A Perfect Spy (46 page)

I shall stay here for ever, he decided. I shall become a don and be hero to my pupils. To entrench this ambition he worked up a selective stammer and a self-denying smile, and at night sat long hours at his desk keeping himself awake on Nescafé. When daylight came he ventured downstairs unshaven so that all might see the lines of study etched upon his eager face. It was on one such morning that he was surprised to find a case of vintage port waiting for him, accompanied by a note from the Regius Professor of Law:

For half the day, Pym did not know where to put himself. He turned up his collar, wandered miserably in Christ Church Meadows, cut his tutorial for fear of being arrested and wrote letters to Belinda who was working as an unpaid secretary to a London charity. In the afternoon he sat in a dark cinema. In the evening, still in despair, he carted his guilty parcel to Balliol, determined to tell Sefton Boyd the whole story. But by the time he got there he had thought of a better version.

“Some rich shit in Merton is trying to get me to go to bed with him,” he protested, in the tone of healthy exasperation he had been practising all the way to the gates. “He sent me a Harry great case of port to buy me over.”

If Sefton Boyd doubted him he did not let it show. Between them they carried their booty to the Gridiron Club where six of them drank it at a sitting, fitfully toasting Pym's virginity till morning. A few days later Pym was elected a member. When the vacation came he took a job selling carpets at a shop in Watford. A lawyers' vacation course, he told Rick. Similar to the holiday seminars he had attended in Switzerland. In reply Rick sent him a five-page homily, warning him against airy-fairy intellectuals, and a cheque for fifty pounds that bounced.

A summer term was devoted entirely to women. Pym had never been so in love. He swore his love to every girl he met, he was so anxious to overcome what he assumed would be their poor opinion of him. In intimate cafés, on park benches or strolling beside the Isis on glorious afternoons, Pym held their hands and stared into their puzzled eyes and told them everything he had ever dreamed of hearing. If he felt awkward today with the one, he swore he would feel better tomorrow with the next, for women of his own age and intelligence were a novelty to him and he became disconcerted when they did not assume a subordinate position. If he felt awkward with all of them he wrote to Belinda, who never failed to reply. His love-talk was never duplicated; he was not a cynic. To one he spoke of his ambitions to return to the Swiss stage, where he had been such a runaway success. She should learn German and come with him, he said; they would act together. To another he painted himself as a poet of the futile and described his persecution at the hands of the murderous Swiss police.

“But I thought they were so terrifically neutral and humane!” she cried, appalled by his descriptions of the beatings he had received before being marched over the border into Austria.

“Not if you're different,” Pym said grimly. “Not if you refuse to conform with the bourgeois norm. Those Swissies have two laws that really matter out there. Thou shalt not be poor and thou shalt not be foreign. I was both.”

“You've really been through it,” she said. “It's fantastic. I haven't done anything at all.”

And to a third he portrayed himself as a novelist of the tortured life, with work that he had yet to show his publishers, all stashed away in an old filing cabinet at home.

One day Jemima came. Her mother had sent her to an Oxford secretarial college to learn typing and go to dances. She was long-legged and distraught like someone always late. She was more beautiful than ever.

“I love you,” Pym told her, handing her bits of fruitcake in his room. “Wherever I was, whatever I was having to endure, I loved you all the time.”

“But what were you having to endure?” Jemima asked.

For Jemima an extra kind of specialness was needed. Pym's reply took him by surprise. Afterwards, he decided that it had been lying in wait inside him and leapt out before he could prevent it. “It was for England,” he said. “I'm lucky to be alive. If I tell anyone about it they'll kill me.”

“Why ever will they do that?”

“It's secret. I swore never to tell.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

“I love you. I had to do awful things to people. You can't imagine what it's like, carrying secrets like that alone.”

As Pym heard himself saying this he remembered something that Axel had told him shortly before the end: There is no such thing as a life that does not return.

The next time he met Jemima, he described a brave girl he had worked with when he was doing his terribly secret work. He had in mind one of those muddy war photographs of beautiful women who win George Medals for being parachuted weekly into France.

“Her name was Wendy. We did secret missions into Russia together. We became partners.”

“Did you do it with her?”

“It wasn't that kind of relationship. It was professional.”

Jemima was fascinated. “You mean she was a tart?”

“Of course she wasn't. She was a secret agent like me.”

“Have you ever done it with a tart?”

“No.”

“Kenneth has. He's done it with two. One each end.”

Each end of what? thought Pym, in rampant indignation. Me a secret hero, and she talks to me about sex! In his despair he wrote Belinda a twelve-pager about his platonic love for her, but by the time her reply came he had forgotten the context of his feelings. Sometimes Jemima came uninvited, wearing no make-up and her hair shoved behind her ears. She lay on the bed and read Jane Austen on her tummy, while she kicked a bare leg in the air or yawned.

“You can put your hand up my skirt if you like,” she said.

“I'm fine, thanks,” said Pym.

Too polite to disturb her further he sat in the chair and read
A Handbook of Old High German Literature
till she made a grimace and left. For a while after that, she didn't visit him. He kept glimpsing her in cinemas of which there were seven so he got round them nicely in a week. Always she was with another man and once, like her brother, she had two. Once during this same period Belinda came to stay with her, but told Pym she should keep away from him because it wasn't fair on Jem. Pym's need to impress Jemima now took on wild dimensions. He ate his meals alone and looked haunted, but she still didn't come to him. One evening, passing a brick wall, he deliberately dashed his knuckles against it until they bled, then hurried to her expensive lodgings in Merton Street, where he found her drying her long hair before the electric fire.

“Who've you been fighting?” she asked as she dabbed on iodine.

“I can't talk about it. Some things never go away.”

Laying the fire on its back she cooked him toast while she went on brushing her hair and watching him through the strands.

“If
I
were a man,” she said, “I wouldn't waste my energy hitting anybody. I wouldn't play rugger, I wouldn't box, I wouldn't spy for people. I wouldn't even ride. I'd save everything I had for fucking, again and again and again.”

Pym departed, once more smouldering at the frivolity of those who failed to perceive his higher calling.

Did Pym know that he had tempted God? Certainly I know it now, this blowy night beside the sea as I try to write it so many years later. Whom else but his Maker was he provoking as he spun his stupid stories? Pym was calling down his fate on himself as surely as if he had begged for it by name in his prayers, and God dealt him the favour as God often did. Pym's fantasy version of himself waited out there like a decoy that no celestial eye could overlook, and the divine response was lying in his cubbyhole in the porter's lodge not twenty-four hours later when he came down to see who loved him this Saturday morning before breakfast. Ah! A letter! Blue in colour! Can it be perhaps from Jemima? Or is it from the virtuous Belinda, Jemima's friend? Is it from Lalage, perhaps—or Polly, or Prudence, or Anne? The answer, Jack, was none of them. It came, like so many bad things, from you. You were writing to Pym from Oman, care of the Trucial-Oman Scouts, though the stamp was true-blue British and the postmark Whitehall, because it had come to England by bag.

Pym had not long to wait, though every minute seemed a year. On the following Tuesday, returning from a testing tutorial on the theory of Ablaut, he found a second envelope waiting for him. This one was brown and of exceptional thickness, of a type I never saw in later years. Faint lines ran across it, giving it the appearance of corrugated cardboard though the texture was oily and smooth. There was no crest on the back, no address of sender. Even the manufacturer was secret. Yet Pym's name and address were immaculately typed, the stamp perfectly centred, and when he probed at the flap in the safety of his room, he discovered that it was stuck down with a rubberised bonding, which smelt of acid drops and parted in sticky threads like chewing gum. Inside lay a single sheet of thick white paper that was not so much folded as ironed. Prising it open the great spy observed at once the absence of a watermark. The type was large, as if for the partially sighted, the alignment faultless:

For the next five days Pym abandoned work. He paced the back streets of the city, turning in his tracks to see who was following him. He bought a sheath knife and practised throwing it at trees until the blade broke. He wrote a Will and sent it to Belinda. When he entered his rooms he did so with circumspection, never descending or climbing his staircase without first listening for unfamiliar sounds. Where should he hide the secret letters? They were far too precious to throw away. Remembering something he had read, he gouged out the centre of his brand-new copy of Kluge's
Etymological Dictionary
to make a nest for them. From then on, his eviscerated Kluge became the first thing his eye fell upon when he returned from his sorties. To buy his copy of the
Financial Times
without attracting notice, he walked all the way to Littlemore but the village post office had never heard of it. By the time he returned to Oxford everything was shut. After a sleepless night he made a dawn raid on the Junior Common Room before anyone was up, and stole a back number from the racks.

Two buses went to Burford on weekday mornings but the second left him only twenty minutes to find the Monmouth Arms, so he took the first and got there at nine-forty, only to discover that the bus dropped him at the door. In his overalert condition the inn sign with its bold lettering struck him as a breach of national security and he strode past it with averted eyes. The rest of the morning crawled by on feet of lead. By eleven o'clock his notebook was already crammed with the number of every parked car in Burford, as well as copious notes on suspicious passers-by. By two minutes to twelve, duly seated in the saloon bar of the Monmouth Arms, he was seized by panic. Was he in the Monmouth Arms or the Golden Pheasant ? Had Colonel Gaunt said the Horn of Plenty? In the furnace of Pym's mind these possibilities fused themselves into a brilliant and appalling alloy. He stepped into the forecourt and covertly reread the inn sign before hastening to the outdoor gentlemen's to throw cold water in his face. Standing at a stall he heard the sound of wind breaking and divined a bulky figure in a navy-blue mackintosh standing at his side. The body was tilted backwards and sideways, the eyes were cast upward in agony. For a frightful moment Pym feared the man was shot, until he realised that these contortions were caused by the difficulties of retaining a thick volume wedged under his armpit. Unable to perform, Pym buttoned himself, hurried back to the saloon and, laying
Financial Times
on the bar, ordered himself a bitter.