A Perfect Spy

“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.