For the Good of the State

Strangers in the mirror, thought Tom. Last night we were lovers, but now we’re worse than enemies, we’re strangers. He moved again, staring at himself. And here’s another stranger, too!

He sat down on the dressing-table stool and began to take off his shoes, half-fearful that he might find cloven- hooves in them, with the toe-caps filled with devil’s oakum, as in the old Polish fairy-tale Mamusia had told him years ago. ‘But it isn’t in the hotel car park, is it?’

Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State

‘They gave me a Metro, Tom.’

They? ‘Yes. I suppose a Caddy would have been a bit obvious, at that.’ Now he was down to his trousers. But, very strangely, the brutal stranger inside him was embarrassed, as the old Tom had never been—just as the stranger on the bed had been embarrassed about her slipped shoulder-strap.

‘You’ve been checking out the place, then?’

It was a curiously innocent question, delivered in a voice which had suddenly become curiously shaky, ‘Not well enough, apparently.’ There had been a Metro in the car park: a silver MG

Metro, B-registered. But there had been no Wilhemina Groot in the hotel register to match it, of course.

‘W-what took you… so long?’

He remembered his pyjamas—the pyjamas he hadn’t worn last night. Mamusia’s Christmas-tree present from last year, still in their festive wrapper: Christian Dior, Midnight Blue, finest silk.

They were the natural partners of the thing the blonde stranger on the rugger pitch was wearing. And they were in his case in the dressing-room. ‘I was checking the place out—not well enough—’

He threw the words over his shoulder as he found Mamusia’s unopened present ‘ —I just told you.’

They? he thought again. The odds said CIA, but he couldn’t take that for granted. All he knew was what Audley had already concluded, that too many people already knew too much.

‘I mean—’ She threw the words back at him, out of the bedroom

‘—what took you so long to the hotel, Tom honey?’

Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State He ripped the wrapper savagely—ridiculous things—

(‘They’re lovely, Mamusia dear. But you know I don’t wear pyjamas.’)

(‘But you should have them nevertheless, my darling. Whenever you go away… if there is a fire. Or a husband knocking on your door. Or… on your wedding night, my darling… there is a moment of delicacy—’)

“There was a pile-up on the motorway, just before the Taunton intersection, Miss Groot.‘ Mamusia cherished a long love-hate relationship with the idea of her only son’s hypothetical marriage: she didn’t want to be a mother- in-law, but she wanted a daughter-in-law to dress and dominate; and she didn’t want to be a grandmother, but she dearly wanted a grandchild to mould, having failed with Tom himself. ’We were held up for an hour or more.‘

What twisted his heart now, as the silk slid up his legs, was that of all the possibles, Willy Groot (the former occupant of the stranger on the rugger pitch) would have resisted Mamusia best, both as a wife and a mother. But that was water under the bridge, now and for ever. ’As a matter of fact, I wondered whether it was your Cadillac which had piled up.‘ The memory of Mamusia’s ambitions and his own was swallowed up in the more recent and far more horrific image of obscenely mangled metal, and the false fairyland of flashing blue and red lights, as the fluorescent-coated policemen had at last flagged him from one clogged motorway lane to another with angry urgency on the edge of the disaster area.

Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State

’Because you came by me like a bat out of hell.‘ The coincidence of the Cadillac vanished as he thought about it: there was only one road westwards, so they had both taken it, quite naturally; the only questionable unresolved coincidence was Willy Groot’s relationship with Tom Arkenshaw, which now must be questioned and resolved. ’If that was your Cadillac, Miss Groot, I take it?‘

No answer. So he surveyed himself in the full-length Princess Diana bridal mirror in the emptiness of her silence—

Yes… well, in Mamusia’s custom-built pyjamas, at least he looked like he was taking the bridegroom’s role, if not Hamlet’s father’s—

‘Such was the very armour he put on—’

It was like Peter Beckett had said in Lebanon, that last time: everyone knew the big Hamlet speeches, but the part most people knew, and the lines, were those of Horatio—

‘So frown’d he once, when, in angry parle, He smote the sledded Polack on the ice —’

‘It probably was.’ Her voice came to him almost in a whisper from the bedroom. ‘We had a Marine captain driving us, from the embassy guards, who said he’d driven in the Indianapolis race.’

At least it hadn’t been that bloody USN fellow! thought Tom. Not Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State that this poor frowning Anglo-Polack needed to worry about that now.

‘He did drive rather fast,’ the small voice concluded.

Tom dismissed himself from the mirror. Whichever self that was, it didn’t matter—it didn’t matter any more than who had got her here, Navy man or Marine, one jump or two ahead of him. Why she was here, and to what CIA end, was all that mattered. And it wasn’t one of Mamusia’s ‘moments of delicacy’ now, either.

He switched off the dressing-room light and re-entered the bedroom, squaring his shoulders in preparation for what had to be done.

She had moved, but only slightly, to face him from her pillows.

The glossy magazine had disappeared, but the disgusting little pistol still lay where she’d thrown it. And now she was biting her lip, as though readying herself mentally for that freebie, with which they’d each insulted the other. And she also looked much smaller, and heart-rendingly less confident, than the tough Wilhemina Groot he’d left this morning on Ranulf’s defences.

‘Okay, then.’ The old Tom would have been into that inviting bed faster than light. But Tom the Stranger had other fish to fry first, and merely sat on the end of it. ‘So why was I one-hundred-percent wrong, Willy?’ Almost to his surprise, he discovered that Tom the Stranger wasn’t stupid.

She stopped biting her lip, but he could see that she hadn’t expected him to go back to an answer he’d already