A Perfect Spy

That’s perfectly right, she thought in absurd relief. The first thing you always ask your agent is how long you’ve got him for. The second is whether he needs immediate help. Magnus is in good hands. But she knew that already.

“Where is he?” she said.

He had the authority that enabled him to own to failure. “If only we knew, how happy we would both be!” he agreed as if her question had been a statement of despair, and with his long hand showed her to the chair that he required her to sit on. We, she thought. We are equals yet you are in command. No wonder Tom fell in love with you on sight.

* * *

They were sitting opposite one another, she on the gilded sofa, he on the gilded chair. The Slav girl had brought a tray of vodka and some gherkins and black bread and her devotion to him was obscene, she preened and smirked so. She’s one of his Marthas, thought Mary, which was what Magnus called his Station secretaries. He poured two stiff ones, holding each glass carefully by turn. He drank to her, looking over the brim. That’s what Magnus does, she thought. And it’s you he learned it from.

“Has he telephoned?” he asked.

“No. He can’t.”

“Of course not,” he agreed sympathetically. “The house is bugged and he knows that. Has he written?”

She shook her head.

“He’s wise. They are watching for him everywhere. They are immoderately angry with him.”

“Are you?”

“How can I be angry when I owe the man so much? His last message to me was that he didn’t want to see me any more. He said he was free and goodbye. I felt a genuine pang of jealousy. What freedom has he found so suddenly that he cannot share it with us?”

“He said the same to me — I mean about being free. I think he said it to several people. To Tom as well.”

Why do I talk to you as if you were an old lover? What sort of whore am I that I can throw off my loyalties with my clothes? If he had reached out to her and taken her hand she would have let him. If he had drawn her to him—

“He should have come to me when I told him,” he said in the same philosophically reproachful tone. “‘It’s over, Sir Magnus,’ I said to him. That’s my name for him. Forgive me.”

“In Corfu,” she said.

“In Corfu, in Athens, everywhere I could speak to him. ‘Come with me. We are passé, you and I. It’s time for us oldies to leave the field to the next anguished generation.’ He wouldn’t see it. ‘Do you want to be like one of those poor old actors one has literally to drag from the stage?’ I said. He wouldn’t listen. He was so adamant they would clear him.”

“They almost did. Maybe they did. He thought so.”

“Brotherhood won a little time and that was all. Not even Jack could sweep back the tide for ever. Besides — Jack has joined the bad guys now. Hell hath no fury like a deceived protector.”

He taught Magnus his style, she thought, in another spurt of recognition. The style he was always wanting for his novel. He taught him how to be superior to human foibles and how to give a Godlike laugh at himself as a way of fending off morbidity. He did all the things for him that a woman is grateful for, except that Magnus is a man.

“His father seems to have been quite a mystery man,” he said, lighting himself another cigar. “What’s all that about, do you think?”

“I don’t know. I never met him. Did you?”

“Many times. In Switzerland when Magnus was a student, his father was a great British sea captain who had gone down with his ship.”

She laughed. Heaven help me, I’m actually laughing. Now it’s me who’s found the style.

“Oh yes. Then when I next heard of him he was a great financial baron. His tentacles extended to every banking house in Europe. He had miraculously recovered from being drowned.”

“Oh Christ,” she said. And burst out again in cathartic, uncontrollable laughter.

“Since I was German at the time I naturally felt greatly relieved. I had had a really bad conscience about sinking his father until then. What is it about your husband, do you know, that gives us such a bad, bad conscience?”

“His potential,” she said unthinkingly, and took a long pull of vodka. She was trembling and her cheeks were burning hot. He watched her calmly, helping her to steady.

“You’re his other life,” she said.

“He always told me I was his oldest friend. If you know different, please don’t destroy my illusions.”

She was getting it back. Her head. The room was clearing and her head with it. “I understood that position was reserved for somebody called Poppy,” she said.

“Where did you hear that name?”

“It’s in the great book he’s been writing. ‘Poppy, my dearest, oldest friend.’”

“Is that all?”

“Oh no. There’s much more. Poppy gets a big hand on every fifth page. Poppy this, Poppy that. When they found the camera and the codebook they found dried poppies with them, as a keepsake.”

She had hoped to disconcert him, but all she drew from him was a smile of gratification.

“I’m flattered. Poppy is the fanciful codename he awarded me many years ago. I have been Poppy for most of our lives.”