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their departed host? In all the turmoil since, Mary’s answer to those questions had not budged an inch. It wasn’t sex, it wasn’t love, it wasn’t envy and it wasn’t friendship. It was conspiracy. Mary was not fanciful. But Mary had seen and she knew. They were a pair of murderers telling each other “soon” and the soon was about Magnus. Soon we shall have him. Soon his hubris will be purged and our honour restored. I saw them hate him, thought Mary. She had thought it then, she thought it now.
    â€œGrant is a Cassius looking for a Caesar,” Magnus had said. “If he doesn’t find a back to stab soon, the Agency will give his dagger to someone else.”
    Yet in diplomacy nothing lasts, nothing is absolute, a conspiracy to murder is no grounds for endangering the flow of conversation. Chatting busily, talking children and shopping—hunting frantically for an explanation for the Lederers’ bad look—waiting, above all, for Magnus to return to the party and re-enchant his end of the table in two languages at once—Mary still found time to wonder whether this urgent telephone call from London might be the one her husband had been waiting for all these weeks. She had known for some while that he had something big going on, and she was praying it was the promised reinstatement.
    And it was at this moment, as Mary remembered it while she was still chatting and still praying for her husband’s luck to change, that she felt his fingertips skip knowingly over her naked shoulders as he returned to his place at the head of the table. She hadn’t even heard the door, though she’d been listening for it.
    â€œEverything all right, darling?” she called to him over the candelabra, playing it openly because the Pyms were so frightfully happily married.
    â€œHer Maj in good shape, Magnus?” she heard Grant enquire in his insinuating drawl. “No rickets? Croup?”
    Pym’s smile was radiant and relaxed but that didn’t always mean too much, as Mary knew. “Just one of Whitehall’s little rumbles, Grant,” he replied with magnificent casualness. “I think they must have a spy here who tells them when I’m giving a dinner party. Darling, are we out of claret? Jolly mingy rations, I must say.”
    Oh, Magnus, she had thought excitedly: you chancer.
    It was time to get the women upstairs for a pee before coffee. The Frau Oberregierungsrat, who held herself to be modern, was inclined to resist. A scowl from her husband dislodged her. But Bee Lederer, who by this time in the evening was disposed to become the great American feminist—Bee left like a lamb, peremptorily handed out by her sexy little husband.
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    â€œNow comes the punch,” says Jack Brotherhood contentedly, in Mary’s imagination.
    â€œThere is no punch.”
    â€œThen why are we shaking, dear?” says Brotherhood.
    â€œI’m not shaking. I’m just pouring myself a small drink waiting for you to arrive. You know I always shake.”
    â€œI’ll have mine straight, please, same as you. Just give it me the way it happened. No ice, no fizz, no bullshit.”
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    Very well then, damn you, have it.
    The night is ending as perfectly as it began. In the hall Mary and Magnus help the guests to their coats and Mary cannot help noticing how Magnus, whose life is service, stiffens his arms and curls his fingers with each successfully negotiated sleeve. Magnus has invited the Lederers to linger but Mary has covertly countermanded this by telling Bee, with a giggle, that Magnus needs an early night. The hall empties. The diplomatic Pyms, ignoring the cold—they are English after all—stand valiantly on their doorstep and wave farewell. Mary has an arm around Pym’s waist and she is secretly poking her thumb inside the waistband of his trousers at the back and down the partition of his buttocks. Magnus does not resist her.