The Spy Game (20 page)

There is a chance on that journey that the whole thing might end, right there, when it has scarcely begun. Close to the tram
stop is a market where people sell things. They come and lay things out before them on a blanket on the pavement: china, gold,
watches, stockings, cigarettes in packets that are already battered with handling, a bundle of precious sticks of asparagus
from the countryside. The Englishman wants to buy her a present. He stops, browses, bends to take a closer look at a piece
of jewellery. All the time she does not loose the hand of his that she holds but grasps it tighter, pulling at his fingers.
He, laughing, reaches back for her, puts his arm now around her waist. Here, how about this one? It is an amber necklace,
a fine colour, very clear.

'How much is it?' he asks the woman there. The girl has scarcely looked at her until now. She is a middle-aged woman of tight
respectability. She has brought her possessions in a suitcase, and a folding chair for herself to sit in, laid the things
out on the suitcase lid. There are not very many of them but they are all good; besides the necklace, a large brooch also
of amber, trinkets and scarves and pieces of lace, a clock, a cup and saucer that may perhaps be Meissen. She has been sitting
with that hunched anonymity that so many of the market traders have, that is part boredom, part a removal of herself from
the fact of what she is doing there. It is only now, with the possibility of a sale, that she becomes alert, and the girl
looks into her face and knows her from the past.

She is certain that the woman must recognise her also. This woman has known her all of her life, but as another person under
another name. Yet she does not say it. She looks away, looks now only at the Englishman and names a price, and it is the high
sort of price you would name to a British soldier who appears to be in love. Then when he does not bargain she unclasps her
bag and takes from it a scrap of tissue paper that she has smoothed and folded from its previous use, and wraps the necklace
in it, and takes the notes he gives her and folds them and puts them away. And lets the girl go on being the other person
that she has become, and the girl goes on and does not know whether the woman has acted out of discretion or amnesia.

The boy with the stick stands idle, looking out across the pond. A roller skater comes up behind him, then another, two youths
who are bigger, bulkier, than he is. The second brushes so close behind him that he takes a step forward, almost to the water's
edge. He shouts something angry after them, throwing down his stick. Then scuffs away, hands in his pockets. He goes right
past me where I sit on this bench in the sun.

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

The text of this book is set in Granjon. This old-style face is named after the Frenchman Robert Granjon, a sixteenth-century
letter cutter whose italic types have often been used with the romans of Claude Garamond. The origins of this face, like those
of Garamond, lie in the late fifteenth century types used by Aldus Manutius in Italy.