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 shape 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.