A Perfect Spy (24 page)

“It was a natural, Titch,” says Syd. “Dobbsie hops on his bicycle, slips round to a bombed house, picks up the blower to Whitehall. ‘Dobbs here,' he says. ‘I'll have twenty thousand quids' worth by Thursday and no backchat.' And Government pays up like a lady. Why?” Syd jabs my upper knee with his forefinger—Rick's gesture to the life. “Because Dobbsie is impartial, Titch, and never you forget it.”

Dimly I remember Dobbsie too, a whipped, untruthful little man plastered on two glasses of bubbly. I remember being ordered to be nice to him—and when was Pym ever not? “Son, if Mr. Dobbs here asks you for something—if he wants that fine picture off the wall there—you give it to him. Understand?”

Pym eyed the picture of ships on a red sea in a different light from that day on but Dobbsie never asked for it.

With Flora's amazing secret on the table, Syd continues, the wheels of commerce are flung into top gear. Rick is recalled from his conference, a meeting with Dobbsie is arranged, a mutuality established. Both men are Liberals or Masons or the Sons of Great Men, both follow Arsenal, admire Joe Louis, think Noël Coward is a sissy or share the same vision of men and women of all races marching arm in arm towards the one great Heaven which, let's face it, is big enough for all of us, whatever our colour or creed may be—this being one of Rick's set speeches, guaranteed to make him weep. Dobbs becomes an honorary member of the court and within days introduces a loved colleague named Fox, who also likes to do good for mankind, and whose job is selecting building land for the post-war Utopia. Thus the ripples of conspiracy multiply, find each other and spread.

The next to be blessed is Perce Loft. While pursuing a line of business in the Midlands Perce has heard voices about a moribund Friendly Society that is sitting on a fortune, and makes enquiries. The Chairman of the Society, name of Higgs—Destiny has decreed that all conspirators bear monosyllables—turns out to be a lifelong Baptist. So is Rick; he could never have got where he is today without it. The fortune derives from a family trust watched over by a country solicitor named Crabbe, who went off to the war the moment it became available, leaving the trust to watch over itself as it thought best. As a Baptist, Higgs can fiddle no funds without Crabbe to cover him. Rick secures Crabbe's release from his regiment, whisks him by Bentley to Chester Street where he can inspect the Wall of Fame, the law books and the Lovelies, and thence to the dear old Albany where he can have a nice talk and relax.

Crabbe turns out to be a cantankerous, idiotic little man who sticks out his elbow to take his drink, sir, wiggles his moustache to demonstrate his military shrewdness and after a few glasses demands to know what you stripe-arsed civilians were doing while I was taking part in a certain contest, sir, risking one's neck amid shot and shell? At the Goat some drinks later, however, he declares Rick to be the kind of chap he'd have liked to have as commandant and if need be die for, which one damn nearly did a few times but mum's the word. He even calls Rick “Colonel,” thus triggering a bizarre interlude in the great man's rise, for Rick is so taken with the rank that he decides to award it to himself in earnest, much as in later life he convinces himself he has been knighted secretly by the Duke of Edinburgh and keeps a set of calling-cards for those admitted to this confidence.

Yet none of these added responsibilities holds up Rick's breathless waltz for one minute. All night long, all weekend, the house in Ascot receives a pageant of the great, the beautiful and the gullible, for Rick has become a collector of celebrities as well as fools and horses. Test cricketers, jockeys, footballers, fashionable Counsel, corrupt parliamentarians, glistening Under Secretaries from helpful Whitehall Ministries, Greek shipowners, cockney hairdressers, unlisted maharajahs, drunk magistrates, venal mayors, ruling princes of countries that have ceased to exist, prelates in suède boots and pectoral crosses, radio comedians, lady singers, aristocratic layabouts, war millionaires and film stars—all pass across our stage as the bemused beneficiaries of Rick's great vision. Lubricious bank managers and building-society chairmen who have never danced before throw off their jackets, confess to barren lives and worship Rick the giver of their sun and rain. Their wives receive unobtainable nylons, perfumes, petrol coupons, discreet abortions, fur coats and, if they are among the lucky ones, Rick himself—for everyone must have something, everyone must be taken care of, everyone must think the world of him. If they have savings, Rick will double them. If they like a flutter, Rick will get them better odds than the bookies—slip me the cash, I'll see you right. Their children are passed to Pym for entertainment, exempted from National Service by the intervention of dear old somebody, given gold watches, tickets to the Cup Final, red setter puppies and, if they are ailing, the finest doctors to attend them. There was a time when such liberality dismayed the growing Pym and made him envious. Not today. Today I would call it no more than normal agent welfare.

And among them, casual as cats, stalk the quiet men of the enlarged court, the men from Mr. Muspole's side, in broadshouldered suits and brown pork-pie hats, calling themselves consultants and holding the telephone receiver to their ear but not speaking into the mouthpiece. Who they were, how they came there, where they went—to this day only the Devil and Rick's ghost know, and Syd refuses point-blank to speak of them, though with time I think I have put together a fair idea of what they did. They are the axemen of Rick's tragicomedy, now yielding at the knees and covered in false smiles, now posted like Shakespearean sentries round his stage, white-eyed in the gloom as they wait to disembowel him.

And tiptoeing between this entire menagerie—as if between their legs, although he was already as tall as half of them—I glimpse Pym again, willing potboy, blank page, Lord Chief Justice designate, clipping their cigars and topping them all up. Pym the credit to his old man, the diplomat in embryo, scurrying to every summons: “Here, Magnus—what have they done to you at that new school of yours, poured fertiliser over you?” “Here, Magnus, who cut your hair then?” “Here, Magnus, tell us the one about the cabbie who puts his wife in the family way!” And Pym—the most compelling raconteur for his age and weight in all of Greater Ascot—obliges, smiles and sidesteps between their anomalous, colliding masses, and for relaxation attends late-night classes in radical politics with Ollie and Mr. Cudlove in their cottage, at which it is heartily agreed over stolen canapés and cocoa that all men are brothers but nothing against your dad. And though political doctrines are at root as meaningless to me today as they were to Pym then, I remember the simple humanity of our discussions as we promised to mend the world's ills, and the truthful goodheartedness with which, as we went off to bed, we wished each other peace in the spirit of Joe Stalin who, let's face it, Titch, and nothing against your dad
ever,
won the war for all these capitalist bastards.

Court holidays are restored to the curriculum, for no man can give of his best without relaxation. St. Moritz is off the map following Rick's unsuccessful bid to buy the resort as a substitute for paying his bills there, but as compensation, now a favourite word, Rick and his advisers have espoused the South of France, sweeping down on Monte in the Train Bleu, banqueting the journey away in a brass-and-velvet dining-car, only pausing to tip the Froggie engine driver, who's a first-rate Liberal, before dashing off to the Casino, illicit currency at the ready. There, standing at Rick's shoulder in the
grande salle,
Pym can watch a year's school fees vanish in seconds and nobody has learned a thing. If he prefers the bar he can exchange views with a Major de Wildman of Lord knew whose army, who calls himself King Farouk's equerry and claims to have a private telephone link to Cairo so that he can report the winning numbers and take royal orders inspired by soothsayers on how to dissipate the wealth of Egypt. For our Mediterranean dawns we have the sombre march to the all-night pawnbroker on the waterfront, where Rick's gold watch, gold cigarette case, gold swizzle-stick and gold cufflinks with the Pym sporting colours are sacrificed to the elusive god liquidity. For our reflective afternoons, we have the
tir aux pigeons
at which the court, well lunched, lies face down in the butts and pots away at luckless doves as they emerge from their tunnels and start out into the blue sky before crashing into the sea in a crumpled swirl. Then home again to London with the bills all taken care of, which meant signed, and the concierges and headwaiters seen right, which meant tipped lavishly with the last of our cash, to resume the ever-mounting cares of the Pym & Son empire.

For nothing may stand still, too much is not enough, as Syd himself admits. No income is so sacrosanct that expenditure cannot exceed it; no expenditure is so great that more loans cannot be raised to hold the dam from breaking altogether. If the building boom is put temporarily out of service by the passing of an unfriendly Building Act, then Major Maxwell-Cavendish has a plan that speaks deeply to Rick's sporting soul: it is to buy up everyone who has drawn a horse in the Irish Sweep and so win first, second and third prizes automatically. Mr. Muspole knows a derelict newspaper proprietor who has got in with a bad crowd and needs to sell out fast; Rick has ever seen himself as a shaper of the human mind. Perce Loft the great lawyer wants to buy a thousand houses in Fulham; Rick knows a building society whose chairman has Faith. Mr. Cudlove and Ollie are on intimate terms with a young dress designer who has acquired the donkey-ride concession for the projected Festival of Britain; Rick likes nothing better than to give our English kids a break, and my God, son, if anybody has earned it they have. An amphibious motorcar has been designed by Morrie Washington's nephew, a National Cricket Pool is envisaged to complement the winter Football Pools, Perce has yet another scheme for contracting an Irish village to grow human hair for the wig market which is expanding fast thanks to the munificence of the newly formed National Health Service. Automatic orange-peelers, pens that can write under water, the spent shell cases of temporarily discontinued wars: each project engages the great thinker's interest, attracts its experts and its alchemists, adds another line to the Pym & Son Tablet of Honour at the house in Chester Street.

So what went wrong? I ask Syd again, glancing ahead to the inevitable end. What quirk of fate, this time round, Syd, checked the great man's stride? My question sparks unusual anger. Syd sets down his glass.

“Dobbsie went wrong, that's what. Flora wasn't enough for him any more. He had to have the lot. Dobbsie went woozy in the head from all his women, didn't he, Meg?”

“Dobbsie done his little self too well,” says Meg, ever a stern student of human frailty.

Poor Dobbs, it transpires, became so lulled that he awarded a hundred thousand pounds of compensation to a housing estate that had not been built till a year after the bombing ended.

“Dobbsie spoilt it for everyone,” says Syd, bristling with moral indignation. “Dobbsie was selfish, Titch. That's what Dobbsie was. Selfish.”

One later footnote belongs to this brief but glorious high point of Rick's affluence. It is recorded that in October 1947 he sold his head. I chanced upon this information as I was standing on the steps of the crematorium covertly trying to puzzle out some of the less familiar members of the funeral. A breathless youth claiming to represent a teaching hospital waved a piece of paper at me and demanded I stop the ceremony. “In Consideration of the sum of fifty pounds cash I, Richard T. Pym of Chester Street W., consent that on my death my head may be used for the purposes of furthering medical science.” It was raining slightly. Under cover of the porch I scribbled the boy a cheque for a hundred pounds and told him to buy one somewhere else. If the fellow was a confidence trickster, I reasoned, Rick would have been the first to admire his enterprise.

 

And always somewhere in this clamour the name of Wentworth ringing softly in Pym's secret ear like an operational codename known only to the initiated: Wentworth. And Pym—the outsider, not on the list—struggling to join, to know. Like a buzzword passed between older hands in the senior officers' bar at Head Office and Pym the new boy, hearing from the edge, not knowing whether to pretend knowledge or deafness: “We picked it up on Wentworth.” “Top Secret and Wentworth—have you been Wentworth-cleared?” Till the very name became to Pym a teasing symbol of wisdom denied, a challenge to his own desirability. “The bugger's doing a Wentworth on us,” he hears Perce Loft grumble under his breath one evening. “That Wentworth woman's a tiger,” says Syd another time. “Worse than her stupid husband ever was.” Each mention spurred Pym to renew his searches. Yet neither Rick's pockets nor his desk drawers, not his bedside table or his pigskin address book or pop-up plastic telephone book, not even his briefcase, which Pym reconnoitred weekly with the key from Rick's Asprey key chain, yielded a single clue. Nor did the impenetrable green filing cabinet which like a travelling icon had come to mark the centre of Rick's migrant faith. No known key fitted it, no fiddling or prising made it yield.

 

And finally there was school. The cheque was sent, the cheque was cleared.

The train lurched. In the window Mr. Cudlove and other people's mothers dipped their faces into handkerchiefs and vanished. In his compartment, children larger than himself whimpered and chewed the cuffs of their new grey jackets. But Pym with one turn of his head glanced backward on his life thus far, and forward to the iron path of duty curling into the autumn mist, and he thought: here I come, your best recruit ever. I'm the one you need so take me. The train arrived, school was a mediaeval dungeon of unending twilight, but Saint Pym of the Renunciation was on hand immediately to help his comrades hump their trunks and tuck-boxes up the winding stone staircases, wrestle with unfamiliar collar-studs, find their beds, lockers and clothes-pegs and award himself the worst. And when his turn came to be summoned before his housemaster for an introductory chat Pym made no secret of his pleasure. Mr. Willow was a big homely man in tweeds and a cricket tie, and the Christian plainness of his room after Ascot filled Pym at once with an assurance of integrity.