Letters for a Spy by Stephen Benatar Read Free Book Online Page B

said before, but if only time could sometimes stand still just for a minute —But that line of thought is too pointless. Pull your socks up, Syb, & dont be such a fool.
    “Your letter made me feel slightly better—but I shall get horribly conceited if you go on saying things like that about me—they’re utterly unlike ME, as I’m afraid you’ll soon find out. Here I am for the weekend in this divine place with Mummy & Jane being too sweet & understanding the whole time, bored beyond words & panting for Monday so that I can get back to my crowd of silly females, not always that sweet & not always that understanding. What an idiotic waste!
    “Bill darling, do let me know as soon as you get fixed & can make some more plans, & dont please let them send you off into the blue the horrible way they do nowadays—now that we’ve found each other out of the whole world I dont think I could bear it—
    “All my love,
    “Sybella.”
    And, as had happened on every single occasion I had read the letter, I thought it odd about the lack of apostrophes in certain places and about the way she always used an ampersand. Could she honestly believe that it saved time? Perhaps in England this represented a revived style of letter-writing. Mr Martin had adopted it, as well, although I couldn’t see William’s father as being someone generally influenced by fads—nor, indeed, very much aware of them. But actually he had used an ampersand both in his personal and his business correspondence. (Lord Mountbatten hadn’t; nor had Sir Archibald Nye; though was this because typewriters had been to the fore here, rather than plain fountain pens?) And I supposed, of course, that you could always put it down to mere coincidence.
    Yet that sounded grudging—and why, all of a sudden, should I have chosen to sound grudging? Good heavens, wasn’t I well aware of the astonishing frequency of this kind of coincidence? How often had I come across a word or a name unknown to me on one day, and then, in some wholly unrelated context, heard it again the very next? Ironically enough, the word ampersand itself was an example. At least temporarily, therefore, the Sybella and J.G. Martin thing could be filed away—without too much fret and too much fuss—under the codename: Operation Ampersand.
    In fact, just had to be.
    For how could they possibly have influenced one another? I acknowledged that they might have corresponded—once, perhaps?—but even this I somewhat doubted; and, anyhow, just a single brief exchange could hardly have accounted for it.
    Instinctively, I didn’t believe that they’d have met. Not that, if they had, meetings were in any way germane to writing styles, unless they had actually sat down together and zealously drawn up guidelines on how to achieve epistolary excellence in six easy lessons.
    Which—I had to admit—didn’t seem likely.
    Otherwise, we were back with coincidence.
    Or, maybe, with just one last tenuous option: Bill Martin as common denominator?
    Because if the major himself had employed such a style of writing, wasn’t it feasible that both his father and his fiancée, whether consciously or unconsciously, should at some stage have fallen in with it? Out of sheer admiration and a wish to emulate. Possibly unrecognized.
    And out of affection, too, of course. Out of love.
    But then I was struck by something else. Could Sybella and J.G. Martin have ever met? I still strongly doubted it, but how long did you normally delay a meeting between your fiancée and your father? Weren’t you rather keen to have it happen? At the very least, wasn’t your father rather keen to have it happen? And that engraving on the ring revealed, incontestably, the date of the engagement. 14.4.43.
    Which led us on to another point. Mr Martin had written to his solicitor on 10 th April. “I have considered your recent letter concerning the Settlement that I intend to make on the occasion of William’s marriage.” Which definitely