A Perfect Spy (17 page)

If Pym possessed any learning by the time he presented himself to Mr. Grimble's country academy for the sons of gentlemen, then he owed it to Lippsie and not to any of the dozen or so infant schools, Bible schools and kindergartens scattered along the hectic road of Rick's progress. Lippsie taught him writing, and to this day I write a German “t” and put a stroke through my small “z”s. She taught him spelling, and it was always a great joke between them that they could not remember how many “d”s there were in the English version of “address,” and to this day I can't be sure of the answer until I have written out the German first. Whatever else Pym knew, apart from meaningless passages of the Scriptures, was contained in her cardboard suitcase, for she never came to see him anywhere without whisking him to her room and foisting some piece of geography or history on him, or making him play scales on her flute.

“See, Magnus, without informations we are nothing. But with informations we can go anywhere in the world, we are like turtles, our houses always on our backs. You learn to paint, you can paint anywhere. A sculptor, a musician, a painter, they need no permits. Only their heads. Our world must be inside our heads. That is the only safe way. Now you play Lippsie a nice tune.”

The arrangement at Mr. Grimble's was the perfect flowering of this relationship. Their world was inside their heads, but it was also contained in a brick-and-flint gardener's cottage at the end of Mr. Grimble's long drive, designated the Overflow House and occupied by the Overflow Boys of whom Pym was the newest recruit. And Lippsie, his lovely lifelong Lippsie, their best and most attentive mother. They knew at once they were outcasts. If they didn't, the eighty boys up the drive made it plain to them. They had a pallid grocer's son without an “h” to his name, and tradesmen were ridiculous. They had three Jews whose speech was spattered with Polish, and a hopeless stammerer called M-M-Marlin, and an Indian with knock-knees whose father was killed when the Japanese took Singapore. They had Pym with his spots and wet beds. Yet under Lippsie they contrived to glory in all these disadvantages. If the boys up the drive were the crack regiment, the Overflow Boys were the irregulars who fought all the harder for their medals. For staff, Mr. Grimble took what he could get, and what he could get was whatever the country didn't need. A Mr. O'Mally punched a boy so hard across the ear he knocked him out cold, a Mr. Farbourne beat heads together and fractured someone's skull. A science master thought the marauding village boys were Bolsheviks and fired his shotgun into their retreating rumps. At Grimble's, boys were flogged for tardiness and flogged for untidiness, flogged for apathy and flogged for cheek, and flogged for not improving from the flogging. The fever of war encouraged brutality, the guilt of our noncombatant staff intensified it, the intricacies of the British hierarchical system provided a natural order for the exercise of sadism. Their God was the protector of English country gentlemen and their justice was the punishment of the ill-born and disadvantaged, and it was meted out with the collaboration of the strong, of whom Sefton Boyd was the strongest and most handsome. It is the saddest of all the ironies of Lippsie's death, as I see it now, that she died in the service of a Fascist state.

Each leave-out day, on Rick's standing orders, Pym presented himself at the entrance to the school drive in readiness for Mr. Cudlove's arrival. When nobody appeared, he hurried gratefully to the woods in search of privacy and wild strawberries. Come evening he returned to the school boasting of the great day he had had. Just occasionally the worst happened and a carload would appear—Rick, Mr. Cudlove, Syd in private's uniform, and a couple of jockeys crammed in anyhow—all well refreshed after a pause at the Brace of Partridges. If a school match was in progress they would roar support for the home side and hand round unheard-of oranges from a crate in the boot of the car. If none, then Syd and Morrie Washington would press-gang any boy who happened to be passing on his bicycle, and mount a handicap race round the playing fields while Syd belted out the commentary through his cupped hands. And Rick personally, dressed in the Admiral's suit, would start them off with a mayoral wave of his handkerchief, and Rick personally would present an unimaginable box of chocolates to the winner, while the pound notes changed hands around the court. And when evening came Rick never failed to install himself at the Overflow House, bringing a bottle of bubbly along to cheer old Lippsie up because she seemed so glum—“What's got into her, son?” And Rick cheered her up all right; Pym heard it going on, thump, creak and scream, while he crouched outside her door in his dressing-gown wondering whether they were fighting or pretending. Back in bed, he would hear Rick tiptoeing down the stairs, though Rick could tread as lightly as a cat.

Till a morning came when Rick did not leave quietly at all. Not for Pym, not for the rest of the Overflow Boys, who were greatly excited to be woken by the clamour. Lippsie was bawling and Rick was trying to quell her, but the nicer he was to her the more unreasonable she became. “You made me to be a
teef!”
she was yelling between great big whoops while she took another gulp of air. “You made me
teef
to punish me. You were bad priest, Rickie Pym. You made me to steal. I was honest woman. I was refugee but I was honest woman.” Why did she speak as if it was all last year? “My father was honest man. My broder also was honest man. They was good men, not bad like me. You made me to steal until I was criminal like you. Maybe God punish you one day, Rickie Pym. Maybe He make you to weep, too. I hope He will. I hope, I hope!”

“Old Lippsie's having a touch of her wobblies, son,” Rick explained to Pym, finding him on the stairs as he made to leave. “Slip in there and see if you can make her laugh with one of your stories. Is old Grimble feeding you up there?”

“It's super,” said Pym.

“Your old man is seeing them right, know that? The healthiest school in Britain, this is. Ask them at the Ministry. Want a half-crown? Well then.”

 

To reach Lippsie's bicycle Pym used a walk he had acquired from Sefton Boyd. You kept your hands lightly linked behind your back, shoved your head forward and fixed your eyes upon some vaguely pleasing object on the horizon. You stalked wide and high, smiling slightly, as if listening to other voices, which is how the flower of us wear authority. He was too small to sit on the tartan saddle but a lady's bicycle has a hole and not a bar, as Sefton Boyd was always happy to point out, and Pym swayed through the hole pumping his legs from side to side as he swung the handlebars between the rain-filled craters in the tarmac. I am the official bicycle collector. To his right was the kitchen garden where he and Lippsie had Dug for Victory, to his left the coppice where the German bomb had fallen, hurling bits of blackened twig against the window of the bedroom he shared with the Indian and the grocer's boy. But behind him in his terrified imagination was Sefton Boyd with his lictors in full cry, mimicking Lippsie at him because they knew he loved her: “Vere are you goink, mein little black market? Vot are you doink mit your sweetheart, mein little black market, now she be dead?” Ahead of him was the gate where he had waited for Mr. Cudlove, and to the left of the gate was the Overflow House with its iron railings ripped away for the war effort, and a policeman standing in the gap.

“I've been sent to collect my nature-study book,” said Pym to the policeman, looking him straight in the eye as he leaned Lippsie's bicycle against a brick post. Pym had lied to policemen before and knew you must look honest.

“Your nature book, have you?” said the policeman. “What's your name, then?”

“Pym, sir. I live here.”

“Pym who?”

“Magnus.”

“Hop along then, Pym Magnus,” said the policeman but Pym still walked slowly, refusing to show any sign of eagerness. Lippsie's silver-framed family was queued up on the bedside table, but Rick's heavy head dominated the lot of them, sensitive and political in its pigskin frame, and Rick's sage eyes followed him wherever he went. He opened Lippsie's wardrobe and breathed the smell of her, he shoved aside her frilly white dressing-gown, her fur cape and the camel-hair overcoat with the pixie's hood that Rick had bought her in St. Moritz. From the back of her wardrobe he pulled out her cardboard suitcase. He set it on the floor and opened it with the key she kept hidden in the Toby jug on the tiled mantelpiece next to the soft toy chimp who was Little Audrey who laughed and laughed and laughed. He took out the book like a Bible that was written in little black sword blades, and the music books and reading books he didn't understand and the passport with her picture in it when she was young, and the wads of letters in German from her sister Rachel, pronounced “Ra-ha-el,” who no longer wrote to her, and from the very bottom of the case Rick's letters, tied into bundles with bits of harvest twine. Some he knew almost by heart, though he had difficulty unravelling the portent seething beneath their verbiage:

Lippsie's letter, which he had left till last, was by contrast a marvel of conciseness:

Pym made a bundle of them, Lippsie's included, stuffed them inside his nature book and the nature book inside his belt. He rode past the policeman slowly, feeling cats' claws on his back. The school boiler was a brick furnace built into the basement, fed by a chute in the kitchen yard. To approach the chute was a beatable offence, to burn paper was a Quisling act and sailors would drown for it. A fierce rain was blowing from the Downs, the chalk hills were olive against the storm-clouds. Standing before the open chute, shoulders high against his neck, Pym shoved the letters into it and watched them disappear. A dozen people must have seen him, staff and inmates, and some for sure were allies of Sefton Boyd. But the openness with which he had proceeded convinced them he was acting on authority. Certainly it convinced Pym. He shoved in the last letter, which was the one that told him to be strong, and walked away without once turning to see if he was being noticed.

He needed the staff lavatory again. He needed his secret St. Moritz with its panelled seclusion, he needed the secret majesty of its brass taps and mahogany-framed mirror, for Pym loved luxury as only those can who have had love taken from them. He gained the forbidden staircase to the staffroom; he reached the half-landing. The lavatory door was ajar. He pushed it, slipped inside, locked it behind him. He was alone. He stared at his face, making it harder, then softer, then harder. He ran the taps and washed his cheeks till they shone. His sudden isolation, added to the grandeur of his achievement, made him unique in his own eyes. His mind whirled with the vertigo of greatness. He was God. He was Hitler. He was Wentworth. He was the king of the green filing cabinet, TP's noble descendant. Henceforth, nothing on earth need happen without his intervention. He took out his penknife, opened it and held its big blade uppermost before his face in the mirror, taking an Arthurian vow. By Excalibur I swear. The lunch bell rang but there was no roll-call for lunch and he was not hungry; he would never be hungry again, he was an immortal knight. He thought of cutting his throat but his mission was too important. He thought of names. Who has the best family in the school? I have. The Pyms are crackerjack and Prince Magnus is the fastest horse in the world. He pressed his cheek against the wood panelling, smelling cricket bats and Swiss forests. The knife was still in his hand. His eyes went hot and blurred, his ears sang. The divine voice inside him told him to look, and he saw the initials “KS-B” carved very deeply into the best panel. Stooping, he gathered the splinters at his feet and put them into the lavatory where they floated. He pulled the plug but they still floated. He left them there, went to the arts hut and completed his Dornier bomber.

All afternoon he waited, confident nothing had happened. I didn't do it. If I went back it wouldn't be there. It was Maggs in third form. It was Jameson who owns a kukri, I saw him go in. An oik from the village did it, I saw him sneaking round the grounds with a dagger in his belt, his name is Wentworth. At evensong he prayed that a German bomb would destroy the staff lavatory. None did. Next day, he presented Sefton Boyd with his greatest treasure, the koala bear Lippsie had given him after his appendix operation. In break he buried his penknife in the loose earth behind the cricket pavilion. Or as I would say today, cached it. It was not until evening line-up that the full name of the Honourable Kenneth Sefton Boyd was called out in a voice of doom by the duty master, the sadist O'Mally. Mystified, the young nobleman was led to Mr. Grimble's study. Mystified himself, Pym watched him go. Whatever can they want him for—my friend, my best friend, the owner of my koala bear? The mahogany door closed, eighty pairs of eyes fixed upon its fine workmanship, Pym's also. Pym heard Mr. Grimble's voice, then Sefton Boyd's raised in protest. Then a great silence while God's justice was administered, blow by blow. Counting, Pym felt cleansed and vindicated. So it wasn't Maggs, it wasn't Jameson and it wasn't me. Sefton Boyd did it himself, otherwise he would not have been beaten. Justice, he was beginning to learn, is only as good as her servants.