A Perfect Spy

Forward again: “. . don’t normally answer the phone in Wiltshire but Monday’s her bridge night and I was in the library playing a game of backgammon so when the phone rang I thought I might as well take it rather than spoil her four. Half past eleven it must have been but Jean’s bridge nights go on for ever. Chap’s voice. Must be her boyfriend, I thought. Bloody cheek, really, this time of night. ‘Hullo? Sef? That Sef?’ ‘Who the hell’s that?’ I said. ‘It’s me. Magnus. My father’s died. Over here to bury him.’ I thought, Poor old chap. Nobody likes to have his old man die on him. . That right for you? More water? Help yourself.”

Brotherhood hears himself roar “Thanks” as he leans towards the water jug. Then the sounds of a flood as he pours.

“‘ How’s Jem?’ he says. Jemima’s my sister. They had a dingdong once, never came to much. Married a florist. Extraordinary thing. Chap grows flowers all along the road to Basing-stoke. Puts his name up on a board. Doesn’t seem to bother her. Not that she sees much of him. Navigational problems, our Jem. Same as me.”

Forward again: “. . pissed. Couldn’t tell whether he was laughing or crying. Poor chap, I thought. Drowning his sorrows. I’d do the same. Next thing I know, he’s prosing on about our private school. I mean Christ, we’d done two or three schools together, Oxford, not to mention a couple of holidays, yet all he wants to talk about forty years later, on the blower middle of the night, party going on, is how he carved my initials in the staff loo at our private and got me flogged for it. ‘Sorry I carved your initials, Sef.’ All right. He did it. He carved’em. I never doubted he carved ’em. Cocked it up too. He would. Know what he did? Bloody fool put a hyphen between the ‘S’ and the ‘B’ where we don’t have one. I told old Grimble, the headmaster. ‘Why would I put a hyphen in?’ I said. ‘Not how I spell my name,’ I said. ‘No hyphen in it. Look at the school list.’ Not a blind bit of difference, flogged me. Way it goes, you see. No justice. I don’t know I minded much. Everybody flogged everybody in those days. Besides, I wasn’t very nice to him myself. Always ragging him about his people. Father was a con man, you know. Nearly ruined my aunt. Had a go at my mother too. Tried to bed her but she was too fly. Some scheme to build a new airport in Scotland somewhere. He’d squared the locals, all he needed was buy the land, get the formal permission, make a fortune. Cousin of mine owns half Argyll. I asked him about it. Hokum, the whole thing. Extraordinary. I stayed with ’em once. Tarts’ parlour in Ascot. All these crooks hanging about and Magnus calling them ‘sir’. Father tried to get into Parliament once. Pity he didn’t. He’d have been good company. . ”

Forward again: “. . banging in the cash. I asked him where he was, he said London but he had to use phone boxes, he was being followed. I said, ‘Whose initials have you been carving now?’ Joke actually, but he didn’t see it. I was sorry about his old man, you see. Didn’t want him moping. Dramatic chap, always has been. Nothing going on in his life unless he’s got some frightful problem on his hands. You could have sold him the Egyptian pyramids long as you said they were falling down. I said, give me the number of your phone, I’ll ring you back. He said somebody must have told me to say that. I said, ‘Absolute bilge, hell are you talking about? Half my friends are on the run.’ He said his father was dead and he was looking at his life for the first time. Fundamental. Always has been. Then he went back to these initials he’d carved. ‘I’m really sorry, Sef.’ I said, ‘Look here, old boy, I always knew it was you and I don’t think we should go through life wearing hairshirts about what we did at our private. Do you need cash? Want a bed? Take a cottage on the estate.’ ‘I’m really sorry, Sef. Really sorry.’ I said, ‘You tell me what I can do, I’ll do it. I’m in the book in London, give me a buzz if I can help.’ Well, I mean damn it, he’d been on for twenty minutes. I put the phone down and half an hour later he’s back. ‘Hullo, Sef. Me again.’ Jean was pretty shirty this time. Thought it was Steggie having a tantrum. ‘Got to talk to you, Sef. Listen to me.’ Well, you can’t ring off on an old chum when he’s down, can you?”

Brotherhood heard Sir Kenneth’s clock chime twelve. He was jotting fast. Concentric fantasies, he repeated to himself, defining the truth at the centre. He had reached the passage he was waiting for.