A Perfect Spy

The desk was in the old servants’ room next to the kitchen, a sprawling, spidery half-cellar to which no servant had been consigned for forty years. Near the window among Mary’s plant pots stood her easel and water-colours. Against the wall, the old black-and-white television and the agonising sofa for watching it. “There’s nothing like a little discomfort,” Magnus liked to say primly, “for deciding whether a programme is worth its salt.” In an alcove under lanes of piping stood the ping-pong table where Mary did her bookbinding and on it lay her hides and buckram and glues and clamps and threads and marbled end-papers and powering knives, and the bricks in Magnus’s old socks that she used instead of lead weights, and the wrecked volumes she had bought for a few schillings at the flea market. Beside it, next to the defunct boiler, stood the desk, the great, crazy Hapsburg desk bought for a song at a sale in Graz, sawn up to get it through the door and glued together again all by clever Magnus. Brotherhood pulled at the drawers.

“Key?”

“Magnus must have taken it.”

Brotherhood lifted his head. “Harry!”

Harry kept his lock picks on a chain the way other men keep keys, and held his breath to help him listen while he probed.

“Does he do all his homework here or is there somewhere else?”

“Daddy left him his old campaign table. Sometimes he uses that.”

“Where is it?”

“Upstairs.”

“Where upstairs?”

“Tom’s room.”

“Keep his documents there too, does he?. . Firm’s papers?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know where.”

Harry walked out smiling with his head down. Brotherhood pulled open a drawer.

“That’s for the book he was writing,” she said as he extracted a meagre file. Magnus keeps everything inside something. Everything must wear a disguise in order to be real.

“Is it though?” He was pulling on his glasses, one red ear at a time. He knows about the novel too, she thought, watching him. He’s not even pretending to be surprised.

“Yes.” And you can put his bloody papers back where you got them from, she thought. She did not like how cold he had become, how hard.

“Gave up his sketching, did he? I thought you two were in that together.”

“It didn’t satisfy him. He decided he preferred the written word.”

“Doesn’t seem to have written much here. When did he switch?”

“On Lesbos. On holiday. He’s not writing it yet. He’s preparing.”

“Oh.” He began another page.

“He calls it a matrix.”

“Does he though?”—still reading—“I must show some of this to Bo. He’s a literary man.”

“And when we retire — when he does — if he takes early retirement, he’ll write, I’ll paint and bookbind. That’s the plan.”

Brotherhood turned a page. “In Dorset?”

“At Plush. Yes.”

“Well, he’s taken early retirement all right,” he remarked not very nicely as he resumed his reading. “Wasn’t there sculpture, too, at some point?”

“It wasn’t practical.”

“I shouldn’t think it was.”

“You encourage those things, Jack. The Firm does. You’re always saying we should have hobbies and recreations.”

“What’s the book about, then? Anything special?”

“He’s still finding the line. He likes to keep it to himself.”

“Listen to this: ‘When the most horrible gloom was over the household; when Edward himself was in agony and behaving as prettily as he knew how.’ Not even a main verb, far as I can make out.”

“He didn’t write that.”

“It’s in his handwriting, Mary.”

“It’s from something he read. When he reads a book he underlines things in pencil. Then when he’s finished it he writes out his favourite bits.”

From upstairs she heard a sharp snap like the cracking of timber or the firing of a pistol back in the days when she had been taught.

“That’s Tom’s room,” she said. “They don’t need to go in there.”

“Get me a bag, dear,” Brotherhood said. “A bin bag will do. Will you find me one?”

She went to the kitchen. Why do I let him do this to me? Why do I let him march into my house, my marriage and my mind and help himself to everything he doesn’t like? Mary was not usually compliant. Tradesmen did not rob her twice. In the English school, the English church, in the Diplomatic Wives Association, she was regarded as quite the little shrew. Yet one hard stare of Jack Brotherhood’s pale eyes, one growl of his rich, careless voice, was enough to send her running to him.

It’s because he’s so like Daddy, she decided. He loves our kind of England and the rest can go hang.

It’s because I worked for Jack in Berlin when I was an empty-headed schoolgirl with one small talent. Jack was my older lover at a time when I thought I needed one.

It’s because he steered Magnus through his divorce for me when he was dithering and gave him to me “for afters” as he called it.

It’s because he loves Magnus too.

Brotherhood was flipping the pages of her desk diary.

“Who’s P?” he demanded, tapping a page. “ ‘ Twenty-fifth September, six-thirty p.m. P.’ There’s a P on the sixteenth too, Mary. That’s not ‘P’ for Pym, is it, or am I being stupid again? Who’s this P he’s meeting?”