A Perfect Spy

“When he needs to keep abreast — for his work — he’s a conscientious officer — he takes a newspaper with him.”

“Rolled up?”

“Sometimes.”

“Bring them back ever?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Ever remark on it to him?”

“No.”

“He to you?”

“Jack. It’s a habit he has. Look, I’m not going to have a marital row with you!”

“We’re not married.”

“He rolls up a newspaper and walks with it. The way a child carries a stick or something. As a comforter or something. Like his Polos. There. He had Polos in his pocket. It’s the same thing.”

“Always the wrong date?”

“Not always — don’t make so much of everything!”

“And always loses it?”

“Jack, stop. Just stop. Okay?”

“Does he do it on any special occasion? Full moon? Last Wednesday of the month? Or only when his father dies? Have you noticed a pattern to it? Go on, Mary, you have!”

Beat me, she thought. Grab me. Anything is better than that ice-cold stare.

“It’s sometimes when he meets P,” she said, trying to sound as if she were pacifying a spoilt child. “Jack, for God’s sake, he runs Joes, he lives that life, you trained him! I don’t ask him what his tricks are, what he’s doing with who. I’m trained too!”

“And when he came back — how was he?”

“He was absolutely fine. Calm, completely calm. He’d walked it out of himself, I could feel. He was absolutely fine in every way.”

“No phone calls while he was out?”

“No.”

“None after?”

“One. Very late. But we didn’t answer it.”

It was not often she had seen Jack surprised. Now he almost was. “You didn’t answer it?”

“Why should we?”

“Why shouldn’t you? It’s his job, as you said. His father had just died. Why shouldn’t you answer the phone?”

“Magnus said don’t.”

“Why did he say don’t?”

“We were making love!” she said, and felt like the worst whore ever.

Harry was looming in the doorway again. He was wearing blue overalls and had a red face from his exertions. He was holding a long screwdriver in his hand and he looked shamefully joyful.

“Care to pop upstairs a jiffy, Mr. Brotherhood?” he said.

* * *

It’s like our bedroom before the Diplomatic Wives’ jumble sale, with our cast-off clothes all over the bed, she thought. “Magnus, darling, do you really need three worn-out cardigans?” Clothes over the chairs. Over the dressing-table and the towel-horse. My summer blazer that I haven’t worn since Berlin. Magnus’s dinner-jacket hung from the cheval mirror like a drying hide. There was nothing on the floor because there was no floor. Fergus and Georgie had removed the carpet and most of the floorboards underneath it, and stacked them like sandwiches beneath the window, leaving the joists and the odd plank for a walkway. They had taken the bedside lamps to pieces and the bedside furniture and the telephone and the wake-up wireless. In the bathroom, it was the floor again, and the panel to the bath, and the medicine chest, and the sloped attic door that led to the sloped attic where Tom had hidden for a whole half hour last Christmas playing Murder, and nearly died of fright from being so brave. At the basin, Georgie was working her way through Mary’s things. Her face-cream. Her diaphragm.

“What’s yours is his, for them, dear, and vice versa,” said Brotherhood as they paused to stare in from the doorless doorway. “There’s no his and hers, not for them — there can’t be.”

“Not for you either,” she said.

Tom’s bedroom was across the corridor from theirs. His luminous Superman lay sprawled over the bed, together with his thirty-one Smurfs and three Tiggers. Her father’s campaign table was folded against the wall. The toy chest had been pulled to the centre of the floor, revealing the marble fireplace behind. It was a fine fireplace. Works Department had wanted to board it over to reduce draughts but Magnus hadn’t let them. Instead he had bought this old chest to put across the opening, leaving the mantel visible over it, so that Tom could have a bit of old Vienna all his own. Now the fireplace stood free and the girl Georgie knelt respectfully before it in her fifty-guinea freedom fighter’s tunic. And before Georgie lay a white shoe box with its lid off, and inside the shoe box was a rag bundle, then several smaller bundles around it.

“We found it on the ledge up above the grate, sir,” said Fergus. “Where it joins the main flue.”

“Not a speck of dust on it,” said Georgie.

“Reach up and it’s there,” said Fergus. “Dead handy.”

“You don’t even have to shove the chest out really, once you get the knack,” said Georgie.

“Seen it before?” Brotherhood asked.

“It’s obviously something of Tom’s,” said Mary. “Children will hide anything.”

“Seen it before?” Brotherhood repeated.

“No.”

“Know what’s in it?”

“How could I if I haven’t seen it?”

“Easily.”