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  A SPY IN THE FAMILY

  Alec Waugh describes his novel as an erotic comedy. It is the story of a respectable Treasury official, Victor Trail, and his wife Myra, whose marriage has lost its flavour, owing to Victor's clock-work schedule and Myra's bland acceptance of it. The unexpected revelation that Victor has suspiciously altered his routine rouses Myra out of her complacency, and her jealousy rapidly changes the shape of their lives. It leads her into a series of quite extraordinary adventures and demimonde activities which are altogether astonishing in a respectable married woman.

  Her discomfiture is made all the more excruciating by her new-found intimacy with Victor, who apparently knows nothing about her illegal actions and amazing amatory diversions—or does he?

  The reader of this novel of sex and international intrigue is in for a number of surprises. The only unsurprising thing about it is that it is a marvellous piece of entertainment by a past master of the art.

  A Spy in the Family

  An Erotic Comedy

  ________________

  Alec Waugh

  To the memory of my deeply missed friend

  Vyvyan Holland

  the younger son of Oscar Wilde and very

  much a person in his own right, as a man of

  letters and a bon viveur, I dedicate

  with great affection

  this indelicate story that contains no indelicate

  words.

  Contents

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  1

  That’s curious, she thought. That’s very curious.

  She stared perplexed at the telephone receiver she had just replaced. Five minutes earlier it had rung. ‘Please can I speak to Mrs. Trail? Oh, but that is you, Myra; yes, of course it is. Naturally I recognised the voice; but it is so long, so very long too long. It’s Kitty here. Kitty Severod. When did we meet last? The Carringtons? That’s a year ago.’

  It’s thirty months!’

  ‘It can’t be. Really. Yes, I suppose it is. That’s what’s so awful about London. So rushed, so driven, no time for anything; never seeing one’s friends, one’s real friends. Yet when one gets to the end of the year, one asks oneself what it’s all been about. Doing so much, but what? That’s what I keep telling Martin. We’re losing touch with all the people that we care for. So that this afternoon when I saw Victor …’

  ‘You saw Victor!’

  ‘Yes, in the Brompton Road.’

  ‘The Brompton Road?’

  ‘From the top of a bus. I’d been lunching with Marjorie Fitzgeorge. You know her? Oh, but you must. The dearest person, you’d love her, with the loveliest flat; in Chelsea. That new block just off Tite Street; with a wonderful an pair girl from Vienna making the most scrumptious pastry. You can’t think about calories when you lunch with her. I must see that you meet. All the same I have only known them for six months; that’s not the same thing as someone you’ve known all your life. Which is exactly what I was saying to myself as I came away. There wasn’t a taxi in the whole King’s Road; there never is, is there, when one really wants one, so I caught a 14 bus and there I was sitting on the top deck, thinking of all the people I never seem to see these days, when lo and behold right down below me, on the pavement, just where the old tube station used to be …’

  ‘No … no … you must be mistaken. Victor couldn’t possibly be there in mid-afternoon.’

  She knew her husband’s movements too well to have any doubt upon that score. Victor was a Treasury official; and there was no one in Whitehall whose routine moved more smoothly to a clockwork rhythm. At half past nine every morning he was at his desk; at a quarter to one he would walk up Whitehall to his club, the Athenaeum. He would lunch frugally, for his figure’s sake, though he would enliven his meal with a small carafe of wine, or divide with a friend a half bottle of better wine. When his hair needed trimming, he would have that done for him at the Athenaeum. Every other Friday he would be manicured at Simpson’s, three minutes’ walk from Piccadilly Circus. At Simpson’s he would make any personal purchase he might need. His tailor was a hundred yards to the north in Savile Row. Day after day, week after week, year after year, his movements in London between 9.15 in the morning and 5.45 at night were contained within the circumference of a circle, its centre in Piccadilly Circus and a radius of a quarter of a mile. He could not possibly have been in the Brompton Road at three o’clock in the afternoon.

  ‘You must be mistaken,’ she insisted.

  ‘Oh, no, how could I be? Victor! That guardee look, the black hat slightly tilted, the gloves, the rolled umbrella, and that dark, short overcoat with the black velvet collar—another half inch and he’d be a hippie. I couldn’t mistake Victor. The moment I saw him I thought, Now, isn’t that just what I was saying to myself? I never see the people whom I’m fondest of. Myra and Victor … when did I see them last, and is there anyone I’m fonder of than Myra? Myra whom I learned skiing with. I’ve got to do something about them right away. Then I remembered … Friday. The Jacksons, the Eric Jacksons, you must remember them; they’re dining with us. Couldn’t you come too? We’re eight at present, but ten is a much better number. You can have the host and the hostess at each end. It’s terribly short notice, but can’t you manage it?’

  ‘Unless Victor’s got something fixed.’

  ‘Is he likely to?’

  ‘It’s most unlikely.’

  Most, most unlikely. Victor never made arrangements on his own. He was completely predictable. The standardised civil servant. Winchester his school; a scholarship at New College. One of the top men of his year at Oxford, but with successes exclusively scholastic. He had never made the headlines. From the start he had been destined for the Treasury. As he had begun, so had he gone on. Completely organised. He never wasted time. That was why he was able to do so much. He belonged to a couple of masculine dining-clubs. The Omar Khayyam and the Odde Volumes, which met eight times a year on the fourth Tuesday of the month. Wine was one of his hobbies. He was a member of the Wine and Food Society. Occasionally he went to tastings; as often as not he took her with him. They were usually in cellars, in the City. Far from the Brompton Road. He was on the Wine Committee at the Athenaeum. Once every six weeks or so, the committee would meet to discuss additions to the cellar. He had been a useful cricketer; he had now given up the game, but often on Saturdays in the summer he would go up to Lord’s, and he would always take the day off for the first morning of the Test match. On an average, she supposed, he had a masculine dinner of some kind every other week; as did most Englishmen of his taste and training. But everything he did fitted into a pattern. At the start of every year, he would know roughly what he would be doing on every single day of it. What could he have been doing at three o’clock on a March afternoon in the Brompton Road?

  ‘That’s settled then, isn’t it?’ said Kitty. ‘Eight o’clock, black tie.’

  From the hall below she heard the sound of a door opening. It was ten past six. He would have walked from Whitehall to the Charing Cross tube station. Seven minutes. The Northern line would have got him to Hampstead station in twenty minutes. Six minutes’ walk down hill, past the parish church to their house in Holly Place, a synchronised piece of clockwork. His black hat was laid on the hall chest beside his gloves and his umbrella. He was taking off the short dark overcoat with the black velvet collar. He was unmistakable. He was wearing a black, pin-stripe suit, double-breasted, a black and white striped shirt with a starched white collar, and a black and white polka-dot tie. She drew a long, slow breath. He was good-looking; and he would sta
y good-looking, for a long, long time. Friends had said to her when she was engaged, ‘How wise to marry someone quite a little older than yourself, someone who knows his mind.’ But though he may have known his mind, he had not been that much older—twenty-six to her twenty. But he had looked thirty-five. Now, five years later, he still looked thirty-five, while she, the mother of two children, was starting to catch up. In the middle thirties they would look contemporaries. At forty she might look the elder. I’ll have to be on my guard then, she had warned herself. Young girls will be setting their caps at him. I’ll seem to them exceedingly autumnal.

  ‘Had a good day?’ she asked.

  ‘Like all my days.’

  ‘No high affairs of state?’

  ‘Not on my humble level.’

  He hung his coat upon a hanger. He came up the stairs with a light bouyant stride, two steps at a time. He put an arm round her shoulders. He drew her close against him; his cheek against hers was a little rough, but though he was dark, he did not look quarter-shaven, and there was about him a fresh air of soap and toilet water.

  ‘Kitty Severod rang up,’ she said.

  ‘She did? What was on her mind?’

  ‘She wanted us to dine on Friday.’

  ‘And can we?’

  ‘Unless you’ve anything arranged.’

  ‘Me, on a Friday? What an idea. The Severods. That’ll be fun. It’s a long time since we’ve met.’

  ‘That was what she said.’

  She almost added: ‘She saw you from the top of a bus this afternoon. That’s what made her think of us.’ She did not though. Something held her back. She was wondering whether he would tell her on his own account what project had taken him two miles from his desk and telephone.

  He was carrying two parcels, one small and one large and flat. He handed her the large one. ‘A record that I thought you’d like; the other one’s for Jerry.’

  Jerry was their daughter, four years old. Their son Frank would be two next month. ‘Let’s go up,’ he said.

  Their house was three-storeyed; the nursery quarters were on the second and third floors. They had had the good fortune to find two Swedish au pair girls, who looked after the children and ran the house, leaving Myra to do the cooking. ‘It’s all too good to last,’ Myra kept saying. But it had lasted for two years, and the girls seemed happy. They were cheerful, healthy creatures who liked bicycling over the Heath. They did not seem to have any boy friends. ‘I’ve an idea,’ said Victor,‘that they’re more interested in their own sex than the other.’

  Jerry jumped to her feet as they came in. She ran towards her father, arms spread wide. ‘Dadsey man, Dadsey man,’ she cried. His return every night was the big moment of her day. As often as not he brought her back a present, something appropriately fragile and inexpensive that would amuse her for ten minutes and next morning be forgotten. He handed her the packet, She tore it open. It was a toy he had bought her in the street, an ostrich that you wound and that darted its head forward as it walked. ‘Dadsey, I love it. Thank you, thank you, thank you.’

  Her father went down on his knees beside her. He had hitched up his trousers before kneeling down, but there was no sign of guardee starchiness as he assisted his daughter’s efforts to control the toy that pranced uncertainly across the carpet. ‘What a clumsy fellow,’ he exclaimed. ‘We’d better send him to a dancing class.’ Myra smiled fondly. What a father he’s going to be, she thought.

  She turned to the far corner where Frank, before being put to bed, was being fed his final bottle. Lena, the younger of the two Swedish girls, was cradling him against her shoulder, murmuring softly in his ear. She was blonde and slim and tall, with a clean, clear complexion. She was barely twenty-one. She adored Frank. She was very feminine, the kind of girl any man would go for. Was it really true what Victor had suggested? Myra looked across the room at the other girl. She knew from her passport that Anna was only twenty-six. But she looked thirty. She was blonde too, almost flaxen, but she was less tall. She had a firm, almost protuberant jaw and heavy haunches. Her eyes were very blue; and she had the complexion that is known as typically Swedish. She would have been a strikingly handsome man. Even as it was, Myra could imagine some men falling for her. She had a commanding presence, but her smile was welcoming. She gave the impression that she found life fun, something to be enjoyed, that she was eager to have others enjoy it with her.

  It must have been easy for Lena, who was younger not only in years but in experience, to fall under her influence. But surely, at base, Lena was completely feminine. She was certain to shake out of it, to find her true nature, her true destiny through a man. And Anna … what happened to Anna then? … Move on to another Lena?

  Myra looked across the room to Anna. Anna seemed so relaxed, so self-fulfilled. She had accepted her particular, her peculiar destiny, had come to realise that the Lenas of the world moved on, that there were always other Lenas; until one became old oneself, but then wasn’t that the human lot … had not the psalmist said just that? We are old who once were young …

  Myra mentally shook herself. What on earth was she doing, following this sultry daydream! She looked from Anna to Lena and then back again. Was it true what Victor had suggested? She tried to picture them together … the attempt sent a spasm of prurient curiosity along her nerves. What was it precisely that they did together?

  The Trails dined alone three or four nights a week. This night was one of them. After they had said goodnight to the children, Victor mixed a martini. Usually while they drank it, they would put on records. Music was very special for them. After their cocktail, Myra would prepare dinner while he bathed and changed. ‘What was that record you brought back?’ she asked.

  ‘Aaron Copland’s latest. I think you’ll like it.’

  She did; but she found it difficult to concentrate her attention on it. She was still curious about the afternoon. It was too late now to question him. She had been stupid perhaps not to have told him at the start, but she rather enjoyed knowing something about him that he did not know she knew.

  It was a short record, a bare seven minutes. Ordinarily she would have asked him to put on another. But she was still fretted by uncertainty.

  ‘You remember that novelist we met the other evening at the Strouds,’ she said.

  ‘Of course. Ralph Symons. I picked up one of his novels in the Athenaeum the other day. It looked entertaining. I wished I had had time to read it.’

  ‘I always read him. I asked him why so many of his characters were in jobs that had to do with writing, advertising, publishing, the BBC or films. He said it was the only kind of job that he knew anything about. “It’s a problem,” he said. “One of my greatest problems. I wish I didn’t have to write about that kind of person. I’m always afraid that because my heroes are alike, my books will seem alike. Perhaps they are. I wish I could write about stockbrokers and chartered accountants. But I don’t know anything about them.”

  ‘ “But you must,” I said, “know some stockbrokers and accountants.”

  ‘ “Of course, naturally …”

  ‘ “Can’t you ask them?” I said. He shook his head. “I do, but the answers that they give don’t help me. They say it would all sound boring. Routine stuff, they say. ‘It isn’t boring to us because our lives depend on it; you have to be a part of it to understand.’ And that, of course, is what one needs to be if one’s going to put a character into a novel; one has to be a part of his life, to see it from the inside. I can’t do that. I have to be devious. In the novel I’m writing now, my chief character is an underwriter at Lloyd’s, and I’m going to try to make his problems real by showing them through his wife’s eyes. She’ll be wondering about him. As she’s arranging the flowers in the drawing room, she’ll be saying to herself. ‘It’s ten o’clock. He’ll have finished going through his mail. What kind of a mail was it? He told me that he was worried about the insurance of that new estate; will there be any answer about that?’ You see the kind of thi
ng I mean. I’ll make him real because he’s so real to her. Yet I don’t know about him basically, nor does she. You see my point?” Of course I saw it and what do you think I said to him?’

  ‘You tell me what you said to him.’

  ‘I said, “That’s exactly how I feel about my husband. I’ve no idea what it is that he’s doing in that office of his. I hardly ever see any of the men he works with. Half the wives I know are expected to entertain their husbands’ business friends. In America a firm insists on seeing an applicant’s wife before it takes him on. It wants to know whether she’ll be a liability or an asset. It isn’t like that in England, at least not in the high echelons of the Civil Service. ‘Keep your home and your office separate,’ Victor says. ‘I don’t want to see in the evening the people I’ve been with all day long. You can choose your friends, after all. You can’t choose your opposite number in a ministry.’ “ Isn’t that what you do say, Victor?’

  He laughed. She was speaking lightly in the teasing way that she knew he found attractive. She assumed the role of the irresponsible female. The directness of her finishing school in Switzerland had described her once as papillon, a bird-brain. It made her a good foil for him.

  ‘What else could I say?’ he answered. ‘That is the way it is.’

  ‘And if I were to ask you exactly what you had been doing today, hour by hour, there wouldn’t be anything in the whole day worth recounting. Just another day like any other.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Exactly. But it couldn’t have been a day like any other. If he had made a practice of going out to the Brompton Road he would certainly have mentioned it, at some time or another before now. But he never had.

  She finished her martini, then stood up. ‘Time I was getting along with that sole Amandine.’

  In the kitchen she thought, Something is going on that he doesn’t tell me. For the first time in five years of marriage she had a presentiment of trouble.