“I didn’t look for it, I simply noticed it was missing. And yes, it wasn’t there.”
“Does he often go out with old newspapers?”
“When he needs to keep abreast — for his work — he’s a conscientious officer — he takes a newspaper with him.”
“Rolled up?”
“Sometimes.”
“Bring them back ever?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Ever remark on it to him?”
“No.”
“He to you?”
“Jack. It’s a habit he has. Look, I’m not going to have a marital row with you!”
“We’re not married.”
“He rolls up a newspaper and walks with it. The way a child carries a stick or something. As a comforter or something. Like his Polos. There. He had Polos in his pocket. It’s the same thing.”
“Always the wrong date?”
“Not always — don’t make so much of everything!”
“And always loses it?”
“Jack, stop. Just stop. Okay?”
“Does he do it on any special occasion? Full moon? Last Wednesday of the month? Or only when his father dies? Have you noticed a pattern to it? Go on, Mary, you have!”
Beat me, she thought. Grab me. Anything is better than that ice-cold stare.
“It’s sometimes when he meets P,” she said, trying to sound as if she were pacifying a spoilt child. “Jack, for God’s sake, he runs Joes, he lives that life, you trained him! I don’t ask him what his tricks are, what he’s doing with who. I’m trained too!”
“And when he came back — how was he?”
“He was absolutely fine. Calm, completely calm. He’d walked it out of himself, I could feel. He was absolutely fine in every way.”
“No phone calls while he was out?”
“No.”
“None after?”
“One. Very late. But we didn’t answer it.”
It was not often she had seen Jack surprised. Now he almost was. “You didn’t answer it?”
“Why should we?”
“Why shouldn’t you? It’s his job, as you said. His father had just died. Why shouldn’t you answer the phone?”
“Magnus said don’t.”
“Why did he say don’t?”
“We were making love!” she said, and felt like the worst whore ever.
Harry was looming in the doorway again. He was wearing blue overalls and had a red face from his exertions. He was holding a long screwdriver in his hand and he looked shamefully joyful.
“Care to pop upstairs a jiffy, Mr. Brotherhood?” he said.
* * *
It’s like our bedroom before the Diplomatic Wives’ jumble sale, with our cast-off clothes all over the bed, she thought. “Magnus, darling, do you really need three worn-out cardigans?” Clothes over the chairs. Over the dressing-table and the towel-horse. My summer blazer that I haven’t worn since Berlin. Magnus’s dinner-jacket hung from the cheval mirror like a drying hide. There was nothing on the floor because there was no floor. Fergus and Georgie had removed the carpet and most of the floorboards underneath it, and stacked them like sandwiches beneath the window, leaving the joists and the odd plank for a walkway. They had taken the bedside lamps to pieces and the bedside furniture and the telephone and the wake-up wireless. In the bathroom, it was the floor again, and the panel to the bath, and the medicine chest, and the sloped attic door that led to the sloped attic where Tom had hidden for a whole half hour last Christmas playing Murder, and nearly died of fright from being so brave. At the basin, Georgie was working her way through Mary’s things. Her face-cream. Her diaphragm.
“What’s yours is his, for them, dear, and vice versa,” said Brotherhood as they paused to stare in from the doorless doorway. “There’s no his and hers, not for them — there can’t be.”
“Not for you either,” she said.
Tom’s bedroom was across the corridor from theirs. His luminous Superman lay sprawled over the bed, together with his thirty-one Smurfs and three Tiggers. Her father’s campaign table was folded against the wall. The toy chest had been pulled to the centre of the floor, revealing the marble fireplace behind. It was a fine fireplace. Works Department had wanted to board it over to reduce draughts but Magnus hadn’t let them. Instead he had bought this old chest to put across the opening, leaving the mantel visible over it, so that Tom could have a bit of old Vienna all his own. Now the fireplace stood free and the girl Georgie knelt respectfully before it in her fifty-guinea freedom fighter’s tunic. And before Georgie lay a white shoe box with its lid off, and inside the shoe box was a rag bundle, then several smaller bundles around it.
“We found it on the ledge up above the grate, sir,” said Fergus. “Where it joins the main flue.”
“Not a speck of dust on it,” said Georgie.
“Reach up and it’s there,” said Fergus. “Dead handy.”
“You don’t even have to shove the chest out really, once you get the knack,” said Georgie.
“Seen it before?” Brotherhood asked.
“It’s obviously something of Tom’s,” said Mary. “Children will hide anything.”
“Seen it before?” Brotherhood repeated.
“No.”
“Know what’s in it?”
“How could I if I haven’t seen it?”
“Easily.”
Brotherhood did not stoop but held his arms out. Georgie passed the box up to him and Brotherhood took it to the table where Tom did his Spirograph and his Lego and his endless drawings of German aeroplanes being shot down against a Plush sunset, with family in the background, everybody waving, everybody absolutely fine. Brotherhood picked out the biggest bundle first and they looked on while he started to unwrap it and changed his mind.
“Here,” he said, handing it to Georgie. “Woman’s fingers.”
She’s one of his mistresses, Mary suddenly realised. She wondered why on earth it hadn’t dawned on her before.
Georgie rose elegantly to her full height, one leg, other leg, and having fixed her straight hair behind her ears, applied her woman’s fingers to unwinding the strips of bedsheet that Magnus had said he wanted for the car, revealing at last a small, clever-looking camera with a clever steel harness round it. And after the camera a thing like a telescope with a bracket on it which, when you pulled it to its full length, made a stand that you could screw the camera to, face downwards and at a fixed distance, for photographing documents on your father-in-law’s campaign table. After the telescope came a succession of films and lenses and filters and rings and other bits of equipment she could not identify offhand. And underneath these a pad of flimsy cloth-paper with columns of numbers on the top sheet and thickly rubberised edges so that you could only see the top page. Mary knew the type of paper. She had worked on it in Berlin. It shrivelled into fern the moment you put a match near it. The pad was half used. Underneath the pad again, an aged cardboard-backed military jotting pad marked “W.D. Property,” standing for War Department and consisting of unwritten-on lined paper of blotchy wartime quality. And inside it, when Brotherhood continued searching, two pressed red flowers of great age, poppies, but just possibly roses, she was not entirely certain, and anyway by then she was shouting.
“It’s for the Firm! It’s for his work for you!”
“Of course it is. I’ll tell Nigel. No problem.”
“Just because he didn’t tell me about it, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong! It’s for in case he gets landed with documents in the house! At weekends!” And then, realising what she had said: “It’s for his Joes — if they bring him documents, you fool! If Grant does, and he’s got to turn them round at short notice! What’s so fucking sinister about that?”