“Did you tell Nigel this?”
“Why do you keep asking me that? I didn’t think it was Nigel’s business. I didn’t want to say he was being drunk and sentimental on the phone late at night just at the time when they were considering him for promotion. Serves him right for deceiving me.”
“What else did Nigel ask you?”
“Just character stuff. Had I ever had any reason to suppose Magnus might have had Communist sympathies. I said Oxford. Nigel said they knew about that. I said I didn’t think university politics meant much anyway. Nigel agreed. Had he ever been erratic in any way? Unstable — alcoholic — depressive? I said no again. I didn’t reckon one drunken phone call constituted drunkenness, but if it did I wasn’t going to tell four of Magnus’s colleagues about it. I felt protective of him.”
“They ought to have known you better, Belinda,” said Brotherhood. “Would you have given him the job yourself, by the way?”
“What job? You said there wasn’t one.” She was being sharp with him, belatedly suspecting him too of duplicity.
“I meant suppose there had been a job. A high-level, responsible job. Would you give it to him?”
She smiled. Very prettily. “I did, didn’t I? I married him.”
“You’re wiser now. Would you give it to him today?”
She was biting her forefinger, frowning angrily. She could change moods in moments. Brotherhood waited but nothing came so he asked her another question: “Did they ask you about his time in Graz, by any chance?”
“Graz? You mean his army time? Good heavens, they didn’t go back that far.”
Brotherhood shook his head as if to say he would never be equal to the wicked ways of the world. “Graz is where they’re trying to say it all started,” he said. “They’ve got some grand theory he fell among thieves while he was doing his National Service there. What do you make of that?”
“They’re absurd,” she said.
“Why are you so sure?”
“He was happy there. When he came back to England he was a new man. ‘I’m complete,’ he kept saying. ‘I’ve done it, Bel. I’ve got my other half together.’ He was proud he’d done such good work.”
“Did he describe the work?”
“He couldn’t. It was too secret and too dangerous. He just said I would be proud of him if I knew.”
“Did he tell you the name of any of the operations he was mixed up in?”
“No.”
“Did he tell you the names of any of his Joes?”
“Don’t be absurd. He wouldn’t do that.”
“Did he mention his C.O.?”
“He said he was brilliant. Everyone was brilliant for Magnus when they were new.”
“If I said ‘Greensleeves’ to you in a loud voice, would that ring any bells?”
“It would mean English traditional music.”
“Ever hear of a girl called Sabina?”
She shook her head. “He told me I was his first,” she said.
“Did you believe him?”
“It’s hard to tell when it’s the first for you too.”
With Belinda, he remembered, the quiet was always good. If her charges into the lists had something comic about them, there was always dignity to the calm between.
“So Nigel and his friends went away happy,” he suggested. “Did you?”
Her face against the window was in silhouette. He waited for it to lift or turn to him, but it didn’t.
“Where would you look for him?” he said. “If you were me?”
Still she did not move or speak.
“Some place by the sea somewhere? He had these fantasies, you know. He chopped them up and gave a bit to each person. Did he ever give a version to you? Scotland? Canada? The migration of the reindeer? Some kind lady who’d take him in? I need to know, Belinda. I really do.”
“I won’t talk to you any more, Jack. Paul’s right. I don’t have to.”
“Not whatever he’s done? Not to save him perhaps?”
“I don’t trust you. Specially when you’re being nice. You invented him, Jack. He’d have done whatever you told him. Who to be. Who to marry. Who to divorce. If he’s done wrong it’s as much your fault as his. It was easy to get rid of me — he just gave me the latch key and went to a lawyer. How was he supposed to get rid of you?”
Brotherhood moved towards the door.
“If you find him, tell him not to ring again. And Jack?” Brotherhood paused. Her face was soft again, and hopeful. “Did he write that book he was always on about?”
“Which book was that?”
“The great autobiographical novel that was going to change the world.”
“Should he have done?”
“‘ One day I’m going to lock myself away and tell the truth.’ ‘Why do you have to lock yourself away? Tell it now,’ I said. He didn’t seem to think he could. I’m not going to let Lucy marry early. Nor’s Paul. We’re going to put her on the pill and let her have affairs.”
“Lock himself away where, Belinda?”
The light once more faded from her face. “You brought it on yourselves, Jack. All of you. He’d have been all right if he’d never met people like you.”
* * *
Wait, Grant Lederer told himself. They all hate you. You hate most of them. Be a clever boy and wait your turn. Ten men sat in a room inside a room. In the false walls, false windows looked onto plastic flowers. From places like this, thought Lederer, America lost her wars against the little brown men in black pyjamas. From places like this, he thought — from smoked-glass rooms, cut off from humankind — America will lose all her wars except the last. A few yards beyond the walls lay the placid diplomatic backwaters of St. John’s Wood. But here inside they could have been in Langley or Saigon.
“Harry, with the greatest possible respect,” Mountjoy of the Cabinet Office piped with very little respect at all. “These early indicators of yours could perfectly easily have been dumped on us by an unscrupulous opposition, as some of us have been saying all along. Is it really fair to trot them out yet again? I thought we put all this stuff to bed back in August.”
Wexler stared at the spectacles he was holding in both hands. They are too heavy for him, thought Lederer. He sees too clearly through them. Wexler lowered them to the table and scratched his veteran’s crew cut with his stubby fingertips. What’s holding you up? Lederer demanded of him silently. Are you translating English into English? Are you paralysed by jet-lag after flying Concorde all the way from Washington? Or are you in awe of these English gentlemen who never tire of telling us how they set up our service in the first place and generously invited us to sup at their high table? You’re a top man of the best intelligence agency in the world, for Christ’s sake. You’re my boss. Why don’t you stand up and be counted? As if in response to Lederer’s silent pleading, Wexler’s voice started functioning again with all the animation of a machine that speaks your weight.
“Gentlemen,” Wexler resumed — except that he said “junnlemen.” Reload, aim again, take your time, thought Lederer. “Our position, Sir Eric,” Wexler resumed, with something unpleasantly close to a bow in the direction of Mountjoy’s knighthood, “that is — the ah Agency position overall on this thing — at this important meeting, and at this moment in time — is that we have here an accumulation of indicators from a wide range of sources on the one hand, and new data on the other which we consider pretty much conclusive in respect of our unease.” He moistened his lips. So would I, thought Lederer. If I’d spoken that mouthful, I’d spit at least. “It looks to us therefore that the ah logistics here require us to go back over the ah course a little distance and — when we’ve done that — to ah slot the new stuff in where we can all take a good look at it in light of what has — ah latterly gone before.” He turned to Brammel and his lined but innocent face broke into an apologetic smile. “You want to do it different in any way, Bo, why don’t you just say so and see if we can accommodate you?”