A Perfect Spy

CHAPTER 8

My memory gets selective here, Jack. More than usual. He’s in my sights as I expect he begins to be in yours. But you are in them too. Whatever doesn’t point to you both slips by me like landscape through a railway window. I could paint for you Pym’s distressing conversations with the luckless Herr Bertl in which, on Rick’s instruction, he assured him repeatedly it was in the post, it was taken care of, everybody would be seen right, and his father was on the point of making an offer for the hotel. Or we could have some fun with Pym, languishing for days and nights in his hotel bedroom as a hostage to the mountain of unpaid bills downstairs, dreaming of Elena Weber’s milky body reflected in its many delightful poses in the mirrored changing rooms of Bern, kicking himself for his timidity, living off hoarded continental breakfasts, running up more bills and waiting for the telephone. Or the moment when Rick went off the air. He did not ring and when Pym tried his number the only response was a howl, like the cry of a wolf stuck on one note.

When he tried Syd he got Meg, and Meg’s advice was strikingly similar to E. Weber’s. “You’re better off where you are, dear,” she said in the pointed voice of someone who is telling you she is overheard. “There’s a heat wave here and a lot of people are getting burned.” “Where’s Syd?” “Cooling himself, darling.” Or the Sunday afternoon when everything in the hotel fell mercifully silent and Pym, having packed together his few possessions, stole heart in mouth down the staff staircase and out through a side door into what was suddenly a hostile foreign city — his first clandestine exit, and his easiest.

I could offer you Pym the infant refugee, though I never starved, had a valid British passport and in retrospect seldom wanted for a kindly word. But he did dip tallows for a religious candlemaker, sweep the aisle of the Minster, roll beer barrels for a brewer and unstitch sacks of carpets for an old Armenian who kept urging him to marry his daughter, and come to think of it he might have done worse; she was a beautiful girl and kept sighing and draping herself over the sofa but Pym was too polite to approach her. All those things he did and more. All of them at night, a night animal on the run through that lovely candlelit city with its clocks and wells and cobble and arcades. He swept snow, carted cheeses, led a blind dray-horse and taught English to aspiring travel agents. All under cover while he waited for Herr Bertl’s hounds to sniff him out and bring him to justice, though I know now the poor man bore me no grudge whatever, and even at the height of his rage avoided mentioning Pym’s part in the affair.

“Dear Father,

“I am really happy out here and you must not worry about me at all as the Swiss are kindly and hospitable and have all sorts of remarkable bursaries for young foreigners keen on reading law.”

I could sing of another great hotel, not a stone’s throw from the first, where Pym went to earth as a night waiter and became a schoolboy again, sleeping under avenues of lagged piping in a basement dormitory as big as a factory where the lights never went out; how he took gratefully once more to his little iron bed and how he jollied his fellow waiters as he had jollied his fellow new boys, for they turned out to be peasants from Ticino who wanted only to go home. How he rose willingly with every bell and donned a white dicky that, though thick with last night’s grease, was not half as constricting as Mr. Willow’s collars. And how he took trays of bubbly and foie gras to ambiguous couples who sometimes wanted him to stay, Amor and Rococo beckoning from their glances. But once again he was too polite and too unknowing to oblige. His manners in those days were a barbed-wire cage. He only lusted when he was alone. Yet even as I allow my memory to brush past these tantalising episodes, my heart is hurtling ahead to the night I met the saintly Herr Ollinger in the third-class buffet of Bern railway station and, through his charity, stumbled into the encounter that altered all my life till here — and I fear your life as well, Jack, though you have yet to learn by how much.

Of the university, how Pym enrolled there and why, my recollections are equally impatient. It was for cover. All for cover as usual, leave it there. He had been working in a circus at its winter home, which was a patch of land just beneath the same railway station where his footsteps so often finished after his all-day walks. Somehow the elephants had drawn him. Any fool can wash an elephant, but he was surprised to learn how hard it was to dip the head of a twenty-foot brush into a bucket when the only light comes in shafts from the spotlights in the apex of the marquee. Each dawn when his work was done he made his way home to the Salvation Army hostel that was his temporary Ascot. Each dawn he saw the green dome of the university rising above him through the autumn mist like an ugly little Rome challenging him to convert. And somehow he had to get inside the place, for he had a second terror, greater than Herr Bertl’s hounds: namely that Rick despite his problems of liquidity would appear in a cloud of Bentley and whisk him home.

He had fabricated for Rick handsomely and imaginatively. I have won that foreigners’ scholarship I was talking about. I am reading Swiss law and German law and Roman law and all the other laws there are. I am attending night school on the side to keep myself out of mischief. He had praised the erudition of his non-existent tutors and the piety of the university chaplains. But Rick’s systems of intelligence, though erratic, were impressive. Pym knew he was not safe until he had given substance to his fictions. One morning therefore he found the courage and marched up there. He lied first about his qualifications and then about his age, for the one could not have been earned without an adjustment to the other. He paid out the last of E. Weber’s white banknotes to a crew-cut cashier, and in return received a grey cloth-card with his photograph on it, describing him as legitimate. I have never in my life been so gratified by the sight of a false document. Pym would have given his whole fortune for it, which was a further seventy-one francs. Philosophie Zwei was Pym’s faculty and I still have only the sketchiest notion of what it comprised, for Pym had asked for law but somehow been rerouted. He learned more from translating the students’ bulletins on the notice-board, which invited him to a string of unlikely forums and gave him his first rumblings of political gunfire since Ollie and Mr. Cudlove had vented their anger against the rich and Lippsie had warned him of the hollowness of possessions. You remember those forums too, Jack, though from a different aspect, and for reasons we shall come to soon enough.

It was from the university notice-board also that Pym discovered the existence of an English church in Elfenau, the diplomatic fairyland. Along he went — he could hardly wait — often two or three Sundays running. He prayed, he hovered outside the doors afterwards, shaking hands with anything that moved, though little did. He gazed soulfully at elderly mothers, fell in love with several, consumed cake and lifeless tea in their thickly curtained houses and charmed them with extravagant accounts of his parentless upbringing. Soon the expatriate in him couldn’t get along without its weekly shot of the English banality. The English church with its iron-back diplomatic families, ancient Britons and dubious Anglophiles became his school chapel and all the other chapels he had defected from.

Its counterpart was the third-class railway buffet where, if he wasn’t working, he could sit all night smoking himself sick on Disque Bleus over a single beer and fancying himself the most stateless, world-weary globe-trotter he had ever met. Today the station is an indoor metropolis of smart boutiques and plastic-coated restaurants, but in the immediate post-war years it was still an ill-lit Edwardian staging post, with stuffed stages in the concourse and murals of freed peasants waving flags, and a scent of Bockwurst and fried onion that never went away. The first-class buffet was full of gentlemen in black suits with napkins round their necks, but the third class was shadowed and beery, with a whiff of Balkan lawlessness and drunks who sang out of tune. Pym’s favourite table was in a panelled corner near the coats where a sacred waitress called Elisabeth gave him extra soup. It must have been Herr Ollinger’s favourite also for he homed on it as soon as he entered and having bowed lovingly at Elisabeth, who wore a low-cut Tracht with perforated smocking, bowed at Pym too, and fidgeted with his poor briefcase, and hauled at his disobedient hair, and asked, “Do we disturb you?” in a tone of breathless anxiety while he stroked an old yellow chow dog that hung grumbling on its lead. Thus as I now know does our Maker disguise His best agents.

Herr Ollinger was ageless but I guess now fifty. His complexion was doughy, his smile regretful, his cheeks were dimpled and pendulous like an old man’s bottom. Even when he did finally allow that his chair was not taken by superior beings, he lowered his round body so gingerly into it that you would think he expected to be shooed away any minute by someone more deserving. With the assurance of an habitué Pym took the brown raincoat from his unresisting arm and threaded a hanger into it. He had decided he needed Herr Ollinger and his yellow chow dog urgently. His life was going through a fallow period at the time and he had not exchanged more than a few words with anyone for a week. His gesture threw Herr Ollinger into a vortex of hopeless gratitude. Herr Ollinger beamed and declared Pym most friendly. He grabbed a copy of Der Bund from the rack and buried his face in it. He whispered to the dog to behave itself and tapped it ineffectually on the snout, though it was behaving with exemplary tolerance. But he had spoken, which gave Pym reason to explain, in a set sentence, that unfortunately I am foreign, sir, and not yet equal to your local dialect. So please be kind enough to speak High German and excuse me. After this, as he had learned to, he added his surname, “Pym,” at which Herr Ollinger confessed that he was Ollinger, as if the name implied some frightful slur, and afterwards presented the chow as Herr Bastl, which for a moment rang uncomfortably of the luckless Bertl.

“But you speak excellent German!” Herr Ollinger protested. “I would immediately have thought you are from Germany! You are not? Then where do you come from, if I may be so impertinent?”

And this was kind of Herr Ollinger for nobody in his right mind, in those days, could have confused Pym’s German with the real thing. So Pym told Herr Ollinger the story of his life, which was what he had intended from the first, and dazzled him with tender questions about himself, and in every way he knew laid upon Herr Ollinger the full burden of his sensitive charm — which as it later turned out was a totally needless exertion on Pym’s part since Herr Ollinger was unselective in his acquaintance. He admired everybody, pitied everybody from below — not least for their dreadful misfortune in having to share the world with him. Herr Ollinger said he was married to an angel, and possessed three angel daughters who were musical prodigies. Herr Ollinger said he had inherited his father’s factory in Ostermundigen, which was a great worry to him. And so indeed it should have been, for in retrospect it is clear that the poor man rose diligently every morning in order to run it further into the earth. Herr Ollinger said Herr Bastl had been with him three years but only temporarily, because he was still trying to find the dog’s owner.

Reciprocating with equal generosity, Pym described his experiences in the blitz, and the night he had been visiting his aunt in Coventry when they hit the cathedral; how she lived but a hundred yards from the main doors and her house by a miracle was unscathed. When he had destroyed Coventry, he described himself in an imaginative tour de force as an admiral’s son standing at his dormitory window in his dressing-gown, calmly watching the waves of German bombers flying over his school and wondering whether this time they were going to drop the parachutists dressed as nuns.

“But did you have no shelters?” Herr Ollinger cried. “That’s a disgrace! You were a child, my God! My wife would be completely furious. She is from Wilderswil,” he explained, while Herr Bastl ate a pretzel and farted.

Thus Pym skipped on, piling one fiction on another, appealing to Herr Ollinger’s Swiss love of disaster, enthralling the neutral in him with the dire realities of war.

“But you were so young,” Herr Ollinger protested again when Pym related the rigours of his early military training at the Signals Depot in Bradford. “You had no nest warmth. You were a child!”

“Well, thank God they never had to use us,” said Pym in a throw-away voice as he called for his bill. “My grandfather died in the first one, my father was given up for dead in the second, so I can’t help feeling it’s time our family had a break.” Herr Ollinger would not hear of Pym paying. Herr Ollinger might be breathing the free air of Switzerland, he said, but he had three generations of English to thank for the privilege. Pym’s sausage and beer were a mere step in the mercurial progress of Herr Ollinger’s generosity. It was followed by the offer of a room, for as long as Pym wished to do him the honour, in the narrow little house in the Länggasse that Herr Ollinger had inherited from his mother.

* * *

It was not a big room. It was actually a very small room indeed. An attic, one of three, and Pym’s was in the middle, and only the middle of it was big enough for him to stand in, and even then he was more comfortable with his head poked through the skylight. In summer the daylight lasted all night, in winter the snow blacked out the world. For heating he had a great black radiator cut into the party-wall, which he heated from a wood stove in the corridor. He had to choose between freezing and boiling, depending on his mood. Yet, Tom, I have not been so content anywhere until I found Miss Dubber. Once in our lives, it is given us to know a truly happy family. Frau Ollinger was tall and luminous and frugal. On a routine patrol of the house Pym once watched her through a crack in a doorway while she slept, and she was smiling. I am sure she was smiling when she died. Her husband fussed round her like a fat tug, upsetting the economy, dumping every waif and sponger on her that he came upon, adoring her. The daughters were each plainer than the next, played musical instruments atrociously, to the fury of the neighbours, and one by one they married even plainer men and worse musicians whom the Ollingers thought brilliant and delightful — and by thinking made them so. From morning till night a trail of migrants, misfits and undiscovered geniuses drifted through their kitchen, cooking themselves omelettes and treading out their cigarettes on the linoleum. And woe if you left your bedroom unlocked, for Herr Ollinger was quite capable of forgetting you were there — or, if need be, of persuading himself you would be out tonight, or that you wouldn’t mind a stranger just until he’s got somewhere. What we paid I don’t remember. What we could afford was next to nothing and certainly not enough to subsidise the factory in Ostermundigen, for the last I heard of Herr Ollinger he was working happily as a clerk in Bern’s main post office, enchanted by the erudite company. The only possession I associate with him apart from Herr Bastl is a collection of erotica with which he consoled himself in his shyness. Like everything else about him it was there to be shared, and it was a great deal more revealing than Amor and Rococo Woman.

Such then was the household on which Pym’s crow’s-nest was built. For once his life was as good as complete. He had a bed, he had a family. He was in love with Elisabeth in the third-class buffet and contemplating marriage and early fatherhood. He was locked in a tantalising correspondence with Belinda, who felt it her duty to inform him of Jemima’s love affairs, “which I’m sure she only has because you are so far away.” If Rick was not extinct he was at least quiescent, for the only sign of him was a flow of homilies on Being Ever True to your Advantages, and avoiding the Foreign Temptations and the Snares of Synicism, which either he or his secretary could not spell. These letters had the distinct air of being typed on the run, and never came from the same place twice: “Write care Topsie Eaton at the Firs, East Grinstead, no need to put my name on envelope.” “Write to Colonel Mellow post restaurant the main G.P.O. Hull who obliges by collecting my mail.” On one occasion a handwritten love letter varied the diet, beginning: “Annie, my sweet Pet, your body means more to me than Riches of the earth.” Rick must have put it into the wrong envelope.

The only thing Pym missed therefore was a friend. He met him in Herr Ollinger’s basement on a Saturday at midday, when he took down his laundry for his weekly wash. Upstairs in the street the first snowfall was driving out the autumn. Pym had an armful of damp clothes in front of his face and was concerned about the stone steps. The basement light was operated by a time switch; any second he could be plunged into darkness and trip over Herr Bastl, who owned the boiler. But the light stayed on and as he brushed past the switch he noticed that somebody had ingeniously jammed a matchstick into it, a very sleek matchstick trimmed with a knife. He smelt cigar smoke but Bern was not Ascot — anyone who had a few pence could smoke a cigar. When he saw the armchair he mentally assigned it to the junk Herr Ollinger set aside as a gift to Herr Rubi the rag-and-bone man who came on Saturdays on his horse-drawn float.

“Don’t you know it is forbidden for foreigners to hang their clothes in Swiss basements?” said a male voice, not in dialect but in a crisp High German.

“I’m afraid I didn’t,” said Pym. He peered round for someone to apologise to and saw instead the unclear form of a slender man curled on the armchair, clutching a patchwork blanket to his neck with one long white hand and a book with the other. He wore a black beret and had a drooping moustache. No feet showed, but his body had the look of something spiky and wrongly folded, like a tripod that had stuck halfway. Herr Ollinger’s walking-stick was propped against the chair. A small cigar smouldered between the fingers that clutched the blanket.

“In Switzerland it is forbidden to be poor, it is forbidden to be foreign, it is completely forbidden to hang clothes. You are an inmate of this establishment?”

“I am a friend of Herr Ollinger’s.”

“An English friend?”

“My name is Pym.”

Discovering the moustache, the fingers of one white hand began stroking it reflectively downward.

“Lord Pym?”

“Just Magnus.”

“But you are of aristocratic stock.”

“Well, nothing very special.”

“And you are the war hero,” the stranger said, and made a sucking noise that in English would have sounded skeptical.

Pym did not like the description at all. The account of himself that he had given to Herr Ollinger was obsolete. He was dismayed to hear it revived.

“So who are you, if I may ask?” said Pym.

The stranger’s fingers rose to claw at some irritation in his cheek while he appeared to consider a range of alternatives. “My name is Axel and since one week I am your neighbour, so I am obliged to listen to you grinding your teeth at night,” he said, drawing on his cigar.

“Herr Axel?” said Pym.

“Herr Axel Axel. My parents forgot to give me a second name.” He put down the book and held out a slim hand in greeting. “For God’s sake,” he exclaimed with a wince as Pym grasped it. “Go easy, will you? The war’s over.”

Too challenged for his comfort Pym left his washing for another day and took himself upstairs.

“What is Axel’s other name?” he asked Herr Ollinger next day.

“Maybe he hasn’t one,” Herr Ollinger replied mischievously. “Maybe that’s why he has no papers.”

“Is he a student?”

“He is a poet,” said Herr Ollinger proudly but the house was stiff with poets.

“They must be very long poems. He types all night,” said Pym.

“Indeed he does. And on my typewriter,” said Herr Ollinger, his pride complete.

My husband found him in the factory, Frau Ollinger said while Pym helped her prepare vegetables for the evening meal. That is to say, Herr Harprecht the night-watchman found him. Axel was sleeping on sacks in the warehouse and Herr Harprecht wanted to hand him over to the police because he had no papers and was foreign and smelly, but thank goodness my husband stopped Herr Harprecht in time and gave Axel breakfast and took him to a doctor for his sweating.

“Where does he come from?” Pym asked.

Frau Ollinger became uncharacteristically guarded. Axel comes from drüben, she said—drüben being across the border, drüben being those irrational tracts of Europe that were not Switzerland, where people rode in tanks instead of trolley-buses, and the starving had the ill manners to pick their food from rubble instead of buying it from shops.

“How did he get here?” Pym asked.

“We think he walked,” Frau Ollinger said.

“But he’s an invalid. He’s all crippled and thin.”

“We think he had a strong will and a great necessity.”

“Is he German?”

“There are many sorts of German, Magnus.”

“Which sort is Axel?”

“We don’t ask. Maybe you should not ask either.”

“Can you guess from his voice?”

“We don’t guess either. With Axel it is better we are completely without curiosity.”

“What’s he ill of?”

“Maybe he suffered in the war, as you did,” Frau Ollinger suggested with a smile of rather too much understanding. “Don’t you like Axel? Is he disturbing you up there?”

How can he disturb me when he doesn’t speak to me? thought Pym. When all I hear of him is the clicking of Herr Ollinger’s typewriter, the cries of ecstasy from his lady callers in the afternoons and the shuffle of his feet as he hauls himself to the lavatory on Herr Ollinger’s walking-stick? When all I see of him is his empty vodka bottles and the blue cloud of his cigar smoke in the corridor and his pale empty body disappearing down the stairs?

“Axel’s super,” he said.

Pym had already appointed Christmas to be the jolliest of his life and so it was — despite a letter of appalling misery from Rick describing the privations of “a small Private hotel in the wilds of Scotland where the meagrest of life’s Necessities are a Godsend.” He meant, I discovered later, Gleneagles. Christmas Eve came. Pym as youngest lit the candles and helped Frau Ollinger lay the presents round the tree. It had been wonderfully dark all day and in the afternoon thick snowflakes began swirling in the streetlights and clogging the tramlines. The Ollinger daughters arrived with their escorts, followed by a shy married couple from Basel over whom some shadow hung, I forget what. Next a French genius called Jean-Pierre who painted fish in profile, always on a sepia background. And after him an apologetic Japanese gentleman called Mr. San — enigmatically so since, as I now know, San is itself a term of Japanese address. Mr. San was working at Herr Ollinger’s factory as some sort of industrial spy, which in retrospect strikes me as very funny indeed, because if the Japanese ever tried copying Herr Ollinger’s methods, they must have set back their industrial output by a decade.

Finally Axel himself came slowly down the wood stairs and made his entry. For the first time Pym could regard him at his leisure. Though desperately thin, his face was by nature rounded. His brow was tall but the hank of brown hair that grew sideways over it gave it a curved and saddening air. It was as if his Maker had put His thumb and forefinger to either temple and yanked the whole face downward as a warning to his frivolity: first the hooped eyebrows, then the eyes, then the moustache which was a shaggy horseshoe. And somehow inside all this was Axel himself, his eyes twinkling out of their own shadows, the grateful survivor of something Pym was not allowed to share. One of the daughters had knitted him a sloppy cardigan which he wore like a cape over his wasted shoulders.

“Schön guten Abend, Sir Magnus,” he said. He was carrying a straw bonnet upside down. Pym saw parcels in it, beautifully wrapped. “Why do we never speak to each other up there? We could be kilometres apart instead of twenty centimetres. Are you still fighting the Germans? We are allies, you and I. Soon we shall be fighting the Russians.”

“I suppose we shall,” said Pym feebly.

“Why don’t you bang on my door once when you are lonely? We can have a cigar together, save the world a little. You like to talk nonsense?”

“Very much.”

“Okay. We talk nonsense.” But on the point of shuffling away to greet Mr. San, Axel stopped and turned. And over his caped shoulder he vouchsafed Pym a quizzical, almost challenging glare, as if asking himself whether he had invested his trust too easily.

“Aber dann können wir doch Freunde sein, Sir Magnus?”—then we may be friends after all?

“Ich würde mich freuen!” Pym replied heartily, meeting his gaze without fear — I would be happy!

They shook hands again, but this time lightly. At the same moment Axel’s features broke into such a smile of sparkling good fun that Pym’s heart filled for him in response, and he promised himself that he would follow Axel anywhere for all the Christmases that he was spared. The party began. The girls played carols and Pym sang with the best, using English words where he lacked the German. There were speeches and after them a toast to absent friends and relations, at which Axel’s long eyelids almost hid his eyes and he fell quiet. But then, as if shaking off bad memories, he stood up abruptly and began unpacking the bonnet he had brought while Pym hovered at hand to help him, knowing that this was what Axel had always done at Christmas, wherever Christmas was. For the daughters he had made musical pipes, each with her name carved along the underneath. How had he carved with such wispy white hands? So exquisitely, without Pym hearing him through the partition? Where had he found his wood, his paint and brushes? For the Ollingers he produced what I later realised was another emblem of prison life, a matchstick model. This one was an ark with painted figures of our extended family waving from the portholes. For Mr. San and Jean-Pierre he had squares of cloth of a sort that Pym had once made for Dorothy on a homemade handloom between nails. For the Basel couple a patterned woollen eye to ward off whatever was afflicting them. And for Pym — I still take it as a compliment that he left me until last — for Sir Magnus he had a much used copy of Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus, bound in old brown buckram, which Pym had not heard of but could not wait to read since it would give him an excuse to bang on Axel’s door. He opened it and read the inscription. “For Sir Magnus, who will never be my enemy.” And in the top left corner, in an older ink but in a younger version of the same hand: “A. H. Carlsbad August 1939.”

“Where is Carlsbad?” Pym asked before he had allowed himself a second’s thought, and noticed at once an awkwardness round him as if everybody had heard the bad news except for himself who was deemed not old enough to receive it.

“Carlsbad no longer exists, Sir Magnus,” Axel replied politely. “When you have read Simplicissimus you will understand why.”

“Where was it?”

“It was my home town.”

“Then you have given me a treasure from your own past.”

“Would you prefer me to give you something I did not value?”

And Pym — what had he brought? God help him, the Chairman and Managing Director’s son was not used to ceremonies with meaning, and had thought of nothing better than a box of cigars to see dear old Axel right.

* * *

“Why does Carlsbad no longer exist?” Pym asked Herr Ollinger as soon as he could get him alone. Herr Ollinger knew everything except how to run a factory. Carlsbad was in the Sudetenland, he explained. It was a beautiful spa city and everybody used to go there: Brahms and Beethoven, Goethe and Schiller. First it was Austria, then it became Germany. Now it was Czechoslovakia and had a new name and the Germans had all been chucked out.

“So who does Axel belong to?” Pym asked.

“Only to us, I think,” said Herr Ollinger gravely. “And we must be careful of him or they will take him away from us, you may be sure.”

“He has women in his room,” said Pym.

Herr Ollinger’s face turned pink with impish pleasure. “I think he has all the women of Bern,” he agreed.

A couple of days passed. On the third Pym banged on Axel’s door and found him standing smoking at the open window with several heavy-looking books before him on the sill. He must have been freezing but he seemed to need the open air to read by.

“Come for a stroll,” said Pym boldly.

“At my speed?”

“Well we can’t go at mine, can we?”

“My constitution dislikes crowded places, Sir Magnus. If we are to walk, better we stay out of town.”

They borrowed Bastl and wandered with him along the empty towpath beside the racing Aare while Herr Bastl peed and refused to follow and Pym did his best to keep an eye open for anyone who looked like a policeman. In the sunless river valley the frost drifted about in evil clouds and the cold was merciless. Axel seemed not to notice. He puffed at his cigar while he tossed out questions in his soft, amused voice. If this is how he walked from Austria, thought Pym, shivering in his wake, he must have taken years.

“How did you reach Bern, Sir Magnus? Were you advancing or retreating?” Axel asked.

Never able to resist an opportunity to portray himself on a fresh page, Pym went to work. And though, as was his wont, he took care to improve upon the reality, rearranging the facts to fit his prevailing image of himself, an instinctive caution nevertheless counselled him restraint. True, he endowed himself with a noble and eccentric mother, and true, when he came to describe Rick he awarded him many of the qualities Rick unsuccessfully aspired to, such as wealth, military distinction and daily access to the Highest in the Land. But in other respects he was frugal and self-mocking and when he came to the story of E. Weber, which he had not told anyone till now, Axel laughed so much he had to sit on a bench and light another cigar to get his wind back, while Pym laughed with him, delighted by his success. And when he showed him her very letter saying, “Never mind. E. Weber love you always,” he shouted, “Nochmal! Tell it again, Sir Magnus! I order you! And make sure it is completely different this time. Did you sleep with her?”

“Of course.”

“How many times?”

“Four or five.”

“All in one night? You are a tiger! Was she grateful?”

“She was very, very experienced.”

“More than your Jemima?”

“Well, jolly nearly.”

“More than your wicked Lippsie who seduced you when you were still a little boy?”

“Well, Lippsie was in a class of her own.”

Axel slapped him gaily on the back. “Sir Magnus, you are a prince, no question. You are a dark horse, you know that? Such a good little boy, yet you sleep with dangerous adventuresses and young English aristocrats. I love you, hear me? I love all English aristocrats, but you best.”

Walking again, Axel had to shove his arm through Pym’s to support himself, and from then on used him unashamedly as his walking-stick. For the rest of our lives we have seldom walked in any other way.

* * *

Somewhere that evening under a bridge, Pym and Axel found an empty café and Axel insisted on paying for two vodkas from the black purse he kept on a leather thong round his neck. Somewhere on the freezing journey home they agreed that Axel and Pym must begin the education they had never had, and that they would appoint tomorrow the first day of the world, and that Grimmelshausen would be their first subject because he taught that the world was a mad place and getting madder by the moment, with everything that appeared right almost certainly wrong. They agreed that Axel would take charge of Pym’s spoken German and not rest till he spoke it to perfection. Thus, in a day and an evening, Pym became Axel’s legs and Axel’s intellectual companion and, though it was not initially meant that way, Axel’s pupil, for over the next few months he unveiled for Pym the German muse. If Axel’s knowledge was greater than Pym’s, his curiosity was no less, his energy equally relentless. Perhaps by resuscitating his country’s culture for an innocent, he was reconciling himself to its recent past.

As to Pym, he was gazing at last on the glories of the kingdom he had dreamed of for so long. The German muse had no particular draw for him, then or later, for all his loud enthusiasm. If she had been Chinese or Polish or Indian, it would have made no earthly odds. The point was, she supplied Pym with the means, for the first time, to regard himself intellectually as a gentleman. And for that Pym was eternally grateful to her. By willing Pym night and day to accompany Axel on his explorations, she gave him the world inside his head that Lippsie had said he would be able to take with him anywhere. And Lippsie was right, because when he went down to the warehouse in Ostring where Herr Ollinger had obtained illegal nightwork for him at the hands of a fellow philanthropist, he neither walked nor took the tram but rode with Mozart in his coach to Prague. When he washed his elephants at night he endured the humiliations of Lenz’s Soldaten. When he sat in the third-class buffet bestowing soulful looks on Elisabeth, he imagined himself as the young Werther, planning his wardrobe before committing suicide. And when he considered all his failures and hopes together, he was able to compare his Werdegang with Wilhelm Meister’s years of apprenticeship, and planned even then a great autobiographical novel that would show the world what a noble sensitive fellow he was compared with Rick.

And yes, Jack, the other seeds were there, of course they were: a crash diet of Hegel, as much as they both could swallow at a time, a burst of Marx and Engels and the bad bears of Communism — for after all, said Axel, this was the first day of the world. “If we are to judge Christianity by the misery it has caused mankind, who would ever be a Christian? We accept no prejudices, Sir Magnus. We believe everything as we read it and only afterwards reject it. If Hitler hated these fellows so much, they can’t be all bad, I say.” Out came Rousseau and the revolutionaries, and Das Kapital, and Anti-Dühring, and in went the sun for several weeks, though I swear we came to no conclusions that I remember, except that we were glad when it was over. And I honestly doubt now whether the substance of Axel’s teaching was of importance beside Pym’s joy that he was teaching him at all. What counted was that Pym was happy from the moment he got up until the early hours of the following morning; and that when they finally went to bed on either side of their black radiator, sleeping, to use Axel’s phrase, like God in France, Pym’s mind went on exploring in his sleep.

“Axel’s got the Order of the Frozen Meat,” Pym told Frau Ollinger proudly one day, carving bread for family fondue.

Frau Ollinger gave an exclamation of disgust. “Magnus, what nonsense are you talking now?”

“It’s true! It’s German soldiers’ slang for a Russian campaign medal. He volunteered from his Gymnasium. His father could have got him a safe post in France or Belgium. A Druckposten, somewhere he could keep his head down. Axel wouldn’t let him. He wanted to be a hero like his classmates.”

Frau Ollinger was not pleased. “Then better you keep quiet about where he fought,” she said sternly. “Axel is here to study, not to boast.”

“He has women up there,” said Pym. “They creep up the stairs in the afternoons and scream when he makes love to them.”

“If they give him happiness and help him to study they are welcome. Do you wish to invite your passionate Jemima?”

Furious, Pym stalked to his room and penned a long letter to Rick about the unfairness of the average Swiss in daily matters. “Sometimes I think the law here does duty for common kindness,” he wrote stuffily. “Particularly where women are concerned.”

Rick wrote back by return, urging chastity: “Better you remain Clean until you have made the choice that is Meant for you.”

“Dear Belinda,

“Things are a bit sticky here at the moment. Some of the foreign students in the house are taking things a bit far with their womenfolk and I have had to step in or I’ll never get my work done. Perhaps if you adopted the same firm line with Jem, you might in the long run be doing her a favour.”

A day came when Axel fell ill. Pym hurried back from the zoo full of funny stories about his adventures to find him in bed, where he hated most to be. His tiny room was heavy with cigar smoke, his pale head darkened with stubble and shadows. A girl was hanging about but Axel ordered her out when Pym arrived.

“What’s wrong with him?” Pym asked Herr Ollinger’s doctor, peering over his shoulder, trying to decipher the prescription.

“What is wrong with him, Sir Magnus, is that he was bombed by the heroic British,” said Axel savagely from the bed, in a barbed unfamiliar voice. “What is wrong with him is that he got half a British shell up his arse and is having trouble shitting it out.”

The doctor was sworn not just to secrecy but to silence and with a friendly pat for Pym departed.

“Maybe it was you who fired it at me, Sir Magnus. Did you land in Normandy, by any chance? Perhaps you led the invasion?”

“I didn’t do anything like that at all,” said Pym.

So Pym became Axel’s legs again, fetching his medicines and cigars and cooking for him and ransacking the university libraries for ever more books which he could read aloud to him.

“No more Nietzsche, thank you, Sir Magnus. I think we know enough about the cleansing effect of violence. Kleist is not as bad but you don’t read him properly. You must bark Kleist. He was a Prussian officer, not an English hero. Get the painters.”

“Which ones?”

“Abstractionists. Decadents. Jews. Anyone who was entartet or forbidden. Give me a holiday from these mad writers.”

Pym consulted Frau Ollinger. “Then you must ask the librarian for whomever the Nazis did not like, Magnus,” she explained in her governess voice.

The librarian was an émigré who knew Axel’s needs by heart. Pym brought Klee and Nolde, Kokoschka and Klimt, Kandinsky and Picasso. He stood their picture books and catalogues open on the mantelshelf where Axel could see them without moving his head. He turned the pages and read the captions out loud. When women came, Axel again sent them away. “I am being attended to. Wait till I am well.” Pym brought Max Beckmann. He brought Steinlen, then Schiele and more Schiele. Next day the writers were reinstated. Pym fetched Brecht and Zuckmayer, Tucholsky and Remarque. He read them aloud, hours of them. “Music,” Axel commanded. Pym borrowed Herr Ollinger’s wind-up gramophone and played him Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky until Axel fell asleep. He woke delirious, the sweat falling off him like raindrops while he described a retreat through snow with the blind hanging on to the lame and the blood freezing in the wounds. He talked of a hospital, two to a bed and the dead lying on the floor. He asked for water. Pym fetched it and Axel took the glass in both hands, shaking wildly. He lifted the glass till his hands froze, then he lowered his head in jerks until his lips reached the brim. Then he sucked the water like an animal, spilling it while his fevered eyes kept guard. He drew up his legs and wetted himself and sat shaking and grumpy in an armchair while Pym changed his sheets.

“Who are you afraid of?” Pym asked again. “There’s no one here. It’s just us.”

“Then I must be afraid of you. What’s that poodle in the corner?”

“It’s Herr Bastl and he’s a chow chow, not a poodle.”

“I thought it was the Devil.”

Till a day when Pym woke to find Axel standing fully dressed at his bedside. “It is Goethe’s birthday and it’s four in the afternoon,” he announced in his military voice. “We must go into town and listen to the idiot Thomas Mann.”

“But you’re ill.”

“Nobody who stands up is ill. Nobody marches who is ill. Dress.”

“Was Mann on the forbidden list too?” Pym asked as he pulled on his clothes.

“He never made it.”

“Why’s he an idiot?”

Herr Ollinger supplied a raincoat that could have gone twice round Axel’s body, Mr. San provided a broad black hat. Herr Ollinger drove them to the door in his broken car two hours early and they took their places at the back before the great hall filled. When the lecture was over, Axel marched Pym backstage and hammered on the dressing-room door. Pym had not cared for Thomas Mann till now. He found his prose perfumed and unwieldy, though he had tried his best for Axel’s sake. But now, there stood God Himself, tall and angular like Uncle Makepeace. “This young English nobleman wishes to shake your hand, sir,” Axel advised him with authority from underneath Mr. San’s broad hat. Thomas Mann peered at Pym, then at Axel so pale and ethereal from his fever. Thomas Mann frowned at the palm of his own right hand as if asking himself whether it could take the strain of an aristocratic embrace. He held out his hand and Pym shook it, waiting to feel Mann’s genius flow into him like one of those electric shocks you used to be able to buy at railway stations — hold this knob and let my energy revive you. Nothing happened, but Axel’s enthusiasm was enough for both of them:

“You touched him, Sir Magnus! You are blessed! You are immortal!”

Within a week, they had saved enough cash to take themselves to Davos to visit the shrine of Mann’s diseased souls. They travelled in the lavatory, Pym standing and Axel, in his beret, sitting patiently on the seat. The conductor knocked on the door and yelled, “Alle Billette, bitte”; Axel gave a girlish whimper of discomfort and pushed their one ticket under the door. Pym waited, his eyes fixed on the shadows of the conductor’s feet. He felt the conductor stoop, he heard him grunt as he straightened up. He heard a snap that felt like his own nerve breaking as the ticket reappeared under the door with a hole punched in it. The shadows moved on. This is how you walked here, thought Pym with admiration, as they silently shook hands. These are the tricks that got you to Switzerland. In Davos that evening Axel told Pym all about his nightmare journey from Carlsbad to Bern. Pym felt so proud and rich he decided that Thomas Mann was the best writer in the world.

“Dear Father”—he wrote jubilantly as soon as he was back in the attic—“I am having a really wizard time here now and getting some first-rate instruction. I cannot tell you how much I miss your worldly counsel and how grateful I am for your wisdom in sending me to Switzerland for my studies. Today I met lawyers who really seem to know life in all its aspects, and I am sure they will be a help in furthering my career.”

“Dear Belinda,

“Now that I have put my foot down, things are much better.”

* * *

Meanwhile there was good old you, wasn’t there, Jack? Jack the other war hero, Jack the other side of my head. I will describe to you who you were because I don’t expect we know the same person any more. I will describe what you were to me and what I did for you and as best I can why, because there again I doubt whether we share the same interpretation of events and personalities. I doubt it very much. To Jack, Pym was just another baby Joe, one more addition to his private army in the making, not broken and certainly not trained, but with the halter already slipped nicely round his neck and willing to run a long way for his lump of sugar. You probably don’t remember — why should you? — how you picked him up or made your overtures to him. All you knew was he was the type the Firm liked, and so did you, and so did part of me. Short back and sides, speaks the King’s English, decent linguist, good country public school. A games player, understands discipline. Not an arty chap, certainly not one of your overintellectual types. Levelheaded, one of us. Comfortably off but not too grand, father some sort of minor tycoon — how typical that you never bothered to check Rick out. And where else should you meet this paragon of tomorrow’s men but at the English church, where the flag of Saint George fluttered victorious in the neutral Swiss breeze?

How long you had been tracking Pym I don’t know. I’ll bet you don’t either. You liked the way he read the Lesson, you said, so you must have had your eye on him from at least before Christmas because it was an early Advent text. You seemed surprised when he told you he was studying at the university, so I guess your first enquiries were made before he enrolled there and you hadn’t topped them up. It was on Christmas Day after matins that Pym shook your hand for the first time. The church porch was like a crowded lift with everyone rattling umbrellas and making rah-rah English noises, and the diplomatic kids pelting each other with snowballs in the street. Pym was wearing his E. Weber jacket, and you, Jack, you were a tweedy, unscalable English mountain of twenty-four. In terms of war and peace the seven years between us were a generation, more like two. Much as they were with Axel, as a matter of fact; you both had those crucial years on me, still do.

Do you know what else you wore apart from your good brown suit? Your Airborne tie. Prancing silver-winged horses and crowned Britannias on a maroon field, congratulations. You never told me where you had been for it, but the reality as I now know it is no less impressive than my imaginings: with the Partisans in Yugoslavia and the Resistance in Czechoslovakia, behind the lines with the Long Range Desert Group in Africa and even, if I remember right, in Crete. You are an inch taller than I, but I remember as if it were yesterday how, as Pym grasped your great dry hand, that Airborne tie looked him in the eye. He lifted his head, he saw your rock jaw and your blue eyes — the ferocious bushy eyebrows even then — and he knew he was standing face to face with the character he was supposed to have become at all his schools, and sometimes in his fancy had: a straight-backed English brave of the officer class, the one who keeps his head when all about him are losing theirs. You wished him Happy Christmas and when you spoke your name he thought you were making a sort of Everyman’s joke to do with Christmas Day — you are Good Fellowship and I will be Brotherhood.

“No, no, old boy, it’s real,” you insisted with a laugh. “Why should a nice chap like me use a false name?”

Why indeed, when you had diplomatic cover? You invited him for a glass of sherry before lunch tomorrow, Boxing Day, and you said you would have sent him an invitation if you’d known his address, which was clever of you, because of course you knew it perfectly well: address, date of birth, education and all the other nonsense we imagine gives us ascendancy over those we seek to obtain. Then you did an amusing thing. You took an invitation card from your pocket and in the crammed porch while everyone went on woof-woofing you spun Pym round and, using his back to press on, wrote his name along the middle line and handed it to him: “Captain and Mrs. Jack Brotherhood request the pleasure.” You scratched out the “RSVP” to emphasise that the deal was done, and you scratched out the “Captain” to show what pals we were. “If you want to stay on afterwards you can help us eat up the cold turkey. Rough clothes,” you added. Pym watched you stride off through the rain exactly as he knew you had carried yourself through the gunfire of all the battlefields where you had triumphed single-handed over Jerry, while Pym was doing nothing braver than carve Sefton Boyd’s initials on the wall of the staff lavatory.

Next day he presented himself punctually at your little diplomatic house, and as he pressed the bell he read your visiting card framed in the panel above it. “Captain J. Brotherhood, Assistant Passport Officer, British Embassy, Bern.” You were married to Felicity in those days, you may remember. Adrian was six months old. Pym played with him for hours in order to impress you, a habit that soon became a feature of his dealings with the younger members of your trade. You questioned him in a perfectly agreeable way and, where you left off, Felicity as the good Secret Service squaw took over, God forgive her: “But what friends have you got, Magnus, you must be so lonely here?” she cried. “What do you do for fun, Magnus?” And was there much in the way of an extracurricular life at the university, for instance — she asked — political groups and so forth? Or was it all a bit flat and dreary like the rest of Bern? Pym didn’t find Bern flat or dreary at all, but for Felicity he pretended he did. In the chronology, Pym’s friendship with Axel was by now twelve hours old, but he didn’t give him a thought — why should he when he was so taken up with impressing you both with himself?

I remember asking what crowd you fought with, sir, expecting you to say “Fifth Airborne,” or “Artists’ Rifles” so that I could look suitably awed. Instead you went a bit gruff and said, “General List.” I know now that you were exercising the double standard of diplomatic cover: you wanted it to cover you, but you also wanted Pym to see through it. You wanted him to know you were an irregular, and not one of those intellectual little ponces from the Foreign Office, as you call them. You asked him whether he got around the country and suggested that, on occasions when you were making an official car journey somewhere, he might like to come aboard and amuse himself the other end. The two of us put on boots and went for what you called a bash: meaning a forced march through the Elfenau woods. In the course of it you told Pym he needn’t call you “sir,” and when we came back, Felicity had fed Adrian, and there was an older, smirking man sitting talking to her. You introduced him as Sandy from the Embassy and Pym sensed you were colleagues and vaguely that Sandy was your boss. I know now that he was your Station Head and you were his number two, and that he was performing his standard task of looking over the property before allowing you to buy your way any further in. But at the time Pym just thought of Sandy as headmaster and you as housemaster, a construction you would not have disapproved of.

“How good’s your German, by the by?” Sandy asked Pym through his smirk while the three of us munched Felicity’s mince pies. “Bit hard to learn here, isn’t it, with all this Swissie dialect about?”

“Magnus knows rather a lot of university émigrés,” you explained for me, underlining a selling point. Sandy let out a silly laugh and slapped his knee.

“Does he, does he though? I’ll bet there’s some rum characters among that crowd!”

“He could probably tell us a good deal about them too, couldn’t you, Magnus?” you said.

“You wouldn’t mind?” said Sandy quizzically, still smirking.

“Why should I?” said Pym.

Sandy forced the card cleverly. He sensed that Pym liked taking rash decisions in front of people, and he used this knowledge to press a commitment out of him before he knew what he was committing to.

“No high-minded scruples about the sanctity of academic study or anything like that?” Sandy insisted.

“None at all,” said Pym boldly. “Not if it’s for my country,” and was rewarded by Felicity’s smile.

What version of himself Pym supplied that day, and had to live with for the coming months, I do not remember, which means it must have been a fairly restrained one, short on those awkward story-points that too often had to be paid for later. As best he could, he gave you what he thought you were looking for. He was prudent enough not to admit he was earning money, which went down well with you, for you knew already he was working “black,” as the Germans call it — meaning illegally, and at night. Shrewd chap, you thought; resourceful; not above a bit of larceny. He played down family life with the Ollingers since proxy parents undermined his self-image as a mature exile. When you asked him whether he knew any girls — the shadow of homosexuality, is he one of those? — Pym got the message at once, and wove a harmless fantasy around an Italian beauty called Maria whom he had met at the Cosmo Club and was keen on, but only as a stopgap for his regular girlfriend Jemima, back in England.

“Jemima who?” you asked, and Pym said Sefton Boyd, which produced an audible sigh of social satisfaction. A real Maria did indeed exist and was indeed beautiful but Pym’s adoration of her was private to himself, for he had never spoken to her.

“Cosmo?” said you. “Don’t think I’ve heard of that one. Have you, Sandy?”

“Can’t say I have, old boy. Sounds fishy to me.”

Pym explained that the Cosmo was a sort of foreigners’ political forum, and Maria was some sort of officer of it, like treasurer.

“Any particular complexion?” Sandy asked.

“Well she’s dark,” said Pym ingenuously and you and Felicity and Sandy laughed and laughed, like Little Audrey, and Felicity remarked that it was quite clear what Magnus’s politics were. After that no meeting was complete without somebody asking after Maria’s complexion, and everyone cracking up over such a marvellously healthy misunderstanding. It was evening by the time Pym left your house and you had given him a present of a duty-free bottle of scotch to keep out the cold. Cost to the Firm in those days: I guess around five shillings. You offered to run him home but he said he loved to walk, thus earning further Brownie points. And walk he did, on air. He skipped and laughed and hugged his bottle and himself; he hadn’t felt so blessed in all his seventeen years. In a single Christmas, God had dished him up two saints. The one was on the run and couldn’t walk, the other was a handsome English warlord who served sherry on Boxing Day and had never had a doubt in his life. Both admired him, both loved his jokes and his voices, both were clamouring to occupy the empty spaces of his heart. In return he was giving to each man the character he seemed to be in search of. His decision to keep them secret from each other was never taken. Let each be the mistress that keeps the other home intact, Pym thought. If he thought at all.

“From whom did you steal it, Sir Magnus?” Axel asked in his formal English, looking curiously at the label.

“The chaplain,” said Pym without a second’s hesitation. “He’s a terrific bloke. Ex-army. I didn’t steal it. He gave it me, actually. A free bottle for regular attenders. They get it at diplomatic rates, of course. They don’t have to pay like in the shops.”

“He didn’t offer you cigarettes as well, did he?” said Axel.

“Why should he?”

“A bar of chocolate for a night with your sister?”

“I haven’t got a sister.”

“Good. Then let’s drink it.”

Do you remember our car journeys, Jack? I begin to think you do. Have you ever wondered how our forebears managed to run their agents in the days before the motorcar? Our first trip could not have come more handy. You had a date in Lausanne. You would need three hours. You gave no reason why you needed three hours in Lausanne, though you could have given me any cover story under the sun. Once again with the advantage of hindsight I know that you were deliberately admitting me to the secrecy of your work without letting on what the work was. You asked nothing of Pym on that occasion. You were building intimacy. The most you did was give him a rendezvous and a fallback and see whether he managed them. “Look here, it’s just possible I’ll have to make another call. If I’m not outside the Hotel Dora at three, be at the west side of the main post office at three-twenty.” Pym wasn’t good at east and west but he asked about six people till one of them got it right for him, and he made the fallback at three-twenty exactly, even if he was panting his heart out. You circled the square and the second time round you kept the car rolling and pushed open the door, and Pym hopped in like an airborne soldier to show you how able he was.

“I’ve been talking to Sandy,” you said as we drove to Geneva a week later. “He wants you to do a job for him. Mind?”

“Of course not.”

“You any good at translation?”

“What sort?”

“Can you keep your mouth shut?”

“I think so.”

You gave him his first Target for Tonight: “We get technical stuff in from time to time. Mainly about funny little Swissie firms that are manufacturing things we don’t much like. Nasty things that blow up,” you added with a smile. “It’s not exactly secret, but we hire a lot of local labour in the Embassy so we’d rather have it done by someone outside. Preferably a Brit. Someone we trust. You game?”

“Of course.”

“We pay. Not much, but it’ll buy you a dinner with Maria now and then. Heard from Jemima recently?”

“Jem’s fine, thanks.”

Pym had never been so scared in his life. You handed him the envelope, he put it in his pocket, you gave him your Master of Intrigue look and said “Good luck, old chap”—Yes, Jack, you did! We talked to each other like that — and Pym walked home changing that damned envelope from one pocket to another so many times he must have looked like a bookie on the run. And what was in it? Don’t tell me, I’ll tell you: junk. Photocopied junk from out-of-date armaments catalogues. It was Pym’s soul you were after, not the piffling translation. He lost the envelope about six times in his attic too. Under the bed, under the mattress, behind the mirror, up the chimney. He translated its contents in hours even Axel didn’t know he had. You paid Pym twenty francs. The technical dictionary had cost twenty-five but he knew that gentlemen didn’t mention things like that, even if Rick’s cheques, if they came at all, tended to meet with failure.

“Been to the Cosmo Club recently?” you enquired lightly as we headed towards Zurich, where you said you had a man to see about a dog. Pym confessed he had not. With Axel and Jack Brotherhood as his cosmos, who needed another?

“I’m told some of the people who go along there are a bit outspoken. Nothing against Maria, mind. Those outfits always have a broad spectrum. Part of democracy. Might be a good idea all the same if you took a closer look,” you said. “Don’t stick out. If they expect you to be a Leftie, let them think you are one. If they’re looking for a Right-of-centre Brit, give ’em one. If necessary give ’em both. But don’t go overboard. We don’t want you getting into trouble with the Swissies. Any other Brits there, apart from you?”

“There are a couple of Scottish medical students but they told me they come for the girls.”

“A few names would help,” you said.

With that one conversation, looking back, Pym was Pym no longer. He was our man in the Cosmo, don’t use the telephones for anything delicate. He was a symbolised agent, graded semiconscious, which is our sweet way of saying he sort of half knows what he is sort of doing and sort of why. He was seventeen years old, and if he needed you urgently he was to ring Felicity and say his uncle was in town. If you needed him you’d phone the Ollingers from a callbox and say you were Mac from Birmingham passing through. Otherwise it was meeting-to-meeting, which means we always fix the next one at this one. Float, Magnus, you said. Get in there and be your own charming self, Magnus. Keep your ears and eyes open, see what sticks, but for God’s sake don’t get us into trouble with the Swissies. And here’s your next month’s alimony, Magnus. And Sandy sends his love. I tell you, Jack: we reap as we sow, even if the harvest is thirty-five summers in the growing.

* * *

The secretary of the Cosmo was a vapid Rumanian royalist called Anka who wept unaccountably in lectures. She was gangly and wild and walked with her wrists turned inside out, and when Pym stopped her in the corridor she scowled at him with red eyes and told him to go away because she had a headache. But Pym was on spy’s business and brooked no rejection.

“I’m thinking of starting a Cosmo newsletter,” he announced. “I thought we might include a contribution from each group.”

“The Cosmo don’t got no groups. The Cosmo don’t want no newsletter. You are stupid. Go away.”

Pym pursued Anka to the tiny office that was her lair.

“All I need is a list of members,” he said. “If I have a list of members I can send out a circular and find out who is interested.”

“Why don’t you come to next meeting and ask them?” Anka said, sitting down and putting her head in her hands as if she were about to be sick.

“Not everyone comes to meetings. I want to test all shades. It’s more democratic.”

“Nothing is democratic,” said Anka. “Is all illusion.”

“He is an English,” she explained to herself aloud as she hauled open a drawer and began to pick through its chaotic contents. “What does an English know about illusion?” she demanded of some private confessor. “He is mad.” She handed him a grimy sheet of names and addresses. Most of them, it turned out later, were misspelt.

“Dearest Father”— wrote Pym excitedly—“I am having one or two amazing successes here despite my youth, and I gather the Swissies are considering offering me some kind of academic honour.”

“I love you”—he wrote to Belinda—“I’ve never written that to anyone before.”

* * *

It is night. It is Bern’s darkest winter. The city will never see day again. A smothering brown fog rolls down the wet cobble of the Herrengasse and the good Swiss hurry dutifully through it like reservists headed for the front. But Pym and Jack Brotherhood sit snugly in a corner of their little restaurant and Sandy has sent his extra-special love, together with his absolutely warmest congratulations. It is the first time agent and controller have eaten together in public in their target city. An ingenious cover story has been agreed in the event of a chance encounter. Jack has appointed himself secretary of the Embassy’s Anglo-Swiss Christian Society and wishes to attract elements of the university. What more natural than he should turn to Magnus whom he knows from the English church? For deeper cover still he has brought the lovely Wendy who works in Chancery and is honey-haired and well-born, and has a slight but prominent protrusion of the upper lip as if she is permanently blowing out a candle just below her chin. Wendy loves both men equally; she is a natural and spontaneous toucher, with shallow, unfrightening breasts. When Pym has finished describing how he landed his great coup, Wendy cannot resist laying a hand along his cheek and saying, “God, Magnus, that was so brave. I mean marvellous. Wouldn’t Jemima be proud if she was allowed to know. Don’t you think so, Jack?” But all very quietly, in the soft-fall voice that even the horsiest must learn before they are let out of the paddock. And going very near to Jack with her hair to speak to him.

“You did a damn good job,” says Brotherhood with his military smile. “Church should be proud of you,” he adds, straight at his agent. They drink to Pym’s good job for the church.

It is coffee time and Brotherhood has taken an envelope from one jacket pocket and from the other a pair of steel-framed half-moon spectacles which give a mysteriously finite authority to his British-brave face. Not alimony this time, for alimony comes in a white unwatermarked envelope, not a mousy-brown one like this. He does not hand it to Pym but opens it himself in full view of everyone who cares to watch, and asks Wendy for a pencil, dear, your flashy gold one, don’t tell me how you earned that. And Wendy says, “For you, darling, anything,” and drops it into his cupped hands, which close on hers. Jack spreads the paper out before him.

“Just want to check on a few of these addresses,” he says. “Don’t want to start sending out literature till we’re sure. Okay?”

“Okay” meaning: Have you decoded this brilliant double entendre?

Pym says absolutely fine and Wendy trails a loving fingernail down the list, stopping at one or two lucky names that are marked with ticks and crosses.

“Only it seems that one or two members of our choir have been quite unduly modest about their personal particulars. Almost as if they wanted to hide their lights under a bushel,” says Brotherhood.

“I didn’t really look,” says Pym.

Brotherhood’s voice drops. “Nor should you. That’s our job.”

“We couldn’t find your lovely Maria anywhere,” says Wendy, frightfully disappointed. “What have you done with her?”

“I’m afraid she has gone back to Italy,” says Pym.

“Not looking for a replacement, Magnus, are you, darling?” says Wendy, and all laugh uproariously, Pym loudest, though he would have given the rest of his life just for the sight of one of her breasts.

Brotherhood mentions names that have no addresses. Pym can help with none of them, cannot put faces to them, cannot supply character descriptions. In other circumstances, he would gladly have made some up but Brotherhood has an uncomfortab — le way of knowing answers before he asks questions and Pym is getting wise to this. Wendy refills the men’s glasses and keeps the dregs for herself. Brotherhood passes to addresses that have no names.

“A.H.,” he says carelessly. “Ring a bell? A.—H.?”

Pym confesses it does not. “I really haven’t been to enough meetings yet,” he says apologetically. “I’ve been having rather a hard slog at my work before exams.”

Brotherhood is still smiling, still perfectly relaxed. Does he know that Pym is sitting no exams? Pym notices that Wendy’s pencil has nearly vanished inside his closed fist. Its sharp end peeks out of it like a tiny gun barrel.

“Think a bit,” Brotherhood suggests. And says it again, mouthing it slowly like a password: “A.—H.”

“Perhaps it’s A.H. somebody else,” says Pym. “A. H. Smith. Schmidt. I could find a way of asking if you like. It’s all quite open really.”

Wendy has frozen in the way you freeze in party games when the music stops. Her smile has frozen with her. Wendy has the private secretary’s art of suspending her personality until it is required and something has told her it is not required at present. The waiter is clearing plates. Brotherhood’s fist is covering the paper so that quite by accident no names are visible to the passer-by.

“Would it help if I told you that A.H., whoever he is — or she is — shares a certain address in the Länggasse. Or says he does. Care of Ollinger. That’s your place too, isn’t it?”

“Oh you mean Axel,” says Pym.

* * *

Somewhere a cock was crowing but Pym didn’t hear it. His ears were full of a kind of waterfall, his heart was bursting with a sense of righteous duty. He was in Rick’s dressing-room, looking for a way of stealing back the love he had given to a wrong cause. He was in the staff lavatory, doing a knife job on the classiest boy in the school. There were the stories Axel had told him when he was delirious and spilling his drinking water with both hands. There were the stories he had told him in Davos when they went to visit Thomas Mann’s sanatorium. There were the crumbs he had gleaned for himself on his occasional precautionary inspections of Axel’s room. And there was Brotherhood’s clever prompting that dragged things out of him he hadn’t realised he knew. Axel’s father had fought with the Thälmann brigade in Spain, he said. He was an old-style Social Democrat, so he was lucky to die before the Nazis could arrest him.

“So he’s a Leftie?”

“He’s dead.”

“I meant the son.”

“Well not really, not that he’s said. He’s just catching up on his education. He’s uncommitted.”

Brotherhood pressed his eyebrows together and penciled “Thälmann” on his choir list. Axel’s mother was Catholic but his father had been a member of the anti-Catholic Los von Rom movement, which was Lutheran, Pym said. His mother lost her right to confession because she had married a Protestant.

“And a Socialist,” Brotherhood reminded Pym, under his breath, as he wrote.

At the Gymnasium Axel’s friends all wanted to fly planes against England but Axel was persuaded by the visiting recruiting teams to volunteer for the army. He was posted to Russia, taken prisoner and escaped, but when the Allies invaded France he was pulled out to fight in Normandy where he was wounded in the spine and hip.

“Did he tell you how he escaped from the Russians?” Brotherhood cut in.

“He said he walked.”

“Like he walked to Switzerland,” said Brotherhood with a hard smile and Pym began to see a pattern that he had not thought of until Brotherhood suggested it.

“How long was he there?”

“I don’t know. But long enough to learn Russian anyway. He’s got books in Cyrillic in his room.”

Back in Germany he went ill from his wounds but as soon as he was well enough to walk he was sent to fight the Americans. He was wounded again and sent back to Carlsbad where his mother was laid up with jaundice, so he put her on a cart with her possessions and pushed her to Dresden, a beautiful city that the Allies had recently bombed flat. He took his mother to the district where the Silesian refugees had gathered but she died soon after he got her there, so he was alone. By now Pym’s head was swimming. The colours on the wall behind Brotherhood’s head were merging and sliding. It’s not me. It’s me. I’m doing my duty for my country. Axel, help me.

“Right-ho, now it’s peacetime. Forty-five. What does he do?”

“Gets out of the Soviet Zone.”

“Why?”

“He was scared the Russians would find him and put him back in prison. He didn’t like them and he didn’t like prison and he didn’t like the way the Communists were taking over Eastern Germany.”

“Good story so far. What does he do about it?”

“He burns his paybook and buys another one.”

“Where from?”

“A soldier he met in Carlsbad. Somebody who came from Munich who looked fairly like him. He said that in 1945 nobody in Germany looked like their photograph anyway.”

“Why didn’t this accommodating soldier want his papers?”

“He wanted to stay in the East.”

“Why?”

“Axel didn’t know.”

“Bit thin, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is.”

“On we go.”

“He boarded the repatriation train to Munich and everything worked fine till he got to the other end, when the Americans pulled him straight off the train and put him into prison and beat him up.”

“Why’d they do a thing like that?”

“It was because of his papers. He’d bought the papers of a wanted man. He’d just walked completely into a trap.”

“Unless of course they were his own papers in the first place and he never bought them from anybody,” Brotherhood suggested, writing again. “Sorry, old boy. Didn’t mean to shatter your illusions. Way of the world, I’m afraid. How long did he do?”

“I don’t know. He got ill again and they put him into hospital and he escaped from hospital.”

“Pretty good at escaping, I must say. You say he walked here?”

“Well, walked and bummed rides on trains. They had to shorten one of his legs. The Germans did. After he came back from Russia. That’s why he limps. I should have said that earlier. So I mean even with trains it was quite a walk. Munich to Austria, then Austria over the border at night to Switzerland. Then to Ostermundigen.”

“To where?”

“That’s where Herr Ollinger has his factory.” Pym heard himself trying to make excuses. “He hasn’t any papers at all, you see. He destroyed his own in Carlsbad. The Americans kept the ones he bought and he can’t find anyone to give him a new set. Meanwhile he’s still on the Allied wanted list. He says he’d have confessed everything the Americans asked if only he’d known what he was supposed to have done wrong. But he didn’t, so they went on beating him.”

“Heard that one before too,” said Brotherhood under his breath, once more writing. “How does he spend his days here, Magnus? Who are his buddies?”

Far, far too late, voices were whispering Pym caution.

“He’s afraid to go out in case the Fremdenpolizei arrest him. If he goes into town he borrows a big hat. It isn’t only the Fremdenpolizei. If the ordinary Swissies knew about him they’d inform against him too. He says they do that. It’s a national sport. He says they do it out of envy and call it civic-mindedness. It’s just household gossip I’m telling you.”

“Pity you didn’t tell it to us earlier.”

“It didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t anything you were interested in. Herr Ollinger told me most of it. He gossips all the time.”

Brotherhood had his car outside. Man and boy were sitting in it but Brotherhood didn’t drive anywhere. Wendy had gone home. Brotherhood asked about Axel’s politics. Pym said Axel despised established attitudes. Brotherhood said, “Describe.” He wasn’t writing any more and his head was very still in the window frame. Pym said Axel had once remarked that pain was democratic.

“Reading habits?” said Brotherhood.

“Well, everything really. Everything he’s missed from the war. He types a lot. Mostly at night.”

“What does he type?”

“He says it’s a book.”

“What does he read?”

“Well, everything. Sometimes when he’s ill I get books out of the library for him.”

“In your own name?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a bit rash. What do you get?”

“The whole spectrum.”

“Describe.”

Pym described and came inevitably to Marx and Engels and the bad bears, and Brotherhood wrote all of them down, asking him who Dühring was when he was at home.

Brotherhood asked about Axel’s habits. Pym said he liked cigars and vodka and sometimes kirsch. He didn’t mention whisky.

Brotherhood asked about Axel’s sex-life. Sweeping aside his own limitations in this respect, Pym declared it mixed.

“Describe,” said Brotherhood again.

Pym did his best, though he knew even less about Axel’s sexuality than his own, except that whatever form it took, unlike Pym he was on terms with it.

“He does sometimes have women,” said Pym deprecatingly, as if that were something all of us did. “Usually she’s some token beauty from the Cosmo, cooking for him or polishing his room. He calls them his Marthas. I thought at first he meant martyr.”

“Dearest Father”—Pym wrote that night, alone and miserable in his attic—“I am absolutely fine and my head is buzzing from all the seminars and lectures, though I miss you terribly as ever. One bad thing however is that I had a pal who recently let me down.”

* * *

How Pym loved Axel in the weeks that followed! For a day or so, it was true, he would not go near him, he resented him so much. He resented everything about him, every move on the other side of the radiator. He patronises me. He sneers at my ignorance without respecting my strengths. He is an arrogant German of the worst sort and Jack is right to keep his eye on him. Pym resented the mail he received, Herr Axel care of Ollinger. He resented more than ever the Marthas tiptoeing like shy disciples up the stairs to the great thinker’s sanctum, and down again two hours later. He is dissolute. He is unnatural. He is turning their heads for them, exactly as he tried to turn mine. Diligently he kept a log of these developments to give to Brotherhood at their next meeting. He also spent a lot of time in the third-class buffet wearing his clouded look for the benefit of Elisabeth. But these exercises in separation did not endure and the line to Axel grew tighter with every day. He discovered he could gauge his friend’s mood from the tempo of his typing: whether he was excited or angry or tired. He is reporting on us, he told himself without conviction. He is selling out the foreign students to his German paymaster. He is a Nazi war criminal turned Communist spy in the image of his Leftie father.

“When do we ever get to read it?” Pym had asked him once shyly in the days when they were close.

“If I ever finish it, and the publisher ever publishes it.”

“Why can’t I read it now?”

“Because you will take the cream off it for me, and leave me with the curds.”

“What’s it about?”

“Mysteries, Sir Magnus, and if they are spoken aloud they will never be written down.”

He’s writing his Wilhelm Meister autobiography, thought Pym indignantly. That was my idea, not his.

He could tell when Axel could not sleep by the striking of his matches as he lit his cigars. He could tell when his body was driving him mad. He told it by the altered rhythm of his movements and the determined gaiety of his singing as he clomped the wooden corridor to crouch for hours in their shared lavatory with its porcelain footprints. After several nights had passed that way Pym was able to loathe Axel for his incontinence. Why doesn’t he go back to hospital? “He sings German marching songs,” he wrote to Brotherhood in his notebook. “Tonight he sang the whole Horst Wessel Lied in the lavatory.” On the third night, long after Pym had gone to bed, his door suddenly flew open and there stood Axel wrapped in Herr Ollinger’s dressing-gown.

“Well? Have you forgiven me yet?”

“What have I got to forgive you for?” Pym replied, discreetly pushing his secret logbook under the bedclothes.

Axel stayed in the doorway. The dressing-gown was ridiculously large for him. Sweat had made black fangs of his moustache. “Give me some of your priest’s whisky,” he said.

After that Pym couldn’t let Axel go until he had wiped the shadows of suspicion from his face. The weeks passed and spring began and Pym knew that nothing was happening, and that he had never betrayed Axel in the first place, because if he had they would have done something long ago. Occasionally Brotherhood asked a couple of follow-up questions but they had the ring of routine. Once he asked, “Can you tell me an evening when you know for certain he will be out?” But Pym was able to answer that there were no certainties in Axel’s life. “Well look here. Why don’t you take him out to a slap-up dinner at our expense?” said Brotherhood. One night Pym tried. He told Axel he had had a windfall from his father and wouldn’t it be fun to put on disguise again like the time they called on Thomas Mann? Axel shook his head with a wisdom Pym dared not explore. After that Pym studied and strove for Axel in every way he knew, now denying to himself that Brotherhood existed anywhere but in his mind, now congratulating himself on Axel’s continued survival, which was owed entirely to Pym’s nimble manipulation of irresistible forces.

* * *

They came in the small hours of a spring morning, just when we fear them most: when we want to live the longest and are most afraid of dying. Soon, unless I make their journey unnecessary, they will come for me in the same way. If so, I trust I shall see the justice of it and relish the circularity of life. They had acquired a key to the front door and some method of detaching Herr Ollinger’s chains which were not unlike Miss Dubber’s. They knew the house inside out because they had been watching it for months, photographing our visitors, sending in their bogus meter men and window cleaners, delaying the mail while they read it and no doubt listening to Herr Ollinger’s forlorn telephone conversations with his creditors and lame ducks. Pym knew there were three of them because he could count their stealthy Father Christmas footsteps on the squeaky top stair. They looked in the lavatory before they placed themselves outside Axel’s door. Pym knew this because he heard the lavatory door squeak and stay open. He also heard a rattle as they removed the lavatory-door key in case their desperate criminal should attempt to lock himself inside. But Pym could do nothing personally because at the time he lay deeply dreaming in all the scared beds of his childhood. He dreamt about Lippsie and her brother Aaron and how he and Aaron together had pushed her off the rooftop at Mr. Grimble’s school. He dreamt that an ambulance was waiting outside the house like the one that called at The Glades for Dorothy, and that Herr Ollinger was trying to stop the men coming up the stairs but was being ordered back to his quarters in a fury of Swiss dialect. He dreamt that he heard a shout of “Pym, you bastard, where are you?” from the direction of Axel’s room and directly afterwards the awful brief thundering noise of a man with uneven legs struggling against three healthy intruders and the furious opposition of Bastl whom Axel had once accused of being his Faustian Devil. But when he lifted his head from the pillow and listened to the real world, there was silence and everything was absolutely fine.

* * *

I held it against you, Jack, I confess. I argued with you in my head for years, uphill, downhill, and long after I had joined the Firm. Why had you done it to him? He wasn’t English, he wasn’t a Communist, he wasn’t the war criminal the Americans claimed he was. He was nothing to do with you. His only crimes were his poverty, his illegal presence and his lameness — plus a certain freedom in his way of thinking, which in the eyes of some is what we are there to protect. But I did nurse a grudge and I’m sorry. Because now of course I know you hardly gave it a thought. Axel was another bit of barter material. You wrote him up; he came back into your in-tray looking formidable and sinister in Wendy’s flawless type. You lit your pipe and admired your handiwork, and you thought: Hullo, I’ll bet the old Swissies will like a smell of this one; I’ll pop it down to them and earn myself a Brownie point. You made a phone call or two and invited some contact in the Swiss Security Service to join you for an extended luncheon at your favourite restaurant. Over the coffee and the schnapps you slipped him an anonymous brown envelope. As an afterthought you slipped a copy to your American colleague too, because if you’re going to earn one favour, why not earn a second while you’re about it? After all, it was the Yanks who put him in the cooler, even if they got his record wrong.

You were junior then, too, weren’t you? You had your way to make. As we all have. Maturer now, both of us. Sorry to be so lengthy in the remembering, but the episode took me rather a long time to forget. I’ve got it straight now. Served me right for having a friend outside the service.

* * *

“Mr. Canterbury! Mr. Canterbury! You’ve got a man!”

Pym had put down his pen. He had not looked towards the door. Almost before he was aware of it, he had leapt to his slippered feet and was flying across the room to where the metal-lined black briefcase, still locked, stood against the wall. Dropping to a crouch beside it, he inserted the complicated key in the first lock and sprung it. Then the second: anti-clockwise or it fires.

“What man’s that, Miss D?” he said in his softest and most reassuring tone, one hand already in the case.

“With a cabinet, Mr. Canterbury,” Miss Dubber replied with disapproval through the keyhole. “You’ve never had a cabinet before. You’ve never had anything. You’ve never locked your door either. What’s wrong?”

Pym laughed. “Nothing’s wrong. It’s just a cabinet. I ordered it. How many of them are there?”

Taking the briefcase with him, he tiptoed to the window and squared his back against the wall while he squinted cautiously through the gap in the curtain.

“Just one — isn’t that enough? A great green ugly one made of iron. If you’d wanted a cabinet why didn’t you tell me? You could have had Mrs. Tutton’s cupboard from room two.”

“I meant how many men?”

It was daylight. A yellow taxi-truck was parked outside the house, the driver at the wheel. He glanced round the rest of the square. Fast. Checking everything. Then slowly. Checking everything again.

“What does it matter how many men, Mr. Canterbury? Why do we have to count the men when it’s a cabinet?”

Relaxing, Pym replaced the briefcase in its corner and relocked it. Clockwise or it fires. He returned the keys to his pocket. He opened the door.

“Sorry, Miss D. I think I must have been dozing.”

She watched him down the stairs, then went after him and watched again as he looked first at the two men, then shyly at the green cabinet, lightly touching its chipped paintwork, up and down, tugging at each drawer in turn.

“It’s a bloody weight, governor, I’ll tell you,” said the first.

“Who’s it got in it then?” said the second.

She watched him lead the men up to his room, the cabinet between them, and lead them down again. She watched him pay their bill in cash from his back pocket, and give them an extra five pounds for themselves.

“Sorry about that, Miss D,” he said as they drove off. “Some old Ministry archives I’m working on. Here. This is for you.” He handed her a travel brochure he had brought down with him from his room. There was a whiff of Rick about the capitals. “Discover Tunisia in the Luxury of our air-conditioned Coach. Seniors a Speciality. Shades of the East in the Mediterranean. Enough to make your mouth Water.”

But Miss Dubber would not accept the brochure. “Toby and I aren’t going anywhere any more, Mr. Canterbury,” she said. “Whatever’s troubling you won’t go away with us. That’s for sure.”