A Perfect Spy (65 page)

Sympathetic murmurs. Mary whispered “Thank you” and keeled forward not too far. She sensed the anxious pause while everyone waited for her head to come up, but it didn't. She began to shake and was impressed to see real tears flopping on to her clenched hands. She let out a little choke and from her willed darkness heard cheerful Mrs. Simpson, wife of the Chancery guard, say “Come here, lovey,” as she put an enormous arm round Mary's back. She choked again, pushed Mrs. Simpson half heartedly away and struggled to her feet, tears everywhere: tears for Tom, tears for Magnus, tears for being deflowered in the potting shed and I bet I'm pregnant. She let Mrs. Simpson take her arm, she shook her head and stammered “I'm fine.” She reached the hall to find that Caroline Lumsden had followed her out. “No thanks . . . really I don't want to lie down. Far rather just take a walk . . . get my coat, please? . . . Blue with a foul fur collar . . . Rather be alone if you don't mind.... You've been so kind. Oh Christ, I'm going to cry again. . . .”

Once in the Lumsdens' long back garden, she wandered, still hunched, along the path until it dropped out of sight behind the trees. Then she moved fast. Training, she thought gratefully, as she unlatched the back gate; nothing quite like it for cooling the blood. She headed quickly for the bus stop. There was one every fourteen minutes. She had looked them up.

 

“How terribly good of them!” cried Mrs. Membury, with the greatest satisfaction, as she topped up Brotherhood's glass with her homemade elderflower wine. “Oh I do think that's farsighted and sensible. I'd never supposed the War Office would have
half the
wit. Would
you,
Harrison? Not deaf,” she explained to Brotherhood while they waited. “Just slow-thinking. Would you, darling?”

Harrison Membury had come up from the stream at the end of the garden where he had been cutting reeds, and he was still wearing his waders. He was large and loping and at seventy still boyish, with pink immature cheeks and silk white hair. He sat at the far end of the table washing down homemade cake with tea from a huge pottery mug with “Gramps” written on it. He moved, Brotherhood reckoned, at exactly half his wife's pace and spoke at half the volume.

“Oh I don't know,” he said when everyone else had forgotten the question. “There were some quite clever chaps scattered around the place. Here and there.”

“Ask him about fish and you'll get a
far
quicker answer,” said Mrs. Membury, hurtling off to the corner of the room and pulling out some albums from among the collected works of Evelyn Waugh. “How are the trout, Harrison?”

“Oh they're all right,” said Membury with a grin.

“We're not allowed to eat them, you know. Only the pike can do that. Now would it be fun to look at my photographs? I mean is it going to be an
illustrated
history? Don't tell me. It doubles the cost. It said so in the
Observer.
Pictures double the cost of a book. But then I do think they double the attractiveness too. Specially with biographies. I can't be doing with biography if I can't
look
at the people who are being biogged. Harrison can. He's cerebral. I'm visual. Which are you?”

“I think I must be more your way,” said Brotherhood with a smile, playing his ponderous rôle.

The village was one of those half-urbanised Georgian settlements on the edge of Bath where English Catholics of a certain standing have elected to gather in their exile. The cottage lay at the country end of it, a tiny sandstone mansion with a steep narrow garden descending to a stretch of river, and they sat in the cluttered kitchen on wheelback chairs, surrounded by washing-up, and vaguely votive bric-a-brac: a cracked ceramic plaque of the Virgin Mary from Lourdes; a disintegrating rush cross jammed behind the cooker; a child's paper mobile of angels rotating in the draught; a photograph of Ronald Knox. While they talked, filthy grandchildren wandered in and stared at them before tall mothers swept them off. It was a household in permanent and benevolent disorder, pervaded by the gentle thrill of religious persecution. A white morning sun was poking through the Bath mist. There was a sound of slow water dripping in the gutters.

“You an academic chap?” Membury enquired suddenly, from the end of the table.

“Darling, I
told you.
He's an
historian.”

“Well, more a retired trooper, I suppose, sir, to be honest,” Brotherhood replied. “I was lucky to get the job. I'd have been on the shelf by now, if this hadn't come along.”

“Now when will it come out?” Mrs. Membury shouted, as if everyone were deaf. “I've got to know
months
in advance so that I can put my name down with Mrs. Lanyon. Tristram, don't tug. We have a mobile library here, you know. Magda darling, do something about Tristram, he's trying to tear a page out of history. They come once a week and they're an absolute godsend as long as you don't mind waiting. Now this is Harrison's villa where he had his office and everyone worked for him. The main bit's 1680, the wing's new. Well nineteenth. This is his pond. He stocked it from scratch. The Gestapo had thrown grenades into it and blown up all the fish. They would. Pigs.”

“From what my masters say, it will start out as a work of internal reference,” Brotherhood said. “Then afterwards they'll publish a sanitised version for the open market.”

“You're not M. R. D. Foot, are you?” said Mrs. Membury. “No, you can't be. You're Marlow. Well I think they're inspired, anyway. So sensible to get hold of the actual people before they peg out.”

“Who did you troop with?” Membury said.

“Let's just say I did a little of this and a little of that,” Brotherhood suggested with deliberate coyness, while he pulled on his reading glasses.

“There he is,” said Mrs. Membury, stabbing a tiny finger at a group photograph. “There. That's the young man you were asking about. Magnus. He did all the really brilliant work. That's the old Rittmeister, he was an absolute darling. Harrison, what was the mess waiter's name—the one who ought to have become a novice but didn't have the gump?”

“Forget,” said Membury.

“And who are the girls?” said Brotherhood, smiling.

“Oh my dear, they were all sorts of trouble. Each one dottier than the next and if they weren't pregnant they were running off with unsuitable lovers, cutting their wrists. I could have opened a Marie Stopes clinic for them full time if we'd believed in birth control in those days. Now we're hybrids. Our girls are on the pill, but they still get pregnant by mistake.”

“They did the interpreting for us,” Membury said, filling himself a pipe.

“Was there an interpreter involved in the Greensleeves operation?” Brotherhood said.

“No need,” said Membury. “Chap spoke German. Pym handled him alone.”

“Completely alone?”

“Solo. Greensleeves insisted on it. Why don't you talk to Pym?”

“But who took him over when Pym left?”

“I did,” said Membury proudly, brushing wet tobacco from the front of his disgraceful pullover.

There is nothing like a red-backed notebook to instill order into desultory conversation. Having spread one very deliberately among the débris of several meals, and shaken out his big right arm as a prelude to becoming what he called a little bit official, Brotherhood drew a pen from his pocket with as much ceremony as a village policeman at the scene of the occurrence. The grandchildren had been removed. From an upper room came the sounds of someone trying to coax religious music from a xylophone.

“If we could get it all down first I can come back to the individual specifics later,” said Brotherhood.

“Jolly good idea,” said Mrs. Membury sternly. “Harrison, darling, listen.”

“Unfortunately, as I have already told you, most of the raw material on Greensleeves has been destroyed, lost or misplaced, which puts even greater responsibility on the shoulders of surviving witnesses. That's you. Now then.”

For a while after this forbidding warning there was relative sanity while Membury with surprising accuracy recalled the dates and content of Greensleeves' principal triumphs and the part played by Lieutenant Magnus Pym of the Intelligence Corps. Brotherhood wrote diligently and prompted little, only pausing to wet his thumb and turn the pages of his notebook.

“Harrison, darling, you're being slow again,” Mrs. Membury interposed occasionally. “Marlow hasn't got all day.” And once: “Marlow's got to get back to
London,
darling. He's not a fish.”

But Membury continued swimming at his own good pace, now describing Soviet military emplacements in southern Czechoslovakia; now the laborious procedure for prising small gold bars out of the Whitehall war chests which Greensleeves insisted on receiving in payment; now the fights he had had with Div. Int. to protect his pet agent from being overused. And Brotherhood, despite the little tape-recorder that nestled once more in his wallet pocket, set it all out for them to see, dates left, material centre.

“Greensleeves didn't have any other codename at any time, did he?” he asked casually as he jotted. “Sometimes a source gets rechristened for security reasons or because the name's already been bagged.”

“Think, Harrison,” Mrs. Membury urged.

Membury took his pipe from his mouth.

“Source Wentworth?” Brotherhood suggested, turning a page.

Membury shook his head.

“There was also a source”—Brotherhood faltered slightly as if the name had nearly escaped him—“Serena, that was it—no it wasn't—Sabina. Source Sabina, operating out of Vienna. Or was it Graz? Maybe it was Graz before your time. Used to be a popular thing that, anyway, mixing up the sexes with the cover names. A quite general trick of disinformation, I'm told.”

“Sabina?” cried Mrs. Membury. “Not
our
Sabina?”

“He's talking about a source, darling,” Membury said firmly, coming in much more quickly than was his habit. “Our Sabina was an interpreter, not an agent. Quite different.”

“Well
our
Sabina was an absolute—”

“She wasn't a source,” said Membury firmly. “Now, come on, don't tittle-tattle. Poppy.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Brotherhood.

“Magnus wanted to call him Poppy. We did for a bit. Source Poppy. I rather liked it. Then up came Remembrance Day and some ass in London decided Poppy was derogatory to the fallen—poppies are for heroes, not traitors. Absolutely typical of those chaps. Probably got promoted for it. Total buffoon. I was furious, so was Magnus. ‘Poppy
is
a hero,' he said. I liked him for that. Nice chap.”

“That's the bare bones done, then,” said Brotherhood, surveying his handiwork. “Now let's flesh them out, can we?” He was reading from the subject headings he had written at the beginning of his notebook before he came. “Personalities, well, we're touching on that. Value or otherwise of national servicemen to the peacetime intelligence effort, were they a help or a hindrance—we'll come to it. Where they all went afterwards—did they attain positions of interest in their chosen walk of life? Well, you may have kept up with them, and there again you may not. That's more for us to worry about than you.”

“Yes, well now, whatever
did
happen to Magnus?” Mrs. Membury demanded. “Harrison was so upset he never wrote. Well so was I. He never even told us whether he converted. He was awfully
close,
we felt. All he needed was one more shove. Harrison was exactly like that for years. It took a jolly good talking to from Father D'Arcy before Harrison saw the light, didn't it, darling?”

Membury's pipe had gone out and he was peering disappointedly into the bowl.

“I never liked the chap,” he explained with a kind of embarrassed regret. “Never thought much of him.”

“Darling, don't be silly. You adored Magnus. You practically adopted him. You know you did.”

“Oh Magnus was a splendid chap. The other chap. The source. The Greensleeves chap. I thought he was a bit of a fraud, to be honest. I didn't say anything—it didn't seem useful. With Div. Int. and London waving their caps in the air, why should we complain?”

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Membury, very firmly indeed. “Marlow, don't listen. Darling, you're being far too modest, as usual. You were the linchpin of the operation, you know you were. Marlow's writing a
history,
darling. He's going to write about
you.
You mustn't spoil it for him, must he, Marlow? That's the fashion these days. Put down, put down. I get absolutely sick of it. Look at what they did to poor Captain Scott on the television. Daddy knew Scott. He was a marvellous man.”

Membury continued as if she hadn't spoken. “All the brigadiers from Vienna beaming away like sand boys. Roars of applause from the War Office. No point in me killing the golden goose if they were all happy, was there? Young Magnus cocka-hoop. Well I didn't want to spoil
his
fun.”

“And
he was taking instruction,” said Mrs. Membury pointedly. “Harrison had arranged for him to go to Father Moynihan twice a week.
And
he was running garrison cricket.
And
he was learning Czech. You can't do that in a day.”

“A h now, that's interesting. About the learning Czech, I mean. Was this because he had a Czech source then?”

“It's because Sabina set her cap at him, the little minx,” said Mrs. Membury, but this time her husband actually spoke through her.

“His stuff was all so flashy, somehow,” he was saying, undeterred. “Always looked good on the plate, but when you came to chew it over, nothing really there. That's how it seemed to me.” He gave a puzzled giggle. “Same as trying to eat a pike. All bones. You'd get a report in, look it over. I say, that's jolly good, you'd think. But when you took a closer look it was boring. Yes, that's true because we already know it.... Yes, that's possible but we can't verify it because we've nothing on that region. I didn't like to say anything, but I think the Czechs could have been batting and bowling at the same time. I always thought that was why Greensleeves didn't show up after Magnus went back to England. He wasn't so sure he could hoodwink an older chap. Mean of me, I expect. I'm just a failed fish freak, aren't I, Hannah? That's what she calls me. Failed fish freak.”