And they do. And make love. The desperate screwing of strangers while Tom reads fantasy next door. And two days later they leave for Hydra, but Hydra is too cramped, too ominous, there is suddenly nowhere to go but Spetsai: at this time of year we’ll have no problem. Tom asks if Becky can join them, Magnus says no she absolutely can’t because they’ll all want to come and he’s not going to have a pride of Lederers sitting on his head while he’s trying to write. Otherwise, apart from his drinking, Magnus has never been more caring and polite than now.
She had stopped. Like standing back from a painting halfway. Studying the story so far. She drank some whisky, lit a cigarette.
“Christ,” said Brotherhood softly. Then nothing.
Nigel had found a bit of dead skin on the back of one undersized finger and was picking it off meticulously.
* * *
It is Lesbos again, it is another dawn but the same Greek bed and Plomari is once more waking up though Mary is praying it will go back to sleep again, that the sounds will fade and the sun flop behind the rooftops where it came from, because it is Monday and yesterday Tom went back to school. Mary has the evidence under her pillow where she promised to put the rabbitskin he gave her to keep her safe — and as if she needed it to strengthen her resolve — the terrible memory of his last words to her before he left. Mary and Magnus have driven him to the airport, weighed him in for yet another departure. Tom and Mary are standing about unable to touch each other while they wait for the flight to be called, Magnus is at the bar buying Tom a bag of pistachios for the journey and an ouzo for himself while he’s about it. Mary has six times confirmed that Tom has his passport and his money and his letter to Matron about his shrimp rash, and his letter to Granny to be handed to her the moment you meet her at London Airport, darling, so that you don’t forget. But Tom is even more than usually distracted; he is looking back to the main entrance, watching the people going through the swing doors, and there is something desperate in his face, so desperate that Mary really wonders whether he is thinking of making a dash for it.
“Mums?” Sometimes, when he is distracted, he still calls her that.
“Yes, darling.”
“They’re here, Mums.”
“Who are?”
“Those two campers from Plomari. They’re sitting in the airport carpark on their motorbike, watching Dad.”
“Now darling just stop,” Mary retorts firmly, determined to drive away these shadows, one and all. “Just completely stop, okay?”
“Only I’ve recognised them, you see. I worked it out this morning. I remembered. They’re the men who drove the car round the outside of the cricket ground at Corfu while Dad’s friend tried to make him come for a drive.”
For a moment, though Mary has been through this agonising procedure a dozen times before, she wants to scream out: “Stay — don’t go — I don’t care a damn about your bloody education — stay with me!” But instead the fool waves him through the barrier and saves her tears for the journey back while Magnus is absolutely sweet to her as ever. And now it is next morning, Tom is just about arriving at his school, and Mary is staring at the prison bars of Kyria Katina’s rotting shutters while the sky remorselessly whitens through the cracks and she is trying not to hear the clanking of the water-pipes beneath her and the rush of water free-falling onto the flagstones as Magnus celebrates his morning shower.
“Wowee! Christ! You awake, girl? It’s brass monkeys down here, believe me!”
Believe you, she repeats to herself and draws deeper into the bedclothes. In fifteen years he never called me girl till here. Now suddenly she is girl all day as if he has woken to her gender. A single width of floorboard separates her from him and if she dares look over the bedside she will glimpse his stranger’s naked body through the gaps between the planks. Receiving no reply from her, Pym starts singing his one piece of Gilbert and Sullivan while he sloshes water.
“‘ Rising early in the morning, We proceed to light the fire. .’ How’m I doing?” he calls when he has sung all he knows.
Mary in another life has a small reputation for her music. In Plush she led a passable group in madrigals. When she was doing her stint at Head Office she sang solo in the Firm choir. It’s just that nobody’s ever played records for you, she used to tell him in a veiled criticism of his first wife, Belinda. One day your singing voice will be as good as your spoken one, darling.
She summons her breath. “Better than Caruso!” she shouts.
The exchange is accomplished, Magnus can resume his showering.
“It went well, Mabs. Really well. Seven pages of deathless prose. Undercoat but good.”
“Great.”
He has started shaving. She can hear him empty the kettle into the plastic washing-up bowl. Contour blades, she thinks: oh God, I forgot to buy him his bloody Contour blades. All the way to the airport and back she had known there was something she had forgotten, for little things are as dreadful to her as big things these days. Now I will buy cheese for lunch. Now I will buy bread to go with the cheese. She closes her eyes and takes another enormous breath.
“Did you sleep?” she asks.
“Like the dead. Didn’t you notice?”
Yes, I noticed. I noticed how you slipped out of bed at two in the morning and crept downstairs to your workroom. How you paced and stopped pacing. I heard the creak of your chair and the whisper of your felt-tipped pen as you began to write. Who to? In what voice? Which one?
A boom of music drowns the sound of his shaving. He has switched on his clever radio for the BBC World News. Magnus knows the time to the minute, all through the day and night. If he looks at his watch it is only to confirm the schedules in his brain. She listens numbly to a recitation of events no one is able to control. A bomb has gone off in Beirut. A town has been wiped out in El Salvador. The pound has fallen. Or risen. The Russians are out of the next Olympics — or into them after all. Magnus follows politics like a gambler who is too wise to bet. The noise grows steadily louder as Magnus carries the radio upstairs, slop, slop, naked except for his sandals. He bends over her and she smells his shaving soap and the flat Greek cigarettes he has taken to smoking while he writes.
“Still sleepy?”
“A bit.”
“How’s Rat?”
Mary has been tending a half-eviscerated rat she found in the garden. It is lying in a straw box in Tom’s room.
“I haven’t looked,” she says.
He kisses her close to the ear, an explosion, and starts to fondle her breast as a sign to her to take him, but she grunts an awkward “Later” and rolls over. She hears him slop to the wardrobe, she hears the old door resist and jolt open. If he chooses shorts he’s going for a walk. If he chooses jeans he’s going into town to drink with the deadbeats. Colonel call-me-Parkie Parker, with my Greek fancy-boy and my Sea-lyham dog that I hold on the lead like a teapot. Elsie and Ethel, retired dyke schoolteachers from Liverpool. Jock somebody, I’ve a wee business in Dundee. Magnus pulls out a shirt and slips it on. She hears him fastening his shorts.