A Perfect Spy (16 page)

Rick took a wounded line. “You'll just have to put up with your old man for a while. I thought we were having fun then. Aren't we having fun?”

“All the fun in the world,” said Pym.

On the subject of his recent absence Rick was as sparing as the rest of the court, so that soon Pym began to wonder whether they had ever been on holiday at all. Only the occasional hint convinced him that they had shared a cementing experience. Winchester had been worse than Reading because of those bloody gypsies off of Salisbury Plain, Pym once overheard Morrie Washington tell Perce Loft. Syd backed him up. “Those Winchester gyppos was rough you wouldn't believe,” said Syd with feeling. “The screws was no better, either.” And Pym noticed that their holiday had made hearty eaters of them. “Eat your peas now, Magnus,” Syd urged him amid much laughter. “There's worse hotels than this one,
we
can tell you.”

It wasn't till a year or more later, when Pym's vocabulary had grown equal to his intelligence gathering, that he realised they had been talking about prison.

But their leader did not share these jokes and they ceased abruptly, for Rick's
gravitas
was something no man tampered with lightly, least of all those appointed to uphold it. Rick's superiority was manifest in everything he did. In the way he dressed even when we were very broke, his clean laundry and clean shoes. In the food he required and the style to eat it in. The rooms he had in the hotel. In the way he needed brandy for his snooker, and scared everyone into silence with his brooding. In his preoccupation with good works, which involved visiting hospitals where people had taken bad knocks and seeing the old people right while their children were away at the war.

“Will you see Lippsie right too, when the war's over?” Pym asked one day.

“Old Lippsie's crackerjack,” said Rick.

Meanwhile we traded. What in, Pym never rightly knew and nor do I now. Sometimes in rare commodities, such as hams and whisky, sometimes in promises, which the court called Faith. Other times in nothing more solid than the sunny horizons that sparkled ahead of us down the empty wartime roads. When Christmas approached somebody produced sheets of coloured crêpe paper, thousands of them. For days and nights on end, augmented by extra mothers recruited for this vital war-work, Pym and the court crouched in an empty railway carriage at Didcot, twisting the paper into crackers that contained no toys and would not crack, while they told each other wild stories and cooked toast by laying it on top of the paraffin stove. Some of the crackers, it was true, had little wooden soldiers inside them, but these were called “samples” and kept separate. The rest, Syd explained, was for decoration, Titch, like flowers when there isn't any. Pym believed it all. He was the most willing child labourer in the world, so long as there was approval waiting for him round the corner.

Another time they towed a trailer filled with crates of oranges which Pym refused to eat because he overheard Syd saying they were hot. They sold them to a pub on the road to Birmingham. Once they had a load of dead chickens that Syd said they could only move at night when it was cold enough, so perhaps that was what had gone wrong with the oranges. And there is a clip of film running for ever in my memory. It shows a scraggy moonlit hilltop on the moors, and our two cabs with their lights out winding nervously to the crest. And the dark figures standing waiting for us on the back of their lorry. And the masked lamp that counted out the money for Mr. Muspole the great accountant while Syd unloaded the trailer. And though Pym watched from a distance because he hated feathers, no night frontier crossing later in his life was ever more exciting.

“Can we send the money to Lippsie now?” Pym asked. “She hasn't got any left.”

“Now how do you know a thing like that, old son?”

From her letters to you, Pym thought. You left one in your pocket and I read it. But Rick's eyes had their flick-knife glint so he said “I made it up,” and smiled.

Rick did not come on our adventures. He was saving himself. What for was a question nobody asked within Pym's hearing and certainly he never asked it for himself. Rick was devoting himself to his good works, his old people and his hospital visiting. “Is that suit of yours pressed, son?” Rick would say when as a special privilege father and son embarked together on one of these high errands. “God in heaven, Muspole, look at the boy's suit, it's a damned shame! Look at his hair!” Hastily a mother would be ordered to press the suit, another to polish his shoes and get his fingernails proper, a third to comb his hair till it was orderly and sensitive. With flimsy patience Mr. Cudlove tapped his keys on the car roof while Pym was given a final check-over for signs of unintentional irreverence. Then away at last they sped to the house or bedside of some elderly and worthy person, and Pym sat fascinated to see how swiftly Rick trimmed his manner to suit theirs, how naturally he slipped into the cadences and vernacular that put them most at ease, and how the love of God came into his good face when he talked about Liberalism and Masonry and his dear dead father, God rest him, and a first-class rate of return, ten percent guaranteed plus profits for as long as you're spared. Sometimes he brought a ham with him as a gift and was an angel in a hamless world. Sometimes a pair of silk stockings or a box of nectarines, for Rick was always the giver even when he was taking. When he was able Pym threw his own charm into the scales by reciting a prayer he had composed, or singing “Underneath the Arches,” or telling a witty story with a range of regional accents that he had picked up in the course of the crusade. “The Germans are killing all the Jews,” he said once, to great effect. “I've got a friend called Lippsie and all her other friends are dead.” If his performance was wanting, Rick let him know this without brutality. “When somebody like Mrs. Ardmore asks you whether you remember her, son, don't scratch your old head and pull a face. Look her in the eye and smile and say, ‘
Yes.'
That's the way to treat old people,
and
to be a credit to your father. Do you love your old man?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well then. How was your steak last night?”

“It was super.”

“There's not twenty boys in England ate steak last night, do you know that?”

“I know.”

“Give us a kiss then.”

Syd was less reverent. “If you're going to learn to shave people, Magnus,” he said over a lot of winks, “you've got to learn how to rub the soap in first!”

Somewhere near Aberdeen, without warning, the court became interested only in chemists' shops. We were a limited company by then, which to Pym was as good as being a policeman. Rick had found a new banker with Faith, Mr. Cudlove's live-in friend Ollie signed the cheques. And our product was a concoction of dried fruit that we pulped with a handpress in the kitchens of a great country house belonging to a dashing new mother called Cherry. It was a large house with white pillars at the front door and white statues all like Lippsie in the garden. Even in Paradise the court had never stayed anywhere so grand. First we stewed the fruit and pulped it in the press, which was the best bit; then we added gelatine to make lozenges out of it, which Pym rolled round and round in Company sugar with his bare palm, licking it clean between batches. Cherry had evacuees and horses, and gave parties for American soldiers who presented her with cans of petrol in the tithe barn. She owned farms and a great park with deer, and an absent husband in the Navy whom Syd referred to as “the Admiral.” In the evenings before dinner, a pack of King Charles spaniels was whipped by an old gamekeeper. They swarmed over the sofas yapping till they were whipped out again. At Cherry's, for the first time since St. Moritz, Pym saw silver candles on the dinner table lighting bare shoulders.

“There's a lady called Lippsie who's in love with my father and they're going to marry and have babies,” Pym told Cherry helpfully one evening as they walked together down the ride; and was greatly impressed by how seriously Cherry took this news, and how intently she questioned Pym concerning Lippsie's accomplishments. “I've seen her in the bath and she's beautiful,” said Pym.

And when they left a few days later, Rick took something of the dignity of the place with him, and something of its proprietor also, for I remember him striding down the great stone steps with a white hide suitcase in each hand—Rick always loved a fine suitcase—and sporting a smart country outfit of the sort no admiral would wear to sea. Syd and Mr. Muspole followed after him like circus midgets, clutching the chipped green filing cabinet between them and shouting, “Your end, Deirdre!” and “Gently down the stairs, Sybil!”

“Don't you ever talk to Cherry about Lippsie again, son,” Rick warned him, in his heaviest moralistic tone. “It's high time you learned it's not polite to mention one woman to another. Because if you don't learn that, you'll waste your advantages and that's a fact.”

It was through Cherry also, I suspect, that Rick formed the determination to turn Pym into a gentleman. Until now it has been assumed that Pym was already of the aristocracy. But Cherry, a forceful and superior woman, taught Rick that true English privilege was obtained by hardship, and that the best hardship was to be found at English boarding-schools. She also had a nephew at Mr. Grimble's academy by the name of Sefton Boyd, but better known to her as my darling Kenny. A second and less tender influence was the army. First Muspole became its casualty, then Morrie Washington, then Syd. Each with a rueful smile of failure packed his little suitcase and disappeared, returning only seldom and with very short hair. Then one day to his hurt surprise Rick himself was summoned to the flag. In later life he took a more tolerant view of the pettiness of the society entrusted to his care, but the sight of his call-up papers on the breakfast table provoked an outburst of righteous anger.

“God damn it, Loft, I thought we'd taken care of all that,” he raged at Perce, who was exempt from everything.

“We did take care of it,” said Perce, jabbing a thumb in my direction. “Delicate kid, mother in the nut-house, it's watertight compassion.”

“Well where the devil's their compassion now then?” Rick demanded, shoving the buff document under Perce's nose. “It's a damn shame, Loft. That's what it is. Get after it.”

“You never ought to have told old Cherry about Lippsie,” Perce Loft fumed at Pym later. “She went and peached on your dad out of spite.”

But the army declined to surrender, and the depleted court, consisting of Perce Loft, a clutch of mothers, Ollie and Mr. Cudlove, duly uprooted itself to a drab hotel in Bradford, where Rick was obliged to reconcile the ignominy of the parade ground with the burdens of financial generalship. Using the hotel's coin box and the hotel's credit, typing and filing in the hotel's bedrooms, storing their mysterious wares in the hotel's garage, the court fought a gallant rearguard action against dissolution, but in vain. It was Sunday evening in the hotel. Rick in his private's uniform, freshly pressed, was preparing to return to barracks. A new dartsboard was wedged under his arm, which he planned to present to the sergeants' mess, for Rick had his heart set on the post of catering clerk, which would enable him to see us right in the shortages.

“Son. It's time for you to set those fine feet of yours on the hard road of becoming Lord Chief Justice and a credit to your old man. There's been too much lazy fare about and you're part of it. Cudlove, look at his shirt. No man ever did business in a dirty shirt. Look at his hair. He'll be an airy-fairy before you can say Jack Robinson. It's boarding-school for you, son, and God bless you and God bless me too.”

One more bear-hug, a final staunching of the tears, one noble handshake for the absent cameras as, dartsboard at the ready, the great man rode away to war. Pym watched him out of sight, then stealthily climbed the stairs to the provisional State Apartments. The door was unlocked. He smelt woman and talc. The double bed was in disarray. He pulled the pigskin briefcase from beneath it, tipped out the contents and, as he had often done before, puzzled over unintelligible files and correspondence. The Admiral's country suit, donned for a few hours and still warm, was hanging in the wardrobe. He poked in the pockets. The green filing cabinet, more chipped than ever, lurked in its habitual darkness. Why does he always keep it in cupboards? Pym tugged vainly at the locked drawers. Why does it travel separately from everything as if it had a disease?

“Looking for money, are we, Titch?” a woman's voice asked him, from the bathroom doorway. It was Doris, typist elect and good scout. “Spare yourself the trouble, I would. It's all tick with your dad. I've looked.”

“He told me he'd left me a bar of chocolate in his room,” Pym replied resolutely, and continued delving while she watched.

“There's three gross of army milk-and-nut sitting in the garage. Help yourself,” Doris advised. “Petrol coupons too, if you're thirsty.”

“It was a special kind of bar,” said Pym.

 

I have never fathomed the machinations that sent Pym and Lippsie to the same school. Were they infiltrated singly or as a package, the one to be taught, the other to supply her labour in payment? I suspect as a package but have no proof beyond a general knowledge of Rick's methods. All his life, Rick maintained a work-force of devoted women whom he regularly discarded and revived. When they were not required in the court they were put out to work for him in the great world, easing his crusade with remittances they could ill afford, selling their jewellery for him, cashing their savings and lending their names to bank accounts from which Rick's name was banned. But Lippsie had no jewellery and no credit with the banks. She had only her lovely body and her music and her brooding guilt, and a little English schoolboy who held her to the world. I suspect now that Rick had already read the warning signs collecting in her, and decided to give her to me to look after. Nevertheless there was profit to our partnership and Rick was nothing if not an opportunist.