Читать книгу Spy Story - Len Deighton - Страница 9

All time is game time …

RULES. ALL GAMES. STUDIES CENTRE. LONDON

I let myself into the flat as quietly as possible. Marjorie turned up the heating whenever I was away, and now the stale air, heavy with fresh paint and unseasoned timber smells, hit me like a secondhand hangover. It would be a long time before I’d get used to living here.

‘Is that you, darling?’

‘Yes, love.’ I prodded at the pile of mail, pushing the unsealed buff envelopes aside until there remained only a postcard from a ski resort, Cross and Cockade magazine and a secondhand book about the Battle of Moscow. On the silver-plated toast rack – a place kept for urgent messages – there was a torn piece of hospital notepaper with ‘Please go to Colonel Schlegel’s home on Sunday. He’ll meet the ten o’clock train’ written on it in Marjorie’s neat handwriting. I’d have gone Monday except that Sunday was underlined three times, in the red pencil she used for diagrams.

‘Darling!’

‘I’m coming.’ I went into the sitting-room. When I was away she seldom went in there: a quick bout with the frying pan and a briefcase full of post-graduate medical studies on the bedside table was her routine. But now she’d got it all tidied and ready for my return: matches near the ashtray and slippers by the fireplace. There was even a big bunch of mixed flowers, arranged with fern and placed in a jug amid her copies of House and Garden on the side table.

‘I missed you, Marj.’

‘Hello, sailor.’

We embraced. The lingering smell of bacon I’d encountered in the hall was now a taste on her lips. She ran a hand through my hair to ruffle it. ‘It won’t come loose,’ I said. ‘They knit them into the scalp.’

‘Silly.’

‘Sorry I’m late.’

She turned her head and smiled shyly. She was like a little girl: her large green eyes and small white face, lost somewhere under that dishevelled black hair.

‘I made a stew but it’s a bit dried up.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You haven’t noticed the flowers.’

‘Are you working in the mortuary again?’

‘Bastard,’ she said, but she kissed me softly.

In the corner, the box was keeping up its bombardment of superficial hysteria: British Equity outwits fat German extras shouting Schweinhund.

‘The flowers were from my mother. To wish me many happy returns.’

‘You’re not rerunning that twenty-ninth birthday again this year?’

She hit me in the ribs with the side of the hand and knew enough anatomy to make it hurt.

‘Take it easy,’ I gasped. ‘I’m only joking.’

‘Well, you save your lousy jokes for the boys on the submarine.’

But she put her arms round me and grabbed me tight. And she kissed me and stroked my face, trying to read her fortune in my eyes.

I kissed her again. It was more like the real thing this time.

‘I was beginning to wonder,’ she said, but the words were lost in my mouth.

There was a pot of coffee clipped into an electric contraption that kept it warm for hours. I poured some into Marjorie’s cup and sipped it. It tasted like iron filings with a dash of quinine. I pulled a face.

‘I’ll make more.’

‘No.’ I grabbed her arm. She made me neurotic with all this tender loving care. ‘Sit down, for God’s sake sit down.’ I reached over and took a piece of the chocolate bar she’d been eating. ‘I don’t want anything to eat or drink.’

The heroes on the box got the keys to a secret new aeroplane from this piggy-eyed Gestapo man, and this fat short-sighted sentry kept stamping and giving the Heil Hitler salute. The two English cats Heil Hitlered back, but they exchanged knowing smiles as they got in the plane.

‘I don’t know why I’m watching it,’ said Marjorie.

‘Seeing these films makes you wonder why we took six years to win that damned war,’ I said.

‘Take off your overcoat.’

‘I’m OK.’

‘Have you been drinking, darling?’ She smiled. She’d never seen me drunk but she was always suspecting I might be.

‘No.’

‘You’re shivering.’

I wanted to tell her about the flat and the photographs of the man who wasn’t me, but I knew she’d be sceptical. She was a doctor: they’re all like that. ‘Did the car give you trouble?’ she asked finally. She wanted only to be quite certain I wasn’t going to confess to another woman.

‘The plugs. Same as last time.’

‘Perhaps you should get the new one now, instead of waiting.’

‘Sure. And a sixty-foot ocean racer. Did you see Jack while I was away?’

‘He took me to lunch.’

‘Good old Jack.’

‘At the Savoy Grill.’

I nodded. Her estranged husband was a fashionable young paediatrician. The Savoy Grill was his works canteen. ‘Did you talk about the divorce?’

‘I told him I wanted no money.’

‘That pleased him, I’ll bet.’

‘Jack’s not like that.’

‘What is he like, Marjorie?’

She didn’t answer. We’d got as close as this to fighting about him before, but she was sensible enough to recognize male insecurity for what it was. She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. ‘You’re tired,’ she said.

‘I missed you, Marj.’

‘Did you really, darling?’

I nodded. On the table alongside her there was a pile of books: Pregnancy and Anaemia, Puerperal Anaemia, Bennett, Achresthic Anaemia, Wilkinson, A Clinical Study, by Schmidt and History of a Case of Anaemia, by Combe. Tucked under the books there was a bundle of loose-leaf pages, crammed with Marjorie’s tiny writing. I broke the chocolate bar lying next to the books and put a piece of it into Marjorie’s mouth.

‘The Los Angeles people came back to me. Now there’s a car and a house and a sabbatical fifth year.’

‘I wasn’t …’

‘Now don’t be tempted into lying. I know how your mind works.’

‘I’m pretty tired, Marj.’

‘Well, we’ll have to talk about things some time.’ It was the doctor speaking.

‘Yes.’

‘Lunch Thursday?’

‘Great,’ I said.

‘Sounds like it.’

‘Sensational, wonderful, I can’t wait.’

‘Sometimes I wonder how we got this far.’

I didn’t answer. I wondered too. She wanted me to admit that I couldn’t live without her. And I had the nasty feeling that as soon as I did that, she’d up and leave me. So we continued as we were: in love but determined not to admit it. Or worse: declaring our love in such a way that the other could not be sure.

‘Strangers on a train,’ said Marjorie.

‘What?’

‘We are – strangers on a train.’

I pulled a face, as if I didn’t understand what she was getting at. She pushed her hair back but it fell forward again. She pulled a clip from it and fastened it. It was a nervous movement, designed more to occupy her than to change her hair.

‘I’m sorry, love.’ I leaned forward and kissed her gently. ‘I’m really sorry. We’ll talk about it.’

‘On Thursday …’ she smiled, knowing that I’d promise anything to avoid the sort of discussion that she had in mind. ‘Your coat is wet. You’d better hang it up, it will wrinkle and need cleaning.’

‘Now, if you like. We’ll talk now, if that’s what you want.’

She shook her head. ‘We’re on our way to different destinations. That’s what I mean. When you get to where you’re going, you’ll get out. I know you. I know you too well.’

‘It’s you who gets offers … fantastic salaries from Los Angeles research institutes, reads up anaemia, and sends polite refusals that ensure an even better offer eventually comes.’

‘I know,’ she admitted, and kissed me in a distant and preoccupied way. ‘But I love you, darling. I mean really …’ She gave an attractive little laugh. ‘You make me feel someone. The way you just take it for granted that I could go to America and do that damned job …’ She shrugged. ‘Sometimes I wish you weren’t so damned encouraging. I wish you were bossy, even. There are times when I wish you’d insist I stayed at home and did the washing-up.’

Well, you can’t make women happy, that’s a kind of fundamental law of the universe. You try and make them happy and they’ll never forgive you for revealing to them that they can’t be.

‘So do the washing-up,’ I said. I put my arm round her. The wool dress was thin. I could feel that her skin was hot beneath it. Perhaps she was running a fever, or perhaps it was passion. Or perhaps I was just the icy cold bastard that she so often accused me of being.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like a bacon sandwich?’

I shook my head. ‘Marjorie,’ I said, ‘do you remember the caretaker at number eighteen?’ I walked across to the TV and switched it off.

‘No. Should I?’

‘Be serious for a moment … Charlie the caretaker. Charlie Short … moustache, cockney accent – always making jokes about the landlords.’

‘No.’

‘Think for a moment.’

‘No need to shout.’

‘Can’t you remember the dinner party … he climbed in the window to let you in when you’d lost your key?’

‘That must have been one of your other girls,’ said Marjorie archly.

I smiled but said nothing.

‘You don’t look very well,’ said Marjorie. ‘Did anything happen on the trip?’

‘No.’

‘I worry about you. You look pretty done in.’

‘Is that a professional opinion, Doctor?’

She screwed her face up, like a little girl playing doctors and nurses. ‘Yes, it is, honestly, darling.’

‘The diagnosis?’

‘Well it’s not anaemia.’ She laughed. She was very beautiful. Even more beautiful when she laughed.

‘And what do you usually prescribe for men in my condition, Doc?’

‘Bed,’ she said. ‘Definitely bed.’ She laughed and undid my tie.

‘You’re shaking.’ She said it with some alarm. I was shaking. The trip, the journey home, the weather, that damned number eighteen where I was now in mass production, had all got to me suddenly, but how do you explain that? I mean, how do you explain it to a doctor?