‘Good God, did you really mean it then?’ she inquired.
‘Would I joke about marriage?’ he replied with another question.
She reached out and touched him casually.
‘Are you sure it’s not just that?’ she asked.
He looked down.
‘I want to marry you in spite of that,’ he grinned.
‘You’re not built for monogamy, Marcus,’ she told him.
‘The only time I have been with another woman since you came to London is when you have been away for weeks on end,’ he said.
She knew it was the truth. He had not lied. She would not have believed him if he had said that there had been no one else at all.
He went on: ‘You’re not away so much now and I believe I can control myself ... if you can.’
He grinned at her. He had no illusions either.
‘Touché,’ she said.
He lightly kissed one of her breasts. The touch of his lips never failed to make her flesh tingle.
‘When I can have you there is nothing and no one else. We have the best sex in the world.’
‘Anything else?’
‘What else is there?’
She wasn’t even sure he was joking.
‘Well, for example, do you love me?’
She looked inquiringly into his eyes. They were sparkling. They almost always were.
‘To distraction,’ he said.
In the morning he was ecstatic. Even more like Marcus than usual. Later in the office, a delivery boy arrived laden down with great boxes of lily of the valley. She had once told him they were her favourite flowers. It was only years afterwards that she discovered that lily of the valley are lethally poisonous.
There was a note asking her to join him for lunch at Langans. She did so joyfully. The next couple of weeks were wonderful. They partied with their friends and they partied without them. They planned their future together. They started house-hunting. They both wanted a big town house somewhere very central; they wanted children, too, but not yet. Marcus had convinced himself that he deeply desired a normal family life, and that he could have that in spite of all the things about him which might seem to conspire against it.
Jennifer and Marcus were the couple the whole of London envied. Years later, Jennifer could never remember whether she had had any suspicions about Marcus at that time. Had she really taken him so much at face value? Had she never suspected that he had an under-life? She wasn’t sure. One occasion did stick in her head, however. Shortly after agreeing to marry him, she had decided to confront him again with some of her lurking doubts. Marcus often took phone calls behind closed doors, sometimes in the dead of night. He was always vague about his movements, going missing without explanation for hours on end, occasionally overnight.
She had blurted out her anxieties to him about his behaviour, the anxieties that had been with her ever since the early days in Pelham Bay, the way she often wondered how he could have made so much money in such a short time, how he seemed able to fix anything and everything so effortlessly, and how she still fretted about Irene and her disappearance and what it continued to mean to both of them.
‘Nothing,’ Marcus had replied shortly. ‘Irene’s disappearance means nothing to either of us any more. If I could ever have done anything about it, I would have done, but I am not going to let it ruin my life — or yours.
‘And as for being successful, have you ever noticed how hard I work?’
It was true. He did work hard, and he was clever, but was there more to it than that?
‘OK,’ she said. ‘But there is something going on in your life that’s a secret and you won’t let me know about and there always has been.’
She paused. Typically he said nothing to fill the pause.
‘I want to know once and for all if it’s another woman,’ she said.
He chuckled then and told her not to be ridiculous, but she persisted in cross-examining him.
‘All I can think of is that you have been having an affair all these years with someone who is unavailable, a married woman, and if it’s not that, what the hell is it?’ she asked.
He sighed. He had to tell her something because he knew she would not let him off the hook now, and he also knew, another born politician’s skill, how to appear to give way while actually giving next to nothing.
‘OK, you silly cow,’ he said affectionately. ‘I’m a Freemason, that’s all.’
‘You’re a what?’ Jennifer was stunned, she felt her head rock back on her shoulders.
‘I’m a Freemason,’ he repeated, with a small smile. ‘You’re supposed to keep things secret, that’s half the idea of it.’
‘Good God,’ she said. This made sense of so much, but it was still curious. From the little she knew of the Masons and the great deal she felt she knew of Marcus, he was the last man in the world she would have expected to join.
‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me before?’ she asked. ‘Surely you could have told me that?’
‘I thought you’d laugh,’ he said. Clever as ever, he decided to play it lightly now.
‘I don’t know about that,’ she said. ‘All I know about the Masons is that my father would never join them — because he believed they were a cartel who look after their own at the expense of anything and anybody else inside and outside the law.’
She looked at him questioningly. He seemed more than a tiny bit sheepish. Well, he would be, wouldn’t he? Apart from anything else, Marcus liked to give the impression he had carved his life and career singlehandedly with help from no one. Only he would know the degree of assistance he had had from Masons in high places, and, heaven forbid — she thought back to that first job so readily offered her by Marcus’s newspaper — the help she had unknowingly received.
Marcus was not rising to the bait. ‘We all need a bit of a helping hand now and again,’ he said casually. ‘All you are talking about is a group of hard-working men who will support each other through thick and thin. What’s wrong with that?’
She didn’t understand enough about the Masons to know whether that was more or less the sum of it or not. She merely nodded and said: ‘You’ve been a member since Pelham, haven’t you?’
He shrugged his agreement.
‘Fascinating,’ she said, the journalist in her taking over now. ‘How much help have they really given you, then?’
For a moment Marcus frowned and looked as if he might be about to say something in anger. Instead he decided to stick to the light approach.
‘Oh, you’d never guess the half of it,’ he said. ‘I mean, I’m so useless at the job I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes as a hack, let alone anything else, without help, would I?’
She raised her hands in defeat. Marcus was a quite brilliant journalist who had always been destined for the top, and that was one of his many attractions to her. So he was a Freemason. That didn’t really bother her much, although she would have preferred to have known all along. Mind you, she could see how he would be embarrassed by it. She asked some more questions. Some he would answer, some he wouldn’t.
Yes, of course he went to regular lodge meetings, and that probably accounted for most of what she described as his mysterious disappearances. Yes, he had to admit that he had joined because he thought it would do his career good and he didn’t see the need to apologise for that. No, he could not and would not tell her how he came to join. Masons had to be invited, they couldn’t just apply; if he told her who had invited him he would be breaking his oath.