Which was when she heard the phone ring. Exactly then. As she was transmitting those loving thoughts to Magnus and having a desperately happy time with them. She heard it ring twice, three times, she started to get cross, then to her relief she heard Herr Wenzel answer it. Herr Pym will return your call later unless it’s urgent, she rehearsed in her mind. Herr Pym should not be disturbed unless it is essential. Herr Pym is far too busy telling a funny story in that perfect German of his which so annoys the Embassy and surprises the Austrians. Herr Pym can also do you an Austrian accent on demand, or funnier still a Swiss one, from his days at school there. Herr Pym can put you a row of bottles in a line, and by pinging them with a table-knife, make them chime like the bells of the old Swiss railway, while he chants the stations between Interlaken and the Jungfraujoch in the tones of a local station-master and his audience collapses in tears of nostalgic mirth.
Mary lifted her gaze to the far end of the empty table. And Magnus — how was he doing at that moment, apart from flirting with Mary?
Going great guns was the answer. On his right sat the dread Frau Oberregierungsrat Dinkel, a woman so plain and rude, even by the standards of official wives, that some of the toughest troopers in the Embassy had been reduced to stunned silence by her. Yet Magnus had drawn her to him like a flower to the sun and she could not get enough of him. Sometimes, watching him perform like this, Mary was moved to involuntary pity by the absoluteness of his dedication. She wished him more ease, if only for a moment. She wanted him to know that he had earned his peace whenever he chose to take it, instead of giving, giving all the time. If he were a real diplomat, he’d be an Ambassador easily, she thought. In Washington, Grant Lederer had privately assured her, Magnus had exerted more influence than either his Station Chief or the perfectly awful Ambassador. Vienna — though of course he was enormously respected here and enormously influential too — was an anticlimax, obviously. Well it was meant to be, but when the dust settled, Magnus would be back on course, and the thing here was to be patient. Mary wished she was not so young for him. Sometimes he tries to live down to me, she thought. On Magnus’s left, similarly mesmerised, sat Frau Oberst Mohr, whose German husband was attached to the Signals Bureau at Wiener Neustadt. But Magnus’s real conquest, as ever, was Grant Lederer III, “he of the little black beard and little black eyes and little black thoughts,” as Magnus called him, who six months ago had taken over the American Embassy’s Legal Department, which meant of course the reverse, for Grant was the Agency’s new man, though he was an old friend from Washington.
“Grant’s a piss artist,” Magnus would complain of him, as he complained of all his friends. “He has us all round a big table once a week inventing words for things we’ve been doing perfectly well for twenty years without them.”
“But he is fun, darling,” Mary would remind him. “And Bee’s terribly dishy.”
“Grant’s an alpinist,” Magnus said another time. “He’s stacking us all in a neat line so he can climb over our backs. You just wait and see.”
“But at least he’s bright, darling. At least he can keep up with you, can’t he?”
For the truth was, of course, that given the limitations of any diplomatic friendship, the Pyms and the Lederers were one of the great quartets, and it was just Magnus’s perverse way of liking people to kick at them and pick holes in them and swear he would never talk to them again. The Lederers’ daughter Becky was the same age as Tom and they were practically lovers already; Bee and Mary got on like a house on fire. As to Bee and Magnus — well frankly Mary did wonder sometimes whether they weren’t the tiniest bit too friendly. But, on the other hand, she had noticed that with quartets there was always one strong diagonal relationship even if it never came to anything. And if it ever did come to something between them — well, to be absolutely totally frank, Mary would be quite willing to take her revenge with Grant, whose lurking intensity she found increasingly to be rather a turn-on.
“Mary, cheers, okay? A great party. We’re loving it.”
It was Bee, for ever toasting everyone. She was wearing diamond earrings and a décolleté which Mary had been eying all evening. Three children and breasts like that: it was bloody unfair. Mary lifted her glass in return. Bee has typist’s fingers, she noticed, crooked at the tips.
“Now Grant, old boy, come on now,” Magnus was saying, in his half-serious banter. “Give us a break, be fair. If everything your gallant President tells us about the Communist countries is true, how the devil can we do a deal with any of them?”
Out of the corner of her eye Mary saw Grant’s droll smile stretch until it looked like snapping in itchy admiration of Pym’s wit.
“Magnus, if I had my way, we’d set you up on a big Embassy carpet with a shaker full of dry Martinis and an American passport and magic you right back to Washington and have you pick up the Democratic ticket. I never heard a seditious case put so well.”
“Draft Magnus for President?” Bee purred, sitting up straight and pressing out her breasts as if somebody had offered her a chocolate. “Oh goody.”
At which point the ostentatiously menial Herr Wenzel appeared and, bowing elaborately over Magnus, murmured in his left ear that he was required urgently — forgive, Excellency — on the telephone from London — Herr Counsellor, excuse.
Magnus excused. Magnus excuses everybody. Magnus picked his way delicately between imaginary obstacles to the door, smiling and empathising and excusing, while Mary chatted all the more brightly to provide him with covering fire. But as the door closed behind him something unforeseen occurred. Grant Lederer glanced at Bee, and Bee Lederer glanced at Grant. And Mary caught them at it and her blood ran cold.
Why? What had passed between them in that one unguarded look? Was Magnus really sleeping with Bee — and had Bee told Grant? Were they momentarily joined, the two of them, in perplexed admiration of their departed host? In all the turmoil since, Mary’s answer to those questions had not budged an inch. It wasn’t sex, it wasn’t love, it wasn’t envy and it wasn’t friendship. It was conspiracy. Mary was not fanciful. But Mary had seen and she knew. They were a pair of murderers telling each other “soon” and the soon was about Magnus. Soon we shall have him. Soon his hubris will be purged and our honour restored. I saw them hate him, thought Mary. She had thought it then, she thought it now.
“Grant is a Cassius looking for a Caesar,” Magnus had said. “If he doesn’t find a back to stab soon, the Agency will give his dagger to someone else.”
Yet in diplomacy nothing lasts, nothing is absolute, a conspiracy to murder is no grounds for endangering the flow of conversation. Chatting busily, talking children and shopping — hunting frantically for an explanation for the Lederers’ bad look — waiting, above all, for Magnus to return to the party and re-enchant his end of the table in two languages at once — Mary still found time to wonder whether this urgent telephone call from London might be the one her husband had been waiting for all these weeks. She had known for some while that he had something big going on, and she was praying it was the promised reinstatement.