A Perfect Spy (18 page)

“It had a hyphen,” Sefton Boyd told him next day. “Whoever did it gave us a hyphen when we haven't got one. If I ever find the sod I'll kill him.”

“So will I,” Pym promised loyally and meant every word. Like Rick he was learning to live on several planes at once. The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment.

 

The effects of Lippsie's death upon the young Pym were many and not by any means all negative. Her demise entrenched him as a self-reliant person, confirming him in his knowledge that women were fickle and liable to sudden disappearances. He learned the great lesson of Rick's example, namely the importance of a respectable appearance. He learned that the only safety was in seeming legitimacy. He developed his determination to be a secret mover of life's events. It was Pym, for instance, who let down Mr. Grimble's tyres and poured three six-pound bags of cooking salt into the swimming-pool. But it was Pym who led the hunt for the culprit too, throwing up many tantalising clues and casting doubt on many solid reputations. With Lippsie gone, his love for Rick became once more unobstructed and, better, he could love him from a distance, for Rick had once more disappeared.

Had he gone back to prison, as he had promised Lippsie that he would? Had the police found the green filing cabinet? Pym did not know then and Syd, I suspect by choice, does not know now. Army records grant Rick an abrupt discharge six months before the period in question, referring the reader to the Criminal Records Office for an explanation. None is available, perhaps because that Perce had a friend who worked there, a lady who thought the world of him. Whatever the reason Pym floated out alone once more, and had a fair amount of fun. For weekend leave Ollie and Mr. Cudlove received him at their basement flat in Fulham and pampered him in every imaginable way. Mr. Cudlove, fit as ever from his exercises, taught him how to wrestle, and when they all went out for a toot on the river together, Ollie wore ladies' clothes and did a squeaky voice so well that only Pym and Mr. Cudlove in all the world ever knew there was a man inside them. For his longer holidays, Pym was obliged to trek over Cherry's vast estates with Sefton Boyd, listening to ever more awful stories about the great public school of which he would soon become a member : how new boys were tied into laundry baskets and flung down flights of stone stairs, how they were harnessed to pony traps with fish-hooks through their ears and made to haul the prefect round school yard.

“My father's gone to prison and escaped,” Pym told him in return. “He's got a pet jackdaw that looks after him.” He imagined Rick in a cave on Dartmoor, with Syd and Meg taking him pies wrapped in a handkerchief while the hounds sniffed his trail.

“My father's in the Secret Service,” Pym told him another time. “He's been tortured to death by the Gestapo but I'm not allowed to say. His real name is Wentworth.”

Having surprised himself by this pronouncement Pym worked on it. A different name and a gallant death suited Rick excellently. They gave him the class Pym was beginning to suspect he lacked and made things right with Lippsie. So when Rick came bouncing back one day, not tortured or altered in any way, but accompanied by two jockeys, a box of nectarines and a brand-new mother with a feather in her hat, Pym thought seriously of working for the Gestapo and wondered how you joined. And would have done so, too, for sure, had not the peace ungraciously robbed him of the chance.

A last word is also needed here about Pym's politics during this instructive period. Churchill sulked and was too popular. De Gaulle, with his tilted pineapple head, was too much like Uncle Makepeace, while Roosevelt, with his stick and spectacles and wheelchair, was clearly Aunt Nell in disguise. Hitler was so wretchedly unloved that Pym had more than a fair regard for him, but it was Joseph Stalin whom he appointed to be his proxy father. Stalin neither sulked nor preached. He spent his time chuckling, and playing with dogs, and picking roses in news cinemas while his loyal troops won the war for him in the snows of St. Moritz.

 

Putting down his pen, Pym stared at what he had written, first in fear, then gradually in relief. Finally he laughed.

“I didn't break,” he whispered. “I stayed above the fray.”

And poured himself a Poppy-sized vodka for old times' sake.

F
rau Bauer's bed was as narrow and lumpy as a servant's bed in a fairy-tale and Mary lay in it exactly as Brotherhood had dumped her there, roly-polyed in the eiderdown, knees drawn up in self-protection, clutching her shoulders with her hands. He had slid off her, she could no longer smell his sweat and breath. But she could feel his bulk at the foot of the bed and sometimes she had a hard time remembering that they had not made love a few moments earlier, for his habit in those days had been to leave her dozing while he sat as he was sitting now, making his phone calls, checking his expenses or doing whatever else served to restore the order of his all-male life. He had found a tape-recorder somewhere and Georgie had a second in case his didn't work.

For a hangman Nigel was small but extremely dapper. He wore a waisted pinstripe suit and a silk handkerchief in his sleeve.

“Ask Mary to make a voluntary statement, will you, Jack?” Nigel said, as if he did this every week. “Voluntary but formal is the tone. Could be used, I'm afraid. The decision is not Bo's alone.”

“Who the hell says voluntary?” said Brotherhood. “She signed the Official Secrets Act when she joined, she signed it again when she left. She signed it again when she married Pym. Everything you know is ours, Mary. Whether you heard it on top of a bus or saw the smoking gun in his hand.”

“And your nice Georgie can witness it,” said Nigel.

Mary heard herself talking but didn't understand a lot of what she said because she had one ear in the pillow and the other was listening to the morning sounds of Lesbos through the open window of their little brown terrace house halfway up the hill that Plomari was built on, to the clatter of mopeds and boats and bouzouki music and lorries revving in the alleys. To the scream of sheep having their throats cut at the butcher's and the slither of donkey hoofs on cobble and the yells of the vendors in the harbour market. If she squeezed her eyes tight enough, she could look over the orange rooftops across the street, past the chimneys and the clotheslines and the roof gardens full of geraniums, down to the waterfront and out to the long jetty with its red light winking on the point and its evil ginger cats soaking themselves in the sunshine while they watched the tramper putter out of the mist.

And that was how Mary saw her story henceforth as she told it to Jack Brotherhood: as a nightmarish film she dared look at only piecemeal, with herself as the meanest villain ever. The tramper draws alongside, the cats stretch, the gangway is lowered, the English family Pym—Magnus, Mary and son Thomas—file ashore in search of yet another perfect place away from it all. Because nowhere is far enough any more, nowhere is remote enough. The Pyms have become the Flying Dutchmen of the Aegean, scarcely landing before they pack again, changing boats and islands like driven souls, though only Magnus knows the curse, only Magnus knows who is pursuing them and why, and Magnus has locked that secret behind his smile with all his others. She sees him striding gaily ahead of her, clutching his straw hat against the breeze and his briefcase dangling from his other hand. She sees Tom stalking after him in the long grey flannels and school blazer with his Cub colours on the pocket, which he insists on wearing even when the temperature is in the eighties. And she sees herself still doped with last night's drink and oil fumes, already planning to betray them both. And following them in their bare feet she sees the native bearers with the Pyms' too-much luggage, the towels and bed linen and Tom's Weetabix and all the other junk she packed in Vienna for their great sabbatical, as Magnus calls this once-in-a-lifetime family holiday they have all apparently been dreaming of, though Mary cannot remember it being mentioned until a few days before they left, and to be honest she would rather have gone back to England, collected the dogs from the gardener and the long-haired Siamese from Aunt Tab, and spent the time in Plush.

The bearers set down their burdens. Magnus, generous as ever, tips each of them from Mary's handbag while she holds it open for him. Stooped gawkily over the reception committee of Lesbos cats, Tom declares they have ears like celery. A whistle sounds, the bearers hop up the gangway, the tramper is returned to the mist. Magnus, Tom and Mary the traitor stare after it like every sad story of the sea, their life's luggage dumped around them and the red beacon dripping slow fire on their heads.

“Can we go back to Vienna after this?” asks Tom. “I'd like to see Becky Lederer.”

Magnus does not answer him. Magnus is too busy being enthusiastic. He will be enthusiastic for his own funeral and Mary loves him for this as she loves him for too much else, does still. Sometimes his sheer goodness accuses me.

“This is it, Mabs!” he cries, waving an arm grandly at the treeless conical hill of brown houses that is their newest home. “We've found it. Plush-sur-mer.” And he turns to her with the smile she has not seen until this very holiday—so gallant, so tired-bright in its despair. “We're safe here, Mabs. We're okay.”

He throws an arm around her, she lets him. He draws her to him, they hug. Tom squeezes between, an arm round each of them. “Hey, let
me
have some of that,” he says. Locked together like the closest allies in the world, the three move off down the jetty, leaving their luggage till they have found a place to put it. Which they achieve within the hour, for clever Magnus knows just the right taverna to go to first time, whom to charm and whom to recruit in the surprisingly passable Greek identity he has somehow cobbled together for himself on their journeying. But there is the evening yet to come and the evenings are getting worse and worse, they hang over her from when she wakes, she can feel them creeping up on her all through her day. To celebrate their new home Magnus has brought a bottle of scotch though they have agreed several times in the last few days to lay off the hard stuff and stick to local wine. The bottle is nearly empty and Tom, thank God, is finally asleep in his new bedroom. Or so Mary prays, for Tom has recently become a fag-ender, as her father would have said, hanging around them for whatever he can pick up.

“Hey, come on, Mabs, that's a bit of a bad face, isn't it?” says Magnus, jollying her up. “Don't you like our new
Schloss?”

“You were being funny and I smiled.”

“Didn't look like a smile,” says Magnus, smiling himself to show her how. “More like a bit of a grimace from where I sits, m'dear.”

But Mary's blood is rising and as usual she cannot stop herself. The prospect of her uncommitted crime is already laying its guilt on her.

“That's what you're writing about, is it?” she snaps. “How you waste your wit on the wrong woman?”

Appalled by her own unpleasantness Mary bursts out weeping and drives her fists on to the arms of the rush chair. But Magnus is not appalled at all. Magnus puts down his glass and comes to her, he taps her gently on the arm with his fingertips, waiting to be let in. He puts her glass delicately out of reach. Moments later the springs of their new bed are pinging and whining like a brass band tuning up, for a desperate erotic fervour has latterly come to Magnus's aid. He makes love to her as if he will never see her again. He buries himself in her as if she is his only refuge and Mary goes with him blindly. She climbs, he draws her after him, she is shouting at him—“Please, oh Christ!” He hits the mark for her, and for a blessed moment Mary can kiss the whole bloody world goodbye.

“We're using Pembroke, by the way,” Magnus says later but not quite late enough. “I'm sure it's unnecessary but I want to be on the safe side in case.”

Pembroke is one of Magnus's worknames. He keeps the Pembroke passport in his briefcase, she has already located it. It has an artfully muddy photograph that might be Magnus or might not. In the forgery workshop in Berlin they used to call photographs like that floaters.

“What do I tell Tom?” she asks.

“Why tell him anything?”

“Our son's name is Pym. He might take a little oddly to being told he's Pembroke.”

She waits, hating herself for her intractability. It is not often that Magnus has to hunt for an answer even when it concerns guidance on how to deceive their child. But he hunts now, she can feel him do it as he lies wakefully beside her in the dark.

“Yes, well tell him the Pembrokes own the house we're in, I should. We're using their name to order things from the shop. Only if asked, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“Those two men are still there,” says Tom from the door, who turns out to have been part of their conversation all this while.

“What men?” says Mary.

But her skin is pricking on her nape, her body is clammy with panic. How much has Tom heard? Seen?

“The ones who are mending their motorbike by the river. They've got special army sleeping-bags and a torch and a special tent.”

“There are campers all over the island,” says Mary. “Go back to bed.”

“They were on our ship too,” says Tom. “Behind the lifeboat, playing cards. Watching us. Speaking German.”

“Lots of people were on the ship,” says Mary. Why don't you say something, you bastard? she screams at Magnus in her head. Why do you lie dead instead of helping me when I'm still wet from you?

With Tom on one side of her, Magnus on the other, Mary listens to the bells of Plomari tolling out the hours. Four more days, she tells herself. On Sunday, Tom flies back to London for the new school term. And on Monday I'll do it and be damned.