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The grid’s nearly empty when Tom walks back in, but Ruth’s still at her desk. He walks over. “Ruth. You shouldn’t be here.”
“You can talk,” says Ruth. “Anyway, I wanted to finish something off. I thought you went home hours ago.”
It’s different for Ruth, of course. She gets to be herself all day, every day. She doesn’t spend her time living up (or down) to a legend. Tom’s spent two days being James Rigby, office worker at a stationery place over in Hounslow. Keeping an eye on someone who worked down at Sainsbury’s and who wasn’t any part of any terrorist threat. It was Ruth who’d finally put them all on the right track, but only after he’d invaded someone else’s privacy under false pretences. And then there’d been the rest…
“God, Tom, you look awful. Tea?”
He musters a smile. Tea, the great British cure for everything. Just don’t spill it on the top secret documents you haven’t stolen, haven’t read, will be giving back soon, honest. No, they all lie, they all have secrets. Ruth’s a double agent, he knows that even if no one else does. And like the rest of them, she probably tells her loved ones she does something dull in the civil service, even if it’s only a cat and it doesn’t care.
“Tea,” he says. “Thanks. If you’re making one.”
Ruth nods, and heads off to fetch some. Tom goes out to the corridor to meet her on the way back.
“Somebody has to do it,” she says suddenly, out of nowhere, unless she’s been reading his mind, or possibly she’s talking about the tea. You never know with Ruth. “Why not us?”
“Why the hell not?” says Tom and raises his mug to her. Then he leans back against the wall, pressing his head against it. It’s all simple. It’s just what they do, what they have to do to protect everyone else. It still winds up like a curse: you can never tell the whole truth, you can never let yourself fully out of the box again.
Ruth gives him a sidelong look. “You should go home,” she says, and leans against the wall beside him. “Not much point in being here, is there?”
“Just wanted to check something,” he says. “You’re right; it can wait.”
They ran the country together, once. It wasn’t real, but it still feels as if it was. Nobody else knows that, either. He closes his eyes.
When you come down to it, he doesn’t really have any secrets left. Tom Quinn is a blank waiting to be written over with somebody else’s life, somebody else’s lies. He’s beginning to wonder how that happened.
“This is silly, you know,” says Ruth, but it’s conversational more than accusing. She gives him a smile.
Ruth, Ruth isn’t a blank, he thinks. Ruth is a secret waiting to be found out. He turns his head and looks at her. “You should go home, too. You’re not still –?”
“No!” she says. “Tom! God, no. Just some tidying up.”
She was there at the breach with the information that put the shaky operation back on track. “Good,” he says, and then inclines his head down towards her. She looks up sharply. He holds back for a moment. “This isn’t –”
“I know,” Ruth says, and then Tom kisses her on the forehead, a gesture of gratitude more for who she is than what she does. She puts her hand on his arm; her fingers holding on round his wrist through the coat sleeve. When he eventually draws back, he sees the lights of the grid reflecting in her eyes. He’s never been sure what colour they are.
He thinks about going home; trying to pretend there’s a real life, or trying to pretend this one isn’t real, whichever way round it is.
“Tom,” she says, as if giving him his name back. She lets go of his arm but pulls at it before she does. “Tom. Now bloody well go home and get a good night’s rest.”
He nods, mustering up something that might be a smile. “Thanks,” he says. “For the tea.”
“Just don’t make a habit of it,” says Ruth.