"It's curious, but you don't think seriously about these remarks when you're young. But now I understand that bitter dark current of fear that flowed beneath the placid surface of her ordinary life."
"I now realise she was always frightened that someone was going to come and kill her. And she had good reason."
"As if the traffic of ages past, like a river, had eroded the road into its own mini-valley, deeper and deeper, a foot each decade."
"Everybody's strange when you come to think of it."
"Her garden was designed to be a controlled wilderness – she did not own a mower; she cut her lawn with shears."
"What sort of man wore a brown trilby to a funeral? What sign of respect was that?"
"I thought there was a chance you might join us."
"Everything you thought you knew about your mother was a cleverly constructed fantasy."
"We never saw them; they sent the odd Xmas card. The swarming Gilmartins gave us more than enough family to cope with."
"Absolutely nothing to take exception to; a family history like hundreds of others, only the war and its consequences being the great schism in lives of otherwise utter normality."
"Realising at the same time how little we actually, really, know of our parents’ biographies."
"I felt a kind of sickness in my throat about the unknown revelations that I was sure would have to come."
"Something about my mother’s tone informed me that she was going to tell me everything."
"It’s as if they’ve just discovered language, or something. It’s like when a kid learns to skip – they skip for months."
"Perhaps because I had never known Eva Delectorskaya, Eva Delectorskaya was now determined that I should learn absolutely everything about her."
"What had happened? I was twenty-eight years old – what had happened?"
"But only a quarter, actually. My mother, your grandmother, was English, remember?"
"She thought she was doing all this for him, making some small personal gesture of defiance to show that his death had not been for nothing."
"I never dream of Jochen’s death, though sometimes I think about it, rarely, for a second or two before I banish it – shocked – from my mind."
"A peer through the crack to the emptiness, the big silence beyond."
"It was as if the nervous circuits in her brain had altered, as if she’d been rewired."
"One thing at a time. You’ll find out everything. You’ll have the answers to every question you could ask."
"We all have secrets. No one knows even half the truth about anybody else, however close or intimate they are."
"Did Dad know? No, he didn’t. He didn’t know anything."
"Because I think someone is trying to kill me."
"Information isn’t neutral, Romer constantly repeated: if it was believed or even half believed, then everything began subtly to change as a result."
"False information can be just as useful, influential, as telling, transforming or as damaging as true information."
"I don’t feel safe in the house anymore. I’m not sleeping well – every noise I hear I jerk awake – but really awake."
"It was not so much the idea of Lucas Romer kissing her that had shaken her – it was the fact that she realised, now the moment had passed and gone forever, that she had actually rather wanted it to happen."
"You have to joke a little in life, darling, otherwise what's the point?"
"It depends on the joke. Some jokes aren't funny."
"After that experience, he had made the decision that nothing in life was ever going to bother him again."
"I’m not complaining. Put your arms round me."
"I suppose I might just have recognized him. My, he’s lost his hair."
"There is nothing easier in this world than getting a man to kiss you."
"We’re all going to go to the United States of America."
"You’re a very intelligent young woman – you’ll think of something."
"I felt a faint lowering of my spirits: life was complicated enough – I didn’t want Hamid complicating it further."
"Perhaps the act of relating such a history would help me also, set it in some kind of a context of my life; maybe make it not less significant but provide its significance with some perspective."
"He taught me one important thing: he taught me to be fearless, to be unafraid. I’m not fucking frightened of anyone, thanks to him."
"Nobody needs to be afraid of anyone or anything. The myth of the all-powerful system is a sham, empty."
"I thought: my dad is dead, my mother is a gardening hermit who I never see – I want this baby."
"‘We both know what this is about,’ he said. ‘Let’s not act like a couple of innocents. You’re a beautiful woman. My personal situation has nothing to do with it.’"
"I just want us to win this war. My feelings are irrelevant."
"It's always crap the first time. Don't you find that?"
"Think that everybody is lying to you all the time, it's probably the safest way to proceed."
"It was always going to be a dirty war, nothing should be discounted in the waging of it."
"We may be lovers, but we are also spies: therefore everything is entirely different from what it seems."
"I command you to turn, I insist you turn and look at me again."
"It just seems a terrible waste, an awful waste of precious electricity."
"I think I'm in love with you, Lucas, that's why."
"The implication, Eva thought at once, was too clear – where was the subtlety?"
"She experienced a strange form of inertia, an almost palpable heaviness, as if the world had stopped turning and only the swish of the Indian’s broom on the cement floor was marking the passage of time."
"Everything is complimentary, the bellhop told her, with our compliments."
"She felt no shock, no horror, at what she had done to this man."
"She felt remarkably clear-headed. By any reasonable calculation she would be dead in a minute or two, she realised."
"‘No, I’m not concerned,’ he said. ‘Not remotely.’"
"Because I don’t believe a word you’ve told me."
"‘This is someone she knew a long time ago,’ I said, moving to the phone in the hall."
"‘Listen carefully,’ she said. ‘Leave the building now and walk south down Fifth. I’ll give you two minutes, otherwise there won’t be any meeting.’"
"‘The key thing,’ he continued, ‘the amazing thing, is that it’s all worked out about a hundred times better than anyone could have hoped.’"
"I was meant to be found dead in the desert with a dodgy map of Mexico on me and 5,000 dollars. That was the real plan. Why? What’s it all about?"
"I didn’t even know I was going to Las Cruces until the man in Albuquerque told me. I could have been going anywhere."
"Let’s proceed with the assumption and ignore the solution."
"They wanted you dead with the map on you. You would be identified as a British crow because the FBI were following you out of New York even though you lost them."
"It’s very hard to follow a suspicious target, but she had to say she had never thought about women."
"Sometimes she grew tired of this endless, vigilant suspicion – how can you live like that, she thought? Always watching, always checking, always fearful that you were being betrayed and undone."
"She had to trust Witoldski to help her; Johnson in Meadowville would have been the obvious choice – and she thought she could trust Johnson too – but Romer had been in Meadowville with her."
"We are urged, implored, instructed, ordered, beseeched never to trust anyone – which is all very well, she reflected, but sometimes in desperate situations trust is all you can rely on."
"I thought she was in more serious trouble. I think they just want to warn her."
"Is this how it begins? Is this how your life as a spy begins?"
"She had found a public library that opened late where some nights she could read undisturbed until 9.00 p.m."
"She tried to analyse and second-guess what might be going on at BSC. Despite the euphoria of Pearl Harbor and the arrival of the USA as the long-awaited ally, she imagined that they would still be investigating, digging deep, following up leads."
"She realised now where his air of melancholia originated."
"A thermos flask, she thought: someone spends a lot of time in that car."
"The very suddenness of her move from the Richmonds might have signalled something itself."
"Then she allowed herself to weep for ten minutes, thinking she had never been so alone in her life."
"The simple fact that he could not find her was her hold over him – her little portion of power."
"Eva caught a bus to Deptford the next day and went in search of Carlisle House."
"She discovered that all three of them were lawyers attached to the Irish Embassy, working in the consulate office in Clarges Street."
"So Eva Delectorskaya became Sally Fairchild and this, she thought, was at last a name that Romer didn’t know."
"She sat in her room in Battersea, thinking over the news Blytheswood had given her. Morris, Angus and Sylvia dead – but she had been destined to be the first."
"Now I could drink my wine and smoke a couple of cigarettes. But, instead, twenty minutes after I had washed up the dishes, I was still sitting in the kitchen, a mug of black coffee in front of me, thinking about my mother and her life."
"Like me, Jochen had a terrible voice – completely out of tune – but we sang along, lustily, carelessly, united in our dissonance."
"I realised, now, that I was beginning to think like her: she had wanted me to come back this Sunday morning to find her gone; she had wanted me to search her house and find these things and now she expected me to draw the obvious conclusion."
"Walton Crescent breathed money, class, privilege, confidence – but it did so quietly, with subtlety and no ostentation."
"‘I thought you’d be here ages ago – still, well done.’ She was wearing her pearl-grey trouser suit and her hair was combed and shiny as if she’d just left the hairdresser’s. She was wearing lipstick and her eyelashes were dark with mascara."
"I know I could see him on my own but it’ll be so much better with you beside me."
"As the sky slowly darkened – it was a cloudy day but warm – I began to notice a small squirm of fear entering me: sometimes it seemed in my guts, sometimes my chest, sometimes in my limbs, making them achy and heavy."
"‘We lost you in Canada,’ Romer said. ‘Once we realised that was where you must have gone. You were very clever.’"
"Fine. I’ll sue him, I’ll sue you and you’ll go to prison. You can’t prove a thing."
"‘I wanted you to know that and I wanted to see you for one last time.’ She took a little step forward. ‘And I wanted you to see me. To let you know that I was still very much alive.’"
"Romer will kill himself tonight. He’ll inject himself, take a pill. He’ll have had the method ready for years. It’ll look exactly like a heart attack, or a fatal stroke – something that looks natural, anyway."
"‘It’s rather nice,’ he said. The boy was behaving very well, I thought, polite and rather subdued, as if he sensed there was a complicated and secret sub-text to this unusual trip to London that he would never fathom."
"‘You won.’ I felt absurdly emotional, suddenly, as if I might cry. ‘In the end.’"
"It’s over, finished. You’ve no need to worry anymore."
"And the trees in the dark wood moved and shifted in the wind, and the sun patches skidded across the meadow, cloud shadows rushing by."