But all that was a thousand years ago. All that was until last Wednesday. The only thing that mattered now was that Magnus should drive up the avenue in the Metro he had left at the airport and beat Jack Brotherhood to the front door.
The telephone was ringing. By the bed. His side. Don’t run, you idiot, you’ll fall. Not too slowly or he’ll ring off. Magnus, darling, oh dear God, let it be you, you’ve had an aberration and you’re better, I’ll never even ask what happened, I’ll never doubt you again. She lifted the receiver and for some reason she couldn’t work out sat in a heap on the duvet, plonk, grabbing the pad and pencil with her spare hand in case of phone numbers to take down, addresses, times, instructions. She didn’t blurt “Magnus?” because that would show she was worried about him. She didn’t say “Hullo” because she couldn’t trust her voice not to sound excited. She said their whole number in German so that Magnus would know it was she, hear that she was normal and all right and not angry with him, and that everything was just fine to come back to. No fuss, no problems, I’m here and waiting for you like always.
“It’s me,” said a man’s voice.
But it wasn’t me. It was Jack Brotherhood.
“No word of that parcel, I suppose?” Brotherhood asked in the rich, confident English of the military classes.
“No word from anyone. Where are you?”
“Be there in about half an hour, less if I can. Wait for me, will you.”
The fire, she thought suddenly. My God, the fire. She hastened downstairs, no longer capable of distinguishing between small and large disasters. She had sent the maid out for the night and forgotten to bank up the drawing-room fire. It was out for sure. But it was not. It was burning merrily, and all that was needed was another log to make the early morning hour less funereal. She put it on, then floated round the room prinking things — the flowers, the ashtrays, Jack’s whisky tray — making everything outside herself perfect because nothing inside herself was perfect in the least. She lit a cigarette and puffed out the uninhaled smoke in angry kisses. Then she poured herself a very large whisky, which was what she had come down for in the first place. After all, if we were still dancing I’d be having several.
Mary’s Englishness, like Pym’s, was unmistakable. She was blonde and strong-jawed and forthright. Her one mannerism, inherited from her mother, was the slightly comic stoop from which she addressed the world, and foreigners in particular. Mary’s life was a record of fine deaths. Her grandfather had died at Passchendaele, her one brother, Sam, more recently in Belfast, and for a month or more it had seemed to Mary that the bomb that had blown Sam’s jeep to pieces had killed her soul too, but it was her father, not Mary, who had died of a broken heart. All of her men had been soldiers. Between them they had left her with a decent inheritance, a fiercely patriotic soul and a small manor house in Dorset. Mary was ambitious as well as intelligent, she could dream and lust and covet. But the rules of her life had been laid down for her before she entered it and had been entrenched with every death since: in Mary’s family the men campaigned while the women lent succour, mourned and carried on. Her worship, her dinner parties, her life with Pym had all been conducted on this same sturdy principle.
Until last July. Until our holiday in Lesbos. Magnus, come home. I’m sorry I raised a stink at the airport when you didn’t show up. I’m sorry I bellowed at the British Airways clerk in what you call my six-acre voice and I’m sorry I waved my diplomatic pass around. And I’m sorry — I’m terribly sorry — I phoned Jack to say where the hell’s my husband? So please — just come home and tell me what to do. Nothing matters. Just be here. Now.
Finding herself standing before the double doors to the dining room, she pushed them open, switched on the chandeliers, and, whisky in hand, surveyed the long empty table glistening like a lake. Mahogany. Eighteenth-century repro. Counsellor’s grade, nobody’s taste. Seats fourteen with comfort, sixteen if you double up on the curved ends. That bloody burn mark, I’ve tried everything. Remember, she told herself. Force your mind back. Get the whole story straight in your stupid little head before Jack Brotherhood rings that doorbell. Step outside yourself and look in. Now. It is a night like this one was, crisp and exciting. It is Wednesday and our night for entertaining. And the moon is like the moon tonight except for a bite out of one side. In the bedroom, that fool Mary Pym who notched up one A-level and never went to university stands with her feet too wide apart putting on her family pearls while brilliant Magnus her husband, a First at Oxford and already in his dinner-jacket, kisses the nape of her neck and does his Balkan gigolo number to try to get her in the party mood. Magnus of course is in whatever mood he needs to be in.
“For God’s sake,” Mary snaps more roughly than she intends. “Stop fooling and fix this bloody clasp for me.”
Sometimes my military family gets the better of my language.
And Magnus obliges. Magnus always obliges. Magnus mends and fixes and carries better than a butler.
And when he has obliged he puts his hands over my breasts and breathes hotly on my bare neck: “Please, my dullink, have we not time for most divine perfect moment? No? Yes?”
But Mary is, as usual, too nervous even to smile and orders him downstairs to make sure Herr Wenzel the hired manservant has fetched the ice from Weber’s fish-shop. And Magnus goes. Magnus always goes. Even when a sharp smack across Mary’s chops would be the wiser course, Magnus goes.
Pausing, Mary lifted her head and listened. A car engine. In this snow they come up on you like bad memories. But, unlike a bad memory, this one passed.
* * *
It is dinner; it is the diplomatic happy hour, it is as good as Georgetown in the days when Magnus was still an upwardly mobile Deputy Head of Station with the post of Chief of Service squarely in his sights and everything is mended between Magnus and Mary except for a black cloud that night and day hangs over Mary’s heart, even when she is not thinking of it, and that cloud is called Lesbos, a Greek island in the Aegean wholly surrounded by monstrous memories. Mary Pym, wife to Magnus, Counsellor for Certain Unmentionable Matters at the British Embassy in Vienna and actually the Head of Station here as everyone unmentionable knows, proudly faces her husband across Mary’s silver candelabra while the servants hand round Mary’s venison, jugged according to her mother’s recipe, to twelve unmentionably distinguished members of the local intelligence community.
“Now you also have a daughter,” Mary firmly reminds an Oberregierungsrat Dinkel from the Austrian Ministry of Defence in her well-learned German. “Name Ursula — right? She was studying piano at the Conservatorium when last heard of. Tell me about her.” And to the servant, quietly as she passes: “Frau Wenzel. Mr. Lederer two down has no red sauce. Fix.”
It was a pretty night, Mary had decided as she listened to a recitation of the Oberregierungsrat’s family woes. It was the sort of night she worked for, had worked for all her married life, in Prague and Washington while they were rising and now here where they were marking time. She was happy, she was flying the flag, the black cloud of Lesbos was as good as blown away. Tom was doing well at boarding-school and would soon be home for the Christmas holidays, Magnus had rented a chalet in Lech for skiing, the Lederers had said they would join them. Magnus was so resourceful these days, so attentive to her despite his father’s illness. And before Lech he would take her to Salzburg for Parsifal and, if she pressed him, to the Opera ball because, as they liked to say in Mary’s family, a gal loves a hop. And with luck the Lederers could join them for that too — the children could spend the night together and share a baby-sitter — and somehow with Magnus these days extra people were a comfort. Glimpsing Pym down the candlelight she darted a smile at him just as he slipped away to engage a deaf mute on his left. Sorry about being touchy earlier, she was saying. All forgotten, he was telling her. And when they’ve gone we’ll make love, she was saying, we’ll stay sober and make love and everything will be fine.