“Her house was the first place they looked,” Mary lied, closing her handbag. “They frightened the poor old lady out of her skin. How do I get in touch with you if I need you? Throw a newspaper over the wall?”
She stood up. He stood up also, though not so easily. His smile was still in place, his eyes were still as wise and sad and merry in the style that Magnus envied so.
“I don’t think you will need me, Mary. And perhaps you are right that Magnus does not want me any more either. Just as long as he wants someone. That’s all we must worry about if we love him. There are so many ways of taking vengeance on the world. Sometimes literature is simply not enough.”
The alteration in his tone momentarily halted her in her hurry to get out.
“He’ll find an answer,” she said carelessly. “He always does.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
They walked towards the front door, slowly in order to allow for his limp. He summoned the lift for her and held back the grille. She got in. Her last sight of him was through the bars, still watching her. By then she was liking him again, and frightened stiff.
* * *
She had worked out what she would do. She had her passport and she had her credit card. She had checked both when she looked inside her handbag. She had her plan, because it was the one she had used on training exercises in little English towns, and later with modifications in Berlin. In the world of ordinary mortals it was dusk. In the courtyard, two priests were talking in low voices with their heads together, swinging their rosaries behind their backs. The street was packed with shoppers. A hundred people could have been watching her, and when she began to count the possibilities in her mind, a hundred seemed about the likely figure. She imagined a kind of Vienna Quorn, with Nigel as Master and Georgie and Fergus as Whips, and bearded little Lederer heading up the bunch, and teams of Czech hoods in hot pursuit. And poor old Jack, unhorsed, plodding over the horizon after them.
She chose the Imperial which Magnus loved for its pomp.
“I’ve no luggage, I’m afraid, but I’d like a room for the night,” she said to the silver-haired receptionist, handing him the credit card, and the receptionist, who recognised her at once, said, “How is your husband, madam?”
A chasseur showed her to a magnificent bedroom on the first floor. Room 121 that everybody asks for, she thought; the very room I brought him to on his birthday for dinner and a night of love. The memory did not move her in the least. She phoned down to the same receptionist and asked him to book her on tomorrow morning’s flight to London: “Of course, Frau Pym.” Smoke, she remembered. Smoke was what we called deception. She sat on the bed listening to the footsteps go quiet in the corridor as the dinner hour drew nearer. Double doors, twelve foot high. Painting called Evening on the Bosphorus by Eckenbrecher. “I’ll love you till we’re both too old,” he’d said, with his head on that very pillow. “Then I’ll go on loving you.” The phone rang. It was the concierge to say only club class was available. Mary said, then take club. She kicked her shoes off and held them in her hand while she softly opened the door and peered out. If I think I’m being watched I’ll put my shoes out to be cleaned. Burble and canned music from the bar. A whiff of dill sauce from the dining-room. Fish. They have such good fish. She stepped onto the landing, waited but still no one came. Marble statues. Portrait of bewhiskered nobleman. She pulled her shoes on, climbed one staircase, called the lift and descended to the ground floor, emerging in a side corridor out of sight of the reception area. A darkened passage led towards the rear of the hotel. She followed it, heading for a service door at the far end. The door was ajar. She pushed it, already smiling apologetically. An elderly waiter was adding the finishing touches to a private dinner table. Another door stood open behind him, leading to a side street. With a jolly “Guten Abend” to the waiter, Mary stepped quickly into the fresh air and hailed a cab. “Wienerwald,” she told the driver and heard him announce it over the intercom: “Wienerwald.” Nothing was following. Approaching the Ring she gave him a hundred schillings, hopped out at a pedestrian crossing and took a second cab to the airport where she sat reading in the ladies’ loo for an hour until the last flight to Frankfurt.
* * *
It was earlier on the same evening.
The house was semi-detached and backed on to a railway embankment exactly as Tom had described. Once again Brotherhood reconnoitred it before making his approach. The road was as straight as the railway and seemingly as long. Nothing but the setting autumn sun disturbed the skyline. There was the road, there was the embankment with its telegraph lines and water tower, and there was the huge sky of Brotherhood’s raggedy-arsed childhood which was always filled with white cloud left by the stop-go trains as they trundled across the fens to Norwich. The houses were all of the same design, and as he studied them their symmetry became beautiful to him without his understanding why. This was the order of life, he thought. This line of little English coffins is what I thought I was preserving. Decent white men in ordered rows. Number 75 had replaced his wooden gate with a wrought-iron one, with “Eldorado” done in curly handwriting. Number 77 had laid himself a concrete path with seashells bedded in it. Number 81 had faced himself in rustic teak. And number 79, upon which Brotherhood now advanced, was resplendent with a Union Jack fluttering from a fine white flagpole planted just inside his territory. The tyre marks of a heavy vehicle were cut into the little gravel drive. An electric speaker was set beside the polished doorbell. Brotherhood pressed and waited. A gasp of atmospherics greeted him, followed by a wheezing male voice.
“Who the bloody hell’s that?”
“Are you Mr. Lemon?” Brotherhood said into the microphone.
“What if I am?” said the voice.
“My name is Marlow. I wondered whether I might have a quiet word with you on a private matter.”
“I’ve got two of them and they both work. Piss off.”
In the window bay the net curtain parted far enough for Brotherhood to glimpse a bronzed, shiny little face, very wrinkled, observing him from the darkness.
“Let me put it this way,” said Brotherhood more softly, still into the microphone. “I’m a friend of Magnus Pym.”
A further crackling while the voice at the other end seemed to regather strength. “Well why the hell didn’t you say so in the first place? Come in and have a wet.”
Syd Lemon was a tiny, thickset old man these days, dressed all in brown like a rabbit. His brown hair, without a fleck of grey, was parted down the centre of his skull. His brown tie had horses’ heads looking doubtfully at his heart. He wore a trim brown cardigan and pressed brown trousers and his brown toecaps shone like conkers. From amid a maze of sunbaked wrinkles two bright animal eyes shone merrily, though his breath came hard to him. He carried a blackthorn stick with a rubber ferrule, and when he walked he swung his little hips like a skirt to get himself along.
“The next time you press that bell, just say you’re an Englishman,” he advised as he led the way down the tiny, spotless hall. On the walls Brotherhood saw photographs of racehorses, and a younger Syd Lemon wearing Ascot rig. “After that you state your business clearly and I’ll tell you to piss off again,” he ended with a gush of laughter and pivoted awkwardly on his stick so that he could wink at Brotherhood and show him it was just his joke.
“How is the young tyke then?” said Syd.