They watched him turn and stride down the aisle and slide the locks back on the padded door. Poor old Jack, they said to each other with their eyes as the light went up: his life’s work. Lost all his Joes and can’t face it. Dreadful to see him so cut up. Only Frankel seemed to wish he hadn’t gone.
“Have you ordered the rerun yet?” said Nigel. “I said have you ordered a rerun?”
“I’ll do it now,” said Frankel.
“Good man,” said Bo appreciatively from the stalls.
In the corridor, Brotherhood paused to light himself a cigarette. The door opened and closed again. It was Kate.
“I can’t go on,” she said. “It’s mad.”
“Well it’s going to get a damn sight madder,” snapped Brotherhood, still angry. “That was just the trailer.”
* * *
It was night once more and Mary had got through another day without throwing herself politely from a top-floor window or scrawling filthy words on the dining-room walls. Seated on her bed still moderately sober, she stared at the book and then at the phone. The phone had a second wire fed into it. The wire led to a grey box and seemed to stop. Since my time, she thought. Can’t be doing with these modern gadgets. She poured another generous tot of whisky and set the glass on the table at her elbow in order to end the argument she had been having with herself for the last ten minutes. There you are, damn you. If you want one, have one. If you don’t, leave the bloody thing where it is. She was fully dressed. She was supposed to have a headache but the headache was a lie to escape the excruciating company of Fergus and the girl Georgie who had begun to treat her with the deference of warders before her hanging. “How about a nice game of Scrabble, Mary?. . Not in the mood are we? Never mind…. I say, that shepherd’s pie did go down a treat, didn’t it, Georgie? I haven’t had a shepherd’s pie like that since my nan went. Do you think it’s the freezing that does it? Sort of ripens it, does it, the freezing?” At eleven o’clock, screaming inside, she had left them to the washing-up and brought herself up here to the book and to the note that had accompanied it. A deckled card. Silver-edged, my wedding anniversary. In a deckled envelope. Vile cherub blowing trumpet top left.
“Dear Mary,
“So sorry to hear about M’s calamity. Picked this up for pennies this morning and wondered whether you would like to bind it for me, same as all the others, full hide, buckram and the title printed in gold capitals between the first and second band on the spine. The end-papers look kind of new to me, maybe just rip them out? Grant’s away too so I guess I know how you feel. Could you do it quickly, as a surprise for him? Usual fee, of course!
“My love, darling,
Bee”
Keeping her hand away from the whisky and her mind clear of thoughts of a certain moustached phantom, Mary applied her training to the note. The handwriting was not Bee Lederer’s. It was a forgery and to anyone who knew the game a dismal one. The writer had paid lip-service to Bee’s all-American copperplate but the Germanic influence was clear in the spiky “u”s and “n”s and the “t”s without tails. “Whether” instead of “if,” she thought: when did an American write “whether”? The spelling wasn’t Bee’s either: a word like “calamity.” Bee couldn’t spell for toffee. She doubled every consonant on sight. Her letters to Mary in Greece, penned on similar stationery, had contained such family gems as menipullate and phallassy. As to “full hide”: Mary had bound just three books for Bee, and Bee hadn’t known from green apples how she wanted them, except she thought they looked great on Grant’s shelf, just like the old libraries you have in England. Full hide, buckram, the placing of the lettering: these were the writer talking, not Bee. And if Bee suspected that the end-papers might not be original — well bully for Bee because a month ago she had asked Mary wherever had she bought that cute wallpaper stuff she stuck on the inside of her covers?
The note was so bad, Mary concluded — and so unlike Bee — that it was almost deliberately bad: good enough to fool Fergus when it was delivered to the door this afternoon, bad enough to be a signal to Mary that it meant something different.
Something she had been warned of, for instance.
She had read the clues from the moment she opened the door to the vanman, while Fergus the idiot lurked in the coat cupboard with a bloody great Howitzer in his hand in case the vanman turned out to be a Russian in disguise — which perhaps on reflection he was, because Bee had never used a private delivery service in her life. Bee would have dropped the book in herself on the way back from Becky’s school, coo-eeing through the letter box. Bee would have buttonholed Mary at the International Ladies on Tuesday, leaving her to hump the damn thing home as best she could.
“Mind if I read the card, Mary?” Fergus had said. “It’s just routine, only you know what they’re like in London. Bee. That’ll be Mrs. Lederer, wife of the American gentleman?”
“That’s who it will be,” Mary had confirmed.
“Well it’s a nice book, I will say. In English too. Looks really old, it does.” He was turning through it with practised fingers, pausing at pencil marks, holding occasional pages to the light.
“It’s 1698,” Mary had said, pointing to the Roman numerals.
“My goodness, you can read that stuff.”
“Can I have it back now, please?”
The grandfather clock in the hall was striking twelve. Fergus and Georgie were by now no doubt lying blissfully in each other’s arms. Over the interminable days of her secret imprisonment Mary had watched their romance ripen. Tonight when she came down to dinner Georgie had the indisguisable glow of someone who had been screwing minutes before. In a year’s time the two of them would become yet another his-and-hers couple in one of the resources sections where the Other Ranks held sway: surveillance, microphone installation, sweeping, steaming mail. A year later when they had pooled their fiddled overtime and their cooked-up mileage and inflated their out-of-town subsistence they would make a down payment on a house in East Sheen, have two children and become eligible for the Firm’s subsidised education scheme. I’m being a jealous bitch, thought Mary, unrepentant. Right now, I wouldn’t mind an hour with Fergus myself. She picked up the receiver and waited.
“Who are you ringing, Mary?” said Fergus’s voice immediately.
Wherever he was in his love-life just then, Fergus was very awake indeed when it came to cutting in on Mary’s outgoing phone calls.
“I’m lonely,” Mary replied. “I want to have a chat with Bee Lederer. Anything wrong with that?”
“Magnus is still in London, Mary. He’s been delayed.”
“I know where he is. I know the story. I am also grown up.”
“He’s been contacting you regular by phone, you’ve had nice chats with him, he’ll be back in a day or two. Head Office has nabbed him for a briefing while he’s over there. That’s all that happened.”
“I’m all right, Fergus. I’m word perfect.”
“Would you normally ring her as late as this?”
“If both Magnus and Grant are away, yes I would.”
Mary heard a click and then the dialling tone. She dialled the number and Bee started moaning at once. She was having her damned period, she said, a real bastard, cramps, the bends, you name it. It always grabbed her this way in winter, specially when Grant wasn’t there to service her. Giggle. “Oh shit, Mary, I really miss it. Does that make me a whore?”
“I’ve had a lovely long letter from Tom,” said Mary. A lie. It was a letter and it was long but it was not lovely. It was an account of the great time Tom had had with Uncle Jack last Sunday and it had made Mary’s flesh creep.