John LeCarre - A New Collection of Three Novels Part 6

"There's Tom for a start. What about him?"

"It was much too late to ring Tom and anyway Magnus thought it better to tell him himself."

He was looking at the book. "Another gem he's underlined. 'If I am not for myself who is for me; and being for my own self what am I? If not now when?' Well, well. I'm enlightened. Are you?"

"No."

"Nor am I. He's free." He closed the book and put it back on the table. "He didn't take anything with him on his walk, did he? Like a briefcase?"

"A newspaper."

You're going deaf. Admit it. You're worried that a hearing-aid will spoil your self-image. Speak, d.a.m.n you!

She had said it. She knew she had. She had been waiting all evening to say it, prepared it from every possible angle, practised it, rehea.r.s.ed it, denied it, forgotten it, revived it. And now it was echoing in her head like an explosion while she took a frightfully careless pull at her whisky. Yet his eyes, straight at her, were still waiting.

"A newspaper," she repeated. "Just a newspaper. What of it?"

"Which newspaper?"

"The Presse."

"That's a daily."

"Correct. Die Presse is a daily."

"A local daily newspaper. And Magnus took it with him. To read in the dark. Dressed in his dancing pumps. Tell me about it."

"I just did, Jack."

"No, you didn't. And you're going to have to, Mary, because when we get the heavy guns here you're going to need all the help you can get."

She had perfect recall. Magnus was standing by the door, a step from where Brotherhood stood now. He was pale and untouchable, the dufflecoat flung crookedly over his shoulders while he glared round in stiff phases: fireplace, wife, clock, books. She heard herself telling him the things she had already recounted to Brotherhood, but more of them. For G.o.d's sake, Magnus, stay. Don't get the blacks, stay. Don't sink into one of your moods. Stay. Make love. Get drunk. If you want company, I'll get Grant and Bee back, or we'll go there. She saw him smile his rigid, bright-lit smile. She heard him put on his awfully easy voice. His Lesbos voice. And she heard herself repeat his words exactly, to Brotherhood, now.

"He said, 'Mabs, where's the b.l.o.o.d.y paper, darling?' I thought he meant The Times for looking at the Scottish property market, so I said, 'Wherever you put it when you brought it back from the Emba.s.sy.

"But he didn't mean The Times," said Brotherhood.

"He went over to the rack--there--" She looked at it but didn't point, because she was terrified of giving too much importance to the gesture. "And helped himself. To Die Presse. From the rack, where the Presse is kept. Till the end of each week. He likes me to keep the back numbers. Then he walked out," she ended, making it all sound perfectly normal, which of course it was.

"Did he look at it at all when he took it out?"

"Just the date. To check."

"What did you suppose he wanted it for?"

"Maybe there was a late-night film." Magnus had never gone to a late-night film in his life. "Maybe he wanted something to read in the cafe." With no money on him, she thought, as she filled the void of Brotherhood's silence. "Maybe he was looking for distraction. As we all might be. Have been. Anyone might when they're bereaved."

"Or free," Brotherhood suggested. But he did not otherwise help her.

"Anyway, he was so upset he took the wrong day's," she said brightly, clinching the matter.

"You looked, did you, dear?"

"Only when I was throwing away."

"When were you doing that?"

"Yesterday."

"Which one did he take?"

"Monday's. It was all of three days old. So I mean obviously he was in considerable shock."

"Obviously."

"All right, his father wasn't the great love of his life. But he was still dead. n.o.body's rational when a thing like that happens. Not even Magnus."

"So what did he do next? After he'd looked at the date and taken the wrong day's?"

"He went out. As I told you. For a walk. You don't listen. You never did."

"Did he fold it?"

"Really, Jack! What does it matter how somebody carries a newspaper?"

"Just tuck in your ego a minute and answer. What did he do with it?"

"Rolled it."

"And then?"

"Nothing. He carried it. In his hand."

"Did he carry it back again?"

"Here to the house? No."

"How do you know he didn't?"

"I was waiting for him in the hall."

"And you noticed: no newspaper. No rolled newspaper, you said to yourself."

"Purely incidentally, yes."

"Incidentally nothing, Mary. You had it in your mind to look. You knew he'd gone out with it and you spotted at once he'd come back without it. That's not incidental. That's spying on him."

"Please yourself."

He was angry. "It's you who's going to have to do the pleasing, Mary," he said, loud and slow. "You're going to have to please Brother Nigel in about five minutes from now. They're in spasm, Mary. They can see the ground opening up at their feet again and they do not know what to do. They literally do not know what to do." His anger pa.s.sed. Jack could do that. "And later--as soon as you had a chance--you incidentally searched his pockets. And it wasn't there."

"I didn't look for it, I simply noticed it was missing. And yes, it wasn't there."

"Does he often go out with old newspapers?"

"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 G.o.d'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 wh.o.r.e 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."