A Perfect Spy (52 page)

At a tea-stall on the waterfront while they stood shivering with a crowd of down-and-outs, Peggy told Pym the story of how Rick had stolen her farm. She had begun it the moment they got on the bus, for the benefit of anyone who'd care to hear it, and had continued it without a comma or a full stop since, and Pym knew that it was all true, all terrible, even if quite often the sheer venom in her drove him secretly to Rick's protection. They walked to get warm but she didn't stop talking for one second. When he bought her beans and egg at a Seamen's Mission hut called the Rover, still she went on talking as she spread her elbows and sawed the toast and used her teaspoon to get up the sauce. It was at the Rover that she told Pym about Rick's great trust fund that took possession of the nine thousand pounds of insurance money paid to her husband John after he fell into the thresher and lost both legs below the knee and all the fingers of one hand. As she told this part she drew the lines of amputation on her own scant limbs without looking at them, and Pym sensed her obsession again and was scared of it. The one voice I never did for you, Tom, is Peggy's Irish brogue dropping into Rick's chapel cadences as she repeated his silver-tongued promises: twelve and a half percent plus profits, my dear, year in and year out, enough to see dear old John right for as long as he's spared, and enough for yourself when he's gone, and enough left over after that, my dear, to put some by for that first-rate boy of yours for when he goes to college and reads his law just the way my own son will—they're birds of a feather. It was a Thomas Hardy story that she told, full of casual disasters that seemed to have been timed by an angry God to obtain the maximum of misfortune. And she was Hardy's woman to go with it: lured forward by her obsession, and only her own destiny left to deal with.

John Wentworth, as well as being a victim, was an ass, she explained, and was ready to be swayed by the first charmer who walked into the room. He went to his grave convinced that Rick was a saviour and a pal. His farm was a Cornish manor called Tamar Rose where every grain of wheat had to be wrestled from the sea wind. He had inherited it from a wiser father, and Alastair their son was his only heir. When John died there was not a penny for anybody. Everything signed away, every bloody thing mortgaged to the neck, Magnus—on which word Peggy passed her bean-stained knife across her throat. She told about Rick visiting John in hospital soon after his accident and the flowers and the chocolates and the bubbly—and Pym in his mind's eye saw the basket of black-market fruit beside his own hospital bed when he woke up after his operation. He remembered Rick's noble caring for the aged and decrepit that he had helped him with during the war years of the great crusade. He remembered Lippsie's sobbing voice calling Rick a
teef,
and Rick's letters to her promising to see her right.

“And a free train ticket for myself,” Peggy is saying, “to come up to Truro Hospital to visit him. And your father driving me home after, Magnus, nothing too much trouble for him until he has our man's money.” The documents he made John sign, Magnus, always witnessed by the prettiest nurses. How your father always had the patience for John, always explaining to him whatever he couldn't understand, over and again if necessary, but John won't listen, the deluded man is too trusting and lazy in his mind.

A fit of fury seizes her: “Me up at four in the morning for the milking and falling asleep over my accounts at midnight!” she shouts as sleepy heads turn to her from other tables. “And that stupid husband of mine lying warm in his bed in Truro signing it all away behind my back while your father sits by his bedside playing the saint to him, Magnus. And my Alastair needing a pair of shoes to walk to school in, while you're living on the hog there with your fine schools and your fine clothes, Magnus, God save you!” For it turns out, of course, on John's death, that for reasons outside everyone's control the great trust fund has suffered a purely temporary problem of liquidity and can't pay the twelve and a half percent plus profits after all. It can't refund the capital either. And that to tide everyone over this sticky patch, John Wentworth took the wise precaution, just before his death, of mortgaging the farm and land and livestock, and bloody nearly his wife and child as well, so that nobody will ever want for anything again. And had given the proceeds to his dear old pal Rick. And that Rick has brought down a distinguished lawyer, name of Loft, all the way from London with him, just to explain the implications of this smart move to John on his deathbed. And John, to please everyone as usual, has written out a special long letter all in his own hand, assuring whom it may concern that his decision has been taken while he was of sound mind and in full possession of his mental faculties and was not in any manner subjected to undue influence by a saint and his lawyer while he was lying gasping out his last. All this in case Peggy, or for that matter Alastair, should later have the bad manners to dispute the document in court or try to get John's nine thousand pounds back, or should otherwise show a lack of faith in Rick's selfless stewardship of John's ruin.

“When did all this happen?” says Pym.

She tells him the dates, she tells him the day of the week and the hour of the day. She pulls a wad of letters from her handbag signed by Perce and regretting that “our Chairman, Mr. R. T. Pym, is unavailable, being absent indefinitely on a mission of national necessity,” and assuring her that “the documents relating to the Freehold of Tamar Rose are at present being processed with a view to acquiring a large Figure in your interest.” And she watches him with her mad cold eyes as he reads them by the light of a street lamp while they sit huddled on a broken bench. She takes back the letters and returns them to their envelopes lovingly, careful of the edges and the folds. As she continues talking, Pym wants to close his ears or slap a hand over her mouth. He wants to get up and run to the sea-wall and throw himself over. He wants to scream “Shut up!” But all he does is ask her, please, I beg you, if you would be so kind, don't continue with your story.

“Why not, pray?”

“I don't want to hear it. It's not my business, this part. He robbed you. The rest doesn't make any difference,” says Pym.

Peggy doesn't agree. She is flailing her Irish back with her Irish guilt and using Pym's presence as the excuse to do it. She is talking in a gush. It is what she has been waiting to tell him best.

“And why not—seeing as the bloody man possesses you anyway? If he's already got his filthy arms around you sure as if he had you in his fancy bed with the frills and the fancy mirrors”—it is Rick's bedroom in Chester Street she is describing—“seeing as he's already got the power of life and death over you and you're a foolish lonely woman in the world with a sickly boy to care for and a bankrupt farm to mind, and not a soul but the stupid bailiff to say nice day to for a week at a time?”

“It's enough to know he's done you wrong,” Pym insists. “Please, Peggy. The rest is private.”

“Seeing as he can beckon you up to London first-class, send the tickets, just with a flick of his fingers the moment he gets back from his national necessity, because he thinks you're going to put the lawyers on him? Well, you go, don't you? If you haven't had a man for two years and more and only your own body to look at withering in the mirror every day, you go!”

“I'm sure you do. I'm sure there was every reason,” Pym says. “Please don't tell me any more.”

She is doing Rick's voice again: “‘ Let's sort this matter out once and for all, Peggy my dear. I'm not having a sour bit of business come between us when all I ever wanted was to see you right.' Well, you go, don't you?” Her voice is echoing in the empty square and out over the water. “My God, you go. You pack your bag, you take your boy and lock the door because you're off to get your money and some justice. You scurry up there bursting to have the fight of your life just the moment you set eyes on him. You leave the washing and the dishes and the milking and the penny-pinching life he's put you to. And you tell the stupid bailiff to mind the shop for you, me and Alastair we're going up to London. And when you arrive, instead of a business conference with Mr. Percy Loft and Mr. Bloody Muspole and the gang of them, the man buys you fine clothes in Bond Street and treats you like a princess, with the limousines and the restaurants and the fancy petticoats and silks—well you can always have your row with him later, can't you?”

“No,” says Pym. “You can't. You've got to have it then or never.”

“If he's trodden you into the mud these years the least you can do is get a bit back from him, in exchange for all the misery, take him for every penny he's robbed you of.” Yet again she does Rick's voice: “‘ I always fancied you, Peggy, you know that. You're a good scout, the best. Always had my eye on that pretty Irish smile of yours and not only the smile either.' So all right, he's got a treat prepared for the boy as well. Takes him to the Arsenal and we sit up there like gods in the special box with the lords and grandees, and dinner at Quaglino's after, him the People's Man, with a two-foot cake with the boy's name written on it, you should see Alastair's face. And next day a Harley Street specialist laid on to listen to his cough and a gold watch for the boy after, for being the brave one, with his initials on it, ‘From RTP to a fine young man.' Come to think of it, it's not at all unlike the one you're wearing now—is that a gold one too? So when a man's done all that for you and been a bastard—well you have to admit to yourself after a couple of days of it, there's many worse bastards than him in the world. Most of them wouldn't split their bloody Bath bun with you, let alone a two-foot cake at Quaglino's and somebody to take the boy home to bed after, so that the grown-ups can go to a nightclub and have a bit of fun—why not if he always fancied me? There's not many women wouldn't put off a fight for a day or two for some of that, I suppose—so why not?”

She is speaking as if Pym is no longer there and she is right. She has deafened him but he can still hear her. As I hear her still, an endless, needling babble of destruction. She is speaking to the derelict cattle market with its broken pens and stopped clock, but Pym is numb and dead and anywhere but here. He is in the Overflow House at his prep school and Rick's raised voice and Lippsie's weeping keep waking him in his sleep. He is on Dorothy's bed at The Glades and bored to bloody death, with his head against her shoulder staring at the white sky through the window all day long. He is in an attic somewhere in Switzerland, wondering to God why he has killed his friend to please an enemy.

She is describing Rick's madness with her own. Her voice is a nagging, querulous torrent and he hates it to distraction. The way the man boasted. He'd not a foot on the earth when he started with his lying. How he had been Lady Mountbatten's lover and she'd assured him he was better than Noël Coward. How they'd wanted him for Ambassador in Paris but he'd turned it down; he'd no patience with the airy-fairies. And about the stupid green filing cabinet with his rotten secrets in it, imagine the madness of a fellow who spends his hours weaving the rope they ought to hang him with! How he'd led her barefoot to it in her nightdress, look at this my child. The record, he called it. All the rights and the wrongs he'd done. All the evidence of his innocence—his bloody righteousness. How, when he was judged, as judged he would surely be, everything in this stupid cabinet would be put into the balance, rights and wrongs together, and we would see him for what he was, up alongside of the angels while us poor sinners down here bleed and starve for the glory of him. It's what he's put together to con the Almighty with and that's the short of it—imagine the impertinence, and him a bloody Baptist too!

Pym asks her how she has known where to find it. I saw the stupid thing being delivered, she says. I was keeping a watch on Searle's hotel the first day of the campaign. The pansy Cudlove drove it up specially in his limousine, the cost alone. The bastard Loft helped him carry it to the cellar, first time he's got his hands dirty. Rick didn't dare leave it in London while they were all up here. “I have to put the proof on him, Magnus,” she keeps repeating as he leads her through the dawn to her miserable lodging-house, her voice whining and insisting in his ear like a machine that nobody can stop. “If he's got the proof there like he says, I'll have it off of him and turn it back on him, I swear I will. All right, I've taken a drop of money off him, it's true. But what's the money when he's cheated me in love? What's the money when he can walk down the street a grandee and there's my John rotting in his grave? And the people in the street all clapping for him, for Rickie boy? And con his way to Heaven into the bargain? What's the use of a poor deluded victim like me who let him have his will with her and will burn in Hell for it, if she won't do her duty by the world and point him up for the devil that he is? Where's the proof? I'm asking.”

“Please stop,” said Pym. “I know what you want.”

“Where's the justice? If he's got it there I'll have it from him, thank you. I've no letters above a couple of procrastinators from Perce Loft, and what do they say? It's like trying to nail a raindrop to the wall, I tell you.”

“Try to be calm now,” Pym said. “Please.”

“I took myself to that stupid Lakin, the Tory. Half a day it took of waiting but I got to him. ‘Rick Pym's a shark,' I tell him. What's the good of telling that to a Tory when they're all sharks anyway? I told the Labour but they kept saying ‘What's he done?' They said they'll enquire and thank you, but what will they find, the poor innocents?”

 

Mattie Searle is sweeping the courtyard. Pym is indifferent to his scrutiny. Pym carries himself with authority, using the same walk that got him to Lippsie's bicycle and past the policeman to the Overflow House. I am authority. I am British. Will you kindly get out of my way.