Brotherhood took her cigarette and drew on it.
“‘ I’ll dump Mary. We’ll go and live abroad. France. Morocco. Who cares?’ Phone calls from the other end of the earth. ‘I rang to say I love you.’ Flowers, saying ‘I love you.’ Cards. Little notes folded into things, shoved under the door, personal for my eyes only in top-secret envelopes. ‘I’ve lived too long with the what-ifs. I want action, Kate. You’re my escape-line. Help me. I love you. M.’”
Once again, Brotherhood waited.
“‘ I love you,’” she repeated. “He kept saying it. Like a ritual he was trying to believe in. ‘I love you.’ I suppose he thought if he said it to enough people enough times, one day it might be true. It wasn’t. He never loved a woman in his life. We were enemy, all of us. Touch me, Jack!”
To his surprise he felt a wave of kinship overcome him. He drew her to him and held her tightly to his chest.
“Is Bo wise to any of this?” he said.
He could feel the sweat collecting on his back. He could smell Pym’s nearness in the crevices of her body. She rolled her head against him but he gently shook her, making her say it aloud: Bo knows nothing. No, Jack. Bo’s got no idea.
“Magnus wasn’t interested till he was calling the whole game,” she said. “He could have had me any time. That wasn’t enough for him. ‘Wait for me, Kate. I’m going to cut the cable and be free. Kate, it’s me, where are you?’ I’m here, you idiot, or I wouldn’t be answering the phone, would I?. . He doesn’t have affairs. He has lives. We’re on separate planets for him. Places he can call while he floats through space. You know his favourite photograph of me?”
“I don’t think I do, Kate,” Brotherhood said.
“I’m naked on a beach in Normandy. We’d stolen the weekend. I’ve got my back to him, I’m walking into the sea. I didn’t even know he had a camera.”
“You’re a beautiful girl, Kate. I could get quite hot about a picture like that myself,” said Brotherhood, pulling back her hair so that he could see her face.
“He loved it better than he loved me. With my back to him I was anyone — his girl on the beach — his dream. I left his fantasies intact. You’ve got to get me out of it, Jack.”
“How deep in are you?”
“Deep enough.”
“Write him any letters yourself?”
She shook her head.
“Do him any little favours? Bend the rules for him? You better tell me, Kate.” He waited, feeling the increasing pressure of her head against him. “Can you hear me?” She nodded. “I’m dead, Kate. But you’ve got a while to go. If it ever comes out that you and Pym so much as had a strawberry milkshake together at McDonald’s while you were waiting for your bus home, they will shave your head and post you to Economic Development before you can say Jack anybody. You know that, don’t you?”
Another nod.
“What did you do for him? Steal a few secrets, did you? Something juicy out of Bo’s own plate?” She shook her head. “Come on, Kate. He fooled me too. I’m not going to throw you to the wolves. What did you do for him?”
“There was an entry in his P.F.,” she said.
“So?”
“He wanted it taken out. It was from long ago. An army report from his National Service time in Austria.”
“When did you do this?”
“Early. We’d been going for about a year. He was back from Prague.”
“And you did it for him. You raided his file?”
“It was trivial, he said. He was very young at the time. A boy still. He’d been running some low-grade Joe into Czechoslovakia. A frontier crosser, I think. Really small stuff. But there was this girl called Sabina who’d got in on the act and wanted to marry him and defected. I didn’t listen to it very clearly. He said if anybody picked through his file and came on the episode he’d never make it to the Fifth Floor.”
“Well that’s not the end of the world now, is it?”
She shook her head.
“Joe have a name, did he?” Brotherhood asked.
“A codename. Greensleeves.”
“That’s fanciful. I like that. Greensleeves. An all-English Joe. You fished the paper from the file and what did you do with it? Just tell it to me, Kate. It’s out now. Let’s go.”
“I stole it.”
“All right. What did you do with it?”
“That’s what he asked me.”
“When?”
“He rang me.”
“When?”
“Last Monday evening. After he was supposed to have left for Vienna.”
“What time? Come on, Kate, this is good. What time did he ring you?”
“Ten. Later. Ten-thirty. Earlier. I was watching News at Ten.”
“What bit?”
“Lebanon. The shelling. Tripoli or somewhere. I turned the sound down as soon as I heard him and the shelling went on and on like a silent movie. ‘I needed to hear your voice, Kate. I’m sorry for everything. I rang to say I’m sorry. I wasn’t a bad man, Kate. It wasn’t all pretend.’”
“Wasn’t?”
“Yes. Wasn’t. He was conducting a retrospective. Wasn’t. I said it’s just your father’s death, you’ll be all right, don’t cry. Don’t talk as if you’re dead yourself. Come round. Where are you? I’ll come to you. He said he couldn’t. Not any more. Then about his file. I should feel free to tell everyone what I’d done, not try to shield him any more. But to give him a week. ‘One week, Kate. It’s not a lot after all those years.’ Then, had I still got the paper I took out for him? Had I destroyed it, kept a copy?”
“What did you say?”
She went to the bathroom and returned with the embroidered spongebag she kept her kit in. She drew a folded square of brown paper from it and handed it to him.
“Did you give him a copy?”
“No.”
“Did he ask for one?”
“No. I wouldn’t have done that. I expect he knew. I took it and I said I’d taken it and he should believe me. I thought I’d put it back one day. It was a link.”
“Where was he when he rang you on Monday?”
“A phone box.”
“Reverse charges?”
“Middle distance. I reckoned four fifty-pence pieces. Mind you, that could still be London, knowing him. We were on for about twenty minutes but a lot of the time he couldn’t speak.”
“Describe. Come on, old love. You’ll only have to do it once, I promise you, so you might as well do it thoroughly.”
“I said, ‘Why aren’t you in Vienna?’”
“What did he say to that?”
“He said he’d run out of small change. That was the last thing he said to me. ‘I’ve run out of small change.’”
“Did he have a place he ever took you? A hideaway?”
“We used my flat or went to hotels.”
“Which ones?”
“The Grosvenor at Victoria was one. The Great Eastern at Liverpool Street. He has favourite rooms that overlook the railway lines.”
“Give me the numbers.”
Holding her against him, he walked her to the desk and scribbled down the two numbers to her dictation, then pulled on his old dressing-gown and knotted it round his waist and smiled at her. “I loved him too, Kate. I’m a bigger fool than you are.” But he won no smile in return. “Did he ever talk about a place away from it all? Some dream he had?” He poured her some more vodka and she took it.
“Norway,” she said. “He wanted to see the migration of the reindeer. He was going to take me one day.”
“Where else?”
“Spain. The north. He said he’d buy a villa for us.”
“Did he talk about his writing?”
“Not much.”
“Did he say where he’d like to write his great book?”
“In Canada. We’d hibernate in some snowy place and live out of tins.”