar environment of the F.O. where she’d always be in contact with the forbidden past. There had been something about those undercover days that had been so much more exciting than Eastern Petroleum . . . in particular, her career and Shaw’s had touched—that was how they’d met in the first place and it was something she would never, never forget. She came back to the present, said, “I’d love it, Esmonde darling.” She spoke decisively. “I was just wondering what I could possibly face in this kitchen after Paris. This brute of a stove.”
    She jerked out a long leg and kicked the oven door shut. The telephone was in the cubby-hole which passed for a hall, and when it had rung she’d yanked it into the kitchen without getting up from the leatherette-covered revolving high stool; and she was glaring with distaste at half a dozen eggs, a tin of sardines, a stale loaf of hard-looking bread (steam-baked a l’anglaise, and scarcely worthy of the name of bread at all), a hunk of mousetrap cheese aged to a nasty-looking yellow transparency, half a bottle of milk that had gone sour in her absence. A lovely London supper—and it had cost a small fortune. Somehow you didn’t mind so much spending a fortune in Paris. She said into the phone, “Coming round for me?”
    “Of course. I’d thought of Martinez.”
    He hadn’t really; but he was going to Spain, and the name had just at that moment suggested itself—and, of course, the food was excellent. Might be a good thing, too, just to look through a Spanish menu again. He said, “I’ll be round in half an hour, Debbie. Just as quick as I can make it.”
    “Give me time to doll-up and put a face on.”
    Actually she didn’t use make-up to any extent—for one thing, she just didn’t need it. She gave a little gurgle of happiness and blew a kiss down the unresponsive receiver. As she clicked the call off her eyes were very slightly misty.

    Shaw didn’t talk much in the taxi. A drip of rain ran down his collar from where he’d squelched through London’s filthy weather from Great Portland Street station to Albany Street. And that damned pain in his guts nagged at him, as it would nag all the way to the Spanish-Gibraltar frontier at La Linea. He felt abominably ill in body, depressed in spirit; but he did his best to shake himself out of it by just sitting there and consciously relaxing, liking the nearness of the girl in the intimacy of the dark taxi, enjoying her perfume and the nice feeling that to-night was all theirs, the bitter-sweetness of having to get the most out of the short, calendar-threatened time before good-bye.
    During dinner, across the wine-glasses and the gleaming white napery of their table, beneath the softly shaded lights of the room walled with tiles from the ancient Andalusian orange-town of Seville, he gave her the cover-story. Quietly he said, “I’m off the day after to-morrow, Debbie.”
    The tawny body gave a small shiver, and she felt a little knot of sadness gathering in her throat; she crumbled a piece of bread, looked at his sensitive face outlined sharply against the red glow from the electric ‘brazier’ by the wall behind their table. She thought—suddenly compassionate and understanding: He’s worried, very worried, and a lot of that is my fault, because I’ve only to say the word and he’d be happy, or at least as happy as he’s ever likely to be until the outfit finally take their hands off him. But that’s the way I’m made and I can’t help it. Or I could help it if I really wanted to, and there’s the rub; the whole point being that I don’t really want to, or rather not altogether and definitely not yet, and really that makes it all the worse. Get me a psychiatrist, she thought, and he’ll tell me I’m nothing but a crazy, mixed-up kid!
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