A Perfect Spy (23 page)

Three minutes. I always like to cut it fine. Pym wiped his face clean and from an inside pocket drew his faithful copy of Grimmelshausen's
Simplicissimus,
bound in worn brown buckram and much travelled. He laid it ready on the desk beside a pad of paper and a pencil, crossed the room and knelt down in front of dear old Winston's wireless, spinning the Bakelite tuning dial until he had the wavelength.

Volume down. Switch on. Wait. A man and a woman discussing in Czech the economics of a fruit cooperative. Discussion fades in midsentence. Time signal announces evening news. Stand by. Pym is calm. Operational calm.

But he is also a little bit transported. There is a serenity here that is not quite of this world, a hint of mystical affinity in his youthful loving smile that says “Hullo there” to someone not quite of this earth. Of all those who have known him, other than this extraterrestrial stranger, perhaps only Miss Dubber has seen the same expression.

Item one, harangue against American imperialists following breakdown of latest round of arms talks. Sound of page turning, signal for get ready. Noted. You are going to talk to me. I am thankful. I appreciate this gesture. Item two coming up. Presenter introduces college professor from Brno. Good evening, Professor, and how is the Czech Secret Service this evening? The professor speaks, a passage for translation. All nerves extended, the all of me at full stretch. First sentence: THE TALKS HAVE ENDED IN DEADLOCK. Ignore. IN ANOTHER BID. Write it down. Slowly. Don't rush. Patience again while we wait for the first numeral. Here it is. A FIFTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD WELDER FROM PLZEŇ. He switched off the wireless and, pad in hand, returned to his desk, eyes straight ahead of him. Opening his Grimmelshausen at page 55, he found five lines down without even counting and on a fresh sheet of paper wrote out the first ten letters of that line, then converted them to numerals according to their position in the alphabet. Subtract without carrying. Don't reason, do it. He was adding again, still not carrying. He was converting numbers into letters. Don't reason. NEV . . . VER . . . RMI . . . IND . . . DEW . . . There's nothing here. It's gobbledegook. Tune in again at ten and take a fresh reading. He was smiling. He was smiling like a saint when the agony is over. The tears were starting to his eyes. Let them. He was standing, holding the page in both hands above his head. He was weeping. He was laughing. He could scarcely read what he had written. NEVER MIND, E. WEBER LOVE YOU ALWAYS. POPPY.

“You cheeky sod,” he whispered aloud, punching away more tears. “Oh Poppy. Oh my.”

 

“Is anything wrong, Mr. Canterbury? ” Miss Dubber demanded sternly.

“I came to take that vodka off you, Miss D. Vodka,” he explained. “Vodka and something.”

He was already mixing it.

“You've only been upstairs an hour, Mr. Canterbury. We don't call that working, do we, Toby? No wonder the country's in a fuss.”

Pym's smile widened. “What fuss is that?”

“The football crowds. Setting such a bad example to the foreigners.
You'd
never have let that happen, would you, Mr. Canterbury?”

“Of course I wouldn't.”

Warm orange juice from the bottle, oh glory! Chalky water from the tap, where else would you find it? He sat with her for an hour, bubbling on about the charms of Naples, before he returned to his task of saving the country.

 

How Rick won the peace I'll never rightly know, Tom, but win it he did, overnight as usual, and none of us will ever have to worry again, son, there's plenty for everyone and your old man's made it. In the zeal of the new prosperity father and son took up the profession of country gentleman. With victory in Europe still wet on the hoardings the newly adolescent Pym bought himself a charcoal Harrods suit with its coveted long trousers, a black tie and a stiff white collar, all on the account, and steeled himself to have Sefton Boyd's promised fish-hooks poked through his earlobes. Rick meanwhile in his immense maturity acquired a twenty-acre mansion in Ascot with white fencing down the drive, and a row of tweed suits louder than the Admiral's, and a pair of mad red setters, and a pair of two-toned country shoes for walking them, and a pair of Purdey shotguns for his portrait with them, and a mile-long bar to while away his rustic evenings over bubbly and roulette, and a bronze bust of TP's head on a plinth in the hall beside a larger one of his own. A platoon of displaced Poles was hauled in to staff the place, a new mother wore high heels on the lawn, bawled at the servants and gave Pym tips on the hygiene and diction of the upper classes. A Bentley appeared and was not changed or hidden for several weeks though a Pole with a grudge contrived to fill it with water from a hose-pipe through a crack in the window and drench Rick's dignity when he opened the door next morning. Mr. Cudlove got a mulberry uniform and a cottage in the grounds where Ollie grew geraniums, sang
The Mikado,
and painted the kitchen for his nerves. Livestock and a surly cowman supplied the character of a farm, for Rick had become a taxpayer which I know now marked the summit of his heroic struggle for liquidity: “It's a damn shame, Maxie,” he declared proudly to a Major Maxwell-Cavendish who had been brought in to advise on matters of the Turf. “Lord in Heaven if a man can't enjoy the fruits of his labours these days what the devil did we fight the war for?” The major, who wore a tinted monocle, said “What indeed?” and pursed his lips into a holly leaf. And Pym, agreeing wholeheartedly, topped up the major's glass. Still waiting to be sent to school, he was going through a faceless period and would have topped up anything.

Up in London the court commandeered a pillared Reichskanzlei in Chester Street staffed by a troupe of Lovelies who were changed as often as they wore out. A stuffed jockey in the Pym sporting colours waving his little whip at them, photographs of Rick's neverwozzers, and a Tablet of Honour commemorating the unfallen companies of the latest Rick T. Pym & Son empire completed the Wall of Fame. Their names live in me for ever more, apparently, for it took me years of sworn statements to disown them and I have most of them by heart to this day. The best celebrate the victory at arms that Rick by now was convinced he had obtained for us single-handed: the Alamein Sickness & Health Company, the Military & Permanent Pensions Fund, the Dunkirk Mutual & General, the T.P. Veteran Alliance Company—all seemingly unlimited, yet all satellites of the great Rick T. Pym & Son holding company, whose legal limitations as a receptacle of widows' mites were only gradually revealed. I have enquired, Tom. I have asked lawyers who know things. A hundred pounds of capital was enough to cover the lot. And we had books, fancy! Winfield on Tort, MacGillivray on Insurance, Snell on Equity, somebody else on Rome, hoary old lawyers that they were, they were always the first to disappear in adversity and the first to come back smiling when the struggle was won. And beyond Chester Street lay the clubs, tucked like safe houses around the quieter corners of Mayfair. The Albany, the Burlington, the Regency, the Royalty—their titles were nothing to the glories that awaited us inside. Do such places exist today? Not on the Firm's expenses, Jack, that's for sure. And if so, then in a world already dedicated to pleasure, not austerity. They don't sell you illegal petrol coupons at the bar, illegal steaks in the grill-room or take illegal bets in the illegal sporting room. They don't have illegal mothers in low gowns who swear you'll break a lot of hearts one day. Or real live members of our beloved Crazy Gang leaning gloomily at the bar, an hour before reducing us to tears of laughter in the stalls. Or jockeys scurrying round the snooker table that was too high for them, a hundred quid a corner and Magnus why aren't you at school yet and where's that bloody jigger? Or Mr. Cudlove standing outside in his mulberry, reading
Das Kapital
against the Bentley steering wheel while he waited to whisk us to our next important conference with some luckless gentleman or lady requiring the divine touch.

Beyond the clubs again lay the pubs: Beadles at Maidenhead, the Sugar Island at Bray, the Clock here, the Goat there, the Bell at somewhere else, all with their silver grills and silver pianists and silver ladies at the bar. At one of them Mr. Muspole was called a bloody profiteer by a small waiter he was insulting and Pym contrived to leap in with a funny word in time to stop the fight. What the word was I don't remember, but Mr. Muspole had once shown me a brass knuckleduster he liked to take to the races and I know he had it with him that night. And I know the waiter's name was Billy Craft and that he took me home to meet his underfed wife and children in their Bob Cratchit flat on the edge of Slough, and that Pym spent a jolly night with them and slept on a bony sofa under everybody's woollies. Because fifteen years later at a resources conference at Head Office who should loom out of the crowd but this same Billy Craft, supremo of domestic surveillance section. “I thought I'd rather follow them than feed them, sir,” he said with a shy laugh as he shook my hand about fifty times. “No disrespect to your father, mind. He was a great man, naturally.” Pym, it turned out, had not been the only one to redress Mr. Muspole's ill-behaviour. Rick had sent him a case of bubbly and a dozen pairs of nylons for Mrs. Craft.

After the pubs, if we were lucky, came a dawn raid on Covent Garden for a nice touch of bacon and eggs to perk us up before the hundred-mile-an-hour dash to the stables where the jockeys put on brown caps and jodhpurs and became the Knights Templar Pym had always known they were, galloping the neverwozzers down frosty runways marked by pine sprigs, till in his loyal imagination they rode off into the sky to win the Battle of Britain for us all over again.

Sleep? I remember it just the once. We were driving to Torquay for a nice weekend's rest at the Imperial, where Rick had set up an illegal game of chemin de fer in a suite overlooking the sea, and it must have been one of those times when Mr. Cudlove had resigned, for suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of a moonlit cornfield that Rick, smelling strongly of the cares of office, had mistaken for the open road. Stretched side by side on the Bentley roof, father and son let the hot moon scorch their faces.

“Are you all right?” Pym asked, meaning, are you liquid, are we on our way to prison?

Rick gave Pym's hand a fierce squeeze. “Son. With you beside me, and God sitting up there with His stars, and the Bentley underneath us, I'm the most all-right fellow in the world.” And he meant it, every word as ever, and his proudest day was going to be when Pym was at the Old Bailey on the right side of the rails wearing the full regalia of the Lord Chief Justice, handing down the sentences that had once been handed down to Rick in the days we never owned to.

“Father,” said Pym. And stopped.

“What is it, son? You can tell your old man.”

“It's just that—well, if you can't pay the first term's boarding fees in advance, it's all right. I mean I'll go to day school. I just think I ought to go somewhere.”

“Is that all you've got to say to me?”

“It doesn't matter. Really.”

“You've been reading my correspondence, haven't you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Have you ever wanted for anything? In your whole life?”

“Never.”

“Well then,” said Rick and nearly broke Pym's neck with an armlock embrace.

 

“So where did the money come from, Syd?” I insist again and again. “Why did it ever end?” Even today in my incurable earnestness I long to find a serious centre to the mayhem of these years, even if it is only the one great crime that lies, according to Balzac, behind every fortune. But Syd was never an objective chronicler. His bright eye mists over, a far smile lights his birdy little face as he takes a sip of his wet. Deep down he still sees Rick as a great wandering river which each of us can only ever know the stretch that Fate assigns to us. “Our big one was Dobbsie,” he recalls. “I'm not saying there wasn't others, Titch, there was. There was fine projects, many very visionary, very fantastic. But old Dobbsie was our big one.”

With Syd there must always be the big one. Like gamblers and actors he lived for it all his life, does still. But the Dobbsie story as he told it to me that night over God knows how many wets can serve as well as any, even if it left the darkest reaches unexplored.

For some time, Titch—says Syd while Meg gives us a drop more pie and turns the log fire up—as the ebb and flow of war, Titch, with God's help, naturally, increasingly favours the Allies, your dad has been very concerned to find a new opening to suit those fantastic talents of his that we are all fully aware of and rightly. By 1945 the shortages cannot be counted on to last for ever. Shortages have become, let's face it, Titch, a risk business. With the hazards of peace upon us, your chocolate, nylons, dried fruit and petrol could flood the market in a day. The coming thing, Titch, says Syd—out of whom Rick's cadences ring like tunes I cannot shake off—is your Reconstruction. And your dad, with that brain of his he's got, is as keen as any other fine patriot to get his piece of it, which is only right. The snag, as ever, is to find the toehold, for not even Rick can corner the British property market without a penny piece of capital. And quite by accident, says Syd, this toehold is provided through the unlikely agency of Mr. Muspole's sister Flora—well
you
remember Flora! Of course I do. Flora is a good scout, a favourite with the jockeys on account of her stately breasts and the generous use she puts them to. But her true allegiance, Syd reminds me, is pledged to a gentleman named Dobbs, who works for Government. And one evening in Ascot over a glass—your dad being away at a conference at the time, Titch—Flora casually lets slip that her Dobbsie is by vocation a city architect and that he has landed this important job. What job is that, dear? the court enquires politely. Flora falters. Long words are not her suit. “Assessing the compensation,” she replies, quoting something she has not fully understood. Compensation for what, dear? the court asks, pricking up its ears, for compensation never hurt anyone yet. “Bomb-damage compensation,” says Flora and glowers round her with growing uncertainty.