With Tom on one side of her, Magnus on the other, Mary listens to the bells of Plomari tolling out the hours. Four more days, she tells herself. On Sunday, Tom flies back to London for the new school term. And on Monday I’ll do it and be damned.
* * *
Brotherhood was shaking her. Nigel had said something to him: ask her about the beginning — pin her down.
“We want you to come back a stage, Mary. Can you do that? You’re running ahead of yourself.”
She heard murmuring, then the sound of Georgie changing a reel on her tape-recorder. The murmuring was her own.
“Tell us how you came to be taking the holiday in the first place, will you, dear? Who proposed it?. . Oh Magnus, did he? I see. And was that here in this house?. . It was…. Now what time of day would that have been? Sit up, will you?”
So Mary sat up and began again where Jack had told her: on a sweet, early summer evening in Vienna when everything was still absolutely fine and neither Lesbos nor all the islands that came before it were a glint in clever Magnus’s eye. Mary was in the basement in her overalls, binding a first edition of Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, by Karl Kraus which Magnus had found in Leoben while meeting a Joe there and Mary—
“That a regular one — Leoben?”
“Yes, Jack, Leoben was regular.”
“How often did he go there?”
“Twice a month. Three times. It was an old Hungarian he had, no one special.”
“He told you that, did he? I thought he kept his Joes to himself.”
“An old Hungarian wine dealer from way back, with offices in Leoben and Budapest. Mostly Magnus kept his secrets to himself. Sometimes he told me. Now can I go on?”
Tom was at school, Frau Bauer was out praying, said Mary. It was some kind of Catholic bean feast, Assumption, Ascension, Prayer and Repentance, Mary had lost count. Magnus was supposed to be at the American Embassy. The new committee had just started meeting and she wasn’t expecting him back till late. She was bang in the middle of glueing when suddenly, without hearing a sound, she saw him standing in the doorway — God knows how long he’d been there — looking very pleased with himself and watching her the way he liked to.
“How was that, dear? Watched you how?” Brotherhood cut in.
Mary had surprised herself. She faltered. “Superior, somehow. Pained superiority. Jack, don’t make me hate him, please.”
“All right, he’s watching you,” said Brotherhood.
He is watching her and when she catches sight of him he bursts out laughing and shuts her mouth with passionate kisses doing his Fred Astaire number, then it’s upstairs for a full and frank exchange of views, as he calls it. They make love, he hauls her to the bath, washes her, hauls her out and dries her, and twenty minutes later Mary and Magnus are bounding across the little park on the top of Döbling like the happy couple they nearly are, past the sandpits and the climbing-frame that Tom is too big for, past the elephant cage where Tom kicks his football, down the hill towards the Restaurant Teheran which is their improbable pub because Magnus so adores the black-and-white videos of Arab romances they play for you with the sound down while you eat your couscous and drink your Kalterer. At the table he holds her arm fiercely and she can feel his excitement racing through her like a charge, as if having her has made him want her more.
“Let’s get away, Mabs. Let’s really get away. Let’s live life for a change instead of acting it. Let’s take Tom and all our mid-tour leave and bugger off for the whole of the summer. You paint, I’ll write my book, and we’ll make love until we fall apart.”
Mary says where to, Magnus says who cares, I’ll go to the travel agent on the Ring tomorrow. Mary says what about the new committee. He is holding her hand inside his own, touching it with his fingertips into little peaks, and she is going mad for him again, which is what he likes.
“The new committee, Mary,” Magnus pronounces, “is the most stupid bloody charade I’ve been mixed up in, and believe me, I’ve seen a few. All it is, it’s a talking-shop to goose up the Firm’s ego and allow them to tell whoever will listen to them that we’re hugger-mugger in bed with the Americans. Lederer can’t possibly imagine we’re going to unveil our networks to him, and as for Lederer, he wouldn’t tell me the name of his tailor, let alone his agents — assuming he’s got either, which I doubt.”
Brotherhood again: “Did he tell you why Lederer mightn’t be inclined to talk to him?”
“No,” said Mary.
Nigel for a change: “And no other reasons offered as to why or how the committee might be a charade?”
“It was a charade, it was a sham, it was makework. That’s all he said. I asked about his Joes, he said the Joes could look after themselves and if Jack was bothered about them he could send a locum. I asked what Jack would think—”
“And what would Jack think?” said Nigel, all open curiosity.
“He said Jack’s a sham too: ‘I’m not married to Jack, I’m married to you. The Firm should have retired him ten years ago. Sod Jack.’ Sorry. That’s what he said.”
Hands shoved in his pockets, Brotherhood took a stroll round the little room, poking at Frau Bauer’s photographs of her illegitimate daughter, poring over her shelf of paperback romances.
“Anything else about me?” he asked.
“Jack’s had too many miles in the saddle. The Boy Scout era’s over. It’s a new scene and he’s not up to it.”
“Any more?” said Brotherhood.
Nigel had lowered his chin into his hand and was studying one small but perfectly formed shoe.
“No,” said Mary.
“Did he go for a walk that night? Meet P?”
“He’d been the night before.”
“I said that night. Answer the bloody question!”
“And I said the night before!”
“With a newspaper. The whole bit?”
“Yes.”
His hands still in his pockets, his head high against his shoulders, Brotherhood turned stiffly to Nigel. “I’m going to tell her,” he said. “You want to throw a fit?”
“Are you asking me formally?” Nigel asked.
“Not particularly.”
“If you are, I’ll have to pass it to Bo,” said Nigel and looked respectfully at his gold watch as if he took orders from it.
“Lederer knows and we know. If Pym knows too, who’s left?” Brotherhood insisted.
Nigel thought about this. “Up to you. Your man, your decision, your tail-end. Frankly.”
Brotherhood leaned over Mary and put his head close to her ear. She remembered his smelclass="underline" tweedy and paternal. “Listening?”
She shook her head. I’m not, I never will be, I wish I never had.
“The new committee that your Magnus derided was shaping up to be a very high-powered outfit. Maybe the best potential working relationship at field level that we’ve had with the Americans for years. The name of the game was mutual trust. Not as easy to establish these days as it used to be, but we managed it. Are you going to sleep?”
She nodded.
“Your Magnus was not only aware of this, he was one of the prime movers in getting the committee off the ground. If not the prime mover. He even went so far as to complain to me, when we were negotiating the deal, that London was being small-minded in its interpretation of the barter terms. He thought we should give the Americans more. In exchange for more. That’s number one.”
I have absolutely nothing else to say. You can have my home address, my next of kin and that’s your lot. You taught me that yourself, Jack, in case they ever grabbed me.
“Number two is that for reasons which I regarded at the time as specious and insulting, the Americans objected to your husband’s presence on that committee not three weeks after it met, and asked me to replace him with somebody more to their liking. Since Magnus was kingpin of the Czecho operation and of several other little shows in Eastern Europe besides, this was a totally unrealistic demand. They’d raised the same objections about him in Washington the year before and Bo had bowed to them, in my view mistakenly. I wasn’t about to let them do it again. I happen not to care for American gentlemen or anybody else telling me how to run my shop. I said no and ordered Magnus to take himself off on mid-tour leave and stay clear of Vienna till I told him to come back. That’s the truth, and I think it’s time you heard some.”