“If he can use the Office phone, yes.”
“And if he can’t?”
She thought for him. She really tried. She had been thinking for so long. “Yes,” she conceded. “He’d phone. He likes to know we’re all right, all the time. He’s a worrier. I suppose that’s why I went off with such a bang when he didn’t show up. I think I was worried already.”
Lumsden was stalking round the room in his stockinged feet, pretending to admire Mary’s water-colours of Greece.
“You’re so, so talented,” he marvelled, his face pressed against a view of Plomari. “Did you go to art school or simply do it?”
She ignored him. So did Brotherhood. It was a tacit bond between them. The only decent diplomat is a deaf Trappist, Jack liked to say. Mary was beginning to agree.
“Where’s the servant?” said Brotherhood.
“You told me to get rid of her. On the phone. When I rang.”
“She smell a rat?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It mustn’t get out, Mary. We’ve got to sit on it as long as we possibly can. You know that, don’t you?”
“I guessed.”
“There’s his Joes to think of, there’s everything to think of. Far more than you can know. London’s stiff with theories and begging for time. You quite sure Lederer hasn’t phoned?”
“Jesus,” she said.
His eye fell on Harry, who was unpacking his clever boxes. They were grey-green and possessed no apparent controls. “You can tell the servant they’re transformers,” he said.
“Umformer,” Lumsden piped helpfully from the wings. “Transformer is Umformer. ‘Die kleinen Büchsen sind Umformer.’”
Once again they ignored him. Jack’s German was almost as good as Magnus’s, and about three hundred times better than Lumsden’s.
“When’s she due back?” Brotherhood asked.
“Who?”
“Your servant, for God’s sake.”
“Tomorrow lunchtime.”
“Be a good girl and see if you can get her to stay away a couple more days.”
She went to the kitchen and phoned Frau Bauer’s mother in Salzburg. Sorry about the outrageous hour but with a death that’s how it goes, she said. Herr Pym is remaining in London for a few days, she said. Why don’t you take advantage of Herr Pym’s absence and have a nice rest? she said. When she came back it was Lumsden’s turn to say his piece. She got his drift immediately and after that she deliberately stopped hearing him. “Just to fill in any awkward blanks, Mary. . So that we’re all speaking the same language, Mary. . While Nigel is still closeted with Ambass. . In case, which God forbid, the odious press gets on to it before it’s all cleared up, Mary. .” Lumsden had a cliché for every occasion and a reputation for being nimble-minded. “Anyway, that’s the route Ambass would like us all to go,” he ended, using the very latest in daring jargon. “Not unless we’re asked, naturally. But if we are. And Mary he sends terrific love. He’s with you all the way. And with Magnus too naturally. Terrific condolences, all that.”
“Just nothing to Lederer’s crowd,” said Brotherhood. “Nothing to anyone but for God’s sake nothing to Lederer. There’s no disappearance, nothing abnormal. He’s gone back to London to bury his father, he’s staying on for talks at Head Office. End of message.”
“It’s the same route I’ve been going already,” Mary said, appealing to Brotherhood as if Lumsden didn’t exist. “It’s just that Magnus didn’t apply for compassionate leave before taking it.”
“Yes, well now I think that’s the part Ambass wants us not to say, if you don’t mind,” said Lumsden, showing the steel. “So I think we won’t, please.”
Brotherhood squared to him. Mary was family. Nobody messed her around in front of Brotherhood, least of all some overeducated flunkey from the Foreign Office.
“You’ve done your job,” said Brotherhood. “Fade away, will you? Now.”
Lumsden left the way he had come, but faster.
Brotherhood turned back to Mary. They were alone. He was as broad as an old blockhouse and, when he wanted to be, as rough. His white forelock had fallen across his brow. He put his hands on her hips the way he used to, and drew her into him. “God damn it, Mary,” he said as he held her. “Magnus is my best boy. What the devil have you done with him?”
From upstairs she heard the squeak of castors and another loud thud. It’s the bow-fronted chest of drawers. No, it’s our bed. Georgie and Fergus are taking a look round.
* * *
The desk was in the old servants’ room next to the kitchen, a sprawling, spidery half-cellar to which no servant had been consigned for forty years. Near the window among Mary’s plant pots stood her easel and water-colours. Against the wall, the old black-and-white television and the agonising sofa for watching it. “There’s nothing like a little discomfort,” Magnus liked to say primly, “for deciding whether a programme is worth its salt.” In an alcove under lanes of piping stood the ping-pong table where Mary did her bookbinding and on it lay her hides and buckram and glues and clamps and threads and marbled end-papers and powering knives, and the bricks in Magnus’s old socks that she used instead of lead weights, and the wrecked volumes she had bought for a few schillings at the flea market. Beside it, next to the defunct boiler, stood the desk, the great, crazy Hapsburg desk bought for a song at a sale in Graz, sawn up to get it through the door and glued together again all by clever Magnus. Brotherhood pulled at the drawers.
“Key?”
“Magnus must have taken it.”
Brotherhood lifted his head. “Harry!”
Harry kept his lock picks on a chain the way other men keep keys, and held his breath to help him listen while he probed.
“Does he do all his homework here or is there somewhere else?”
“Daddy left him his old campaign table. Sometimes he uses that.”
“Where is it?”
“Upstairs.”
“Where upstairs?”
“Tom’s room.”
“Keep his documents there too, does he?. . Firm’s papers?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know where.”
Harry walked out smiling with his head down. Brotherhood pulled open a drawer.
“That’s for the book he was writing,” she said as he extracted a meagre file. Magnus keeps everything inside something. Everything must wear a disguise in order to be real.
“Is it though?” He was pulling on his glasses, one red ear at a time. He knows about the novel too, she thought, watching him. He’s not even pretending to be surprised.
“Yes.” And you can put his bloody papers back where you got them from, she thought. She did not like how cold he had become, how hard.
“Gave up his sketching, did he? I thought you two were in that together.”
“It didn’t satisfy him. He decided he preferred the written word.”
“Doesn’t seem to have written much here. When did he switch?”
“On Lesbos. On holiday. He’s not writing it yet. He’s preparing.”
“Oh.” He began another page.
“He calls it a matrix.”
“Does he though?”—still reading—“I must show some of this to Bo. He’s a literary man.”
“And when we retire — when he does — if he takes early retirement, he’ll write, I’ll paint and bookbind. That’s the plan.”
Brotherhood turned a page. “In Dorset?”
“At Plush. Yes.”
“Well, he’s taken early retirement all right,” he remarked not very nicely as he resumed his reading. “Wasn’t there sculpture, too, at some point?”
“It wasn’t practical.”
“I shouldn’t think it was.”
“You encourage those things, Jack. The Firm does. You’re always saying we should have hobbies and recreations.”