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those mourning her—Sarah Paxton—would be there, on the doorstep, within half an hour of our departure. I could easily have waited for her. Henley couldn’t have prevented me, even if he’d wanted to. But I didn’t. When it came to it, I was impatient to be gone, eager to avoid the encounter.
    What it amounted to, I suppose, was fear. The fear that Sarah Paxton might resemble her mother too closely for me to fob her off with the account I’d given the police. But she wouldn’t necessarily welcome the truth. Nor would anyone else who’d loved Louise Paxton. Because the truth made what had happened to her seem just a little too complicated for comfort. To enlighten might also be to antagonize. So I preferred to do neither.
    There was another fear as well, running even deeper. The fear of what
I
might learn in the process. Who was Louise Paxton? What sort of woman was she? What sort of mother? What sort of wife? And what
had
she been trying to change, that evening on Hergest Ridge? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answers. We’d met and parted as total strangers to each other. Perhaps that’s what we ought to remain. If we could.
     
    I flew back to Brussels on Sunday as planned. The following morning, I returned to my office at the Berlaymont and informed my head of unit that he would soon be losing my services. Around the same time, I read later, at a village churchyard in Gloucestershire, Louise Paxton was buried.

C  H  A  P  T  E  R
FOUR
    R esignation isn’t easy if you’re a
fonctionnaire titulaire de la Commission Européenne
. In fact, it’s next to impossible, because any attempt to resign is officially interpreted as a request for long-term leave of absence. When I handed in my notice to my gratifyingly dismayed head of unit that morning in July 1990, he treated it as an application for what we Eurocrats called a
congé de convenance personelle
. Unpaid leave, to put it less grandly. A sabbatical, if you like. A career on ice. For a year in the first instance, but automatically renewable for a second year and a third after that; conceivably, even longer. Opinion was divided over whether, theoretically, it could ever come to a conclusive end short of retirement.
    But technicalities didn’t interest me. I was leaving with no intention of coming back. My colleagues might be saying
au revoir
, but I’d be bidding them
adieu
. That evening, I took a few of them to Kitty O’Shea’s, an Irish bar-cum-English pub near the Berlaymont that supplied an escapist haven for displaced Celts and Anglo-Saxons, to toast my departure. Taken aback by my generosity, they were clearly reluctant to say what they really thought. Poor old Timariot. Giving up an A6 post in the Directorate-General of Economic and Financial Affairs for—what was it?—cricket bats. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
    “Are you sure this is a good idea, Robin?” asked Ronnie Linklater in a soulful moment brought on by a third scotch and soda. “I mean,
absolutely
sure?” I told him I was. But he obviously didn’t believe me. It was true, though. I was certain I was doing the right thing.
    My only frustration was that I couldn’t do it immediately. Three months’ notice loomed oppressively ahead. I tried persuading my head of unit that Timariot & Small were
in extremis
without me and he agreed to recommend an early release. But those whose approval was needed were away for the rest of the summer in their Tuscan villas and Provençal retreats. I would simply have to wait.
     
    I was still waiting two weeks later when I returned to my flat in the rue Pascale one evening to find a letter waiting for me forwarded by my mother from Steep. It had originally been posted in Worcester, with my name and Petersfield address written in two different hands. I recognized neither. But one of them, it transpired, belonged to Sarah Paxton.
    The Old Parsonage,
    Sapperton,
    Gloucestershire
    5th August 1990
    Dear Mr. Timariot,
    I have