A Perfect Spy

CHAPTER 15

You will imagine, Tom, with what glory in his youthful heart the brilliant intelligence officer and lover celebrated the completion of his two years of devoted service to the flag in distant Austria and set about returning to civilian England. His leave-taking from Sabina was not as heart-rending as he had feared, for as the day approached she feigned a Slav indifference to his departure.

“I shall be happy woman, Magnus. Your English wives will not make sour faces at me. I shall be economist and free woman, not the courtesan of a frivolous soldier.” Nobody had ever called Pym frivolous before. She even took herself on leave ahead of him to forestall the agony of parting. She is being brave, Pym told himself. His farewell from Axel, though haunted by rumours of fresh purges, had a similarly rounded feel to it.

“Sir Magnus, whatever happens to me, we have done a great work together,” he said as, in the evening light, they faced each other outside the barn that had become Pym’s second home. “Never forget you owe me two hundred dollars.”

“I never will,” Pym said.

He began the long walk back to Sergeant Kaufmann’s jeep. He turned to wave but Axel had vanished into the forest.

The two hundred dollars were a reminder of their increasing closeness during the final months of their relationship.

“My father’s pressing me for money again,” Pym had said one evening while they photographed a codebook he had borrowed from Membury’s cricket locker. “The Burmese police are proposing to arrest him.”

“Then send it to him,” Axel had replied, winding back the film of his camera. He slipped the film in his pocket and inserted a fresh one. “How much does he want?”

“Whatever it is, I haven’t got it. I’m a subaltern on thirteen shillings a day, not a millionaire.”

Axel had appeared to pay no further interest, and they turned instead to the topic of Sergeant Pavel. Axel said it was time to stage a fresh crisis in Pavel’s life.

“But he had a crisis only last month,” Pym had objected. “His wife threw him out of his apartment for drunkenness and we had to help him buy his way in again.”

“We need a crisis,” Axel had repeated firmly. “Vienna is beginning to take him for granted and I do not care for the tone of their follow-up questions.”

Pym found Membury sitting at his desk. The afternoon sun was shining on one side of his friendly head while he read a fish book.

“I’m afraid Greensleeves wants a bonus of two hundred dollars cash,” he said.

“But my dear chap, we’ve paid him a pot of money this month already! What on earth can he want two hundred dollars for?”

“He’s got to buy his daughter an abortion. The doctor only takes U.S. dollars and it’s getting urgent.”

“But the child’s a mere fourteen. Who’s the man? They ought to throw him into prison.”

“It’s that Russian captain from headquarters.”

“The pig. The utter swine.”

“Pavel’s a Roman Catholic too, you know,” Pym reminded him. “Not a very good one, I agree. But it’s not easy for him either.”

The next night Pym counted two hundred dollars across the barn table. Axel tossed them back at him.

“For your father,” he said. “A loan from me to you.”

“I can’t do that. Those are operational funds.”

“Not any more. They belong to Sergeant Pavel.” Pym still did not pick up the money. “And Sergeant Pavel lends them to you as your friend,” Axel said, tearing a sheet of paper from his notebook. “Here — write me an I.O.U. Sign it and one day I shall make you pay it back.”

Pym rode away in good heart, confident that Graz and all its responsibilities, like Bern, would cease to exist the moment he entered the first tunnel.

Laying down his arms at the Intelligence Corps Depot in Sussex, Pym was handed the following PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL letter by the demobilisation officer:

The Government Overseas Research Group

P. O. Box 777

The Foreign Office

London, S.W. I

Dear Pym,

Mutual friends in Austria have passed your name to me as someone who might be interested in longer term employment. If this is so, would you care to lunch with me at the Travellers’ Club for an informal chat on Friday the nineteenth at 12:45?

(Signed) Sir Alwyn Leith, C.M.G.

For several days a mysterious squeamishness held Pym back from replying. I need new horizons, he told himself. They are good people but limited. Feeling strong one morning, he wrote regretting he was considering a career in the Church.

“There’s always Shell, Magnus,” said Belinda’s mother, who had taken Pym’s future much to heart. “Belinda’s got an uncle in Shell, haven’t you, darling?”

“He wants to do something worthwhile, Mummy,” Belinda said, stamping her foot and making the breakfast table rattle.

“Time somebody did,” said Belinda’s father from behind his Telegraph, and for some reason found this very funny, and went on laughing through his gapped teeth while Belinda stormed into the garden in a rage.

A more interesting contender for Pym’s services was Kenneth Sefton Boyd, who had come into an inheritance and was proposing that he and Pym should open a nightclub. Keeping this intelligence from Belinda, who had views on nightclubs and the Sefton Boyds, Pym pleaded an engagement at his old school and took himself to the family estate in Scotland, where Jemima met him at the station. She was driving the very Land Rover from which she had glowered at him when they were children. She was more beautiful than ever.

“How was Austria?” she asked as they bumped cheerfully over purple Highlands towards a monstrous Victorian castle.

“Super,” said Pym.

“Did you box and play rugger all the time?”

“Well not all the time, actually,” Pym confessed.

Jemima cast him a look of protracted interest.

The Sefton Boyds lived in a parentless world. A disapproving retainer served them dinner. Afterwards they played backgammon until Jemima was tired. Pym’s bedroom was as large as a football field and as cold. Sleeping lightly, he woke without stirring to see a dismembered red spark switching like a firefly across the darkness. The spark descended and disappeared. A pale shape advanced on him. He smelt cigarette and toothpaste and felt Jemima’s naked body arrange itself softly around him, and Jemima’s lips find his own.

“You won’t mind if we turf you out on Friday, will you?” said Jemima while the three breakfasted in bed from a tray brought in by Sefton Boyd. “Only we’ve got Mark coming for the weekend.”

“Who’s Mark?” said Pym.

“Well I’m going to sort of marry him, actually,” said Jemima. “I’d marry Kenneth if I could, but he’s so conventional about those things.”

* * *

Renouncing women, Pym wrote to the British Council offering to distribute culture among primitives, and to his old housemaster, Willow, asking for a position teaching German. “I greatly miss the school’s discipline and have felt a keen loyalty towards it ever since my father failed to pay my fees.” He wrote to Murgo booking himself in for an extended retreat, though he had the prudence to be vague about dates. He wrote to the Catholics of Farm Street asking to continue the instruction he had begun in Graz. He wrote to an English school in Geneva and an American school in Heidelberg, and to the BBC, all in a spirit of self-negation. He wrote to the Inns of Court about opportunities for reading law. When he had thus surrounded himself with a plethora of choices, he filled in an enormous form detailing his brilliant life till now and followed it to the Oxford Appointments Board in search of more. The morning was sunny; his old university city dazzled him with carefree memories of his days as a Communist informer. His interlocutor was whimsical if not downright fey. He pushed his spectacles to the top of his nose. He shoved them into his greying locks like an effeminate racing driver. He gave Pym sherry and put a hand on his backside in order to propel him to a long window that gave on to a row of council houses.

“How about a life in filthy industry?” he suggested.

“Industry would be fine,” said Pym.

“Not unless you like eating with the crew. Do you like eating with the crew?”

“I’m really not very class-conscious actually, sir.”

“How charming. And do you like having grease up to your elbows?”

Pym said he didn’t mind grease either, actually, but by then he was being guided to a second window that gave on to spires and a lawn.

“I’ve a menial librarianship at the British Museum and a sort of third assistant clerkship to the House of Commons, which is the proletarian version of the Lords. I’ve bits and bobs in Kenya, Malaya, and the Sudan. I can do you nothing in India, they’ve taken it away from me. Do you like abroad or hate it?”

Pym said abroad was super, he had been to university in Bern. His interlocuter was puzzled. “I thought you went to university here.”

“Here too,” said Pym.

“Ah. Now do you like danger?”

“I love it, actually.”

“You poor boy. Don’t keep saying ‘actually.’ And will you give unquestioning allegiance to whoever is rash enough to employ you?”

“I will.”

“Will you adore your country right or wrong so help you God and the Tory Party?”

“I will again,” said Pym, laughing.

“Do you also believe that to be born British is to be born a winner in the great lottery of life?”

“Well, yes, to be honest, that too.”

“Then be a spy,” his interlocutor suggested and drew from his desk yet another application form and handed it to Pym. “Jack Brotherhood sends his love, and says why on earth haven’t you been in touch with him, and why won’t you have lunch with his nice recruiter?”

I could write whole essays for you, Tom, on the voluptuous pleasures of being interviewed. Of all the arts of affiliation Pym mastered, and throughout his life improved upon, the interview must stand in first place. We didn’t have Office trick-cyclists in those days, as your Uncle Jack likes to call them. We didn’t have anybody who wasn’t himself a citizen of the secret world, blessed with the unlined innocence of privilege. The nearest they had come to life’s experience was the war, and they saw the peace as its continuation by other means. Yet in the terms of the world outside their heads they had led lives so untested, so childlike and tender in their simplicities, so inward in their connections, that they required echelons of cut-outs to reach the society they honestly believed they were protecting. Pym sat before them, calm, reflective, resolute, modest. Pym composed his features in one mould after another, now of reverence, now of awe, zeal, passionate sincerity or spiritual good humour. He paraded pleasurable surprise when he heard that his tutors thought the world of him, and a stern-jawed pride on learning that the army loved him too. He modestly demurred or modestly boasted. He weeded out the half-believers from the believers and did not rest until he had converted the pack of them to paid-up life membership of the Pym supporters’ club.

“Now tell us about your father, will you, Pym?” said a man with a droopy moustache uncomfortably reminiscent of Axel’s. “Sounds a bit of a colourful sort of type to me.”

Pym smiled ruefully, sensing the mood. Pym delicately faltered before rallying.

“I’m afraid he’s a bit too colourful sometimes, sir,” he said amid a hubble-bubble of male laughter. “I don’t see a lot of him to be honest. We’re still friends, but I rather steer clear of him. I have to, actually.”

“Yes. Well, I don’t think we can hold you responsible for the sins of your old man, can we?” said the same questioner indulgently. “It’s you we’re interviewing, not your papa.”

How much did they know of Rick, or care? Even today I can only guess, for the question was never raised again and I am sure that in any formal way it went forgotten within days of Pym’s acceptance. English gentlemen, after all, do not discriminate against each other on the grounds of percentage, only of breeding. Occasionally they must have read of one of Rick’s more lurid collapses, and perhaps allowed themselves an amused smile. Here and there, presumably, word trickled down to them by way of their commercial contacts. But my suspicion is that Rick was an asset. A healthy streak of criminality in a young spy’s background never did him any harm, they reasoned. “Grown up in a hard school,” they told one another. “Could be useful.”

The last question of the interview and Pym’s answer echo for ever in my head. A military man in tweeds put it.

“Look here, young Pym,” he demanded, with a thrust of his bucolic head. “You’re by way of being a Czech buff. Speak their language a bit, know their people. What d’you say to these purges and arrests they’re having over there? Worry you?”

“I think the purges are quite appalling, sir. But they are to be expected,” said Pym, fixing his earnest gaze upon a distant, unreachable star.

“Why expected?” demanded the military man, as if nothing ought to be.

“It’s a rotten system. It’s superimposed on tribalism. It can only survive by the exercise of oppression.”

“Yes, yes. Granted. So what would you do about it—do?”

“In what capacity, sir?”

“As one of us, you fool. Officer of this service. Anyone can talk. We do.”

Pym had no need to think. His patent sincerity was out there speaking for him already.

“I’d play their game, sir. I’d divide them against themselves. Spread rumour, false accusation, suspicion. I’d let dog eat dog.”

“You mean you wouldn’t mind getting innocent chaps chucked into prison by their own police, then? Being a bit harsh, aren’t you? Bit immoral?”

“Not if it shortens the life of the system. No, sir, I don’t think I am. And I’m not persuaded about the innocence of these men of yours either, I’m afraid.”

In life, says Proust, we end up doing whatever we do second best. What Pym might have done better, I shall never know. He accepted the Firm’s offer. He opened his Times and read with a similar detachment of his engagement to Belinda. That’s me taken care of, then, he thought. With the Firm getting one half of me and Belinda the other, I’ll never want for anything again.

* * *

Turn your eye to Pym’s first great wedding, Tom. It occurs largely without his participation, in his last months of training, in a break between silent killing and a three-day seminar entitled Know Your Enemy, led by a vibrant young tutor from the London School of Economics. Imagine Pym’s enjoyment of this unlikely preparation for his married state. The fun of it. The free-wheeling unreality! He has chased Buchan’s ghost across the moors of Argyll. He has messed about in rubber boats, made night landings on sandy shores, with hot chocolate awaiting him in the vanquished enemy’s headquarters. He has fallen out of aeroplanes, dipped into secret inks, learned Morse and tapped scatological radio signals into the bracing Scottish air. He has watched a Mosquito aeroplane glide a hundred feet above him through the darkness, dropping a boxful of boulders in place of genuine supplies. He has played secret games of fox-and-geese in the streets of Edinburgh, photographed innocent citizens without their knowledge, fired live bullets at pop-up targets in simulated drawing-rooms, and plunged his dagger into the midriff of a swinging sandbag, all for England and King Harry. In spells of quiet he has been dispatched to genteel Bath to improve his Czech at the feet of an ancient lady called Frau Kohl, who lives in a crescent house of impoverished splendour. Over tea and muffins, Frau Kohl shows him albums of her childhood in Carlsbad, now called Karlovy Vary.

“But you know Karlovy Vary very well, Mr. Sanderstead!” she cries when Pym shows off his knowledge. “You have been there, yes?”

“No,” says Pym. “But I have a friend who has.”

Then back to base camp Somewhere in Scotland to resume the red thread of violence that has been spun into every new thing he is learning. This violence is not only of the body. It is the ravishment that must be done to truth, friendship and, if need be, honour in the interest of Mother England. We are the chaps who do the dirty work so that purer souls can sleep in bed at night. Pym of course has heard these arguments before from the Michaels, but now he must hear them again, from his new employers, who make pilgrimages from London in order to warn the uncut young of the wily foreigners they will one day have to tangle with. Do you remember your own visit, Jack? A gala night it was, close to Christmas: the great Brotherhood is coming! We had streamers hanging from the rafters. You sat at the directing staff’s table in the excellent canteen, while we young ’uns craned our necks to catch a glimpse of one of the great players of the Game. After dinner we gathered round you in a half circle, clutching our subsidised port, and you told us tales of derring-do until we crept off to bed and dreamed of being like you — though alas we could never really have your lovely war, even if that was what we were rehearsing for. Do you remember how in the morning, before you left, you called on Pym while he was shaving, and congratulated him on a damn good showing so far?

“Nice girl you’re marrying, too,” you said.

“Oh, do you know her, sir?” said Pym.

“Just good reports,” you said complacently.

Then off you went, confident you had scattered a pinch more stardust in Pym’s eyes. Which you had, Jack. You had. Except that what goes up with Pym has a way of coming down, and it annoyed him to discover that his impending marriage had received the Firm’s approval while it still awaited his.

“So what exactly are you doing for a living, old boy? Don’t quite understand,” Belinda’s father asked, not for the first time, during a discussion about whom to invite.

“It’s a government-sponsored language lab, sir,” said Pym, in accordance with the Firm’s sketchy guidelines on cover. “We work out exchanges of academics from various countries and arrange courses for them.”

“Sounds more like the Secret Service to me,” said Belinda’s father, with that queer cracked laugh of his that always seemed to know too much.

To his future spouse, on the other hand, Pym told everything he knew about his work, and more. He showed her how he could break her windpipe with a single blow, and put her eyes out with two fingers easily. And how she could smash the small bones in someone’s foot if they were annoying her under the table. He told her everything that made him a secret hero of England, seeing the world right single-handed.

“So how many people have you killed?” Belinda asked him grimly, discounting those that he had merely maimed.

“I’m not allowed to say,” said Pym, and with a crisping of the jaw stared away from her towards the stark wastelands of his duty.

“Well don’t then,” Belinda said. “And don’t tell Daddy anything, or he’ll tell Mummy.”

“Dear Jemima”—Pym wrote on an off chance, a week before his great day—

“It seems so odd we are both getting married within a month of each other. I keep wondering whether we are doing the right thing. I’m sick of the boring work I’m doing, and considering a change. I love you. Magnus.”

Pym waited eagerly for the mail and scanned the moors around the training camp for a sight of her Land Rover as she dashed over the horizon to save him. But nothing came, and by the eve of his wedding he was left with himself again, walking the night streets of London, and pretending they reminded him of Karlovy Vary.

* * *

And what a husband he was, Tom! What a match was celebrated! Priests of upper-class humility, the great church famed for its permanence and previous successes, the frugal reception in a tomblike Bayswater hotel, and there at the centre of the throng, our Prince Charming himself, chatting brilliantly to the crowned heads of suburbia. Pym forgot no one’s name, was fluent and informative on the subject of government-sponsored language laboratories, vouchsafed Belinda long and tender glances. All this, at least, until somebody switched off the soundtrack, Pym’s included, and the faces of his audience turned mysteriously away from him, looking for the cause of breakdown. Suddenly the interconnecting doors at the far end of the room, until now locked, were flung open by unseen hands. And Pym knew in his toes at once, just by the timing and the pause, and by the way people parted before the empty space, that somebody had rubbed the lamp. Two waiters entered with the grace of well-tipped men, bearing trays of uncorked bubbly and chargers of smoked salmon, though Belinda’s mother had not ordered smoked salmon, and had decreed that no champagne be served before the toast to the bride and groom. After that it was the Gulworth election all over again, because first Mr. Muspole appeared, followed by a thin man with a razor slash, and each commandeered a door-post as Rick swept between them in full Ascot rig, leaning backwards and holding his arms wide, and smiling everywhere at once. “Hullo, old son! Don’t you recognise your old pal? Have this one on me, boys! Where’s that bride of his? By Jove, son, she’s a beauty! Come here, my dear. Give your old father-in-law a kiss! My God, there’s some flesh here, son. Where have you been hiding her all these years?”

One on each arm, Rick marched the nuptial pair to the hotel forecourt, where a brand-new Jaguar car, painted Liberal yellow, stood parked in everybody’s way, with white wedding ribbons tied to the bonnet, and a mile-high bunch of Harrods gardenias crammed into the passenger seat, and Mr. Cudlove at the wheel with a carnation in his mulberry buttonhole.

“Seen one of those before then, son? Know what it is? It’s your old man’s gift to both of you and nobody will ever take it away from you as long as I’m spared. Cuddie’s going to drive you wherever you want to go and leave it with you, aren’t you, Cuddie?”

“I wish you both all good fortune in your chosen walk of life, sir,” Mr. Cudlove said, his loyal eyes filling with tears.

Of Rick’s long speech, I remember only that it was beautiful and modest, and free of all hyperbole, and rested upon the theme that when two young people love each other, us old ’uns who have had our day should stand aside, because if anyone has deserved it, they have.

Pym never saw the car again, and it was a long while before he saw Rick either, because when they went back outside Mr. Cudlove and the yellow Jaguar had vanished, and two very obvious plainclothes police detectives were talking in low tones to the confused hotel manager. But I have to tell you, Tom, that it was the best of our wedding presents, barring perhaps the posy of red poppies, thrust into Pym’s arms, without a card of explanation, by a man in a Polish-looking Burberry raincoat as Pym and Belinda rode into the sunset for a week at Eastbourne.

* * *

“Put him into the field while he’s unsullied,” says Personnel, who has a way of speaking about people as if they weren’t seated across the desk from him.

Pym is trained. Pym is complete. Pym is armed and ready and only one question remains. What mantle shall he wear? What disguise shall cover the secret frame of his maturity? In a series of unconsummated interviews reminiscent of the Oxford Appointments Board, Personnel unlocks a bedlam of possibilities. Pym will be a freelance writer. But can he write and will Fleet Street have him? With disarming openness Pym is marched through the offices of most of our great national newspapers, whose editors inanely pretend they do not know where he has come from, or why, though henceforth they will know him for ever as a creature of the Firm, and he them. He is already halfway to stardom with the Telegraph when a Fifth Floor genius has a better plan: “Look here, how would you like to join up with the Corns again, trade on your old allegiances, get yourself a billet in the international left wing set? We’ve always wanted to chuck a stone into that pond.”

“It sounds fascinating,” says Pym as he sees himself selling Marxism Today on street corners for the rest of his life.

A more ambitious plan is to get him into Parliament where he can keep an eye on some of these fellow-travelling M.P.s: “Any particular preference as to party, or aren’t we fussy?” asks Personnel, still in tweeds from his weekend in Wiltshire.

“I’d rather prefer it not to be the Liberals if it’s all the same to you,” says Pym.

But nothing lasts long in politics and a week later Pym is destined for one of the private banks whose directors wander in and out of the Firm’s Head Office all day long, moaning about Russian gold and the need to protect our trade routes from the Bolsheviks. At the Institute of Directors, Pym is lunched by a succession of captains of finance who think they may have an opening.

“I knew a Pym,” says one, over a second brandy or a third. “Kept a dirty great office in Mount Street somewhere. Best man at his job I ever knew.”

“What was his job, sir?” Pym asks politely.

“Con man,” says his host with a horsy laugh. “Any relation?”

“Must be my distant wicked uncle,” says Pym, laughing also, and hurries back to the sanctuary of the Firm.

On goes the dance, how seriously I’ll never know, for Pym is not yet privy to these backstage deliberations, though it isn’t for want of peeking into a few desk drawers and locked steel cupboards. Then suddenly the mood changes.

“Look here,” says Personnel, trying to hide his aggravation. “Why the devil didn’t you remind us you spoke Czech?”

* * *

Within a month, Pym is attached to an electrical-engineering company in Gloucester as a management trainee, no previous experience necessary. The managing director, to his lasting regret, was at school with the Firm’s reigning Chief, and has made the mistake of accepting a series of valuable government contracts at a time when he needed them. Pym is given to the exports department, charged with opening up the East European market. His first mission is nearly his last.

“Well, why don’t you just sort of take a general swing through Czecho and test the market?” says Pym’s notional employer wanly. And beneath his breath: “And do please remember that whatever else you get up to is nothing to do with us, will you?”

“A quick in and out,” Pym’s controller tells him gaily, in the safe house in Camberwell where cub agents receive their operational briefing before cutting their milk-teeth. He hands Pym a portable typewriter with hidden cavities in the carriage.

“I know it seems silly,” says Pym, “but I can’t actually type.”

“Everyone can type a bit,” says Pym’s controller. “Practise over the weekend.”

Pym flies to Vienna. Memories, memories. Pym hires a car. Pym crosses the border without the smallest difficulty, expecting to see Axel waiting for him the other side.

* * *

The countryside was Austrian and beautiful. Many barns lay beside many lakes. In Plzeň Pym toured a despondent factory in the company of square-faced men. In the evening he kept the safety of his hotel, watched by a pair of secret policemen who drank one coffee apiece until he went to bed. His next calls were in the north. On the road to Ústí he saw army lorries and memorised their unit insignia. To the east of Ústí lay a factory that the Firm suspected of producing isotope containers. Pym was unclear what an isotope was, or what it should be contained in, but he drew a sketch of the main buildings and hid it in his typewriter. Next day he continued to Prague and at the arranged hour sat himself in the famous Tyn church, which has a window looking into Kafka’s old apartment. Tourists and officials wandered about unsmiling.

“So K. began to move off slowly,” Pym read as he sat in the south aisle, third row from the altar, pretending to study his guidebook. “K. felt forlorn and isolated as he advanced between the rows of empty pews, with the priest’s eyes fixed on him for all he knew. . ”

Needing a rest, Pym knelt down and prayed. With a grunt and a puff, a heavy man shuffled in beside him and sat down. Pym smelt garlic and thought of Sergeant Pavel. Through a crack in his fingers, he identified the recognition signals: smear of white paint on left fingernail, splash of blue on left cuff, a mass of disgraceful black hair, black coat. My contact is an artist, he realised. Why didn’t I think of that before? But Pym did not sit back, he did not ease the little package from his pocket as a prelude to laying it between them on the pew. He remained kneeling and soon discovered why he had done so. The sound of trained feet was crunching towards him down the aisle. The footsteps stopped. A male voice said, “Come with us, please,” in Czech. With a sigh of resignation, Pym’s neighbour clambered wearily to his feet and followed them out.

“Sheer coincidence,” Pym’s controller assured him, much amused, when he got back. “He’s already been on to us. They were pulling him in for a routine questioning. He comes up for one every six weeks. Never even crossed their minds he might be making a clandestine pickup. Let alone with a chap your age.”

“You don’t think he’s — well, told them?” Pym said.

“Old Kyril? Blown you? You must be joking. Don’t worry. We’ll give you another shot in a few weeks’ time.”

* * *

Rick was not pleased to hear of Pym’s contribution to the British export drive, and told him so on one of his secret visits from Ireland, where he had established his winter quarters while he cleared up certain misunderstandings with Scotland Yard, and fought his way into the crowded new profession of West End property evictions.

“Working as a commercial traveller — my own boy?” he exclaimed, to the alarm of the adjoining tables. “Selling electric shavers to a bunch of foreign Communists? We did all that, son. It’s over. What did I pay your education for? Where’s your patriotism?”

“They’re not electric shavers, Father. I sell alternators, oscillators and sparking plugs. How’s your glass?”

Hostility towards Rick was a new and giddying notion for Pym. He vented it cautiously, but with growing excitement. If they ate a meal, he insisted on paying in order to savour Rick’s disapproval at seeing his own boy put down good money where a signature would have done the trick.

“You’re not mixed up with some racket out there, are you?” said Rick. “The doors of tolerance only open a certain distance, you know, son. Even for you. What are you up to? Tell us.”

The pressure on Pym’s arm was suddenly dangerous. He made a joke of it, smiling broadly. “Hey, Father, that hurts,” he said, awfully amused. It was Rick’s thumbnail that he was most aware of, boring into an artery. “Could you possibly stop doing that, Father?” he said. “It really is uncomfortable.” Rick was too busy pursing his lips and shaking his head. He was saying it was a damned shame when a father who had given up everything for his own son was treated like a “poor ayah.” He meant pariah but the notion had never properly formed in him. Placing his elbow on the table, Pym relaxed his whole arm and let it ride about with Rick’s pressure — flop one way, flop the other. Then abruptly stiffened it and, exactly as he had been taught, smacked the fat of Rick’s knuckles on to the table-edge, causing the glasses to jump and the cutlery to dance and slide off the table. Taking back his bruised hand, Rick turned away to bestow a resigned smile on his subjects feasting around him. Then with his good hand he lightly pinged the edge of his Drambuie glass to indicate that he required another nice touch. Just as, by unlacing his shoes, he used to let it be known that somebody should fetch his bedroom slippers. Or by rolling on to his back, after a lengthy banquet, and spreading his knees, he declared a carnal appetite.

* * *

Yet, as ever, nothing is one thing for long with Pym, and soon a strange calm begins to replace his early nervousness as he continues his secret missions. The silent, unlit country that at first sight appeared so threatening to him becomes a secret womb where he can hide himself, rather than a place of dread. He has only to cross the border for the walls of his English prisons to fall away: no Belinda, no Rick — and very nearly no Firm either. I am the travelling executive of an electronic company. I am Sir Magnus, roving free. His solitary nights in unpeopled provincial towns, where at first the yapping of a dog had been enough to bring him sweating to his window, now inspire him with a sense of protection. The air of universal oppression that hangs over the entire country enfolds him in its mysterious embrace. Not even the prison walls of his public school had given him such a sense of security. On car and train rides through river valleys, over hills capped by Bohemian castles, he drifts through realms of such inner contentment that the very cattle seem to be his friends. I shall settle here, he decides. This is my true home. How foolish of me to have supposed that Axel could ever leave it for another! He begins to relish his stilted conversations with officials. His heart leaps when he unlocks a smile from their faces. He takes pride in his slowly filling order book, feels a fatherly responsibility for his oppressors. Even his operational detours, when he is not blocking them from his mind, can be squeezed beneath the broad umbrella of his munificence: “I am a champion of the middle ground,” he tells himself, using an old phrase of Axel’s, as he prises a loose stone from a wall, fishes out one package and replaces it with another. “I am giving succour to a wounded land.”

Yet even with all this preliminary self-conditioning, it takes another six journeys on Pym’s part before he can coax Axel out of the shadows of his perilous existence.

* * *

“Mr. Canterbury! Are you all right, Mr. Canterbury? Answer!”

“Of course I’m all right, Miss D. I’m always all right. What is it?”

Pym pulled back the door. Miss Dubber was standing in the darkness, her hair in papers, holding Toby for protection.

“You thump so, Mr. Canterbury. You grind your teeth. An hour ago you were humming. We’re worried that you’re ill.”

“Who’s we?” said Pym sharply.

“Toby and me, you silly man. Do you think I’ve got a lover?”

Pym closed the door on her and went swiftly to the window. One parked van, probably green. One parked car, white or grey, Devon registration. An early milkman he had not seen before. He returned to the door, put his ear to it and listened intently. A creak. A slippered footstep. He pulled the door open. Miss Dubber was halfway down the corridor.

“Miss D?”

“Yes, Mr. Canterbury?”

“Has anybody been asking you questions about me?”

“Why should they, Mr. Canterbury?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes people just do. Have they?”

“It’s time you slept, Mr. Canterbury. I don’t mind how much the country needs you, it can always wait another day.”

* * *

The town of Strakonice is more famous for its manufacture of motorcycles and Oriental fezzes than for any great cultural gem. Pym made his way there because he had filled a dead letter box in Pisek, nineteen kilometres to the north-east, and Firm tradecraft required he should not register his presence in a target town where a dead letter box was waiting to be cleared. So he drove to Strakonice feeling flat and bored, which was how he always felt after a bit of Firm’s business, and booked himself into an ancient hotel with a grand staircase, then drifted round the town trying to admire the old butchers’ shops on the south side of the square, and the Renaissance church which, according to his guidebook, had been changed to baroque; and the church of St. Wenceslaus which, though originally Gothic, had been altered in the nineteenth century. Having exhausted these excitements, and feeling even wearier from the long heat of the summer’s day, he trudged up the stairs to his bedroom thinking how pleasant it would be if they were leading him to Sabina’s apartment in Graz, in the days when he had been a penniless young double agent without a care in the world.

He put his key in the keyhole but it was not locked. He was not unduly surprised by this for it was still the evening hour when servants turned back bedcovers, and secret policemen took a last look round. Pym stepped inside and discerned, half hidden behind a sloping shaft of sunlight from the window, the figure of Axel, waiting as the old wait, his domed head propped against the chair’s back, pitched a little sideways so that he could make out, among the lights and shades, who was coming in. And not in all the Firm’s unarmed combat lessons, and dagger-play lessons, and close-contact shooting lessons, had anybody thought to teach Pym how to terminate the life of an emaciated friend seated behind a sunbeam.

Axel was prison-pale and a stone lighter. Pym could not have supposed, from his parting memory of him, that he had more flesh to give. But the purgers and interrogators and gaolers had managed to find it, as they usually do, and they had helped themselves to it in handfuls. They had taken it from his face, his wrists, his finger-joints and ankles. They had drained the last blood from his cheeks. They had also helped themselves to one of his teeth, though Pym did not discover this immediately, because Axel had his lips tight shut, and one twiglike forefinger raised to them in warning while he waved the other at the wall of Pym’s hotel bedroom, indicating microphones at work. They had smashed his right eyelid too, which drooped over its parent eye like a cocked hat, adding to his piratical appearance. But his coat, for all that, still hung over his shoulders like a musketeer’s cape, his moustache flourished, and he had inherited a marvellous pair of boots from somewhere, rich as timber, with soles like the running-boards of a vintage car.

“Magnus Richard Pym?” he demanded with theatrical gruffness.

“Yes?” said Pym after a couple of unsuccessful attempts to speak.

“You are charged with the crimes of espionage, provocation of the people, incitement to treason and murder. Also sabotage on behalf of an imperialist power.”

Still slouched languidly in his chair, Axel drove his hands together with improbable vigour, producing a thwack that echoed round the great bedroom, and no doubt impressed the microphones. After it, he offered the prolonged grunt of a man coming to terms with a heavy punch in the stomach. Delving in his jacket pocket, he then detached a small automatic pistol from the lining and, finger to his lips again, waved it about so that Pym got a healthy sight of it.

“Face the wall!” he barked, clambering with difficulty to his feet. “Place your hands on your head, you Fascist swine! March.”

Laying a hand gently round Pym’s shoulder, Axel guided him towards the door. Pym stepped ahead of him into the gloomy corridor. Two burly men in hats ignored him.

“Search his room!” Axel commanded them. “Find what you can but do not remove anything! Pay attention to the typewriter, his shoes and the lining of his suitcase. Do not leave his room until you receive orders from me personally. Walk slowly down the stairs,” he told Pym, prodding him in the small of the back with the gun.

“This is an outrage,” Pym said lamely. “I demand to see a British consul immediately.”

At the reception desk the female concierge sat knitting like a hag at the guillotine. Axel prodded Pym past her to a waiting car outside. A yellow cat had taken shelter underneath it. Pulling open the passenger door, Axel nodded Pym to get in and, having shooed the cat into the gutter, climbed in after him and started the engine.

“If you collaborate completely you will not be harmed,” Axel announced in his official voice, indicating a patch of crude perforations in the dashboard. “If you attempt to escape you will be shot.”

“This is a ridiculous and scandalous act,” Pym muttered. “My government will insist that those responsible be punished.”

But once again, his words had none of the confident ring they had possessed in the cosy barrack hut in Argyll where he and his colleagues had practised the skills of resisting interrogation.

“You have been watched from the moment you arrived here,” said Axel loudly. “All your movements and contacts have been observed by the protectors of the people. You have no alternative but to make an immediate admission of your guilt on all charges.”

“The free world will see this senseless act as the latest evidence of the brutality of the Czech régime,” Pym declared, with increasing strength. Axel nodded approvingly.

The streets were empty, the old houses also. They entered what had once been a rich suburb of patrician villas. Sprawling hedges hid the lower windows. The iron gateways, wide enough to ride a coach through, were blocked with ivy and barbed wire.

“Get out,” Axel commanded.

The evening was young and beautiful. The full moon shed a white, unearthly light. Watching Axel lock the car, Pym smelt hay and heard the clamour of insects. Axel guided him down a narrow path between two gardens until they came to a gap in the yew hedge to his right. Grabbing Pym’s wrist, he led him through it. They were standing on the terrace of what had once been a great garden. A many-towered castle lifted into the sky behind them. Ahead, almost lost to a thicket of roses, stood a decrepit summerhouse. Axel wrestled with the door but it refused to yield.

“Kick it for me, Sir Magnus,” he said. “This is Czechoslovakia.”

Pym drove his foot against the panel. The door gave, they stepped inside. On a rusted table stood the familiar bottle of vodka and a tray of bread and gherkins. Grey stuffing was bleeding from the ripped covers of the wicker chairs.

“You are a very dangerous friend, Sir Magnus,” Axel complained as he stretched out his thin legs and surveyed his fine boots. “Why in God’s name couldn’t you have used an alias? Sometimes I think you have been put on earth in order to be my black angel.”

“They said I would be better being me,” Pym replied stupidly as Axel twisted the cap from the vodka bottle. “They call it natural cover.”

For a long time after that, Axel appeared unable to think of anything useful to say at all, and Pym did not feel it was his place to interrupt his captor’s reverie. They were sitting legs parallel and shoulder to shoulder like a retired couple on the beach. Below them, squares of cornfield stretched towards a forest. A heap of broken cars, more than Pym had ever seen on the Czech roads, littered the lower end of the garden. Bats wheeled decorously in the moonlight.

“Do you know this was my aunt’s house?” said Axel.

“Well, no, I didn’t, actually,” said Pym.

“Well, it was. My aunt was a witty woman. She once described to me how she broke the news to her father that she wished to marry my uncle. ‘But why do you want to marry him?’ said her father. ‘He has no money. He is very small and you are small too. You will have small children. He is like the encyclopedias you make me buy you every year. They look pretty but once you have opened them and seen inside, you don’t bother with them any more.’ He was wrong. Their children were large and she was happy.” He scarcely paused. “They want me to blackmail you, Sir Magnus. That is the only good news I have for you.”

“Who do?” said Pym.

“The aristos I work for. They think I should show you the photographs of the two of us coming out of the barn together in Austria, and play you the recordings of our conversations. They say I should wave the I.O.U. in your face that you signed to me for the two hundred dollars we tricked out of Membury for your father.”

“How did you answer them?” said Pym.

“I said I would. They don’t read Thomas Mann, these guys. They’re very crude. This is a crude country, as you no doubt noticed in your journeys.”

“Not at all,” said Pym. “I love it.”

Axel drank some vodka and stared into the hills. “And you people don’t make it any better. Your hateful little department has been seriously interfering in the running of my country. What are you? Some kind of American butler? What are you doing, framing our officials, sowing suspicion, and seducing our intellectuals? Why do you cause people to be beaten unnecessarily, when a few years in prison would be enough? Do they teach you no reality over there? Have you no reality at all, Sir Magnus?”

“I didn’t know the Firm was doing that,” said Pym.

“Doing what?”

“Interfering. Causing people to be tortured. That must be a different section. Ours is just a sort of postal service for small agents.”

Axel sighed. “Maybe they’re not doing it. Maybe I have been brainwashed by our own stupid propaganda these days. Maybe I’m blaming you unfairly. Cheers.”

“Cheers,” said Pym.

“So what will they find in your room?” Axel asked when he had lit himself a cigar and puffed at it several times.

“Pretty well everything, I suppose.”

“What’s everything?”

“Secret inks. Film.”

“Film from your agents?”

“Yes.”

“Developed?”

“I assume not.”

“From the dead letter box in Pisek?”

“Yes.”

“Then I wouldn’t bother to develop it. It’s cheap pedlar material. Money?”

“A bit, yes.”

“How much?”

“Five thousand dollars.”

“Codebooks?”

“A couple.”

“Anything I might have forgotten? No atom bomb?”

“There’s a concealed camera.”

“Is that the talcum-powder tin?”

“If you peel the paper off the lid, it makes a lens.”

“Anything else?”

“A silk escape map. In one of my neckties.”

Axel drew on his cigar again, his thoughts seemingly far away. Suddenly he drove his fist on to the iron table. “We have got to get ourselves out of this, Sir Magnus!” he exclaimed angrily. “We have got to get ourselves out. We’ve got to rise in the world. We’ve got to help each other until we become aristos ourselves and we can kick the other bastards goodbye.” He stared into the gathering darkness. “You make it so difficult for me, you know that? Sitting in that prison, I had bad thoughts about you. You make it very, very difficult to be your friend.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Oh, oh! He doesn’t see why! He does not see that when the bold Sir Magnus Pym applies for a business visa, even the poor Czechs can look in their card index and discover there was a gentleman of the same name who was a Fascist imperialist militarist spy in Austria, and that a certain running dog named Axel was his fellow conspirator.” His anger reminded Pym of the days of his fever in Bern. His voice had acquired the same unpleasant edge. “Are you really so ignorant of the manners of the country you are spying on that you do not understand what it means these days for a man like me even to have been in the same continent as a man like you, let alone his fellow conspirator in a spying game? Do you really not know that in this world of whisperers and accusers, I may literally die of you? You’ve read George Orwell, haven’t you? These are the people who can rewrite yesterday’s weather!”

“I know,” said Pym.

“Do you also know then, that I may be fatally contaminated like all those poor agents and informers you are showering with money and instructions? Do you not know that you are delivering them to the scaffold, unless they belong to us already? You know at least what they will do with you, I assume, unless I make them hear me, these aristos of mine, if we can’t satisfy their appetites by other means? They mean to arrest you and parade you before the world’s press with your stupid agents and associates. They plan to have another show trial, hang some people. When they start to do that, it will be sheer oversight if they don’t hang me too. Axel, the imperialist lackey who spied for you in Austria! Axel, the revanchist Titoist Trotskyist typist who was your accomplice in Bern! They would prefer an American but in the meantime they will stretch a point and hang an Englishman until they can get hold of the real thing.” He flopped back, his fury exhausted. “We’ve got to get out of this, Sir Magnus,” he repeated. “We’ve got to rise, rise, rise. I am sick of bad superiors, bad food, bad prisons and bad torturers.” He drew angrily on his cigar again. “It’s time I looked after your career and you looked after mine. And this time properly. No bourgeois shrinking back from the big scoops. This time we are professionals, we make straight for the biggest diamonds, the biggest banks. I mean it.”

Suddenly, Axel turned his chair until it was facing Pym, then sat on it again and laughed, and tapped Pym smartly on the shoulder with the back of his hand to cheer him up.

“You got the flowers okay, Sir Magnus?”

“They were super. Someone handed them into our cab as we were leaving the reception.”

“Did Belinda like them?”

“Belinda doesn’t know about you. I never told her.”

“Who did you say the flowers were from?”

“I said I’d no idea. Probably for another wedding altogether.”

“That was good. What’s she like?”

“Super. We were childhood sweethearts together.”

“I thought Jemima was your childhood sweetheart.”

“Well, Belinda was too.”

“At the same time — both of them? That’s quite a childhood you had,” Axel said with a fresh laugh as he refilled Pym’s glass.

Pym managed to laugh too, and they drank together.

Then Axel began speaking, kindly and gently without irony or bitterness, and it seems to me that he spoke for about thirty years because his words are as loud in my ear now as they ever were in Pym’s then, never mind the din of the cicadas and the cheeping of the bats.

“Sir Magnus, you have in the past betrayed me but, more important, you have betrayed yourself. Even when you are telling the truth, you lie. You have loyalty and you have affection. But to what? To whom? I don’t know all the reasons for this. Your great father. Your aristocratic mother. One day maybe you will tell me. And maybe you have put your love in some bad places now and then.” He leaned forward and there was a kindly, true affection in his face and a warm long-suffering smile in his eyes. “Yet you also have morality. You search. What I am saying is, Sir Magnus: for once nature has produced a perfect match. You are a perfect spy. All you need is a cause. I have it. I know that our revolution is young and that sometimes the wrong people are running it. In the pursuit of peace we are making too much war. In the pursuit of freedom we are building too many prisons. But in the long run I don’t mind. Because I know this. All the junk that made you what you are: the privileges, the snobbery, the hypocrisy, the churches, the schools, the fathers, the class systems, the historical lies, the little lords of the countryside, the little lords of big business, and all the greedy wars that result from them, we are sweeping that away for ever. For your sake. Because we are making a society that will never produce such sad little fellows as Sir Magnus.” He held out his hand. “So. I’ve said it. You are a good man and I love you.”

And I remember that touch always. I can see it any time by looking into my own palm: dry and decent and forgiving. And the laughter: from the heart as it always was, once he had ceased to be tactical and become my friend again.