A Perfect Spy

CHAPTER 5

Frau Bauer’s bed was as narrow and lumpy as a servant’s bed in a fairy-tale and Mary lay in it exactly as Brotherhood had dumped her there, roly-polyed in the eiderdown, knees drawn up in self-protection, clutching her shoulders with her hands. He had slid off her, she could no longer smell his sweat and breath. But she could feel his bulk at the foot of the bed and sometimes she had a hard time remembering that they had not made love a few moments earlier, for his habit in those days had been to leave her dozing while he sat as he was sitting now, making his phone calls, checking his expenses or doing whatever else served to restore the order of his all-male life. He had found a tape-recorder somewhere and Georgie had a second in case his didn’t work.

For a hangman Nigel was small but extremely dapper. He wore a waisted pinstripe suit and a silk handkerchief in his sleeve.

“Ask Mary to make a voluntary statement, will you, Jack?” Nigel said, as if he did this every week. “Voluntary but formal is the tone. Could be used, I’m afraid. The decision is not Bo’s alone.”

“Who the hell says voluntary?” said Brotherhood. “She signed the Official Secrets Act when she joined, she signed it again when she left. She signed it again when she married Pym. Everything you know is ours, Mary. Whether you heard it on top of a bus or saw the smoking gun in his hand.”

“And your nice Georgie can witness it,” said Nigel.

Mary heard herself talking but didn’t understand a lot of what she said because she had one ear in the pillow and the other was listening to the morning sounds of Lesbos through the open window of their little brown terrace house halfway up the hill that Plomari was built on, to the clatter of mopeds and boats and bouzouki music and lorries revving in the alleys. To the scream of sheep having their throats cut at the butcher’s and the slither of donkey hoofs on cobble and the yells of the vendors in the harbour market. If she squeezed her eyes tight enough, she could look over the orange rooftops across the street, past the chimneys and the clotheslines and the roof gardens full of geraniums, down to the waterfront and out to the long jetty with its red light winking on the point and its evil ginger cats soaking themselves in the sunshine while they watched the tramper putter out of the mist.

And that was how Mary saw her story henceforth as she told it to Jack Brotherhood: as a nightmarish film she dared look at only piecemeal, with herself as the meanest villain ever. The tramper draws alongside, the cats stretch, the gangway is lowered, the English family Pym — Magnus, Mary and son Thomas — file ashore in search of yet another perfect place away from it all. Because nowhere is far enough any more, nowhere is remote enough. The Pyms have become the Flying Dutchmen of the Aegean, scarcely landing before they pack again, changing boats and islands like driven souls, though only Magnus knows the curse, only Magnus knows who is pursuing them and why, and Magnus has locked that secret behind his smile with all his others. She sees him striding gaily ahead of her, clutching his straw hat against the breeze and his briefcase dangling from his other hand. She sees Tom stalking after him in the long grey flannels and school blazer with his Cub colours on the pocket, which he insists on wearing even when the temperature is in the eighties. And she sees herself still doped with last night’s drink and oil fumes, already planning to betray them both. And following them in their bare feet she sees the native bearers with the Pyms’ too-much luggage, the towels and bed linen and Tom’s Weetabix and all the other junk she packed in Vienna for their great sabbatical, as Magnus calls this once-in-a-lifetime family holiday they have all apparently been dreaming of, though Mary cannot remember it being mentioned until a few days before they left, and to be honest she would rather have gone back to England, collected the dogs from the gardener and the long-haired Siamese from Aunt Tab, and spent the time in Plush.

The bearers set down their burdens. Magnus, generous as ever, tips each of them from Mary’s handbag while she holds it open for him. Stooped gawkily over the reception committee of Lesbos cats, Tom declares they have ears like celery. A whistle sounds, the bearers hop up the gangway, the tramper is returned to the mist. Magnus, Tom and Mary the traitor stare after it like every sad story of the sea, their life’s luggage dumped around them and the red beacon dripping slow fire on their heads.

“Can we go back to Vienna after this?” asks Tom. “I’d like to see Becky Lederer.”

Magnus does not answer him. Magnus is too busy being enthusiastic. He will be enthusiastic for his own funeral and Mary loves him for this as she loves him for too much else, does still. Sometimes his sheer goodness accuses me.

“This is it, Mabs!” he cries, waving an arm grandly at the treeless conical hill of brown houses that is their newest home. “We’ve found it. Plush-sur-mer.” And he turns to her with the smile she has not seen until this very holiday — so gallant, so tired-bright in its despair. “We’re safe here, Mabs. We’re okay.”

He throws an arm around her, she lets him. He draws her to him, they hug. Tom squeezes between, an arm round each of them. “Hey, let me have some of that,” he says. Locked together like the closest allies in the world, the three move off down the jetty, leaving their luggage till they have found a place to put it. Which they achieve within the hour, for clever Magnus knows just the right taverna to go to first time, whom to charm and whom to recruit in the surprisingly passable Greek identity he has somehow cobbled together for himself on their journeying. But there is the evening yet to come and the evenings are getting worse and worse, they hang over her from when she wakes, she can feel them creeping up on her all through her day. To celebrate their new home Magnus has brought a bottle of scotch though they have agreed several times in the last few days to lay off the hard stuff and stick to local wine. The bottle is nearly empty and Tom, thank God, is finally asleep in his new bedroom. Or so Mary prays, for Tom has recently become a fag-ender, as her father would have said, hanging around them for whatever he can pick up.

“Hey, come on, Mabs, that’s a bit of a bad face, isn’t it?” says Magnus, jollying her up. “Don’t you like our new Schloss?”

“You were being funny and I smiled.”

“Didn’t look like a smile,” says Magnus, smiling himself to show her how. “More like a bit of a grimace from where I sits, m’dear.”

But Mary’s blood is rising and as usual she cannot stop herself. The prospect of her uncommitted crime is already laying its guilt on her.

“That’s what you’re writing about, is it?” she snaps. “How you waste your wit on the wrong woman?”

Appalled by her own unpleasantness Mary bursts out weeping and drives her fists on to the arms of the rush chair. But Magnus is not appalled at all. Magnus puts down his glass and comes to her, he taps her gently on the arm with his fingertips, waiting to be let in. He puts her glass delicately out of reach. Moments later the springs of their new bed are pinging and whining like a brass band tuning up, for a desperate erotic fervour has latterly come to Magnus’s aid. He makes love to her as if he will never see her again. He buries himself in her as if she is his only refuge and Mary goes with him blindly. She climbs, he draws her after him, she is shouting at him—“Please, oh Christ!” He hits the mark for her, and for a blessed moment Mary can kiss the whole bloody world goodbye.

“We’re using Pembroke, by the way,” Magnus says later but not quite late enough. “I’m sure it’s unnecessary but I want to be on the safe side in case.”

Pembroke is one of Magnus’s worknames. He keeps the Pembroke passport in his briefcase, she has already located it. It has an artfully muddy photograph that might be Magnus or might not. In the forgery workshop in Berlin they used to call photographs like that floaters.

“What do I tell Tom?” she asks.

“Why tell him anything?”

“Our son’s name is Pym. He might take a little oddly to being told he’s Pembroke.”

She waits, hating herself for her intractability. It is not often that Magnus has to hunt for an answer even when it concerns guidance on how to deceive their child. But he hunts now, she can feel him do it as he lies wakefully beside her in the dark.

“Yes, well tell him the Pembrokes own the house we’re in, I should. We’re using their name to order things from the shop. Only if asked, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“Those two men are still there,” says Tom from the door, who turns out to have been part of their conversation all this while.

“What men?” says Mary.

But her skin is pricking on her nape, her body is clammy with panic. How much has Tom heard? Seen?

“The ones who are mending their motorbike by the river. They’ve got special army sleeping-bags and a torch and a special tent.”

“There are campers all over the island,” says Mary. “Go back to bed.”

“They were on our ship too,” says Tom. “Behind the lifeboat, playing cards. Watching us. Speaking German.”

“Lots of people were on the ship,” says Mary. Why don’t you say something, you bastard? she screams at Magnus in her head. Why do you lie dead instead of helping me when I’m still wet from you?

With Tom on one side of her, Magnus on the other, Mary listens to the bells of Plomari tolling out the hours. Four more days, she tells herself. On Sunday, Tom flies back to London for the new school term. And on Monday I’ll do it and be damned.

* * *

Brotherhood was shaking her. Nigel had said something to him: ask her about the beginning — pin her down.

“We want you to come back a stage, Mary. Can you do that? You’re running ahead of yourself.”

She heard murmuring, then the sound of Georgie changing a reel on her tape-recorder. The murmuring was her own.

“Tell us how you came to be taking the holiday in the first place, will you, dear? Who proposed it?. . Oh Magnus, did he? I see. And was that here in this house?. . It was…. Now what time of day would that have been? Sit up, will you?”

So Mary sat up and began again where Jack had told her: on a sweet, early summer evening in Vienna when everything was still absolutely fine and neither Lesbos nor all the islands that came before it were a glint in clever Magnus’s eye. Mary was in the basement in her overalls, binding a first edition of Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, by Karl Kraus which Magnus had found in Leoben while meeting a Joe there and Mary—

“That a regular one — Leoben?”

“Yes, Jack, Leoben was regular.”

“How often did he go there?”

“Twice a month. Three times. It was an old Hungarian he had, no one special.”

“He told you that, did he? I thought he kept his Joes to himself.”

“An old Hungarian wine dealer from way back, with offices in Leoben and Budapest. Mostly Magnus kept his secrets to himself. Sometimes he told me. Now can I go on?”

Tom was at school, Frau Bauer was out praying, said Mary. It was some kind of Catholic bean feast, Assumption, Ascension, Prayer and Repentance, Mary had lost count. Magnus was supposed to be at the American Embassy. The new committee had just started meeting and she wasn’t expecting him back till late. She was bang in the middle of glueing when suddenly, without hearing a sound, she saw him standing in the doorway — God knows how long he’d been there — looking very pleased with himself and watching her the way he liked to.

“How was that, dear? Watched you how?” Brotherhood cut in.

Mary had surprised herself. She faltered. “Superior, somehow. Pained superiority. Jack, don’t make me hate him, please.”

“All right, he’s watching you,” said Brotherhood.

He is watching her and when she catches sight of him he bursts out laughing and shuts her mouth with passionate kisses doing his Fred Astaire number, then it’s upstairs for a full and frank exchange of views, as he calls it. They make love, he hauls her to the bath, washes her, hauls her out and dries her, and twenty minutes later Mary and Magnus are bounding across the little park on the top of Döbling like the happy couple they nearly are, past the sandpits and the climbing-frame that Tom is too big for, past the elephant cage where Tom kicks his football, down the hill towards the Restaurant Teheran which is their improbable pub because Magnus so adores the black-and-white videos of Arab romances they play for you with the sound down while you eat your couscous and drink your Kalterer. At the table he holds her arm fiercely and she can feel his excitement racing through her like a charge, as if having her has made him want her more.

“Let’s get away, Mabs. Let’s really get away. Let’s live life for a change instead of acting it. Let’s take Tom and all our mid-tour leave and bugger off for the whole of the summer. You paint, I’ll write my book, and we’ll make love until we fall apart.”

Mary says where to, Magnus says who cares, I’ll go to the travel agent on the Ring tomorrow. Mary says what about the new committee. He is holding her hand inside his own, touching it with his fingertips into little peaks, and she is going mad for him again, which is what he likes.

“The new committee, Mary,” Magnus pronounces, “is the most stupid bloody charade I’ve been mixed up in, and believe me, I’ve seen a few. All it is, it’s a talking-shop to goose up the Firm’s ego and allow them to tell whoever will listen to them that we’re hugger-mugger in bed with the Americans. Lederer can’t possibly imagine we’re going to unveil our networks to him, and as for Lederer, he wouldn’t tell me the name of his tailor, let alone his agents — assuming he’s got either, which I doubt.”

Brotherhood again: “Did he tell you why Lederer mightn’t be inclined to talk to him?”

“No,” said Mary.

Nigel for a change: “And no other reasons offered as to why or how the committee might be a charade?”

“It was a charade, it was a sham, it was makework. That’s all he said. I asked about his Joes, he said the Joes could look after themselves and if Jack was bothered about them he could send a locum. I asked what Jack would think—”

“And what would Jack think?” said Nigel, all open curiosity.

“He said Jack’s a sham too: ‘I’m not married to Jack, I’m married to you. The Firm should have retired him ten years ago. Sod Jack.’ Sorry. That’s what he said.”

Hands shoved in his pockets, Brotherhood took a stroll round the little room, poking at Frau Bauer’s photographs of her illegitimate daughter, poring over her shelf of paperback romances.

“Anything else about me?” he asked.

“Jack’s had too many miles in the saddle. The Boy Scout era’s over. It’s a new scene and he’s not up to it.”

“Any more?” said Brotherhood.

Nigel had lowered his chin into his hand and was studying one small but perfectly formed shoe.

“No,” said Mary.

“Did he go for a walk that night? Meet P?”

“He’d been the night before.”

“I said that night. Answer the bloody question!”

“And I said the night before!”

“With a newspaper. The whole bit?”

“Yes.”

His hands still in his pockets, his head high against his shoulders, Brotherhood turned stiffly to Nigel. “I’m going to tell her,” he said. “You want to throw a fit?”

“Are you asking me formally?” Nigel asked.

“Not particularly.”

“If you are, I’ll have to pass it to Bo,” said Nigel and looked respectfully at his gold watch as if he took orders from it.

“Lederer knows and we know. If Pym knows too, who’s left?” Brotherhood insisted.

Nigel thought about this. “Up to you. Your man, your decision, your tail-end. Frankly.”

Brotherhood leaned over Mary and put his head close to her ear. She remembered his smell: tweedy and paternal. “Listening?”

She shook her head. I’m not, I never will be, I wish I never had.

“The new committee that your Magnus derided was shaping up to be a very high-powered outfit. Maybe the best potential working relationship at field level that we’ve had with the Americans for years. The name of the game was mutual trust. Not as easy to establish these days as it used to be, but we managed it. Are you going to sleep?”

She nodded.

“Your Magnus was not only aware of this, he was one of the prime movers in getting the committee off the ground. If not the prime mover. He even went so far as to complain to me, when we were negotiating the deal, that London was being small-minded in its interpretation of the barter terms. He thought we should give the Americans more. In exchange for more. That’s number one.”

I have absolutely nothing else to say. You can have my home address, my next of kin and that’s your lot. You taught me that yourself, Jack, in case they ever grabbed me.

“Number two is that for reasons which I regarded at the time as specious and insulting, the Americans objected to your husband’s presence on that committee not three weeks after it met, and asked me to replace him with somebody more to their liking. Since Magnus was kingpin of the Czecho operation and of several other little shows in Eastern Europe besides, this was a totally unrealistic demand. They’d raised the same objections about him in Washington the year before and Bo had bowed to them, in my view mistakenly. I wasn’t about to let them do it again. I happen not to care for American gentlemen or anybody else telling me how to run my shop. I said no and ordered Magnus to take himself off on mid-tour leave and stay clear of Vienna till I told him to come back. That’s the truth, and I think it’s time you heard some.”

“It’s also very secret,” said Nigel.

She waited in vain to be amazed. No surge of protest, no flash of the celebrated family temper. Brotherhood had taken himself to the window and was staring out. Morning had come early because of the snow. He looked old and beaten. His white hair was fluffed against the light and she could see the pink skin of his scalp.

“You defended him,” she said. “You were loyal.”

“Seems as if I was a bloody fool as well.”

The house had turned itself upside down. The thump of shifting furniture came from below them in the drawing-room. The safest place to be was here. Upstairs with Jack.

“Oh don’t be so hard on yourself, Jack,” Nigel said.

* * *

Brotherhood had sat Mary in the chair and handed her a whisky. You get one only, he had said; make it last. Nigel had taken over the bed and was lounging on it with one suited little leg stuck out in front of him as if he’d sprained it trying to get up the steps of his club. Brotherhood had turned his back on both of them. He preferred the view from the window.

“So first you go to Corfu. Your auntie has a house there. You borrowed it from her. Tell that bit. Carefully.”

“Aunt Tab,” said Mary.

“In full, I think,” said Nigel.

“Lady Tabitha Grey. Daddy’s sister.”

“Sometime member of the Firm,” Brotherhood murmured to Nigel. “There’s hardly a member of her family hasn’t been on our books at one time or another, come to think of it.”

She had telephoned Aunt Tab as soon as they got back from their drink that evening, and by a miracle there’d been a cancellation and her house was free. They took it, phoned Tom’s school and arranged for him to fly there direct when term ended. As soon as the Lederers heard, they wanted to come too of course. Grant said he would drop everything but Magnus wouldn’t hear of it. The Lederers are exactly the kind of social prop I need to kick away, he had said. Why the hell should I take my work with me on holiday? Five days later they were settled into Tab’s house and everything was absolutely fine. Tom took tennis lessons at the hotel up the road, swam, fed the landlady’s goats and pottered around the boat with Costas who looked after it and watered the garden. But his best thing was the crazy cricket matches on the edge of town that Magnus took him to in the evenings. Magnus said the Brits had brought the game to the island when they were defending it against Napoleon. Magnus knew those things. Or pretended to.

At the cricket in Corfu Magnus was closer to Tom than he had ever been. They lay on the grass, munched ice creams, rooted for their favourite players and had those mannish chats that were so crucial to Tom’s happiness: for Tom loved Magnus to distraction; he was a man’s boy, always had been. As to Mary, she had taken up pastels because Corfu in summer was really too hot for her style of water-colours, the paint just dried on the page before she could get near it. But she was drawing well, getting nice likenesses and shapes, and playing hostess to half the dogs on the island because the Greeks don’t feed them or look after them or anything. So everyone was happy, everyone absolutely fine and Magnus had a cool conservatory to write in, and inland walks for his restlessness, which came to him first thing in the morning and again in late evening after he had held it off all day. They lunched late, usually in a taverna — and often rather a liquid affair, to be honest, but why not, they were on holiday. Then long sexy siestas while Mary and Magnus made love on the balcony and Tom lay on the beach studying the nudies across the bay with Magnus’s binoculars, so as Magnus put it everybody was getting his pound of flesh. Until one day the clock stopped dead and Magnus came back from a late walk and confessed he had hit a bit of a block with his writing. He just strode in, poured himself a stiff ouzo, flung himself into a chair and said it straight out:

“Sorry, Mabs. Sorry, Tom, old chap. But this place is too damned idyllic. I need roughing up a bit. I need people, for Christ’s sake. Smoke and dirt and a bit of suffering around us. It’s like being on the moon here, Mabs. Worse than Vienna. Truly.”

He was sweet about it but he was adamant. He’d been drinking, obviously, but that was because he was upset. “I’m going bonkers, Mabs. It’s really getting to me. I told Tom. Didn’t I, Tom? I said I really can’t take much more of this and I feel a shit because you two are having such a good time.”

“Yes, he did,” said Tom.

“Several times. And today it’s just hit me, Mabs. You’ve got to help me out. Both of you.”

So of course they both said they would. Mary rang Tab at once, so that she could put the house back on the market, they all had a bear-hug and went to bed feeling resolved, and next day Mary packed while Magnus went off to town to do tickets and fix the next stage of their odyssey. But Tom, over washing-up which was always a talkative time for him, had a different version of why they were leaving Corfu. Daddy had met this mystery man at cricket. It was a really super match, Mum, the best two teams on the island, a real vendetta. We were watching it like mad and suddenly there was this wise, stringy man with a sad moustache like a conjuror’s and a limp, and Dad got all uptight. He came up to Dad smiling, they talked a bit, they walked round and round the ground together with the thin man going slowly like an invalid, but he was terribly kind to Dad although Dad got so emanated.

“Animated,” Mary corrected him automatically. “Don’t talk too loud, Tom. I think Daddy’s working somewhere.”

And there was this really incredible batsman, said Tom. Called Phillippi. Just the absolute best batsman Tom had seen ever. “He scored eighteen in one over and the crowd went absolutely ape, but Dad didn’t notice, he was so busy listening to the kind man.”

“How do you know he was so kind?” said Mary with a strange irritation. “Keep your voice down.” There was no light in the conservatory, but sometimes Magnus sat there in the dark.

“He was like a father with him, Mum. He’s senior to him but sort of calm. He kept offering Dad a ride in his car. Dad kept saying no. But he didn’t get angry or anything, he was too wise. He gentled him and smiled.”

“What car? It’s just a great big romance, Tom. You know it is.”

“The Volvo. Mr. Kaloumenos’s Volvo. One man was driving and another man in the back. They kept up with them on the other side of the fence when they went round and round talking. Honestly, Mum. The thin man never lost his temper or anything, and he really likes Dad, you can tell. It’s not just holding arms. They’re friends to each other. Much more than Uncle Grant. More like Uncle Jack.”

Mary asked Magnus that night. They’d packed, she was excited to be moving, and really looking forward to the Athens museums.

“Tom says you were harassed by some tiresome man at the cricket match,” said Mary while they enjoyed a rather stiff nightcap after their heavy day.

“Was I?”

“Some little man who chased you round and round the ground. Sounded like an angry husband to me. He had a moustache, unless Tom imagined it.”

Then vaguely Magnus did remember. “Oh that’s right. He was some boring ancient Brit who kept pressing me to go and see his villa. Wanted to flog it. Bloody little pest actually.”

“He spoke German,” said Tom, next day at breakfast while Magnus was out walking.

“Who did?”

“Dad’s thin friend. The man who picked Dad up at the cricket. And Dad spoke German back to him too. Why did Dad say he was an ancient Brit?”

Mary flew at him. She hadn’t been so angry with him for years. “If you want to listen to our conversations, you bloody well come in and listen to them and don’t skulk outside the door like a spy.”

Then she was ashamed of herself and played tennis with him till the boat left. On the boat Tom was sick as a dog and by the time they reached Piraeus he had a temperature of a hundred and three so her guilt was unconfined. At the Athens hospital a Greek doctor diagnosed shrimp rash which was absurd because Tom loathed shrimps and hadn’t touched a single one; by now his face was swollen like a hamster’s, so they took expensive rooms and put him to bed with an icepack and Mary read fantasy to him while Magnus listened or sat in Tom’s room to write. But mainly he liked to listen because the best thing in his life, he always said, was watching her comfort their child. She believed him.

“Didn’t he go out at all?” Brotherhood asked.

“Not to begin with. He didn’t want to.”

“Make any phone calls?” said Nigel.

“The Embassy. To check in. So that you’d know where he was.”

“He tell you that?” said Brotherhood.

“Yes.”

“You weren’t there when he made them?” Nigel said.

“No.”

“Hear him through the wall?” Nigel again.

“No.”

“Know who he spoke to?” Still Nigel.

“No.”

From his place on the bed Nigel lifted his eyes to Brotherhood. “But he phoned you, Jack,” he said encouragingly. “Little chats from out-of-the-way places with his old boss now and then? That’s practically mandatory, isn’t it? Check on the Joes—‘How’s our old buddy from you-know-where?’”

Nigel is one of the new non-professionals, Mary remembered Magnus telling her. He’s one of the idiots who are supposed to be introducing a breath of Whitehall realism. If ever I heard a contradiction in terms, that’s it, said Magnus.

“Not a peep,” Brotherhood was replying. “All he did was send me a string of stupid postcards saying ‘Thank God you’re not here’ and giving me his latest address.”

“When did he start going out?” said Nigel.

“When Tom’s temperature went down,” Mary replied.

“A week?” said Nigel invitingly. “Two?”

“Less,” said Mary.

“Describe,” said Brotherhood.

It was evening, probably their fourth day. Tom’s face was normal again so Magnus suggested Mary go shopping while he baby-sat Tom to give her a break. But Mary wasn’t keen on braving the Athens streets alone so Magnus went instead; Mary would do a museum in the morning. He came back around midnight very pleased with himself saying he’d found this marvellous old Greek travel agent in a basement opposite the Hilton, a tremendously cultured fellow, and how they had drunk ouzo together and solved the problems of the universe. The old man ran a villa-renting service for the islands and hoped to turn up a cancellation in a week or so when they’d all had enough of Athens.

“I thought islands were out,” Mary said.

For a moment it seemed that Magnus had forgotten the reason they had left Corfu. He smiled lamely and said something about not every island being the same. After that, she seemed to lose count of the days. They moved to a smaller hotel; Magnus wrote and wrote, went out in the evenings and when Tom was well enough took him swimming. Mary sketched the Acropolis and took Tom to a couple of museums but he preferred swimming. Meanwhile they waited for the old Greek to come up with something.

Brotherhood was once more interrupting. “This writing of his. How much did he talk about it exactly?”

“He wanted to preserve his secrecy. Scraps. That was all he gave me.”

“Like his Joes. The same,” Brotherhood suggested.

“He wanted to keep me fresh for when he’d really got something to show me. He didn’t want to talk it out of himself.”

It was a quiet and, as Mary now remembered it, strangely furtive time until one night Magnus vanished. He went out after dinner saying he was going to give the old boy a prod. Next morning he hadn’t come back and by lunchtime Mary was scared. She knew she should phone the Embassy. On the other hand she didn’t want to start a scare unnecessarily or do anything that might get Magnus into trouble.

Yet again Brotherhood cut in. “What sort of trouble?”

“If he’d gone on a bender or something. It wouldn’t exactly have looked well on his file. Just when he was hoping for promotion.”

“Had he gone on benders before?”

“Absolutely not. He and Grant got drunk together occasionally but that was as far as it went.”

Nigel sharply lifted his head. “But why should he be expecting promotion? Who said anything about promotion to him?”

“I did,” said Brotherhood without a whiff of repentance. “I reckoned after all the messing him around he was about owed it with his reinstatement.”

Nigel made a neat little note in his book and smiled mirthlessly as he wrote. Mary went on.

Anyway, she waited till evening then took Tom up to the Hilton and together they explored all the houses opposite until they found the cultured old Greek in his basement, exactly as Magnus had described him. But the Greek hadn’t seen Magnus for a week and Mary wouldn’t stay for coffee. When they got back to the taverna they found Magnus with two days’ beard, dressed in the clothes he had disappeared in, sitting in the courtyard and eating bacon and eggs, drunk. Not silly drunk, he couldn’t do that. Not angry drunk, or maudlin, or aggressive, and least of all indiscreet, because drink only ever fortified his defences. Courteous drunk, therefore, and amiable to a fault as ever, and his cover story perfectly intact except for one rare mistake.

“Sorry, gang. Got a bit pissed with Dimitri. Swine drank me clean under the table. Hullo, Tom.”

“Hullo,” said Tom.

“Who’s Dimitri?” Mary asked.

“You know who Dimitri is. Old Greek travel agent who does his beads across the road from the Hilton.”

“The cultured one.”

“That’s him.”

“Last night?”

“Far as I can remember, old girl, last night as ever was.”

“Dimitri hasn’t seen you since last Monday. He told us himself an hour ago.”

Magnus considered this. Tom had found a copy of the Athens News and was standing at the next table intently studying the film page.

“You checked on me, Mabs. You shouldn’t have done that.”

“I wasn’t checking on you, I was looking for you!”

“Don’t make a scene now, girl. Please. Other people eating here, you see.”

“I’m not making a scene. You are. It’s not me who disappears for two days and comes back with a lie. Tom, go to your room, darling. I’ll be up in a minute.”

Tom left, smiling brightly to show he hadn’t heard anything. Magnus took a long drink of coffee. Then he grasped Mary’s hand and kissed it and gently pulled her down on to the chair beside him.

“Which would you rather I told you, Mabs? I was carousing with a whore or I’ve got problems with a Joe?”

“Why don’t you just tell me the truth?”

The suggestion amused him. Not cruelly or cynically. Merely, he received it with the rueful indulgence that he would show towards Tom when he came through with one of his solutions for ending world poverty or the arms race.

“Know something?” He kissed her hand again and held it against his cheek. “Nothing goes away in life.” To her surprise she felt moisture in his stubble and realised he was weeping. “I’m in Constitution Square, right? Coming out of the Grande Bretagne bar. Minding my own business. What happens? I walk straight into the arms of a Czech Joe I used to run. Real tough egg, fabricator, caused us a lot of problems. Holds my arm like this. ‘Colonel Manchester! Colonel Manchester!’ Threatens to call the police, expose me as a British spy if I don’t give him money. Says I’m the only friend he’s got left in the world. ‘Come and drink with me, Colonel Manchester. Like we used to.’ So I did. Drank him right under the table. Then gave him the slip. I’m afraid I got a bit pissed myself. Line of duty. Let’s go to bed.”

And they do. And make love. The desperate screwing of strangers while Tom reads fantasy next door. And two days later they leave for Hydra, but Hydra is too cramped, too ominous, there is suddenly nowhere to go but Spetsai: at this time of year we’ll have no problem. Tom asks if Becky can join them, Magnus says no she absolutely can’t because they’ll all want to come and he’s not going to have a pride of Lederers sitting on his head while he’s trying to write. Otherwise, apart from his drinking, Magnus has never been more caring and polite than now.

She had stopped. Like standing back from a painting halfway. Studying the story so far. She drank some whisky, lit a cigarette.

“Christ,” said Brotherhood softly. Then nothing.

Nigel had found a bit of dead skin on the back of one undersized finger and was picking it off meticulously.

* * *

It is Lesbos again, it is another dawn but the same Greek bed and Plomari is once more waking up though Mary is praying it will go back to sleep again, that the sounds will fade and the sun flop behind the rooftops where it came from, because it is Monday and yesterday Tom went back to school. Mary has the evidence under her pillow where she promised to put the rabbitskin he gave her to keep her safe — and as if she needed it to strengthen her resolve — the terrible memory of his last words to her before he left. Mary and Magnus have driven him to the airport, weighed him in for yet another departure. Tom and Mary are standing about unable to touch each other while they wait for the flight to be called, Magnus is at the bar buying Tom a bag of pistachios for the journey and an ouzo for himself while he’s about it. Mary has six times confirmed that Tom has his passport and his money and his letter to Matron about his shrimp rash, and his letter to Granny to be handed to her the moment you meet her at London Airport, darling, so that you don’t forget. But Tom is even more than usually distracted; he is looking back to the main entrance, watching the people going through the swing doors, and there is something desperate in his face, so desperate that Mary really wonders whether he is thinking of making a dash for it.

“Mums?” Sometimes, when he is distracted, he still calls her that.

“Yes, darling.”

“They’re here, Mums.”

“Who are?”

“Those two campers from Plomari. They’re sitting in the airport carpark on their motorbike, watching Dad.”

“Now darling just stop,” Mary retorts firmly, determined to drive away these shadows, one and all. “Just completely stop, okay?”

“Only I’ve recognised them, you see. I worked it out this morning. I remembered. They’re the men who drove the car round the outside of the cricket ground at Corfu while Dad’s friend tried to make him come for a drive.”

For a moment, though Mary has been through this agonising procedure a dozen times before, she wants to scream out: “Stay — don’t go — I don’t care a damn about your bloody education — stay with me!” But instead the fool waves him through the barrier and saves her tears for the journey back while Magnus is absolutely sweet to her as ever. And now it is next morning, Tom is just about arriving at his school, and Mary is staring at the prison bars of Kyria Katina’s rotting shutters while the sky remorselessly whitens through the cracks and she is trying not to hear the clanking of the water-pipes beneath her and the rush of water free-falling onto the flagstones as Magnus celebrates his morning shower.

“Wowee! Christ! You awake, girl? It’s brass monkeys down here, believe me!”

Believe you, she repeats to herself and draws deeper into the bedclothes. In fifteen years he never called me girl till here. Now suddenly she is girl all day as if he has woken to her gender. A single width of floorboard separates her from him and if she dares look over the bedside she will glimpse his stranger’s naked body through the gaps between the planks. Receiving no reply from her, Pym starts singing his one piece of Gilbert and Sullivan while he sloshes water.

“‘ Rising early in the morning, We proceed to light the fire. .’ How’m I doing?” he calls when he has sung all he knows.

Mary in another life has a small reputation for her music. In Plush she led a passable group in madrigals. When she was doing her stint at Head Office she sang solo in the Firm choir. It’s just that nobody’s ever played records for you, she used to tell him in a veiled criticism of his first wife, Belinda. One day your singing voice will be as good as your spoken one, darling.

She summons her breath. “Better than Caruso!” she shouts.

The exchange is accomplished, Magnus can resume his showering.

“It went well, Mabs. Really well. Seven pages of deathless prose. Undercoat but good.”

“Great.”

He has started shaving. She can hear him empty the kettle into the plastic washing-up bowl. Contour blades, she thinks: oh God, I forgot to buy him his bloody Contour blades. All the way to the airport and back she had known there was something she had forgotten, for little things are as dreadful to her as big things these days. Now I will buy cheese for lunch. Now I will buy bread to go with the cheese. She closes her eyes and takes another enormous breath.

“Did you sleep?” she asks.

“Like the dead. Didn’t you notice?”

Yes, I noticed. I noticed how you slipped out of bed at two in the morning and crept downstairs to your workroom. How you paced and stopped pacing. I heard the creak of your chair and the whisper of your felt-tipped pen as you began to write. Who to? In what voice? Which one?

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.

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?”

“‘He who is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.’ He’d illuminated the edges of the page for hours on end. Different inks.”

“And?”

“‘ Wentworth was Rick’s Nemesis. Poppy was mine. We each spent our lives trying to put right what we’d done to them.’”

“And again!”

“‘ Now everyone’s after me. The Firm’s after me, the Americans are after me, you’re after me. Even poor Mary is after me, and she doesn’t know you exist.’”

“You being who? Who’s you in this poem?”

“‘ Poppy. My destiny. Dearest Poppy, best of best friends, get your bloody dogs off my doorstep.’”

“Poppy like the flowers,” Brotherhood suggested, shoving away Georgie’s microphone as he knelt beside her. “Like the flowers in the chimney. But singular. One Poppy.”

“Yes.”

“And Wentworth like the place. Sunny Wentworth, in tasteful Surrey?”

“Yes.”

“Know him — her — anyone of that name?”

“No.”

“Or Poppy?”

“No.”n

“On.”

“There was a Chapter Eight,” she said. “Out of the blue. No Two to Seven, but this Chapter Eight, all in his own handwriting and without a crossing-out. Titled ‘Overdue Bills,’ whereas the Chapter Ones were untitled. Describing a day when Ben revolts against all his promises. Slipping from third to first person and staying there, whereas the Chapter Ones were ‘he’ and ‘Ben.’ ‘The creditors are beating at the door, Wentworth to the fore, but Ben doesn’t give a damn. I lower my head and lift my shoulders, I wade at them, I punch and flail and butt them while they smash my face in. But even with no face left I am doing what I should have done thirty-five years ago, to Jack and Rick and all the mothers and fathers, for stealing my life off my plate while I watched you do it. Poppy, Jack, the rest of you, driving me into a lifetime’s — a lifetime’s — a lifetime’s—’”

She had stopped. Iron clamps had squeezed the breath out of her. The door opened and Fergus gatecrashed, a flouting of discipline for which he would surely be punished. Nigel was staring at him expressionlessly. Georgie was rolling her eyes at him, pointing at the door and mouthing Get out, get out, but Fergus stood his ground.

“A lifetime’s what, for God’s sake?” Brotherhood was shouting in her ear.

She was whispering. She was screaming. She was fighting the word inside her mouth, heaving and pressing at it but nothing came out. Brotherhood shook her, at first gently, then much harder, then very hard indeed.

“Betrayal,” she said. “‘We betray to be loyal. Betrayal is like imagining when the reality isn’t good enough.’ He wrote that. Betrayal as hope and compensation. As the making of a better land. Betrayal as love. As a tribute to our unlived lives. On and on, these ponderous aphorisms about betrayal. Betrayal as escape. As a constructive act. As a statement of ideals. Worship. As an adventure of the soul. Betrayal as travel: how can we discover new places if we never leave home? ‘You were my Promised Land, Poppy. You gave my lies a reason.’”

And that was the very phrase she had got to in her reading, she explained — the one about Poppy and the Promised Land — when she turned round and saw Magnus in his shorts standing in the open doorway to his workroom, holding a big blue envelope in one hand and the telegram in the other, smiling like the head boy of one of his schools.

“There was someone else inside him,” Mary said, shocking herself. “It wasn’t him.”

“What the hell does that mean? You just said it was Magnus, standing in the doorway. What are you getting at?”

She didn’t know either. “It was something that had happened to him when he was young. Someone standing in doorways watching him. He was doing it back somehow. I could see the recognition in his face.”

“What did he say?” Nigel suggested helpfully.

She had a voice for Magnus, or perhaps it was just a facial expression. Empty yet impenetrable. Tirelessly polite: “Hullo, old love. Catching up with the great novel, are we? Not exactly Jane Austen, I’m afraid, but some of it may be usable when I get a proper run at it.”

The tablecloth was spread on the floor, his books and half his papers on it. But his smile flashed victory and relief as he held the telegram towards her. She took it from his hand and walked with it to the window in order to read it. Or to distract his attention from the desk.

“It was from you, Jack,” she said, “using your cover name of Victor. Addressed to Pym care of Pembroke. Return at once, you said. All is forgiven. Committee reassembles Vienna Monday 10 a.m. Victor.”

Taking his time, Brotherhood had turned to Fergus at last.

“What the hell do you want?” he said.

Fergus spoke the way Tom did when he had been holding back too long, waiting for the grown-ups to let him in.

“Crash message from the Station clerk at the Embassy, sir,” he blurted. “He phoned it through in word code. I’ve just unbuttoned it. The Station burnbox is missing from the strongroom.”

Nigel had a funny little gesture designed to ease a charged atmosphere. He raised his beloved hands and, with the fingertips pointing loosely toward Heaven, flapped them as if he were drying his nails. But Brotherhood, still kneeling at Mary’s side, seemed suddenly to have been seized by lethargy. He rose slowly, then slowly passed his hand across his mouth as if he had a bad taste on the tip of his tongue.

“Since when?”

“Not known, sir. Not signed out. They’ve been searching for it for this last hour. They can’t find it. That’s all they know. There’s a diplomatic courier card that goes with it. The card’s disappeared too.”

Mary had not yet grasped the mood. The synchronisation has gone wrong, she thought. Who is in the doorway, Fergus or Magnus? Jack’s gone deaf. Jack who questions in salvoes has run out of ammunition.

“Chancery guard says Mr. Pym called at the Embassy first thing Thursday morning on his way to the airport, sir. The guard hadn’t thought to mention it because he hadn’t put him into his log. It was upstairs, down again and sorry about your father, sir. But when he came down the stairs he was carrying this heavy black pouch.”

“And the guard didn’t think to question him at all?”

“Well he wouldn’t, sir, would he? Not with his father dead and him being in a hurry.”

“Anything else missing?”

“No, sir, just the burnbox, sir, so far as he’s got. And the card like I said.”

“Where are you going?” said Mary.

Nigel was on his feet, tugging at the points of his waistcoat, while Brotherhood was loading things into his jacket pocket for a long journey on his own. His yellow cigarettes. His pen and notebook. His old German lighter.

“What’s a burnbox?” Mary said, close on panic. “Where are you going? I’m talking! Sit down!”

Finally Brotherhood remembered her, and stared down at her where she sat.

“You wouldn’t know, would you,” he said. “Of course you wouldn’t. You were grade nine. You never got high enough to find out.” Explaining was a chore but he managed it for old times’ sake. “A burnbox is what it says. Little metal box. In this instance it’s a diplomatic pouch, steel-lined. Burns whatever is inside it as soon as you tell it to. It’s where a Station Chief keeps his crown jewels.”

“So what’s in it?”

Nigel and Brotherhood exchanged glances. Fergus still had his eyes wide open.

“What’s in it?” she repeated as a different and more elusive fear began to grip her.

“Oh. Not much,” said Brotherhood. “Agents in place. All our Czechs. A few Poles. Hungarian or two. Just about everything we have that’s run from Vienna. Or used to be. Who’s Wentworth?”

“You asked. I don’t know. A place. What else is in the burnbox?”

“So it is. A place.”

She had lost him. Jack. Gone. Lost him as a lover, as a friend, as an authority. His face was her father’s face when she took him the news of Sam’s death. The love had gone out of him and the last of his faith with it.

“You knew,” he said casually. He was halfway to the door, not even looking at her. “You bloody knew, for years and years.”

We all did, she thought. But she hadn’t the heart to say it to him or, for that matter, the interest.

As if the bell had rung for the end of visiting time, Nigel also prepared to make his exit. “Now, Mary, I’m leaving you Georgie and Fergus for company. They’ll agree their cover with you and tell you how to play everything. They’ll report to me all the time. From now on, so will you. Only to me. Do you understand? If you need to leave a message or anything like that, I’m Nigel, I’m Head of Secretariat, my P.A. is called Marcia. Don’t talk to anybody else in the Firm at all. I’m afraid that’s an order. Even Jack,” he added, meaning Jack particularly.

“What else is in the burnbox?” she repeated.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Routine stores. Don’t you worry yourself.” He came to her and, emboldened by Brotherhood’s intimacy with her, placed a hand awkwardly on her shoulder. “Listen. This needn’t all be as bad as it sounds. We have to take precautions, naturally. We have to assume the worst and cover ourselves. But Jack does have a rather Gothic way of looking at things sometimes. The less dramatic explanations are often a lot closer to home. Jack’s not the only one with experience.”