It’s because he’s so like Daddy, she decided. He loves our kind of England and the rest can go hang.
It’s because I worked for Jack in Berlin when I was an empty-headed schoolgirl with one small talent. Jack was my older lover at a time when I thought I needed one.
It’s because he steered Magnus through his divorce for me when he was dithering and gave him to me “for afters” as he called it.
It’s because he loves Magnus too.
Brotherhood was flipping the pages of her desk diary.
“Who’s P?” he demanded, tapping a page. “ ‘ Twenty-fifth September, six-thirty p.m. P.’ There’s a P on the sixteenth too, Mary. That’s not ‘P’ for Pym, is it, or am I being stupid again? Who’s this P he’s meeting?”
She began to hear the scream inside herself and had no whisky left to quell it. Of all the entries, the dozens and dozens, and he has to pick that one. “I don’t know. A Joe. I don’t know.”
“You wrote it, didn’t you?”
“Magnus asked me to. ‘Put down I’m meeting P.’ He didn’t keep a diary of his own. He said it was insecure.”
“And he made you write the entries for him.”
“He said if anybody looked, they wouldn’t know which were his dates and which were mine. It was part of sharing.” She felt Brotherhood’s stare. He’s making me speak, she thought. He wants to hear the quaver in my voice.
“Sharing what?”
“His work.”
“Explain.”
“He couldn’t tell me what he was doing, but he could show me that he was doing it and when.”
“Did he say that?”
“I could feel it.”
“What could you feel?”
“That he was proud! He wanted me to know!”
“Know what?”
Brotherhood could drive her mad even when she knew he meant to. “Know that he had another life! An important one. That he was being used.”
“By us?”
“By you, Jack. By the Firm! Who do you think—the Americans?”
“Why do you say that—the Americans? Did he have a thing about them?”
“Why should he? He served in Washington.”
“Needn’t stop him. Might even encourage him. Did you know the Lederers in Washington?”
“Of course we did.”
“But better here, eh? I hear she’s quite an armful.”
He was turning forward to the days yet to be endured. Tomorrow and the day after. To the weekend, which was already gaping at her like a hole in her shattered universe.
“Mind if I keep this?” he asked.
Mary damn well did mind. She possessed no spare diary and no spare life either. She snatched it back and let him wait while she copied out her future on a sheet of paper: Drinks Lederer . . . dinner Dinkels . . . Tom’s school term ends.... She came to “meet P” and left it out.
“Why’s this drawer empty?” he asked.
“I didn’t know it was.”
“So what was it full of?”
“Old photographs. Mementoes. Nothing.”
“How long’s it been empty?”
“I don’t know, Jack. I don’t know! Get off my back, will you?”
“Did he put papers in his suitcase?”
“I didn’t watch him pack.”
“Did you hear him down here while he was packing?”
“Yes.”
The telephone rang. Mary’s hand shot out to take it, but Brotherhood was already grasping her wrist. Still holding her, he leaned towards the door and yelled for Harry while the phone went on ringing. It was rising four a.m. already. Who the hell calls at four in the morning except Magnus? Inside herself Mary was praying so loud she hardly heard Brotherhood’s shout. The phone kept calling her, and she knew now that nothing mattered except Magnus and her family.
“It might be Tom!” she shouted while she struggled. “Let go, damn you!”
“It might be Lederer, too.”
Harry must have flown downstairs. She counted two more rings before he was standing in the doorway.
“Trig this call,” Brotherhood ordered, loud and slow. Harry vanished. Brotherhood released Mary’s hand. “Make it very, very long, Mary. Spread it right out. You know how to play those games. Do it.”
She lifted the phone and said, “Pym residence.”
Nobody answered. Brotherhood was conducting her with his powerful hands, willing her, pressing her to talk. She heard a metallic ping and crammed her hand over the mouthpiece. “It could be a call code,” she breathed. She held up one finger for one ping. Then a second. Then a third. It was a call code. They had used them in Berlin: two for this, three for that. Private and prearranged between the Joe and base. She opened her eyes to Brotherhood to say what shall I do? He shook his head to say I don’t know either.
Speak, he mouthed.
Mary drew a deep breath. “Hullo? Speak up, please.” She took refuge in German. “This is the residence of Counsellor Magnus Pym of the British Embassy. Who is that? Will you speak, please? Mr. Pym is not here at the moment. If you wish to leave a message, you may do so. Otherwise, please call later. Hullo?”
More, Brotherhood was urging. Give me more. She recited her telephone number in German and again in English. The line was open and she could hear a noise like traffic and a noise like scratchy music played at half speed, but no more pings. She repeated the number in English. “Speak up, please. The line is dreadful. Hullo. Can you hear me? Who’s that calling, please? Do—please—speak—up.” Then she couldn’t help herself. Her eyes closed and she screamed, “Magnus, for God’s sake say where you are!” But Brotherhood was miles ahead of her. With a lover’s knowledge he had felt her outburst coming and clapped his hand over the cradle.
“Too short, sir,” Harry lamented from the doorway. “I’d need another minute at the least.”
“Was it foreign?” Brotherhood said.
“Could be foreign, could be next door, sir.”
“That was naughty, Mary. Don’t do those things again. We’re on the same side in this and I’m boss.”
“Someone’s kidnapped him,” she said. “I know they have.”
Everything froze: herself, his pale eyes, even Harry in the doorway. “Well, well,” said Brotherhood at last. “That would make you feel better, would it? A kidnapping? Now why do you say that, dear? What’s worse than kidnapping, I wonder?”
Trying to meet his gaze Mary experienced a violent time warp. I don’t know anything. I want Plush. Give me back the land that Sam and Daddy died for. She saw herself as a school-leaver seated in front of the careers mistress in the middle of her last term. A second woman is with her, London and tough. “This lady is a recruiting officer for the Foreign Service, dear,” says the careers mistress. “A special bit of it,” says the tough woman. “She’s terribly impressed by the way you draw, dear,” says the careers mistress. “She so admires your draughtsmanship, as we all do. She wonders whether you’d be interested in taking your folder to London for a day or two, so that some other people can look at it.” “It’s for your country, dear,” the tough woman says with meaning, to the child of English patriots.
She remembered the training house in East Anglia, girls like herself, our class. She remembered the jolly lessons in copying and engraving and colouring, in papers and cardboards and linens and threads, how to make watermarks and how to alter them, how to cut rubber stamps, how to make paper look older and how to make it look younger, and she tried to remember just when it was exactly that they had realised they were being taught to forge documents for British spies. And she saw herself standing before Jack Brotherhood in his rickety upstairs office in Berlin, not a stone’s throw from the Wall, Jack the Stripper, Jack the Stoat, Jack the Black and all the other Jacks he was known as. Jack who had charge of Berlin Station and liked to meet all newcomers personally, particularly if they were pretty girls of twenty. She remembered his bleached gaze running slowly over her body while he guessed her s
hape and sexual weight and she remembered again hating him on sight, as she was trying to hate him now as she watched him flip through a folder of family correspondence he had pulled from the desk.
“You realise half of those are Tom’s letters from boarding-school, I suppose,” she said.
“Why doesn’t he write to both of you?”
“He does write to both of us, Jack. Tom and I have one correspondence. Magnus and Tom have a separate correspondence.”
“No interconsciousness,” said Brotherhood, using a bit of trade talk he had taught her in Berlin. He lit one of his fat yellow cigarettes and watched her theatrically through the flame. There’s a poseur in all of them, she thought. Magnus and Grant included.
“You’re absurd,” she said in nervous anger.
“It’s an absurd situation and Nigel will be here any minute to make it more absurd still. What caused it?” He opened another drawer.
“His father. If it’s a situation at all.”
“Whose camera’s this?”
“Tom’s. But we all use it.”
“Any other cameras around?”
“No. If Magnus needs one for his work he brings it from the Embassy.”
“Any here from the Embassy now?”
“No.”
“Maybe his father caused it or maybe a lot of things did. Maybe a marital tiff I don’t know about caused it.”
He was examining the camera’s settings, turning it over in his big hands as if he were thinking of buying it.
“We don’t have them,” she said.
His knowing eyes lifted to her. “How do you manage that?”
“He doesn’t offer a fight, that’s why.”
“You do though. You’re a right little demon when you get going, Mary.”
“Not any more,” she said, mistrusting his charm.
“You never met his dad, did you?” said Brotherhood as he wound the film through the camera. “There was something about him, I seem to remember.”
“They were estranged.”
“Ah.”
“Nothing dramatic. They’d drifted apart. They’re that sort of family.”
“What sort, dear?”
“Scattered. Business people. He’d said he’d let them in on his first marriage and once was enough. We hardly talked about it.”
“Tom go along with that?”
“Tom’s a child.”
“Tom was the last person Magnus saw before he vanished, Mary. Apart from the porter at his club.”
“So arrest him,” Mary suggested rudely.
Dropping the film into the bin bag Brotherhood picked up Magnus’s little transistor radio.
“This the new one they do with all the shortwave on it?”
“I believe so.”
“Take it with him on holiday, did he?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Listen to it regularly?”
“Since, as you once told me, he runs Czechoslovakia single-handed out here, it would be fairly startling if he didn’t.”
He switched it on. A male voice was reading the news in Czech. Brotherhood stared blankly at the wall while he let it continue for what seemed like hours. He switched off the radio and put it in the bag. His gaze lifted to the uncurtained window, but it was still a long while before he spoke. “Not displaying too many lights for the time of morning, are we, Mary?” he asked distractedly. “Don’t want to set neighbours chattering, do we?”
“They know Rick’s dead. They know it’s not a normal time.”
“You can say that again.”
I hate him. I always did. Even when I fell for him—when he was taking me up and down the scale and I was weeping and thanking him—I still hated him. Tell me about the night in question, he was saying. He meant the night they heard of Rick’s death. She told it to him exactly as she had rehearsed it.
He had found the cloakroom and was standing before the worn dufflecoat that hung between Tom’s loden and Mary’s sheepskin. He was feeling in the pockets. The din from upstairs was monotonous. He extracted a grimy handkerchief and a half-consumed roll of Polo mints.
“You’re teasing me,” he said.
“All right, I’m teasing you.”
“Two hours in the freezing snow in his dancing pumps, Mary? In the middle of the night? Brother Nigel will think I’m making it up. What did he do in them?”
“Walked.”
“Where to, dear?”
“He didn’t tell me.”
“Ask him?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Then how do you know he didn’t take a cab?”
“He’d no money. His wallet and change were upstairs in the dressing-room with his keys.” Brotherhood replaced the handkerchief and mints in the duffle.
“And none in here?”
“No.”
“How d’you know?”
“He’s methodical in those things.”
“Maybe he paid the other end.”
“No.”
“Maybe someone picked him up.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He’s a walker and he was in shock. That’s why. His father was dead, even if he didn’t particularly like him. It builds up in him. The tension or whatever it is. So he walks.” And I hugged him when he came back, she thought. I felt the cold on his cheek and the trembling of his chest and the hot sweat clean through his coat from his hours of walking. And I’ll hug him again, as soon as he comes through that door. “I said to him: ‘Don’t go. Not tonight. Get drunk. We’ll get drunk together.’ But he went. He had his look.” She wished she hadn’t said that, but for a moment she was as cross with Magnus as she was with Brotherhood.
“What look is that, Mary? ‘Had his look.’ I don’t think I follow you.”
“Empty. Like an actor without a part.”
“A part? His father takes up and dies and Magnus doesn’t have a part any more? What the hell does that mean?”
He’s closing in on me, she thought, resolutely not answering. In a minute I’m going to feel his sure hands on me, and I’m going to lie back and let it happen because I can’t think of any more excuses.
“Ask Grant,” she said, trying to hurt him. “He’s our tame psychologist. He’ll know.”
They had moved to the drawing-room. He was waiting for something. So was she. For Nigel, for Pym, for the telephone. For Georgie and Fergus upstairs.
“You’re not doing too much of this, are you?” Brotherhood asked, pouring her another whisky.
“Of course not. When I’m alone, almost never.”
“Well, don’t. It’s too damn easy. And when Brother Nigel’s here, nothing. Keep it under wraps completely. Yes, Jack?”
“Yes, Jack.” You’re a lecherous priest scavenging the last of God’s grace, she told him, watching his slow purposeful movements as he filled his own glass. First the wine, now the water. Now lower your eyelids and lift the chalice for a sanctimonious word with Him who sent you.
“And he’s free,” he remarked. “‘I’m free.’ Rick’s dead, so Magnus is free. He’s one of your Freudian types who can’t say ‘Father.’”
“It’s perfectly normal at his age. To call a father by his Christian name. More normal still, if you haven’t seen each other for fifteen years.”
“I do like you to defend him,” Brotherhood said. “I admire your loyalty. So will they. And you never let me down. I know you didn’t.”
Loyalty, she thought. Keeping my silly mouth shut round the Station in case your wife finds out.
“And you wept. Quite the old weeper, you are, Mary, I didn’t know. Maryweeps, Magnus consoles her. Odd, that, to the casual observer, seeing as how Rick was his daddy, not yours. A rôle reversal with a vengeance, that is: you doing his mourning for him. Who were the tears for exactly? Any idea?”
“His father had died, Jack. I didn’t sit down and say, ‘I’ll cry for Rick, I’ll cry for Magnus.’ I just cried.”
“I thought it might b
e for yourself.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re the one person you didn’t mention. That’s all. Defensive: that’s how you sound.”
“I am not being defensive!”
She was too loud. She knew it and once more so did Brotherhood and he was interested.
“And when Magnus is done with consoling Mary,” he continued, picking a book from the table and flipping through it, “he slips on his duffle and he goes for a walk in his dancing pumps. You try to restrain him—you beg him, which is hard for me to visualise, but I’ll try—but no, he will go. Any phone calls before he leaves?”
“No.”
“No incoming, no outgoing?”
“I said no!”
“Direct dial, after all, you’d think a bereaved man would want to share the bad news with other members of his family.”
“They’re not that kind of family. I told you.”
“There’s Tom for a start. What about him?”
“It was much too late to ring Tom and anyway Magnus thought it better to tell him himself.”
He was looking at the book. “Another gem he’s underlined. ‘If I am not for myself who is for me; and being for my own self what am I? If not now when?’ Well, well. I’m enlightened. Are you?”
“No.”
“Nor am I. He’s free.” He closed the book and put it back on the table. “He didn’t take anything with him on his walk, did he? Like a briefcase?”
“A newspaper.”
You’re going deaf. Admit it. You’re worried that a hearing-aid will spoil your self-image. Speak, damn you!
She had said it. She knew she had. She had been waiting all evening to say it, prepared it from every possible angle, practised it, rehearsed it, denied it, forgotten it, revived it. And now it was echoing in her head like an explosion while she took a frightfully careless pull at her whisky. Yet his eyes, straight at her, were still waiting.