A Spy in the Family Page 2

  2

  They arrived at the Severods’ on Friday after eight. Myra would have preferred to get there punctually, but Victor with his invincible respect for protocol was insistent that one should never be less than five or more than fifteen minutes late. In consequence four of the guests were already there. That left very little opportunity for the conversation between Victor and his hostess that would with any luck refer to that glimpse of him from the top of a 14 bus.

  Kitty rushed forward with outstretched arms. ‘My dears, am I glad to see you. It has been so long. How have we come to miss each other all this time, with all the friends we have in common? No spare time, yet I don’t know what I’m doing with my time. I was saying all this to Myra on the telephone, and you wouldn’t be here this evening but for chance …’

  Ah, now it comes, thought Myra. She could hear Kitty talking about that glimpse from the top of the 14 bus. Would Victor blush? She had never seen him blush. She had never seen him discomposed. What would happen then? Would he let it pass, accept as the most natural thing in the world that he should be walking down the Brompton Road at three o’clock on a March afternoon? Probably he would. But what would he say afterwards to her? With her he couldn’t let it pass, or could he? Make no reference to it; ignore it. If he did, that left it up to her. Do I then let it pass? How can I, after all I’ve said?

  ‘The purest chance,’ Kitty was hurrying on. ‘I couldn’t have been more surprised—’ Now here it comes, thought Myra. But the sentence was never finished. Again the door was opened. The last couple was coming forward. Kitty had broken away. Once again her arms were flung out wide. ‘Darlings, how glad I am to see you.’

  The moment had passed. Myra was reminded of a play by J. B. Priestley called Dangerous Corner. It had shown how a happy family that included several couples suddenly stumbled upon a secret that ruined all their lives. Everything was brought into the open. Nothing could be the same again. The hero committed suicide. Just before the curtain fell one of the characters said, If that secret had never come out, we’d all have gone on quietly with our lives. We’d have lived through our problems, accepted the compromises that have been forced on us. It wouldn’t have been perfect but we’d have stayed together, ignorant about the things that we wouldn’t have had the strength to take. So many things are better hidden.

  To the audience, that had seemed the message of the play, the play was over. Then to everyone’s surprise the curtain went up again. The action returned to the first act, with the women coming into the drawing room after dinner. The same action identically, except that it was compressed. Within a few minutes it had reached the point when the process of revelation had begun. It had concerned a cigarette box that one of the women recognised. Another woman had said, How could you have seen it, when, where, how? That had started the fatal interrogation which once embarked upon could not be abandoned, which had to run its course to its disastrous conclusion.

  Once again in this retake, that decisive moment had been reached; the woman had recognised the box, but before she could speak, there was a burst of music. The play had been written in the early days of radio; one of the characters had been fiddling with a recalcitrant set. His efforts suddenly succeeded. A fox trot blared across the room. ‘Come on, let’s dance,’ he said. The play had been written in the day when one rolled back carpets. The two women stood staring at each other, defiantly, distrustfully; but already one of them had been claimed by a partner. General talk was ended. The dangerous corner had been turned, been passed forever.

  Was this such a moment, Myra wondered. Would she in time to come think: ‘thank heavens Victor was spared being put to embarrassment—to more than embarrassment maybe; to being exposed in public’? Or would she later come to think: ‘if only there had been that exposure then … if only we could have cleared the air. Oughtn’t I to have told him right away? Why was I secretive and so coy?’

  She closed her eyes. She shook her head. She was out of her depth, suddenly….

  The Severods were members of the Wine and Food Society. That was their main link with Victor, and there was always a good deal of talking about wine at their dinner parties. Myra made the best of it. Very dry martinis were what she really liked. She actually preferred drinking before meals. She enjoyed gourmet food, and she had noticed that wine connoisseurs were on the whole indifferent to what they ate, provided it did not interfere with the pleasure of their wine. They seemed to think the perfect dinner was turtle soup, roast beef, and a cheese soufflé. But she enjoyed a glass or two of wine; and so that she could share Victor’s hobby with him, she had made herself reasonably knowledgeable. She was not bored when Victor and his friends began to talk about years and vintages.

  As always at the Severods’, the red wines had been decanted and there were two different types of glass so that one wine could be tasted against another. With the fish course—a prawn cocktail—there had been, to prepare the way, a light white wine of no particular quality. Now on each plate a small plump piece of steak reposed on a piece of toast that had been spread with pâté. Two decanters of red wine went around the table. ‘Now we get down to business,’ the host said. ‘Let’s first take the wine in the right-hand glass. Victor, what would you say this was?’

  Victor went through the ritual. The glass was two-thirds full. He lifted it against the light; he rotated the wine so that minute drops ran down the inner side. He lifted the glass beneath his nostrils. He took a long sniff. He closed his eyes ruminantly, lowered the glass again, then raised it to his lips. The sip he took was quite a big one. He held the wine in his mouth. He gave the impression that he was rinsing his teeth with it. Then he put the glass back on to the table. ‘It’s excellent,’ he said.

  ‘No one, I hope, is going to contradict you there. But what would you say it is?’

  Once again Victor went through the ritual. He shook his head. ‘This is just a guess. I’d say it was a Burgundy. A fairly young one, a ‘62 perhaps and a rather light one. Not as big as a Côte de Nuits. A Santenay perhaps.’

  Severod laughed. ‘That’s what I hoped you’d say. It’s not a bad shot and it is a ‘62; but as a matter of fact it isn’t a Burgundy at all. It’s a Bordeaux—a St. Emilion, which as I don’t need to tell you, can be very like a Burgundy in a hot summer. We’ve most of us heard our fathers talk about that incredibly hot summer of’ 21.’

  ‘When the Australian bowlers spread such havoc on those fast wickets.’

  ‘Exactly. People talk about the Yquem ‘21, and there is still a little of it left; but in the thirties the Cheval Blanc’ 21 was fetching higher prices than Margaux and Latour. It was as rich and heavy as a Burgundy.’

  ‘What was this St. Emilion by the way?’

  ‘Something you may not have heard of … a Château Canon.’

  ‘Oddly enough, I came across a bottle a few weeks ago.’ Myra’s attention was alerted; ‘a few weeks ago.’ When could that have been? She did not remember that there had been talk about such a wine at any of the dinners they had attended. Surely she would have remembered if there had; she always took note of what was said at dinner, refreshing her memory afterwards. Château Canon, St. Emilion. It must, she supposed, have been at one of his tastings at the Athenaeum. But had there been a tasting recently? A week ago she would have let the moment pass. How could she be expected to know when and where her husband drank what with whom? But now she was on her guard. There was something in her husband’s life she did not know about. Something he did not want her to know about.

  Don’t be an ass, she told herself. It could have happened in so many ways. How easy for two or three other members of a club to say over a lunch table: I’m told that there’s an excellent St. Emilion on the list. Why not have a bottle up and try?’ Of course that’s how it had happened. All the same, she vowed, I’m going to have a look at that Athenaeum wine list.

  Her chance came the following week. They were giving a small lunch party in the Ladies’ Annexe, as was their custo
m once a month or so. It was an easy way of returning hospitality. It had been Victor’s idea. Without a cook, it was difficult for Myra to have more than another couple to dine to Hampstead. ‘Serving a dinner for six means your being in the kitchen all the time,’ he said. ‘If people are going to drag themselves all the way to Hampstead, they want to see their hostess.’

  Myra arrived at the club a quarter of an hour early. Victor always ordered the meal and the wines himself, but she had been there now so often that she had got to know the staff.

  ‘I wonder,’ she asked the barman, ‘if I could see the wine list.’ She looked down the row of clarets. No, no Chateau Canon. But then she reminded herself this was the abbreviated Annexe list. ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance,’ she said, ‘but I wonder if I could see the full club list. There’s something that I’d like to ask my husband.’

  The full list was five times as big as the Annexe one. But there was no Chateau Canon there. She closed her eyes. Keep your head now, she adjured herself, you are being ridiculous. There was a play by a man called Shakespeare about a jealous Moor.

  The sky was blue. The sun was warm upon her cheeks but the air had a keen spring bite. It would be nice on the Heath this afternoon, She would take Jerry out there after tea. But as she paused for a lorry to pass at the corner of Pall Mall, she noticed a westbound No. 14 bus swinging around the curve of the Haymarket. There was a bus stop twenty yards to her left. It must be three years since she had been down the Brompton Road. London changed so fast. There might well be a reason now why a Treasury official should be walking down it on a weekday, at three o’clock. It was worth trying anyhow; anything was worth trying that might allay this worry.

  To her left, Sloane Street stretched straight and broad towards the start of the King’s Road. The bus swung to the right, through the Knightsbridge traffic jam. On the left was the imposing red brick façade of Harrods, dominating the scene just as it had when she was a girl, and on the other side there was the raised pavement, so that its succession of small smart boutiques could stand upon the level, before the ground sloped up its gentle rise to the top of Montpelier Square. Beyond and above the gracious Georgian lines of Brompton Square was the dome of the Oratory and, in between, the red glazed tiles that proved that a tube station had once stood there. Her father had pointed it out to her many years ago. ‘All over London you’ll see red tiles like that, particularly on the Piccadilly line. One station has had to do the work of two, so instead of Dover Street, Down Street, Park Lane, Brompton Road, you have Green Park and Knightsbridge, and South Kensington. That’s what we call progress.’

  She had always remembered his saying that. She had ever since been on the lookout for red glazed tiles. How little had she thought then that she would be remembering it, fifteen years later, as a married woman with a fierce dread niggling at her. She had pictured herself then as being married, with a child or two and a handsome husband who came back each evening from the office with the papers under his arm—just as her father had. With herself just as her mother was, contented and fulfilled. She had not pictured any other future. And two weeks ago it had seemed that that very picture was in focus, but now, but now …

  She got down from the bus. She walked slowly up the street on the west side. Yes, it must be over five years since she had been here. There was no occasion. She had friends in Kensington and friends in Chelsea, but coming down from Hampstead, her needs when she came by tube were served by Knightsbridge and South Kensington. She might have been driven through it in a taxi, not noticing such changes as there were. But she had certainly never walked down here. There were several new restaurants on the opposite side. They looked good and far from cheap. Was it in one of those that Victor had encountered Chateau Canon? The small boutiques on the raised pavement had probably changed their owners, but there was no apparent difference; and behind them was the same cluster of quiet streets that led into Montpelier Square. She turned up Montpelier Street. This part of London had always had a glamour for her, because of The Forsyte Saga. Soames and Irene had made their home here. Soames had been very happy at the start, till Bosinney had come, till Irene had realised that she needed more than Soames could offer her. Montpelier Square had not changed since Galsworthy had set his story there. For all the reconstruction that was being carried on elsewhere, the spirit of London reigned in this quiet square, just as in spite of the discoveries of science, the same dramas were being evolved between individual Londoners. The perpetual triangle. What else but another woman could have brought Victor here at such a time?

  At the head of the street, left of the Hyde Park Hotel was a succession of large rectangular buildings. There was a similar succession of buildings on the south side. Some of them, the majority of them probably, were offices, but there must be many flats. How simple it would be for Victor to lunch with one of the residents of those flats at one of those elegantly discreet restaurants. It was a typical situation out of The Forsyte Saga. There had been so many references to ‘unhallowed lovers’; but in Galsworthy, they had remained ‘unhallowed.’ The career of a man like Victor would have been ruined by a divorce. It would not be today. And in those days, the other woman was resigned to being in the background of a man’s life—what was that novel … Back Street—she would not be today. Myra shivered mentally. A cold wind was blowing.

  She had planned originally to get home in time to take Jerry for a walk, but nursery tea was at four. It had been cleared away by the time she was back and Lena had already gone out with Jerry and the baby. Anna was alone, reading beside the fire.

  ‘They went out half an hour ago,’ she said. ‘They should be back within twenty minutes.’ Anna had vowed on her arrival that she would rid herself of her Swedish accent before her assignment was completed. She had almost but not quite succeeded. The slight northern inflection gave her voice a lilt that Myra found attractive.

  ‘Do you mind if I sit down?’ she asked.

  ‘But of course not, please.’

  ‘I hardly ever seem to see you.’

  Anna smiled. ‘Isn’t that the way it is in families, always being with people but never really seeing them? It’s what my sister says about her marriage. Her husband makes his own breakfast, then rushes off to work. He gets back late in the evening, exchanges half a dozen words with her, then either they have guests or they go out to friends; at parties husband and wife are never allowed to sit or stand next to each other. When they are home, at the end of it he remembers that he has to get up early the next morning and goes straight to bed.’

  ‘That’s something I’ve been on my guard against. We try not to go out more than four times a week.’

  ‘You’ve been very wise.’

  That was what she had thought. But had she been? Perhaps Victor was bored, coming back evening after evening to the same armchair, the LP records with his martini, the TV afterwards.

  ‘Though we never have a chance of talking,’ Myra said, ‘I do hope that you realise how much we both appreciate what you are doing for the children.’

  ‘It’s easy to be helpful for such charming children.’

  She smiled as she said that. She had a warm, open smile.

  ‘You are going to be a wonderful mother to some children some day.’

  Anna smiled again. It was still a friendly smile, but it was a rather different one. Myra felt that they were suddenly on another level of communication. ‘Something tells me,’ Anna said, ‘that I shan’t ever be a mother.’ She said it as though there were a hidden meaning behind her words.

  ‘Whatever makes you say that? A young girl as nice to look at as you are.’

  ‘Thank you for that.’ Anna looked at Myra steadily. ‘I’ve an idea,’ she said, ‘that the kind of man to whom I am attracted—and it’s only to one particular type of man that I am attracted—would not be very desirable as a father, even if he would want to be one.’

  Anna was still smiling but her smile was a half smile now. Myra felt oddly tense. Something ext
remely intimate had been said to her. Yet though she felt tense, she had a sense of being surprisingly relaxed.

  ‘Why must you think that?’ she said. ‘You love children. You’re wonderful with children. Couldn’t you find a man who, though he did not attract you quite so much, would be a good father to your children?’

  Anna shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t be a good wife to that kind of man. And it isn’t fair to one’s children to give them the kind of father to whom one can’t be a good wife.’ She paused. Her smile had become almost tender. Myra found herself thinking, She really likes me. How had this conversation come about? Had her own problem, her own confusion made her more human, more approachable? ‘I know myself too well,’ said Anna. ‘I guess that that’s my problem. I know myself far too well.’

  Victor returned at the exact moment he was expected. He was in excellent spirits. ‘That was a delightful lunch, a real success. Don’t you think so? They thoroughly enjoyed themselves. You handled everything so well, as you always do. That’s what makes our parties such fun for me, the knowledge that you’ll do everything as it should be done. So many men must always be uncertain of whether their wives are going to make some ghastly gaffe and spoil the party. Once I’ve ordered the meal and chosen the guests, I can let myself be a guest at my own party. And it’s all due to you. Do I take you for granted? I hope I don’t. But how can I help it sometimes, when you are so perfect?’

  She had risen as he came into the room. He put his arm round her shoulders, drawing her close against him. She could see, reflected in the mirror above the mantelpiece, the perfect young married couple. He was just the right amount taller than she was, four inches when she was in high heels. He looked so elegant, not dapper but well produced, with his creaseless clothes and his close-cut hair; he was one of the few men whom a short clipped moustache genuinely suited. And she, no one could say that she was not considerably more than adequate as a foil for him. She had never thought of herself as a raving beauty; she was not particularly photogenic. But she was unquestionably nice to look at, with her fresh colouring, her short straight nose and her full mouth. There was a wave in her light sandy-coloured hair; she had a trim figure and slim, straight legs. She looked right for him. Whenever, as now, she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror at his side, she felt a warm stir of pride. They looked good together. They set each other off. Or was it merely, she now asked herself in a mood of doubt, that he set her off, that she made a mark in life because she had him with her? He was her justification to the world. She was the woman who had annexed this handsome, effective man. She was what she was because of him.