A Perfect Spy

A boom of music drowns the sound of his shaving. He has switched on his clever radio for the BBC World News. Magnus knows the time to the minute, all through the day and night. If he looks at his watch it is only to confirm the schedules in his brain. She listens numbly to a recitation of events no one is able to control. A bomb has gone off in Beirut. A town has been wiped out in El Salvador. The pound has fallen. Or risen. The Russians are out of the next Olympics — or into them after all. Magnus follows politics like a gambler who is too wise to bet. The noise grows steadily louder as Magnus carries the radio upstairs, slop, slop, naked except for his sandals. He bends over her and she smells his shaving soap and the flat Greek cigarettes he has taken to smoking while he writes.

“Still sleepy?”

“A bit.”

“How’s Rat?”

Mary has been tending a half-eviscerated rat she found in the garden. It is lying in a straw box in Tom’s room.

“I haven’t looked,” she says.

He kisses her close to the ear, an explosion, and starts to fondle her breast as a sign to her to take him, but she grunts an awkward “Later” and rolls over. She hears him slop to the wardrobe, she hears the old door resist and jolt open. If he chooses shorts he’s going for a walk. If he chooses jeans he’s going into town to drink with the deadbeats. Colonel call-me-Parkie Parker, with my Greek fancy-boy and my Sea-lyham dog that I hold on the lead like a teapot. Elsie and Ethel, retired dyke schoolteachers from Liverpool. Jock somebody, I’ve a wee business in Dundee. Magnus pulls out a shirt and slips it on. She hears him fastening his shorts.

“Where are you going?” she says.

“For a walk.”

“Wait for me. I’ll come with you. You can tell me about it.”

Who was this speaking out of her suddenly — this mature straight-to-the-point woman?

Magnus is as surprised as she is: “About what, for heaven’s sake?”

“Whatever it is that’s worrying you, darling. I don’t mind. Just tell me, whatever it is, so that I don’t have to. .”

“Don’t have to what?”

“Bottle it up. Look away.”

“Nonsense. Everything’s fine. We’re just both a bit blue without Tom.” He comes to her and lays her back on the pillow as if she were an invalid. “You sleep it off, I’ll walk it off. See you at the taverna round three.”

Only Magnus can make Kyria Katina’s front door close so softly.

Suddenly Mary is strong. His departure has released her. Breathe. She goes to the north window, everything planned. She has done these things before and remembers now that she is good at them, often steadier than the men. In Berlin when Jack needed a spare girl Mary had kept watch, gulled room keys out of concierges, replaced stolen documents in dangerous desks, driven scared Joes to safe flats. I knew the game better than I realised, she thought. Jack used to praise my coolness and my sharp eye. From the window she sees the new tarmac road winding into the hills. Sometimes he goes that way, but not today. Opening the window, she leans out as if savouring the place and morning. That witch Katina has milked her goats early; that means she’s gone to market. Only one fleeting glance does Mary allow herself towards the dried-up river bed where, in the shadow of the stone footbridge, the same two boys are tinkering with their German-registered motorbike. If they had appeared outside the house in Vienna like this, Mary would have been on to Magnus in an instant — phoned him if need be at the Embassy. “Looks like the angels are flying rather low today,” she’d have said. And Magnus would have done whatever he did — alerted the diplomatic patrol, sent his people down to check them out. But now in their separated lives it is as if they have agreed between them that angels, even suspected ones, are not to be remarked upon.

His workroom is on the ground floor. He does not lock the door on her but there is an ethic between them that she does not enter except at his specific beckoning. She turns the handle and steps inside. The shutters are closed but they do not cover the upper window panes and there is light for her to see by. Tread heavily, she tells herself, remembering her training. If you have to make a noise, make a bold one. The room is sparse, which is what Magnus likes. A desk, a chair, a single bed to crash on between bursts of creative matrix-writing. She pulls back the chair and sends a bottle of vodka skidding. The desk is covered with books and papers but she touches nothing. His old buckram-bound copy of Simplicissimus occupies pride of place as usual. His mascot. His something. It is a source of permanent offence to Mary that he will never let her bind it. Because I like it the way it is, he says stubbornly. That’s how it was given to me. By some woman no doubt. “For Sir Magnus who will never be my enemy” reads the inscription in German. Screw her. And screw fancy nicknames.

Brotherhood had again interrupted.

“Where’s it now, this book?”

With difficulty and a slight resentment Mary returned to time present.