A Perfect Spy (49 page)

“People will say to you,” cries Rick, on a note of ever-mounting humility, “and they've said it to me—they've stopped me in the street—touched my arm—‘Rick,' they say, ‘what is Liberalism except a package of ideals? We can't
eat
ideals, Rick,' they say. ‘Ideals don't buy us a cup of tea or a nice touch of English lamb chop, Rick, old boy. We can't put our ideals in the collection box. We can't pay for our son's education with ideals. We can't send him out into the world to take his place in the highest law courts of the land with nothing but a few ideals in his pocket. So what's the point, Rick?' they say to me, ‘in this modern world of ours, of a party of ideals?'” The voice drops. The hand, till now so agitated, reaches out palm downward to cup the head of an invisible child. “And I say to them, good people of Gulworth, and I say to you too!” The same hand flies upward and points to Heaven as Pym in his sickly apprehension sees the ghost of Makepeace Watermaster leap from its pulpit and fill the Town Hall with a dismal glow. “I say this. Ideals are like the stars. We cannot reach them, but we profit by their presence!”

Rick has never been better, more passionate, more sincere. The applause rises like an angry sea, the faithful rise with it. Pym rises with the faithful, pummelling his hands together loudest of us all. Rick weeps. Pym is on the brink. The good people have their Messiah, the Liberals of Gulworth North have too long been a flock without a shepherd; no Liberal candidate has stood here since the war. At Rick's side our local Liberal Party Chairman is smacking his yeoman's paws together and rhubarbing ecstatically into Rick's ear. At Rick's back, the whole court is following Pym's example, standing, clapping, rah-rahing “Rick for Gulworth!” Thus reminded, Rick turns to them yet again and, taking his cue from any number of the variety shows he loves, indicates the court to the people, saying: “You owe it to them, not to me.” But once more his blue eyes are on Pym, saying, “Judas, patricide, murderer of your best pal.”

Or so it seems to Pym.

For this is exactly the moment, this is exactly where everyone is standing and beaming and clapping, when the bomb that Pym has planted goes off: Rick with his back to the enemy, his face upon Pym and his beloved helpers, half ready, I think, to break into a rousing song. Not “Underneath the Arches,” it is too secular, but “Onward, Christian Soldiers” will be first rate. When suddenly the din takes sick and dies on its feet in front of us, and a freezing silence slips in after it as if somebody has flung open the great doors of the Town Hall and let in the vengeful angels of the past.

Someone unreliable has spoken from under the minstrel gallery where the press sits. At first the acoustics are so lousy they do not allow us more than a few querulous notes, but already the notes are subversive. The speaker tries again but louder. She is not a person yet, merely a damned woman, with the kind of piping, strident Irish voice that menfolk instinctively detest, wheedling you with its impotence in the same breath as its cause. A man shouts “Silence, woman,” then “Be quiet,” and then “Shut up, you bitch!” Pym recognises the port-fed voice of Major Blenkinsop. The major is a Free-Trader and a rural Fascist from the embarrassing Right of our great movement. But the scratchy Irish voice prevails like a door squeak that will not go away, and no amount of slamming or oiling seems able to silence it. Some tiresome Home-Ruler probably. Ah good, somebody has got hold of her. It is the major again—see his bald head and yellow rosette of office. He is calling her “My good
madame,”
of all things, and manhandling her towards the door. But the freedom of the press prevents him. The hacks are leaning over the balcony shouting “What's your name, miss?” and even “Yell it at him again!” Major Blenkinsop is suddenly neither a gentleman nor an officer but an upper-class lout with a screaming Irishwoman on his hands. Other women are yelling “Leave her be!” and “Get your hands off her, you dirty swine.” Somebody shouts “Black and Tan bastard!”

Then we hear her, then we see her, both clearly. She is small and furious in black, a widowed shrew. She wears a pill-box hat. A bit of black veil hangs from it by a corner, ripped aside by herself or someone else. With the perversity of a crowd, everybody wants to hear her. She begins her question for perhaps the third time. Her brogue comes from the front of the mouth and appears to be spoken through a smile, but Pym knows it is no smile but the grimace of a hatred too powerful to be kept inside her. She speaks each word as she has learned it, in the order she has arranged them. The formulation is offensive in its clarity.

“I wish to know please—whether it is true—if you would be so kind, sir—that the Liberal Parliamentary Candidate for the Constituency of Gulworth North—has served a prison sentence for swindle and embezzlement. Thank you very much for your consideration.”

And Rick's face on Pym while her arrow shoots him in the back. Rick's blue eyes opening wide on impact, but still steady on Pym—exactly as they were five days ago, when he lay in his ice-bath with his feet crossed and his eyes open, saying, “Killing me is not enough, old son.”

 

Come back ten days with me, Tom. The excited Pym has arrived from Oxford light of heart, determined as a protector of the nation to throw his changeful weight behind the democratic process and have some fun in the snow. The campaign is in full cry but the trains to Gulworth have a way of petering out at Norwich. It is weekend and God has ruled that English by-elections be held on Thursdays, even if He has long forgotten why. It is evening: the Candidate and his cohorts are on the stomp. But as Pym alights bag in hand at Norwich's imposing railway station, there stands faithful Syd Lemon at the barrier with a campaign car plastered with the Pym regalia waiting to whisk him to the main meeting of the evening, scheduled for nine o'clock in the village of Little Chedworth-on-the-Water, where according to Syd the last missionary was eaten for tea. The car's windows are darkened with posters saying “PYM THE PEOPLE'S MAN.” Rick's great head—the one, as I now know, that he had quite likely sold—is pasted to the boot. A loudspeaker bigger than a ship's cannon is wired to the roof. A full moon is up. Snow covers the fields and Paradise is all around.

“Let's drive to St. Moritz,” Pym says as Syd hands him one of Meg's meat pies, and Syd laughs and musses Pym's hair. Syd is not an attentive driver but the lanes are empty and the snow is kind. He has brought a ginger ale bottle filled with whisky. As they meander between the laden hedges they swallow big mouthfuls. Thus fortified, Syd briefs Pym on the state of the battle.

“We favour free worship, Titch, and we're mustard for Home Ownership for All with Less Red Tape.”

“We always were,” says Pym, and Syd gives him the hairy eyeball in case he's being cheeky.

“We take a poor view of ubiquitous High Toryism in all its forms—”

“Iniquitous,” Pym corrects him, sipping again from the ginger ale bottle.

“Our Candidate is proud of his record as an English Patriot and Churchman. He's a Merchantman of England who has fought for his country, Liberalism being the only right road for Britain. He's been educated in the University of the World, he's never touched a drop of the hard stuff in his life, nor have you, and don't forget it.” He grabbed back the ginger ale bottle and took a long, teetotal draught.

“But will he win?” said Pym.

“Listen. If you'd have come in here with ready money on the day your dad announced his intention, you could have had fifty to one. By the time me and Lord Muspole showed up he was down to twenty-fives and we took a ton each. Next morning after he done his adoption you couldn't get tens. He's nine to two now and shrinking and I'll have a small wager with you that come polling day he's evens. Now ask me whether he'll win.”

“What's the competition?”

“There isn't any. The Labour boy's a Scottish schoolmaster from Glasgow. Got a red beard. Small bloke. Looks like a mouse peering out of a red bear's backside. Old Muspole sent a couple of the lads round the other night to cheer up one of his meetings. Put them in kilts and gave them football rattles and had them roaring round the streets till morning. Gulworth doesn't hold with rowdiness, Titch. They take a very poor view of the Labour Candidate's drunken friends singing ‘Little Nellie of the Glen' at three in the morning on the church steps.”

The car slides gracefully towards a windmill. Syd rights it and they proceed.

“And the Tory?”

“The Tory is everything a Tory candidate should be with knobs on. He's a landed pukka sahib who toils one day a week in the City, rides to hounds, gives beads to the natives and wants to bring back the thumbscrew for first offenders. His wife opens garden fêtes with her teeth.”

“But who's our traditional mainstay?” asks Pym, remembering his social history.

“The God-thumpers are solid for him, so's the Masons, so's the Old Nellies. The teetotallers are a Cakewalk, so's the anti-betting league so long as they don't read the form books and I'll thank you not to mention the neverwozzers, Titch, they've been put out to grass for the duration. The rest are a pig in a poke. The sitting member was a Red but he's dead. The last election gave him five thousand majority on a straight race with the Tory, but look at the Tory. The total poll was thirty-five thousand but since then another five thousand juvenile delinquents have been enfranchised and two thousand geriatrics have passed on to a better life. The farmers are nasty, the fishermen are broke and the hoi polloi don't know their willies from their elbows.”

Switching on the interior light Syd allows the car to steer itself while he reaches into the back and fishes out an imposing red-and-black pamphlet with a photograph of Rick on the front cover. Flanked by somebody's adoring spaniels, he is reading a book before an unfamiliar fireside, a thing he has never done in his life. “A Letter to the Electorate of Gulworth North,” runs the caption. The paper, in defiance of the prevailing austerity, is high gloss.

“We are also supported by the ghost of Sir Codpiece Make-water, V.C.,” Syd adds with particular relish. “Peruse our rear page.”

Pym did so and discovered a ruled box resembling a Swiss obituary notice:

“You've got the learning, Titch. What do you think of it?” asks Syd, with vulnerable earnestness.

“It's beautiful,” says Pym.

“Of course it is,” says Syd.

A village, then a church spire glide towards them. As they enter the main street a yellow banner proclaims that Our Liberal Candidate will be speaking here tonight. A few old Land Rovers and Austin Sevens, already snowbound, stand dejectedly in the carpark. Taking a last pull from the ginger ale bottle, Syd carefully parts his hair before the mirror. Pym notices that he is dressed with unaccustomed sobriety. The frosted air smells of cow dung and the sea. Before them rises the archaic Temperance Hall of Little Chedworth-on-the-Water. Syd slips him a peppermint and in they go.

The ward chairman has been speaking for some time but only to the front row, and those of us at the back hear nothing. The rest of the congregation either stares into the rafters or at the display cards of the Common Man's Candidate: Rick at Napoleon's desk with his law books ranged behind him. Rick on the factory floor for the first and only time in his life, sharing a cup of tea with the Salt of the Earth. Rick as Sir Francis Drake gazing towards the misted armada of Gulworth's dying herring fleet. Rick the pipe-sucking agriculturalist intelligently appraising a cow. To one side of the ward chairman, under a festoon of yellow bunting, sits a lady officer of the ward committee. To the other runs a row of empty chairs waiting for the Candidate and his party. Periodically, while the chairman labours on, Pym catches a stray phrase like the Evils of Conscription or the Curse of Big Monopolies—or worse still an apologetic interjection such as “as I was saying to you only a moment ago.” And twice, as nine o'clock becomes nine-thirty, then ten past ten, an elderly Shakespearean messenger hobbles painfully from a vestry, clutching his earlobe to tell us in a quavering voice that the Candidate is on his way, he has a busy schedule of meetings tonight, the snow is holding him up. Till just when we have given up hope, Mr. Muspole strides in accompanied by Major Maxwell-Cavendish, both prim as beadles in their greys. Together the two men march up the aisle and mount the dais, and while Muspole shakes hands with the chairman and his lady, the major draws a sheaf of notes from a briefcase and lays them on the table. And though Pym by the end of the campaign had heard Rick speak on no less than twenty-one occasions between that night and his Eve of Poll address in the Town Hall, he never once saw him refer to the major's notes or so much as recognise their presence. So that gradually he concluded they were not notes at all, but a piece of stage business to prepare us for the Coming.