Without any notice at all, flowers would be delivered with a card that said: Fancy caviar and sex at 12:30?
In her breathless memoir, the mistress of spy novelist John le Carré says he conducted their secret affair as if it was a Cold War mission
THE SPY WHO SEDUCED ME PART 2
THE ex-mistress of spy novelist John le Carré (real name David Cornwell) has written a scorching memoir of their love affair. In the first part of our serialisation in yesterday’s Daily Mail, she told how their sex life (which reached ‘Olympic’ heights) was marked by his obsession with subterfuge, hiding her from his wife and treating assignations as if they were part of an espionage plot.
Here she relates how their secret meetings became encounters of irresistible seduction…
DAVID was waiting for me at St John’s Wood Underground station in North London. There was exhilaration in his expression. He seemed oblivious to the whipping winter cold. ‘Hurry up and come with me,’ he said. ‘I want you to see my new pad.’ We raced along hand in hand and turned into a side road off the high street, then into a small courtyard.
It might once have been an old mews or a merchant’s yard, but now it was new and shiny and residential. David unlocked an outer door and geed me up three flights of stairs to the apartment on the top floor.
‘Here!’ he said, excitedly turning his latchkey and flinging the door wide. ‘This is it!’
Inside was even colder than outside. The flat was small and neat but an unfinished shell, with nothing except painted walls and new carpet throughout. David’s new bolthole.
‘You’re the only one I’m ever going to let in here,’ he declared, and kissed me to set the seal on it. Within minutes we were lying on the factory-fresh wool twist carpet, doing what we did best – better than anybody ever, even fully clothed in the tomb-like cold, overcoats and all.
‘It’s hard to imagine it without you,’ he said as we left.
The next time I saw the flat, the magic wand of money had been waved over it. In the weeks since our chilly but heated session on the carpet, the place had been plumbed in, wired up and fully furnished.
As I arrived for lunch that day, David kept the front door to the flat open, smiling proudly. I was supposed to notice something, I realised. A thousand guesses wouldn’t have got me close.
‘Bulletproof!’ David declared happily and rapped his knuckles on the door, generating a hard metallic ring. ‘Solid steel facing, a quarter-inch thick.’
There was a spyhole, too – naturally – and when he shut us inside, the door closed with a heavy jailhouse clunk, which seemed to please him tremendously. There was champagne along with caviar and other goodies chilling in the fridge, but it all had to wait while we christened the new rug.
After that we had a picnic on the rug and after that we needed to launch the bed. Then I lay with my head on the crook of David’s arm while, for the first time, he read me the pages of his latest novel that he’d written there that morning. It was thrilling – astounding, in fact – to be so close to the man and to his process as he created what he was determined should be his finest book yet. I asked whether he had a title.
‘Yes,’ David answered contentedly. ‘It’s called A Perfect Spy. It’s going to be wonderful. I’m finally writing the book I want to be buried with.’
That evening, after we’d anointed the new and – I trusted – newly Scotchgarded sofa, we ate at a nearby Chinese restaurant.
As we sat with our menus, David said how wonderful it was to be free, to have finally escaped. ‘No one knows us here,’ he said with a sigh of real relief. ‘It feels like sanctuary at last.’ But he’d been tempting fate. David had been doing his usual room-scanning over the top of his menu when he suddenly gave a whispered exclamation. ‘Christ! It’s Freddie!’
I looked up and, sure enough, there was Frederick Forsyth. He and his wife Carrie had just walked in.
‘And he’s just clocked me,’ David added. ‘This should be interesting.’
I feel I should point out that if David hadn’t been sitting so that he could scan the entrance, Freddie would probably never have noticed him. There was a self-perpetuating aspect to David’s paranoia. ‘Good Lord!’ boomed the unmistakable phoney-colonel voice across the restaurant, as the author of The Day Of The Jackal made a beeline for our table. ‘David, old man – we meet at last!’
Other diners were turning to stare. Somewhere in the midst of it all I wasn’t quite introduced, but it didn’t appear to matter. Freddie was all for David and Carrie was all for me, saying that she was so pleased to meet me and whatever brought us here to their local? ‘What’s the betting they ask us over to their table for coffee and then back to their schloss for brandy and liqueurs afterwards?’ whispered David.
Chez Forsyth was a Spanish-style villa in one of the lusher St John’s Wood avenues, and Freddie and Carrie were very proud of it. They hadn’t had the house for very long and were thrilled to ribbons to be entertaining the Great Man. They seemed pretty thrilled to be enter