A Perfect Spy (77 page)

“God in heaven, old son, what the devil are they doing to me? Can't an honest fellow do a bit of business in this country? Have you seen the food they give you here, these German sausages? What do we pay our taxes for? What did we fight the war for? What's the good of a son who's head of the Foreign Office if he can't keep these German thugs away from his old man?”

But by then Pym was bear-hugging Rick, slapping his shoulders and saying it was good to see him in whatever circumstances. So Rick took to weeping also, and the Kommandant delicately removed himself to another room while, reunited, each pal celebrated the other as his saviour.

I don't mean to disappoint you, Tom, but I do honestly forget, perhaps deliberately, the details of Rick's Berlin transactions. Pym was expecting his own judgment at the time, not Rick's. I remember two sisters and that they were of noble Prussian stock and lived in an old house in Charlottenburg, because Pym called on them to pay them off for the usual missing paintings Rick was selling for them, and the diamond brooch he was getting cleaned for them, and the fur coats that were being remodelled by a first-rate tailor friend of his in London who would do it free because he thought the world of Rick. And I remember the sisters had a bent nephew who was involved in a shady arms racket, and that somewhere in the story Rick had an aeroplane for sale, the finest, best-preserved fighter-bomber you could wish for, in mint condition inside and out. And for all I know it was being painted by those lifelong Liberals, Balham's of Brinkley, and guaranteed to fly everyone to Heaven.

It was in Berlin also that Pym courted your mother, Tom, and took her away from his boss and hers, Jack Brotherhood. I am not sure that you or anybody else has a natural right to know what accident conceived you, but I'll try to help you as best I can. There was mischief in Pym's motive, I won't deny it. The love, what there was of it, came later.

“Jack Brotherhood and I seem to be sharing the same woman,” Pym remarked impishly to Axel one day, during a callbox-to-callbox conversation.

Axel required to know immediately who she was.

“An aristo,” said Pym, still teasing him. “One of ours. Church and spy Establishment, if that means anything to you. Her family's connections with the Firm go back to William the Conqueror.”

“Is she married?”

“You know I don't sleep with married women unless they absolutely insist.”

“Is she amusing?”

“Axel, we are talking of a lady.”

“I mean is she social?” Axel demanded impatiently. “Is she what you call diplomatic geisha? Is she bourgeois? Would Americans like her?”

“She's a top Martha, Axel. I keep telling you. She's beautiful and rich and frightfully British.”

“Then maybe she is the ticket that will get us to Washington,” said Axel, who had recently been expressing anxieties about the number of random women drifting through Pym's life.

Soon afterwards, Pym received similar advice from your Uncle Jack.

“Mary has told me what's going on between you, Magnus,” he said, taking him aside in his most avuncular manner. “And if you ask me you could travel further and fare a damned sight worse. She's one of the best girls we've got, and it's time you looked a little less disreputable.”

So Pym, with both his mentors pushing in the same direction, followed their advice and took Mary, your mother, to be his truly wedded partner at the High Table of the Anglo-American alliance. And really, after all that he had given away already, it seemed a very reasonable sacrifice.

He began a note to Kate and tore it up. He scribbled “Dearest Belinda” and stopped, scared by the silence around him. He looked sharply at his watch. Five o'clock. Why hasn't the clock chimed? I've gone deaf. I'm dead. I'm in a padded cell. From across the square the first chime sounded. One. Two. I can stop it any time I want, he thought. I can stop it at one, at two, at three. I can take any part of any hour and stop it dead. What I cannot do is make it chime midnight at one o'clock. That's God's trick, not mine.

 

A shocked stillness had descended over Pym and it was the literal stillness of death. He was standing at the window once more, watching the leaves drift across the empty square. An ominous inactivity marked everything he saw. Not a head in a window, not an open doorway. Not a dog or cat or squirrel or a single squawking child. They have taken to the hills. They are waiting for the raiders from the sea. But in his head he is standing in the cellar flat of a run-down office block in Cheapside, watching the two faded Lovelies on their knees as they tear open the last of Rick's files and lick their crabbed fingertips to speed them in their paperchase. Paper lies in growing mounds around them, it flutters through the air like swirling petals as they rummage and discard what they have vainly plundered: bank statements written in blood, invoices, furious solicitors' letters, warrants, summonses, love letters dripping with reproach. The dust of them is filling Pym's nostrils as he watches, the clang of the steel drawers is like the clang of his prison grilles, but the Lovelies heed nothing; they are avid widows ransacking Rick's record. At the centre of the débris, drawers and cupboard askew, stands Rick's last Reichskanzlei desk, its serpents twining themselves round its bombé legs like gilded garters. On the wall hangs the last photograph of the great TP in mayoral regalia and on the chimney piece, above a grate stuffed with false coals and the last of Rick's cigar butts, stands the bronze bust of your Founder and Managing Director himself, beaming out the last of his integrity. On the open door at Pym's back hangs the memorial tablet to Rick's last dozen companies, but a sign beside the bell reads “Press here for attention,” because when Rick has not been saving his nation's faltering economy, he has been working as night porter for the block.

“What time did he die?” says Pym, before remembering that he knows.

“Evening, dearie. The pubs was just opening,” says one of the Lovelies through her cigarette as she heaves another batch of paper on to the rubbish heap.

“He was having a nice drop next door,” says the other, who like the first has not for one moment relaxed her labours.

“What's next door?” says Pym.

“Bedroom,” says the first Lovely, tossing aside another spent file.

“So who was with him?” Pym asks. “Were you with him? Who was with him, please?”

“We both were, dearie,” says the second. “We was having a little cuddle, if you want to know. Your dad loved a drink and it always made him amorous. We'd had a nice tea early because of his commitments, steak with onion, and he'd had a bit of a barney on the blower with the telephone exchange about a cheque that was in the post to them. He was depressed, wasn't he, Vi?”

The first Lovely, if reluctantly, suspends her researches. The second does likewise. Suddenly they are decent London women, with kindly faces and puffed, overworked bodies.

“It was over for him, dearie,” she says, pushing away a hank of hair with her chubby wrist.

“What was?”

“He said if he couldn't have that phone no more, he'd have to go. He said that phone was his lifeline and if he couldn't have it, it was a judgment on him, how would he do his business without a blower and a clean shirt?”

Mistaking Pym's silence for rebuke, her companion flares at him. “Don't look at us like that, darling. He'd had all we've got long ago. We done the gas, we done the electric, we cooked his dinners, didn't we, Vi?”

“We done all we could,” says Vi. “And given him the comfort, too.”

“We pulled tricks for him more than was natural, didn't we, Vi? Three a day for him, sometimes.”

“More,” says Vi.

“He was very lucky to have you,” says Pym sincerely. “Thank you very much for looking after him.”

This pleases them, and they smile shyly.

“You haven't got a nice bottle in that big black briefcase of yours, I suppose, dearie?”

“I'm afraid not.”

Vi goes to the bedroom. Through the open doorway Pym sees the great imperial bed from Chester Street, its upholstery ripped and stained with use. Rick's silk pyjamas lie sprawled across the coverlet. He smells Rick's body lotion and Rick's hair oil. Vi returns with a bottle of Drambuie.

“Did he talk about me at all, in the last days?” says Pym while they drink.

“He was proud of you, dear,” says Vi's friend. “Very proud.” But she seems dissatisfied with her reply. “He was going to catch you up, mind. That was nearly his last words, wasn't it, Vi?”

“We was holding him,” says Vi, with a sniff. “You could see he was going from the breathing. ‘Tell them I forgive them at the telephone exchange,' he says. ‘And tell my boy Magnus we'll both be ambassadors soon.'”

“And after that?” says Pym.

“‘ Give us another touch of the Napoleon, Vi,'” says Vi's friend, now weeping also. “It wasn't Napoleon though, it was the Drambuie. Then he says: ‘There's enough in those files, girls, to see you right till you join me.'”

“He just nodded off really,” says Vi, into her handkerchief. “He mightn't have been dead at all, if it hadn't been for his heart.”

There is a rustle at the door. Three knocks. Vi opens it an inch, then all the way, then stands back disapprovingly to admit Ollie and Mr. Cudlove, armed with buckets of ice. The years have not been kind to Ollie's nerves, and the tears at the corners of his eyes are stained with mascara. But Mr. Cudlove is unchanged, down to his chauffeur's black tie. Transferring the bucket to his left side, Mr. Cudlove seizes Pym's right hand in a manly grip. Pym follows them down a narrow corridor lined with photographs of neverwozzers. Rick is lying in the bath with a towel round his middle, his marbled feet crossed over each other as if in accordance with some Oriental ritual. His hands are curled and cupped in readiness to harangue his Maker.

“It's just that there wasn't the funds, sir,” Mr. Cudlove murmurs while Ollie pours in the ice. “Not a penny piece anywhere, to be frank, sir. I think those ladies may have taken a liberty.”

“Why didn't you close his eyes?” says Pym.

“We did, sir, to be frank, but they would open again, and it didn't seem respectful.”

On one knee before his father, Pym writes out a cheque for two hundred pounds, and nearly makes it dollars by mistake.

Pym drives to Chester Street. The house has been in other hands for years but tonight it stands in darkness, as if once more waiting for the Distraining Bailiffs. Pym approaches gingerly. On the doorstep, a nightlight burns despite the rain. Beside it like a dead animal lies an old boa in the mauve of half mourning, similar to the one belonging to Aunt Nell that he had used to block the lavatory at The Glades so long ago. Is it Dorothy's? Or Peggy Wentworth's? Is it some child's game? Is it put there by Lippsie's ghost? No card attaches to its dew-soaked feathers. No sequestrator has pinned his claim to it. The only clue is the one word “Yes,” scrawled in trembling chalklines on the door, like a safety signal in a target town.

 

Turning his back on the deserted square Pym strode angrily to the bathroom and opened the skylight that years ago he had daubed with green paint for Miss Dubber's greater decency. Through a gun slit, he examined the gardens at the side of the house and concluded that they too were unnaturally empty. No Stanley, the Alsatian, tethered to the rain tub of number 8. No Mrs. Aitken, the butcher's wife, who spends every waking hour at her roses. Closing the skylight with a bang, he stooped over the basin and sluiced water in his face, then glowered at his reflection till it gave him a false and brilliant smile. Rick's smile, put on to taunt him, the one that is too happy even to blink. The one that cuddles up against you and presses into you like a thrilled child. The one Pym hated most.

“Fireworks, old son,” said Pym, mimicking Rick's cadences at their holy worst. “Remember how you loved a firework? Remember dear old Guy Fawkes night, and the great setpiece there, with your old man's initials on it, RTP, going up in lights all over Ascot? Well then.”

Well then, Pym echoed in his soul.

 

Pym is writing again. Joyously. No pen can take the strain of this. Reckless free letters are careering over the paper. Lightpaths, rocket tails, stars and stripes are zipping above his head. The music of a thousand transistor radios plays around him; the bright faces of strangers laugh into his own, and he is laughing back at them. It is July 4th. It is Washington's night of nights. The diplomatic Pyms have arrived a week ago to take up his appointment as Deputy Head of Station. The island of Berlin is sunk at last. They have a spell in Prague behind them, Stockholm, London. The path to America was never easy, but Pym has gone the distance, Pym has made it, he is assumed and almost risen into the reddened dark that is repeatedly blasted into whiteness by the floodlights, fireworks and searchlights. The crowd is bobbing round him and he is part of it, the free people of the earth have taken him among them. He is one with all these grown-up happy children celebrating their independence of things that never held them. The Marine Band, the Breckenridge Boys Choir and the Metropolitan Area Symposium Choral Group have wooed and won him unopposed. At party after party Magnus and Mary have been celebrated by half the intelligence aristos of Georgetown, have eaten swordfish by candlelight in red-brick yards, chatted under lights strung in overhanging branches, have embraced and been embraced, shaken hands and filled their heads with names and gossip and champagne. Heard a lot about you, Magnus—Magnus, welcome aboard! Jesus, is that your wife? That's
criminal!
Till Mary, worried about Tom—the fireworks have overexcited him—is determined to go home and Bee Lederer has gone with her.