She looked at the table, then around the room for a long moment. “All right, what I do is the most important thing about me. It’s who I am.”
“Imagine that, through no fault of your own, you were unable to continue in your career. Who would you be, then?”
She took a deep draught of her champagne. “That is an unthinkable thought.”
“Surely you’ve seen people sacked from your service, turned out into the cold.”
“Occasionally.”
“Do you think they were what they did?”
“Some of them, I suppose.”
“And what did they do when they could no longer be what they wanted to be?”
“One or two of them . . . did themselves in.”
“Would you do yourself in?”
“Certainly not,” she replied quickly.
“Then what? What would you do? Who would you be?”
“I might ask you the same question.”
“You may, after you’ve answered mine.”
“I’d be a barrister,” she said. “I read law at Oxford, you know. I could very easily qualify.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-eight,” she said without hesitation.
“Are there jobs for brand-new thirty-eight-year-old barristers in London?”
“I’d have to go to a smaller town, I suppose.”
“Are there jobs for brand-new, thirty-eight-year-old barristers in smaller towns?”
She shrugged. “I’m not without friends of influence.”
“That always helps.”
“I don’t understand your line of questioning,” she said. “What is it you really want to know?”
“I suppose I’m wondering if you and I could have a more permanent relationship—”
“In New York?”
“Of course.”
“Why ‘of course’? Why couldn’t you move to London?”
“Because I couldn’t get a job as a barrister anywhere in England, and I doubt if they’d offer me anything at Scotland Yard. And those are the only things I know how to do. I suppose what I really want to know is if you could be happy in an existence where secrets and routine violence—even murder—don’t play a part.”
“Is that how you see my life?”
“Isn’t it how you see it? Don’t you ever think about what your work does to you as a human being?”