And that was how Mary saw her story henceforth as she told it to Jack Brotherhood: as a nightmarish film she dared look at only piecemeal, with herself as the meanest villain ever. The tramper draws alongside, the cats stretch, the gangway is lowered, the English family Pym — Magnus, Mary and son Thomas — file ashore in search of yet another perfect place away from it all. Because nowhere is far enough any more, nowhere is remote enough. The Pyms have become the Flying Dutchmen of the Aegean, scarcely landing before they pack again, changing boats and islands like driven souls, though only Magnus knows the curse, only Magnus knows who is pursuing them and why, and Magnus has locked that secret behind his smile with all his others. She sees him striding gaily ahead of her, clutching his straw hat against the breeze and his briefcase dangling from his other hand. She sees Tom stalking after him in the long grey flannels and school blazer with his Cub colours on the pocket, which he insists on wearing even when the temperature is in the eighties. And she sees herself still doped with last night’s drink and oil fumes, already planning to betray them both. And following them in their bare feet she sees the native bearers with the Pyms’ too-much luggage, the towels and bed linen and Tom’s Weetabix and all the other junk she packed in Vienna for their great sabbatical, as Magnus calls this once-in-a-lifetime family holiday they have all apparently been dreaming of, though Mary cannot remember it being mentioned until a few days before they left, and to be honest she would rather have gone back to England, collected the dogs from the gardener and the long-haired Siamese from Aunt Tab, and spent the time in Plush.
The bearers set down their burdens. Magnus, generous as ever, tips each of them from Mary’s handbag while she holds it open for him. Stooped gawkily over the reception committee of Lesbos cats, Tom declares they have ears like celery. A whistle sounds, the bearers hop up the gangway, the tramper is returned to the mist. Magnus, Tom and Mary the traitor stare after it like every sad story of the sea, their life’s luggage dumped around them and the red beacon dripping slow fire on their heads.
“Can we go back to Vienna after this?” asks Tom. “I’d like to see Becky Lederer.”
Magnus does not answer him. Magnus is too busy being enthusiastic. He will be enthusiastic for his own funeral and Mary loves him for this as she loves him for too much else, does still. Sometimes his sheer goodness accuses me.
“This is it, Mabs!” he cries, waving an arm grandly at the treeless conical hill of brown houses that is their newest home. “We’ve found it. Plush-sur-mer.” And he turns to her with the smile she has not seen until this very holiday — so gallant, so tired-bright in its despair. “We’re safe here, Mabs. We’re okay.”
He throws an arm around her, she lets him. He draws her to him, they hug. Tom squeezes between, an arm round each of them. “Hey, let me have some of that,” he says. Locked together like the closest allies in the world, the three move off down the jetty, leaving their luggage till they have found a place to put it. Which they achieve within the hour, for clever Magnus knows just the right taverna to go to first time, whom to charm and whom to recruit in the surprisingly passable Greek identity he has somehow cobbled together for himself on their journeying. But there is the evening yet to come and the evenings are getting worse and worse, they hang over her from when she wakes, she can feel them creeping up on her all through her day. To celebrate their new home Magnus has brought a bottle of scotch though they have agreed several times in the last few days to lay off the hard stuff and stick to local wine. The bottle is nearly empty and Tom, thank God, is finally asleep in his new bedroom. Or so Mary prays, for Tom has recently become a fag-ender, as her father would have said, hanging around them for whatever he can pick up.
“Hey, come on, Mabs, that’s a bit of a bad face, isn’t it?” says Magnus, jollying her up. “Don’t you like our new Schloss?”
“You were being funny and I smiled.”
“Didn’t look like a smile,” says Magnus, smiling himself to show her how. “More like a bit of a grimace from where I sits, m’dear.”
But Mary’s blood is rising and as usual she cannot stop herself. The prospect of her uncommitted crime is already laying its guilt on her.
“That’s what you’re writing about, is it?” she snaps. “How you waste your wit on the wrong woman?”
Appalled by her own unpleasantness Mary bursts out weeping and drives her fists on to the arms of the rush chair. But Magnus is not appalled at all. Magnus puts down his glass and comes to her, he taps her gently on the arm with his fingertips, waiting to be let in. He puts her glass delicately out of reach. Moments later the springs of their new bed are pinging and whining like a brass band tuning up, for a desperate erotic fervour has latterly come to Magnus’s aid. He makes love to her as if he will never see her again. He buries himself in her as if she is his only refuge and Mary goes with him blindly. She climbs, he draws her after him, she is shouting at him—“Please, oh Christ!” He hits the mark for her, and for a blessed moment Mary can kiss the whole bloody world goodbye.
“We’re using Pembroke, by the way,” Magnus says later but not quite late enough. “I’m sure it’s unnecessary but I want to be on the safe side in case.”
Pembroke is one of Magnus’s worknames. He keeps the Pembroke passport in his briefcase, she has already located it. It has an artfully muddy photograph that might be Magnus or might not. In the forgery workshop in Berlin they used to call photographs like that floaters.
“What do I tell Tom?” she asks.
“Why tell him anything?”
“Our son’s name is Pym. He might take a little oddly to being told he’s Pembroke.”
She waits, hating herself for her intractability. It is not often that Magnus has to hunt for an answer even when it concerns guidance on how to deceive their child. But he hunts now, she can feel him do it as he lies wakefully beside her in the dark.
“Yes, well tell him the Pembrokes own the house we’re in, I should. We’re using their name to order things from the shop. Only if asked, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
“Those two men are still there,” says Tom from the door, who turns out to have been part of their conversation all this while.
“What men?” says Mary.
But her skin is pricking on her nape, her body is clammy with panic. How much has Tom heard? Seen?
“The ones who are mending their motorbike by the river. They’ve got special army sleeping-bags and a torch and a special tent.”
“There are campers all over the island,” says Mary. “Go back to bed.”
“They were on our ship too,” says Tom. “Behind the lifeboat, playing cards. Watching us. Speaking German.”
“Lots of people were on the ship,” says Mary. Why don’t you say something, you bastard? she screams at Magnus in her head. Why do you lie dead instead of helping me when I’m still wet from you?