John LeCarre - A New Collection of Three Novels Part 35

Briefcase in hand Pym makes quickly for the top floor of the villa and unlocks the door to his office. I am a morning man, it is known of me. Pym is an early riser, Pym is keen, Pym has done a day's work while most of us are still shaving. Membury's office is linked to his own by a pair of grand doors. Pus.h.i.+ng them open, Pym steps inside. As he does so, his sense of well-being becomes unbearable: a dizzying blend of resolution, Tightness and release. I am blessed. Membury's tin desk is no Reichstag desk. It has an old tin back and Pym's Swiss Army penknife knows the four screws well. In the third drawer down, on the left side, Membury keeps his basic works of reference: standing orders for the unit, Brown Fish of the World, cla.s.sified telephone directory, Lakes and Waterways of Austria, Order of Battle of Military Intelligence in London, a list of leading aquaria and a chart for Div. Int., Vienna, showing units and their functions but no names. Pym reaches a hand in. Not an invasion. Not a retribution. No initials are being carved into the panelling. I am here to administer a caress. Folders, loose-leaf manuals. Signals instructions marked "Top Secret, Guard" which Pym has never seen. I am here to borrow, not to steal. Opening his briefcase he extracts an army-issue Agfa camera with a one-foot measuring chain fastened to the lens front. It is the same camera that he uses when Axel brings out raw material and Pym has to photograph it on the spot. He c.o.c.ks it and sets it on the desk. This is what I was born for, he thinks, not for the first time. In the beginning was the spy.

From a file with the word "Vertebrates" crossed out on the cover, he selects the Order of Battle of Div. Int. Axel knows it anyway, he reasons. Nevertheless, there are impressive "Top Secret" stamps at top and bottom, and a distribution stamp to guarantee authenticity. As you love my freedom, get me something wonderful. He photographs it once, then again, and is left with a feeling of anticlimax. There are thirty-six frames on this film. Why do I cheesepare and give him only two? I could do something for our mutual understanding. Axel, you deserve better. He remembers a recent War Office a.s.sessment of the Soviet threat. If they will read that, they'll read anything. It is in the top drawer, beside A Handbook of Water Mammals, and begins with a summary of conclusions. He photographs each page and finishes the film nicely. Axel, I've done it! We're free. We've put the world to rights, exactly as you said we would! We are men of the middle ground--we have founded our own country with a population of two!

"Promise you will never bring me anything so good again, Sir Magnus," said Axel at their next meeting. "If you do, they will make me a general and we shall not be able to meet any more.""Dear Father"--Pym wrote to the Majestic Hotel, Karachi, where Rick appeared to be living for his health--"Thanks for your two letters. I am so glad to hear you are hitting it off with the Aga Khan. I believe I am doing good work out here and you would be proud of me."

14

When Mary Pym at the age of sixteen decided it was time to lose her virginity she faked a heavy dose of adolescent vapours and had herself put to bed by Matron instead of playing hockey. There she lay in the sick wing staring at the wall till the three-o'clock bell rang, telling her that Matron was off duty until five. She waited five more minutes exactly by her Confirmation watch, held her breath for thirty seconds which always helped to get her courage up, then tiptoed down the stone back stairs past the kitchens and the laundry and across a bit of sour gra.s.s to an old brick potting shed where the under-gardener had made a provisional bed of blankets and old sacking. The results were more spectacular than she had reason to hope, but what she relished afterwards was not the event so much as the antic.i.p.ation of it: the lying boldly in the bed with her skirt rucked round her waist knowing nothing was going to stop her now she had made up her mind; the sense of freedom as she took herself across the border into a state of sin.

And that was the feeling she had now, sitting demurely in the centre row in Caroline Lumsden's overfurnished drawing-room, with her hideous Thai tables and her garish Chinese paintings and her shelf full of factory-made Buddhas, listening to Caroline trying to sound like the Queen as she moaned out the minutes of the last meeting of the Vienna Branch of the Diplomatic Wives a.s.sociation in her plummy swansong. I'll do it, Mary told herself, dead calm. If it doesn't work one way, I'll make it work another. She glanced to the window. In their hired Mercedes across the street, Georgie and Fergus were sitting with their heads together, two lovers pretending to study a street map while they kept an eye on the front door and her Rover parked in Caroline's drive. I'll take the back way out. It worked then, it'll work now.

"It was therefore unanimously agreed," Caroline was lamenting, "that the Foreign Office Inspectors' report on the local cost of living was both distorted and unfair, and that a Finance subcommittee would be formed immediately, headed, I am pleased to say, by Mrs. McCormick"--respectful hush. Ruth McCormick was the wife of the Economic Minister and therefore a financial genius. n.o.body mentioned that she was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the Dutch military attache. "The subcommittee will itemise all our points and, having done so, submit a written objection to our a.s.sociation in London for submission through the proper channels to the Head of the Inspectorate himself."

Patter of soprano applause from fourteen pairs of female hands, Mary's included. Great, Caroline, great. In another life, it will be your turn to be the rising young diplomat and your husband's to stay home and imitate you.

Caroline had turned to Any Other Business. "Next Monday, our weekly transatlantic lunch at Manzi's. Twelve-thirty sharp and four hundred schillings a head, cash, please, to include two gla.s.ses of wine, and please don't be late as Herr Manzi took an awful lot of persuading" to give us a private room." Pause. Say it, you fool, Mary urged her. Caroline didn't. Not yet. "Then on Friday, one week today, please, Marjory de Weever will be giving her really fascinating lantern lecture here on aerobics which she taught very successfully to an all-ranks cla.s.s in the Sudan where her husband was second man. Right, Marjory?"

"Well, charge really," Marjory roared from the front row. "The Amba.s.sador was only there for three months out of fourteen. Not that Brian got paid for it but that's beside the point."

For pity's sake! thought Mary furiously. Now! But she had forgotten about Penny Sharlow's b.l.o.o.d.y husband landing a medal.

"And I'm sure we'd all like to congratulate Penny on the fantastic support she's given to James over the years, without which I'll bet he wouldn't have got anything at all."

This was apparently a joke because there was hysterical laughter by too few voices, which Caroline quelled with a mournful stare into the middle distance. She put on her Official Mourning voice.

"And Mary darling--you did say you wouldn't mind if I mentioned it." Mary looked hastily downward to her lap. "I'm sure everyone would like me to say how sorry we are about the death of your father-in-law. We know Magnus has been hit very hard and we do hope he will get over it soon, and be back among us in his usual high spirits that we all find so refres.h.i.+ng."

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 halfheartedly 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 gla.s.s 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 was.h.i.+ng down homemade cake with tea from a huge pottery mug with "Cramps" 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 alb.u.ms 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 role.

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 was.h.i.+ng-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 G.o.dsend 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 gla.s.ses.

"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, brus.h.i.+ng 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 debris 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 be'en 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' princ.i.p.al 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 s.e.xes 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 t.i.ttle-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 a.s.s 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 embarra.s.sed 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 c.o.c.k-a-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."

"Ah 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."

The description pleased them both so much that they broke out laughing for some while, so that Brotherhood had to laugh with them and keep back his question until Membury was able to hear him clearly.

"You mean you never met Greensleeves? He never came to the rendezvous? I'm sorry, sir," he said, returning to his notebook, "but didn't you say just now you yourself took over source Greensleeves when Pym left Graz?"

"I did."

"And now you say you never met him."

"Perfectly true. I didn't. Stood me up at the altar, didn't he, Hannah? She got me into my best suit, packed together all these stupid special foods he was supposed to like--how that started, G.o.d knows--he never turned up."

"Harrison probably got the wrong night," said Mrs. Membury, with a fresh gust of laughter. "Harrison's frightful about time, aren't you, darling? He was never trained for Intelligence, you know. He was librarian in Nairobi. A jolly good one too. Then he met someone on the s.h.i.+p and got roped in."

"And out," said Membury cheerfully. "Kaufmann came along. He was the driver. Charming chap. Well he knew the meeting place like the back of his hand. I didn't get the wrong night, darling. I got the right one, I know I did. Sat in an empty barn all night. No word from him, nothing. We'd no means of getting hold of him, it was all one way. Ate a bit of his stupid food. Drank some of his booze, I enjoyed that. Went home. Same again the next night and the next. I waited for a message of some sort, phone call like the first time. Absolute blank. Chap was never heard of again. We should have had a formal handover with Pym present, of course, but Greensleeves wouldn't allow it. Prima donna, you see, like all agents. 'One chap at a time.' Iron rule." Membury absently helped himself from Brotherhood's gla.s.s. "Vienna was furious. Blamed it all on me. Then I told them he was no good anyway and that didn't help." He gave another rich laugh. "I should think it got me sacked if truth were known. They didn't say so, but I'll bet it jolly well helped!"

Mrs. Membury had made a tuna-fish risotto because it was Friday, and a trifle with cherries on it which she refused to let Membury eat. When lunch was over she and Brotherhood stood on the river bank watching Membury hacking cheerfully at the reeds. Nets and fine wires were stretched all ways across the water. Among the breeding boxes, an old punt was sinking at its mooring. The sun, freed of the mist, beat brightly.

"So tell us about the wicked Sabina," Brotherhood suggested artfully, out of Membury's earshot.

Mrs. Membury couldn't wait. An absolute minx, she repeated: "One look at Magnus and she saw herself with a British pa.s.sport, a jolly good British husband and nothing to worry about for the rest of her life. But Magnus was a bit too sly for her, I'm pleased to say. He must have stood her up. He never said so, but that was the way we read it. In Graz one day. Gone the next."

"Where did she go then?" Brotherhood said.

"Home to Czechoslovakia, that was the story. With her tail between her legs was our theory. Left a note for Harrison saying she was homesick and she was going back to her old boyfriend, despite the beastly regime. Well that didn't please London, as you can imagine. It didn't raise Harrison's stock one bit. They said he should have seen it coming and done something about it."

"I wonder what became of her," Brotherhood mused with an historian's dreaminess. "You don't remember her other name, do you?"

"Harrison. What was Sabina's other name?"

With surprising swiftness the answer rang back across the water. "Kordt. K-O-R-D-T. Sabina Kordt. Very beautiful girl. Charming."

"Marlow says what became of her?"

"G.o.d knows. Last we heard she'd changed her name and landed herself a job in one of the Czech Ministries. One of the defectors said she'd been working for 'em all along."

Mrs. Membury was not so much astonished as proved right. "Now there you are! Married getting on for fifty years, thirty-something years since Austria, and he doesn't even tell me she turned up in Czechoslovakia working for one of the Ministries! I expect Harrison had an affair with her himself if truth were known. Practically everybody did. Well my dear she must have been a spy, mustn't she? It sticks out a mile. They'd never have taken her back if they hadn't their hooks on her all along, they're far too vindictive. So Magnus was well rid of her then, wasn't he? Are you sure you won't stay for tea?"

"If I could take a few of those old photographs," Brotherhood said. "We'll give you a credit in the book, naturally."

Mary knew the technique exactly. In Berlin she had watched Jack Brotherhood use it a dozen times, and helped him often. At training camp they had called it paperchasing: how to make an encounter with someone you don't trust. The only difference was, today it was Mary who was the subject of the operation, and the anonymous writer of the note who didn't trust her: "I have information that could lead us both to Magnus. You will please do the following. Any morning between ten and twelve, you will sit in the lobby of the Hotel Amba.s.sador. Any afternoon between two and six you will take a coffee at the Cafe Mozart. Any evening between nine and midnight, the lounge of the Hotel Sacher. Mr. Konig will collect you."The Mozart was half empty. Mary sat at a centre table where she could be seen and ordered herself a coffee and a brandy. They've watched me arrive and now they're watching to see whether I am followed. Pretending to consult her diary, she took covert note of the people round her and the parked charabancs and fiacres in the street outside the big windows, looking for anything that could resemble a stakeout. When you've got a conscience like mine, everything stinks anyway, she thought: from the two nuns frowning at the stock exchange prices in the window of the bank to the huddle of bowler-hatted young coachmen stamping their feet and watching the girls go by. In a corner of the cafe, a fat Viennese gentleman was expressing interest in her. I should have worn a hat, she thought. I'm not a respectable single woman. She got up, went to the newspaper rack and without thinking chose Die Presse. Now I suppose I roll it up and take it for a walk in my stockinged feet, she thought stupidly, as she opened it at the film page.

"Frau Pym?"

A woman's voice, a woman's bosom. A woman's deferentially smiling face. It was the girl from the cash desk.

"That's right," said Mary, smiling in return.

From behind her back she produced an envelope with "Frau Pym" written on it in pencil. "Herr Konig left this message for you. He is very sorry."