A Perfect Spy

But Brotherhood insisted: “It’s not in his desk downstairs. I didn’t see it lying about in the drawing-room either. It’s not in the bedroom or in Tom’s room. Where is it?”

“I told you,” she said. “He takes it everywhere.”

“You didn’t, but thank you,” Brotherhood retorted.

She is wearing a pair of cotton gloves against sweat and grime marks. He’ll use a trick. He does those things instinctively. His old briefcase lies on the floor, wide open, but she doesn’t touch that either. Other books are strewn like paperweights to hold down the manuscript and seemingly at random. She reads a title. It is in German: Freedom and Conscience by someone she has never heard of. Beside it, a copy of Madox Ford’s Good Soldier, which Magnus reads incessantly these days; it has become his Bible. Beside this again, an old photograph album. Gently she lifts the unfamiliar cover and without moving it turns a few pages. Magnus aged eight in football gear, a team group. Magnus aged five in alpine setting holding a toboggan. Magnus at Tom’s age already with his overwilling smile, inviting you in but not expecting to be invited. Magnus on honeymoon with Belinda, neither of them looking more than about twelve years old. She has not seen these photographs before. Letting the cover fall, Mary steps back and again surveys the arrangement on the desk. As she does so his bit of tradecraft becomes apparent to her. Each of the three books, lying seemingly haphazardly across the papers, is aligned to the point of the paper scissors at their centre. Going to the kitchen Mary grabs the tablecloth, comes back and lays it on the floor beside the desk, then measures the distances between each object on the desk with her gloved hand. As gently as if she is lifting bandages from a wound she lays them in the same pattern on the tablecloth. The papers on the desk now lie free for her inspection. She has not reckoned with so much dust. Just by crossing the floor she has set up clouds of it. I’m a tomb robber, she thinks, as the dust burns her throat. She is gazing at a wad of handwritten manuscript. The top page is dark with crossings-out. She picks up the wad, leaving everything else lying. She takes it to the little bed, sits down. At Plush when she was a girl they had called it “Kim’s Game” and played it every New Year’s Eve along with acting games and Murder and reels. At the training house, when she was supposed to be adult, they called it Observation and played it round the sleepy villages of Dedham, Manningtree and Bergholt: who’s had their door painted this week, pruned their roses, bought a new car; how many bottles of milk did No. 18 have on its doorstep? But wherever they play it Mary always comes top by miles; she is cursed with a snapshot memory from which very little ever goes away.

Bits of novel, she told Brotherhood, all beginnings.

A dozen Chapter Ones, some typed and some in longhand, all stiff with crossings-out. Mostly they told about the orphan childhood of a boy called Ben.

Doodles. Drawings of an arm stretched out to steal. A woman’s crotch.

Notes to himself, all abusive: “sentimental crap”. . “rewrite or destroy”. . “You’ve missed the curse we pass from man to child”. . “One day a Wentworth will get us all.”

A pink folder marked “Random Passages.” Ben gives himself up to the authorities. Ben discovers there is another, real Secret Service, and joins it in the nick of time. A blue folder marked “Final Scenes,” several of them addressed to “Poppy, dear bloody Poppy.” A sheet of cartridge paper stolen from her sketch block on which Magnus has drawn a pattern of linked think-bubbles to form a flow chart of his ideas, exactly as Tom is taught to prepare his essays at school. Bubble: “If all Nature abhors a vacuum, how does a vacuum feel about all Nature?” Bubble: “Duplicity is when you please one person at the expense of another.” Bubble: “We are patriots because we are afraid to be cosmopolitan, cosmopolitan because we are afraid to be patriots.”

There was a tapping at the door but Brotherhood shook his head at Georgie, telling her to ignore it.

“It wasn’t his true writing,” Mary said. “It was all spiky. It ran for a while then seized up. It seemed to hurt him to go on.”

Brotherhood didn’t give a damn whom it hurt.

“More,” he said. “More. Hurry.”

“It’s me, sir,” Fergus called through the door. “Urgent message, sir. Very.”

“I said wait,” Brotherhood ordered.

“‘ The systems of Ben’s life are all collapsing,’” Mary continued. “‘ All his life he’s been inventing versions of himself that are untrue. Now the truth is coming to get him and he is on the run. His Wentworth is standing at the door.’”

“More,” said Brotherhood, towering over her.

“‘ Rick invented me, Rick is dying. What will happen when Rick drops his end of the string?’”

“Keep going.”

“A quotation from Saint Luke. I never saw him open a Bible in his life. ‘He who is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much.’”

“And?”