A Perfect Spy

CHAPTER 2

A black and gusty day then, Tom, as sabbaths in these parts mostly are, I saw a crop of them as a child and I don’t remember a sunny one. I hardly remember outdoors at all except when I was hurried through it like a child criminal on my way to church. But I am running ahead already, for Pym on this particular day was not yet born. The time is all your father’s life ago plus half-a-dozen months, the place a seaboard town not too far from this one, with more of a slope to it and a thicker tower — but this one will do quite as well. A swirling, sopping, doom-laden midmorning, take my word for it, and myself, as I say, an unborn ghost, not ordered, not delivered and certainly not paid for: myself a deaf microphone, planted but inactive in any but the biological meaning. Old leaves, old pine needles and old confetti stick to the wet church steps as the humble flow of worshippers files in for its weekly dose of perdition or salvation, though I never saw that much to choose between the two of them. And myself a mute and foetal spy, unconsciously fulfilling his first mission in a place normally devoid of targets.

Except that today something is up. There’s a buzz around, and its name is Rick. There’s a spark of mischief to their piety today they can’t keep dim and it comes from inside themselves, from the smouldering centre of their dark little sphere, and Rick is its owner and its origin and its instigator. You can read it everywhere: in the portentous, rolling tread of the brown-suited deacon, in the fluttering and exhaling of the hatted women who arrive in a rush imagining they are late, then sit blushing through their white face-powder because they are early. Everyone agog, everyone on tiptoe and a first-class turnout, as Rick would have remarked proudly, and probably he did, for he loved a full house whatever happened, never mind it was his own hanging. A few of them have come by car — such wonders of the day as Lanchesters and Singers — others by trolley-bus, and some have walked; and God’s sea rain has given them beards of cold inside their cheap fox stoles, and God’s sea wind is cutting through the threadbare serge of their Sunday best. Yet there is not one of them, however he has come, who does not brave the weather a second longer to pause and goggle at the notice-board and confirm with his own eyes what the bush telegraph has been telling him these several days. Two posters are fixed to it, both smeared by rain, both to the passer-by as dreary as cups of cold tea. Yet to those who know the code they transmit an electrifying signal. The first in orange proclaims the five-thousand-pound appeal, mounted by the Baptist Women’s League, to provide a reading-room — though all of them know that no book will ever be read in it, that it will be a place to set out homemade cakes and photographs of leprous children in the Congo. A plywood thermometer, designed by Rick’s best craftsmen, is fastened to the railings revealing that the first thousand has already been achieved. The second notice, green, declares that today’s address will be given by the minister, all welcome. But this information has been corrected. A rigid bulletin has been pinned over it, typed in full like a legal warning, with the comically misplaced capital letters that in these parts signal omens.

Due to unforeseen Circumstances, Sir Makepeace Watermaster, Justice of the Peace and Liberal Member of Parliament for this Constituency, will provide today’s Message. Appeal Committee please to Remain behind Afterwards for an Extraordinary meeting.

Makepeace Watermaster himself! And they know why!

Elsewhere in the world, Hitler is winding himself up to set fire to the universe, in America and Europe the miseries of the Depression are spreading like an incurable plague, and Jack Brotherhood’s forebears are abetting them or not according to whatever spurious doctrine of the day prevails in the deniable corridors of Whitehall. But the congregation doesn’t presume to hold opinions on these impenetrable aspects of God’s purpose. Theirs is the dissenting church and their temporal overlord is Sir Makepeace Watermaster, the greatest preacher and Liberal ever born, and one of the Highest in the Land, who gave them this very building out of his own purse. He didn’t, of course. His father Goodman gave it to them, but Makepeace, having succeeded to the fiefdom, has a way of forgetting that his father existed. Old Goodman was a Welshman, a preaching, singing, widowed, miserable potteryman with two children twenty-five years apart of whom Makepeace is the elder. Goodman came here, sampled the clay, sniffed the sea air and built a pottery. A couple of years later he built two more and imported cheap migrant labour to man them, first Low Welsh like himself and afterwards and cheaper still and lower, the persecuted Irish. Goodman lured them with his tied cottages, starved them with his rotten wages, and beat the fear of Hell into them from his pulpit before himself being taken off to Paradise, witness the unassuming monument to him six thousand feet high that stood in the pottery forecourt until a few years ago when the whole lot was ripped down to make way for a bungalow estate and good riddance.

And today due to unforeseen Circumstances that same Makepeace, Goodman’s only son, is coming down from his mountain-top — though the circumstances have been foreseen by everyone except himself, the circumstances are as palpable as the pews we wait in, as immovable as the Watermaster tiles the pews are bolted to, as fateful as the rasping clock that wheezes and whistles between every chime like a dying sow fighting off the awful end. Picture the gloom of it — how it stultified its young and dragged them down, its prohibition of everything exciting that they cared about: from Sunday newspapers to Popery, from psychology to art, from flimsy underwear to high spirits to low spirits, from love to laughter and back again, I don’t think there was a corner of the human state where their disapproval did not fall. Because if you don’t understand the gloom of it, you’ll not understand the world that Rick was running away from or the world he was running towards, or the twisting relish that buzzes and tickles like a flea in every humble breast this dark sabbath as the last chimes merge with the drumming of the rain and the first great trial of young Rick’s life begins. “Rick Pym’s for the high jump at last,” says the word. And what more awesome executioner than Makepeace himself, Highest in the Land, Justice of the Peace and Liberal Member of Parliament, to adjust the noose around his neck?

With the last chime of all, the strains of the voluntary die also. The congregation holds its breath and starts counting to a hundred while it seeks out its favourite actors. The two Watermaster women have arrived early. They sit shoulder to shoulder in the pew for notables directly beneath the pulpit. On almost any other Sunday, Makepeace would have been roosting there between them, all six foot six of him, his long head cocked to one side while he listened to the voluntary with his moist little rosebud ears. But not today because today is extra, today Makepeace is in the wings conferring with our Minister and certain worried trusties from the Appeal Committee.

Makepeace’s wife, known as Lady Nell, is not yet fifty but already she is hunched and shrivelled like a witch, with a habit of flicking her greying head without warning as if she were shaking off flies. And next to her — a tiny, earnest statue beside Nell’s pecking and stupidity — perches Dorothy, rightly called Dot, an immaculate speck of a lady, young enough to be Nell’s daughter instead of Makepeace’s sister — and she is praying, praying to her Maker, she is pushing her tiny scrumpled fists into her eyes while she pledges her life and death to Him if only He will hear her and make it right. Baptists do not kneel before God, Tom. They squat. But my Dorothy would have stretched herself flat on the Watermaster tiles and kissed the Pope’s big toe that day if God would have let her off the hook.

* * *

I have one photograph of her and there have been times — though no longer, I swear it, she is dead for me — when I would have given my soul for just one more. I found it in an old scuffed Bible when I was Tom’s age, in a suburban mansion we were hastily vacating. “To Dorothy with all my special love, Makepeace,” runs the inscription on the inside page. One in all the world. One spotted sepia-brown photograph is all, taken like a pause in flight as she steps down from the taxi, licence number not in frame, clutching a homemade posy of small flowers that could be wild, and her big eyes have too much behind them for our comfort. Is she on her way to a wedding? To her own? Is she calling on a sick relative — on Nell? Where is she? Where is she escaping to this time? She has the flowers to her chin and her elbows pressed together. Her forearms form a vertical line from waist to neck. Long sleeves nipped at the wrist. Muslin gloves, therefore no rings visible, though I have a suspicion of a bulge in the third joint of the third finger of the left hand. A cloche bonnet covers her hair and throws a shadow like a mask across the scaring eyes. Shoulders on a slant, as if she is on the point of losing her balance, and one tiny foot tipped sideways to prevent her. Her pale stockings have the zigzag sheen of silk; her shoes are of patent leather, pointed, buttoned. And somehow I know they pinch her, that they were bought against the clock like the rest of her outfit, in a shop where she is not known and does not wish to be. Her lower face pale as a plant grown in the dark — think of The Glades, the house she was brought up in! An only child, as I was, you can see it at a glance — never mind she has a brother twenty-five years ahead of her.

Shall I tell you what I found once, in the summerhouse in the Watermasters’ great dark orchard, where I myself, a child like her, was wandering? The colouring book she had won at Bible class, The Life of Our Saviour in Pictures. And do you know what my darling Dot had done with it? Scored out every saintly face with savage crayoning. I was shocked at first, until I understood. Those faces were the dreaded ones from the real world she had no part of. They enjoyed all the companionship and kindly smiles she never had. So she coloured them out. Not in rage. Not in hate. Not even in envy. But because their ease of living was beyond her grasp. Look again at the photograph. The jaw. The stern unsmiling jaw locking out expression. The little mouth clamped shut and downward to keep its secrets safe. That face cannot discard a single bad memory or experience, because it has nobody to share them with. It is condemned to store every one of them away until the day when it will break from overloading.

Enough. I’m running out ahead. Dot, a.k.a. Dorothy, family name Watermaster. No connection with any other firm. An abstraction. Mine. An unreal, empty woman permanently in flight. If she had had her back to me and not her face, I could not have known her less or loved her more.

* * *

And behind the Watermaster women, far behind, by chance as far as the great long aisle allows, at the very back of the church, in their chosen pew directly beside the closed doors, sits the flower of our young men, their neckties pulled up and outward from their stiff collars, their slicked hair parted in a razor slash. These are the Night School Boys, as they are affectionately known, our Tabernacle’s apostles of tomorrow, our white hopes, our future ministers of religion, our doctors, missionaries, and philanthropists, our future Highest in the Land, who will one day go out into the world and Save it as it has never been Saved before. It is they who by their zeal have acquired the duties customarily entrusted to older men: the distributing of hymn books and special notices, the taking of collection money and the hanging up of overcoats. It is they who once a week, by bicycle, motorcycle and kindly parents’ motorcars, distribute our church magazine to every god-fearing front door, including that of Sir Makepeace Watermaster himself, whose cook has standing orders that a piece of cake and a glass of lemon barley be always waiting for the bringer; they who collect the few shillings of rent from the church’s poor cottages, who pilot the pleasure boats on Brinkley Mere at children’s outings, host the Band of Hope’s Christmas bunfights and put fire into Christian Endeavour action week. And it is they who have taken upon themselves as a direct commission from Jesus the burden of the Women’s League Appeal, target five thousand pounds, at a time when two hundred would maintain a family for a year. Not a doorbell they have not pressed along their pilgrimage. Not a window they have not offered to clean, flower-bed to weed and dig for Jesus. Day after day the young troops have marched out, to return, reeking of peppermint, long after their parents are asleep. Sir Makepeace has sung their praises, so has our minister. No sabbath is complete without a reminder to Our Father regarding their devotion. And bravely the red line on the plywood thermometer at the church gates has climbed through the fifties, the hundreds to the first thousand, where for a while now, for all their efforts, it has seemed to stick. Not that they have lost momentum, far from it. Failure is not in their thoughts. No need for Makepeace Watermaster to remind them of Bruce’s spider, though he often does. The Night School Boys are “crackerjack,” as our saying goes. The Night School Boys are Christ’s own vanguard and they will be the Highest in the Land.

There are five of them and at their centre sits Rick, their founder, manager, guiding spirit and treasurer, still dreaming of his first Bentley. Rick, full names Richard Thomas after his dear old father, the beloved TP, who fought in the Great War trenches before he became our mayor, and passed away these seven years ago, though it seems like only yesterday, and what a preacher he was before his Maker took him back! Rick, your grandfather without portfolio, Tom, because I would never let you meet him.

* * *

I have two versions of Makepeace’s Message, both incomplete, both shorn of time or place or origin: yellowed press-cuttings, hacked apparently with nail-scissors from the ecclesiastical pages of the local press, which in those days reported our preachers’ doings as loyally as if they were our footballers. I found them in Dorothy’s same Bible with her photograph. Makepeace accused nobody outright, Makepeace framed no charge. This is the land of innuendo; straight speaking is for sinners. “M.P. sounds Stern Warning against Youthful Covetousness, Greed,” sings the first. “Perils of young Ambition splendidly Highlighted.” In Makepeace’s imposing person, the anonymous writer declares, “are met the poet’s Celtic grace, the Statesman’s eloquence, the lawgiver’s Iron sense of Justice.” The congregation was “spellbound unto the Meekest of its Members,” and none more so than Rick himself, who sits in an enraptured trance, nodding his broad head to the cadences of Makepeace’s rhetoric, even though every Welsh note of it — to the excited ears and eyes of those around him — is hurled at Rick personally down the length of the aisle, and rammed home with a botched stab of the lugubrious Watermaster forefinger.

The second version takes a less apocalyptic tone. The Highest in the Land was not ranting against youth’s sinfulness, far from it. He was offering succour to the youthful falterer. He was extolling youth’s ideals, likening them to stars. To believe this second version, you would suppose Makepeace had gone star crazy. He couldn’t get away from the things, nor could the writer. Stars as our destiny. Stars that guide Wise Men across deserts to the very Cradle of Truth. Stars to lighten the darkness of our despair, yea even in the pit of sin. Stars of every shape, for every occasion. Shining above us like God’s very light. The writer must have been Makepeace Watermaster’s property, body and soul, if it wasn’t Makepeace himself. Nobody else could have sweetened that awesome, forbidding apparition in the pulpit.

Though my eyes were not yet open on this day, I see him as clearly as I saw him later in the flesh, and shall see him always: tall as one of his own factory chimneys, and as tapered. Rubbery, with weak pinched shoulders and a wide bendy waist. One jointless arm tipped out at us like a railway signal, one baggy hand flapping on the end of it. And the wet, elastic little mouth that should have been a woman’s, too small even to feed him by, stretching and contracting as it labours to deliver the indignant vowels. And when at long, long last, enough awesome warnings have been uttered, and the penalties of sin outlined in sufficient detail, I see him brace himself and lean back and moisten his lips for the kiss-off, which we children have been begging for these forty minutes while we crossed our legs and died for a pee however often we had peed before we left home. One cutting gives this final preposterous passage in full, and I will give it again now — their text, not mine — though no Watermaster sermon I ever heard later was complete without it, though the words became part of Rick’s very nature, and remained with him all his life and consequently mine, and I would be amazed if they did not ring in his ears as he died, and accompany him as he strode towards his Maker, two pals reunited at last:

“Ideals, my young brethren. .” I see Makepeace pause here, shoot another glare at Rick and start again: “Ideals, my beloved brethren all, are to be likened unto those splendid stars above us”—I see him lift his sad, starless eyes to the pine roof—“we cannot reach them. Millions of miles separate us from them.” I see him hold out his drooping arms as if to catch a falling sinner. “But oh my brethren, how greatly do we profit from their presence!”

Remember them, Tom. Jack, you’ll think I’m mad, but those stars, however fatuous, are a crucial piece of operational intelligence, for they lend a first image to Rick’s unquenchable conviction of his destiny, and it didn’t stop with Rick either; how could it, for what is a prophet’s son but himself a prophecy, even if nobody on God’s earth ever discovers what either one of them is prophesying? Makepeace, like all great preachers, must do without a final curtain or applause. Nevertheless, quite audibly in the silence — I have witnesses who swear to it — Rick is heard to whisper “beautiful” twice over. Makepeace Watermaster hears it too — slurs his big feet and pauses on the pulpit steps, blinking round him as if somebody has called him a rude name. Makepeace sits down, the organ strikes up “what purpose burns within our hearts?” Makepeace stands again, unsure where to put his ridiculously tiny backside. The hymn is sung to its dreary end. Night School Boys, with Rick star-struck at their centre, process down the aisle and in a practised drill movement fan out to their appointed posts. Rick, smart as paint today and every Sunday, proffers the collecting plate to the Watermaster ladies, his blue eyes glistening with divine intelligence. How much will they give? How quickly? The silence lends tension to these massive questions. First comes Lady Nell, who keeps him waiting while she pecks in her handbag and curses, but Rick is all forbearance, all love, all stars today, and each lady regardless of age or beauty receives the benefit of his thrilled and saintly smile. But where daft Nell simpers at him and tries to muss his slicked hair and pull it forward over his broad, Christian brow, my little Dot is looking nowhere but at the ground, still praying, praying even while she stands, and Rick has actually to touch her forearm with his finger in order to alert her to his Godlike nearness. I can feel his touch now upon my own arm, and it sends a healer’s charge through me of weak-kneed loathing and devotion. The boys line up before the Lord’s table, the minister accepts the offerings, says a perfunctory blessing, then orders everyone but the Appeal Committee to leave at once and quietly. The unforeseen Circumstances are about to begin, and with them the first great trial of Richard T. Pym — the first of many, it is true, but this is the one that really whetted his appetite for Judgment.

* * *

I have seen him a hundred times as he stood that morning. Rick alone, brooding at the doorway of a crowded room. Rick his father’s son, the glory of a great heritage creasing on his brow. Rick waiting, like Napoleon before the battle, for Destiny to sound the trumpets for his assault. He never made a lazy entrance in his life, he never fluffed his timing or his impact. Whatever you had in mind till then, you could forget it: the topic of the day had just walked in. So it is in the Tabernacle on this rainy sabbath, while God’s wind booms in the pine rafters high above and the disconsolate huddle of humanity in the front pews waits awkwardly for Rick. But stars, we know, are like ideals and elusive. Heads begin to crane, chairs creak. Still no Rick. The Night School Boys, already in the dock, moisten their lips, tip nervously at their ties. Rickie’s done a bunk. Rickie can’t face the music. The deacon in his brown suit hobbles with an artisan’s mysterious discomfort towards the vestry where Rick may have hidden. Then a thump. Round whips every head to the sound, till they stare straight back down the aisle at the great west door, which has been opened from outside by a mysterious hand. Silhouetted against the grey sea clouds of adversity, Rick T. Pym, until now David Livingstone’s natural heir if ever we knew one, gravely bows to his judges and his Maker, closes the great door behind him, and all but vanishes once more against its blackness.

“Message from old Mrs. Harmann for you, Mr. Philpott.” Philpott being the name of the minister. The voice being Rick’s and everyone as usual remarking its beauty, rallying to it, loving it, scared and drawn by its unflinching self-assurance.

“Oh yes then?” says Philpott, very alarmed to be addressed so calmly from so far away. Philpott is a Welshman too.

“She’d be glad of a lift to Exeter General to see her husband before his operation tomorrow, Mr. Philpott,” says Rick with just the tiniest note of a reproach. “She doesn’t seem to think he’ll pull through. If it’s any bother to you I’m sure one of us can take care of her, can’t we, Syd?”

Syd Lemon is a cockney whose father not long ago came south for his arthritis and in Syd’s view will shortly die of boredom instead. Syd is Rick’s best-loved lieutenant, a small, punchy fighter with the townie’s nimbleness and twinkle, and Syd is Syd for ever to me, even now, and the nearest I ever came to a confessor, excluding Poppy.

“Sit with her all night if we have to,” Syd affirms with strenuous rectitude. “All next day too, won’t we, Rickie?”

“Be quiet,” Makepeace Watermaster growls. But not to Rick, who is bolting the church doors from the inside. We can just make him out among the lights and darks of the porch. Clang goes the first bolt, high up, he has to reach for it. Clang the second, low down as he stoops to it. Finally, to the visible relief of the susceptible, he consents to embark on his forward journey to the scaffold. For by now the weaker of us are dependent on him. By now in our hearts we are begging a smile from him, the son of old TP, sending him messages assuring him that there is nothing personal, enquiring of him after the dear lady his poor mother — for the dear lady, as everybody knows, does not feel sufficiently herself today and nobody can budge her. She sits with a widow’s majesty at home in Airdale Road behind drawn curtains under the tinted giant photograph of TP in his mayoral regalia, weeping and praying one minute to have her late husband given back to her, the next to have him stay put exactly where he is and be spared the disgrace, and the next rooting for Rick like the old punter she secretly is—“Hand it to them, son. Fight them down before they do the same to you, same as your dad did and better.” By now the less worldly officers of our improvised tribunal have been converted if not actually corrupted to Rick’s side. And as if to undermine their authority still further, Welsh Philpott in his innocence has made the error of placing Rick beside the pulpit in the very spot from which in the past he has read us the day’s lesson with such brio and persuasion. Worse still, Welsh Philpott ushers Rick to this position and twitches the chair for Rick to sit on. But Rick is not so biddable. He remains standing, one hand rested comfortingly on the chair’s back as if he has decided to adopt it. Meanwhile he engages Mr. Philpott in a few more easy words of talk.

“I see Arsenal came a cropper Saturday, then,” says Rick. Arsenal, in better times, being Mr. Philpott’s second greatest love, as it was TP’s.

“Never mind that now, Rick,” says Mr. Philpott, all of a flurry. “We’ve business to discuss, as well you know.”

Looking poorly the minister takes his place beside Makepeace Watermaster. But Rick’s purpose is achieved. He has made a bond where Philpott wanted none; he has presented us with a feeling man instead of a villain. In recognition of his achievement Rick smiles. On all of us at once: grand of you to be among us here today. His smile sweeps over us; it is not impertinent, it is impressive in its compassion for the forces of human fallibility that have brought us to this unhappy pass. Only Sir Makepeace himself and Perce Loft the great solicitor from Dawlish, known as Perce the Writ, who sits beside him with the papers, preserve their granite disapproval. But Rick is not awed by them. Not by Makepeace and certainly not by Perce, with whom Rick has formed a fine relationship in recent months, based it is said on mutual respect and understanding. Perce wants Rick to read for the bar. Rick is bent upon it but meanwhile wants Perce to advise him on certain business transactions he is contemplating. Perce, ever an altruist, is supplying his services free.

“That was a wonderful sermon you gave us, Sir Makepeace,” says Rick. “I never heard better. Those words of yours will ring inside my head like the bells of Heaven for as long as I’m spared, sir. Hullo, Mr. Loft.”

Perce Loft is too official to reply. Sir Makepeace has had flattery before, and receives it as no more than his due.

“Sit down,” says our Liberal Member of Parliament for this Constituency and Justice of the Peace.

Rick obeys at once. Rick is no enemy of authority. To the contrary he is a man of authority himself, as we waverers already know, a power and a justice in one.

“Where’s the Appeal money gone?” Makepeace Watermaster demands without delay. “There was close on four hundred pound donated last month alone. Three hundred the month before, three hundred in August. Your accounts for the same period show one hundred and twelve pound received. Nothing put by and no cash in hand. What have you done with it, boy?”

“Bought a motor coach,” says Rick, and Syd — to use his own words — seated in the dock with all the rest of them, has a hard time not corpsing.

* * *

Rick spoke for twelve minutes by Syd’s dad’s watch and when he’d done only Makepeace Watermaster stood between him and victory, Syd is sure of it: “The minister, he was won over before your dad ever opened his mouth, Titch. Well he had to be, he gave TP his first pulpit. Old Perce Loft — well, Perce had fish to fry by then, didn’t he? Rick had stitched him up. The rest of them, they was going up and down like a tart’s knickers from waiting to see which way The Lord High Make-water’s going to jump.”

First of all, Rick magnanimously claims full responsibility for everything. Blame, says Rick, if blame there be, should be laid squarely at his own door. Stars and ideals are nothing to the metaphors he flings at us: “If a finger is to be pointed, point it here.” A stab at his own breast. “If a price is to be paid, here’s the address. Here I am. Send me the bill. And leave them to learn by his mistakes who got them into this, if such there have been,” he challenges them, beating the English language into submission with the blade of his plump hand by way of an example. Women admired those hands till the end of Rick’s days. They drew conclusions from the girth of his fingers, which never parted when he made a gesture.

“Where did he get his rhetoric from?” I once asked Syd reverently, enjoying what he and Meg called “a small wet” at their fireside in Surbiton. “Who were his models, apart from Makepeace?”

“Lloyd George, Hartley Shawcross, Avory, Marshall Hall, Norman Birkett and other great advocates of his day,” replied Syd promptly, as if they were the runners and starters for the two thirty at Newmarket. “Your dad had more respect for the law than any man I ever knew, Titch. Studied their speeches, followed their form better than what he did the geegees. He’d have been a top judge if TP had given him the opportunities, wouldn’t he, Meg?”

“He’d have been Prime Minister,” Meg affirms devoutly. “Who else was there but him and Winston?”

Rick next passes to his Theory of Property which I have since heard him expound many times in many different ways but I believe this was its unveiling. The burden is that any money passing through Rick’s hands is subject to a redefinition of the laws of property, since whatever he does with it will improve mankind, whose principal representative he is. Rick, in a word, is not a taker but a giver and those who call him otherwise lack faith. The final challenge comes in a mounting bombardment of passionate, grammatically unnerving pseudo-Biblical phrases. “And if any one of you here present today — can find evidence of a single advantage — one single benefit — be it in the past, be it stored away for the future — directly or indirectly from this enterprise — which I have derived — ambitious though it may have been, make no two ways about it — let him come forward now, with a clear heart — and point the finger where it belongs.”

From there it is but a step to that sublime vision of the Pym & Salvation Coach Company Ltd., which will bring profit to piety and worshippers to our beloved Tabernacle.

The magic box is unlocked. Flinging back the lid Rick displays a dazzling confusion of promises and statistics. The present bus fare from Farleigh Abbott to our Tabernacle is twopence. The trolley bus from Tambercombe costs threepence, four-up in a cab from either spot costs sixpence, a Granville Hastings motor coach costs nine hundred and eight pounds discounted for cash, and seats thirty-two fully loaded, eight standing. On the sabbath alone — my assistants here have made a most thorough survey, gentlemen — more than six hundred people travel an aggregate of over four thousand miles to worship at this fine Tabernacle. Because they love the place. As Rick does. As we all do, every man and woman here present — let’s make no bones about it. Because they want to feel drawn from the circumference to the centre, in the spirit of their faith. (This last is one of Makepeace Watermaster’s own expressions and Syd says it was a bit cheeky of Rick to throw it back in his face.) On three other days in the week, gentlemen — Band of Hope, Christian Endeavour and Women’s League Bible Group — another seven hundred miles are travelled leaving three days clear for normal commercial operation, and if you don’t believe me watch my forearm as it beats the doubters from my path in a series of convulsive elbow blows, the cupped fingers never parting. From such figures it is suddenly clear there can be only one conclusion.

“Gentlemen, if we charge half the standard fare and give a free ticket to every disabled and elderly person, to every child under the age of eight — with full insurance — observing all the fine regulations which rightly apply to the operation of commercial transport carriages in this increasingly hectic age of ours — with fully professional drivers with every awareness of their responsibilities, god-fearing men recruited from our own number — allowing for depreciation, garaging, maintenance, fuel, ticketing and sundries, and assuming a fifty-percent capacity on the three days of commercial operation — there’s a forty-percent clear profit for the Appeal and room left over to see everybody right.”

Makepeace Watermaster is asking questions. The others are either too full or too empty to speak at all.

“And you’ve bought it?” says Makepeace.

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re not of age, half of you.”

“We used an intermediary, sir. A fine lawyer of this district who in his modesty wishes to remain anonymous.”

Rick’s reply draws a rare smile from the improbably tiny lips of Sir Makepeace Watermaster. “I never knew a lawyer who wished to remain anonymous,” he says.

Perce Loft frowns distractedly at the wall.

“So where is it now?” Sir Makepeace continues.

“What, sir?”

“The coach, boy.”

“They’re painting it,” says Rick. “Green with gold lettering.”

“With whose permission, at any stage, have you embarked on this project?” asks Watermaster.

“We’re asking Miss Dorothy to cut the tape, Sir Makepeace. We’ve drafted the invite already.”

“Who gave you permission? Did Mr. Philpott here? Did the deacons? Did the committee? Did I? To spend nine hundred and eight pounds of Appeal funds, widows’ mites, on a motor coach?”

“We wanted the element of surprise, Sir Makepeace. We wanted to sweep the board with them. Once you spread the word beforehand, talk it round town, you take the air out of it. P.S.C. is going to be sprung upon an unsuspecting world.”

Makepeace now enters what Syd calls the dicey part.

“Where are the books?”

“Books, sir? There’s only one Book I know of—”

“Your files, boy. Your figures. You alone kept the accounts, we heard.”

“Give me a week, Sir Makepeace. I’ll account for every penny.”

“That’s not keeping accounts. That’s fudging them. Did you learn nothing at all from your father, boy?”

“Rectitude, sir. Humbleness before Jesus.”

“How much have you spent?”

“Not spent, sir. Invested.”

“How much?”

“Fifteen hundred. Rounded up.”

“Where’s the coach at present?”

“I said, sir. Being painted.”

“Where?”

“Balham’s of Brinkley. Coach-builders. Some of the finest Liberals in the county. Christians to a man.”

“I know Balham’s. TP sold timber to Balham’s for ten years.”

“They’re charging cost.”

“You propose to ply for trade in public, you say?”

“Three days a week, sir.”

“Using the public coach stages?”

“Certainly.”

“Are you familiar with the likely attitude to be taken by the Dawlish & Tambercombe Transport Corporation of Devon to this venture?”

“A popular demand like this — those boys can’t block it, Sir Makepeace. We’ve got God driving for us. Once they see the ground-swell, feel the pulse, they’ll back away and give us our heads all the way to the top. They can’t stop progress, Sir Makepeace, and they can’t stop the march of Christian people.”

“Can’t they,” says Sir Makepeace, and scribbles figures on a piece of paper in front of him. “There’s eight hundred and fifty pound in rent money missing as well,” he remarks as he writes.

“We invested the rent money too, sir.”

“That’s more than the fifteen hundred then.”

“Call it two thousand. Rounded up. I thought you only meant the Appeal money.”

“What about the collection money?”

“Some of it.”

“Counting all monies from any source, what’s the total capital? Rounded up.”

“Including private investors, Sir Makepeace—”

Watermaster sat up straight: “So we’ve private investors too, have we? My gracious, boy, you’ve been going it a bit. Who are they?”

“Private clients.”

“Of whom?”

Perce Loft looks as though he is about to fall asleep out of sheer boredom. His eyelids are two inches long, his goatish head has slipped forward on his neck.

“Sir Makepeace, I am not at liberty to reveal this. When P.S.C. promises confidentiality, that’s what she delivers. Our watchword is integrity.”

“Has the company been incorporated?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Security, sir. Keep it under wraps. Like I said.”

Makepeace begins jotting again. Everybody waits for more questions. None come. An uncomfortable air of completeness settles over Makepeace, and Rick senses it faster than anybody. “It was like being up the old doctor’s, Titch,” Syd told me, “when he’s made up his mind what you’re dying of, only he’s got to write out this prescription before he gives you the good news.”

Rick speaks again. Unprompted. It was the voice he used when he was cornered. Syd heard it then, I heard it later only twice. It was not a pretty tone at all.

“I could bring those accounts up to you this evening, as a matter of fact, Sir Makepeace. They’re in safekeeping, you see. I’ll have to get them out.”

“Give them to the police,” says Makepeace, still writing. “We’re not detectives here, we’re churchmen.”

“Miss Dorothy might think a bit different, though, mightn’t she, Sir Makepeace?”

“Miss Dorothy has nothing to do with this.”

“Ask her.”

Then Makepeace stops writing and his head comes up a bit sharpish, says Syd, and they look at each other, Makepeace with his little baby eyes uncertain. And Rickie, suddenly his gaze has the glint of a flick-knife in the dark. Syd does not go as far as I shall in describing that stare because Syd won’t touch the black side of his lifelong hero. But I will. It looks out of him like a child through the eyeholes of a mask. It denies everything it stood for not a half-second earlier. It is pagan. It is amoral. It regrets your decision and your mortality. But it has no choice because you cannot go back.

“Are you telling me Miss Dorothy is an investor in this project?” says Makepeace.

“You can invest more than money, Sir Makepeace,” says Rick, from far away but close.

Now the point is, says Syd rather hastily here, Makepeace should never have driven Rick to use that argument. Makepeace was a weak man acting hard and they’re the worst, says Syd. If Makepeace had been reasonable, if he’d been a believer like the rest and thought a little better of poor TP’s boy instead of lacking faith and undermining everybody else’s into the bargain, things could have been settled in a friendly, positive way and everyone could have gone home happy, believing in Rick and his coach the way he needed them to. As it was, Makepeace was the last barrier and he left Rickie no alternative but to knock him down. So Rickie did, didn’t he? Well he had to, Titch.

* * *

I strain and stretch, Tom, I shove with every muscle of my imagination as deep as I dare into the heavy shadows of my own pre-history. I put down my pen and stare at the hideous church tower across the square, and I can hear as plain as Miss Dubber’s television downstairs the ill-contrasted voices of Rick and Sir Makepeace Watermaster matched against each other. I see the dark drawing-room of The Glades where I was so seldom admitted and I picture the two men closeted together there that evening alone, and my poor Dorothy trembling in our murky upper room reading the same hand-stitched homilies that now adorn Miss Dubber’s landings as she tries to suck comfort from God’s flowers, God’s love, God’s will. And I could tell you, I think near enough to a sentence or two, what passed between them by way of continuing their unfinished chat of that morning.

Rick’s spirits are back, because the flick-knife never shows for long and because he has already achieved the object that is more important to him than any other in his human dealings, even if he himself does not yet know it. He has inspired Makepeace to hold two totally divergent opinions of him and perhaps more. He has shown him the official and unofficial versions of his identity. He has taught him to respect Rick in his complexity and to reckon as much with Rick’s secret world as with his overt one. It is as if in the privacy of that room each player revealed the many cards, fake or real is of no account, that comprised his hand: and Makepeace was left without a chip in front of him. But the fact is, both men are dead, both took their secret to the grave, Sir Makepeace going ahead by thirty years. And the one person who may still know it cannot speak, because if she exists at all any more, then it is only as a ghost, haunting her own life and mine, killed long ago by the very consequences of the two men’s fateful dialogue that evening.

History records two meetings between Rick and my Dorothy before that sabbath. The first when she made a royal visit to the Young Liberals Club, of which Rick was at that time an elected officer — I believe, God help them, treasurer. The second when Rick was captain of the Tabernacle’s football team and one Morrie Washington, a Night School Boy and another of Rick’s lieutenants, was goalie. Dorothy, as sister of the Sitting Member, was invited to present the cup. Morrie remembers the line-up ceremony, with Dorothy walking along the troops and pinning a medal to each victorious breast, starting with Rick himself as captain. It seems she fumbled the clasp, or that Rick pretended she did. Either way, he let out a playful cry of pain and went down on one knee, clutching his bosom and insisting she had pierced him to the heart. It was a bold and rather naughty number and I am surprised he took it so far. Even in burlesque, Rick was normally very protective of his dignity, and at fancy-dress balls, which were the rage until the war came, he preferred to go as Lloyd George rather than risk ridicule. But down he went, Morrie remembered it like yesterday, and Dorothy laughed, a thing nobody had ever seen her do: laugh. What assignations followed we can never know, except that, according to Morrie, Rick did once boast that there was more than cake and lemon barley waiting for him up at The Glades when he delivered the church magazine. Syd, I think, knows more than Morrie. Syd saw a lot. And people tell him things because he keeps his counsel. Syd, I believe, knows most of the secrets that lurked in the wooded house that Makepeace Watermaster called his home, even if in old age he has done his best to bury them six foot under. He knows why Lady Nell drank and why Makepeace was so ill-at-ease with himself, and why his damp little eyes were so tormented, and his mouth unequal to his appetites, and why he was able to castigate sin with such passionate familiarity. And why he wrote of a special love when he put his wretched name in my Dorothy’s Bible. And why it was that Dorothy had taken herself to the furthest corner of the house to sleep, far from Lady Nell’s rooms and further still from Makepeace’s. And why Dorothy was so accessible to the smart-tongued upstart from the football team who spoke as if he could build her a road to anywhere, and drive her there in his coach. But Syd is a good man and a Mason. He loved Rick and gave the best years of his life, now to roistering with him, now to hanging on to his coattails. Syd would have a laugh, he would tell a story, provided it hurt nobody too much. But Syd won’t touch the black side.

History records also that Rick took no account books to that meeting, though Mr. Muspole the great accountant, another Night School Boy, offered to help him write some and probably did. Muspole could invent accounts the way others can write postcards on holiday or rattle off anecdotes into a microphone. And that in order to prepare himself, Rick took a stroll over Brinkley Cliffs, alone, which I believe is the first known walk of this kind, though Rick, like myself after him, was always a one for striding out in search of a decision or a voice. And that he returned from The Glades wearing an air of high office not unlike Makepeace Watermaster’s, except that it had more of the natural radiance in it that comes, we are told, of inner cleanliness. The matter of the Appeal had been attended to, he informed his courtiers. The problem of liquidity had been solved, he said. Everybody was going to be seen right. How? they begged him; how, Rickie? But Rick preferred to remain their magician and allowed nobody to look up his sleeve. Because I am blessed. Because I steer events. Because I am destined to become one of the Highest in the Land.

His other good news was not vouchsafed to them. This was a cheque drawn on Watermaster’s personal account in the sum of five hundred pounds to set himself up in life — presumably, said Syd, in outer Australia. Rick endorsed it, Syd cashed it, since Rick’s own bank account, as so often in later years, was temporarily indisposed. A few days afterwards, on the strength of this subsidy, Rick presided over a lavish if sombre banquet at the Brinkley Towers Hotel, attended by the entire court as then composed and several local Lovelies who were always an off-screen feature. Syd recalls a mood of historic change pervading the occasion though no one knew precisely what was over or what was about to begin. Speeches were made, mostly on the theme of old pals sticking together and keeping a straight bat through life, but when Rick’s health was drunk he responded with uncharacteristic brevity, and it was whispered that he was in the grip of an emotion, for he was seen to weep, which he did often, even in those days; he could weep buckets, on the drop of a handkerchief. Perce Loft, the great lawyer, attended the gathering to the surprise of some, and to their greater surprise brought with him a beautiful, if incongruous, young music student named Lippschitz, first name Annie, who put the other Lovelies in the shade even though she’d hardly a coat to cover her back. They dubbed her “Lippsie.” She was a refugee from Germany who had come to Perce in some immigration matter, and Perce in his goodness had decided to extend a helping hand to her, much as he had extended one to Rick. To close proceedings Morrie Washington the court jester sang a song, and Lippsie joined the other women in the chorus, though she sang too well and didn’t fully appreciate the dirty bits, being foreign. It was by then dawn. A sleek taxi took Rick away, and he was not seen in those parts for many years.

History records further that one Richard Thomas Pym, bachelor, and Dorothy Godchild Watermaster, spinster, both very temporarily of this parish, were the next day solemnly and discreetly married in the presence of two co-opted witnesses in a newly opened registry office off the Western by-pass, just where you turned left for Northolt Aerodrome. And that a little boy christened Magnus Richard and weighing in at very few pounds at all was born to them not six months later, whom the Lord protect. The Companies Registry, which I have consulted, also records the event, though in different terms. Within forty-eight hours of the birth, Rick had unveiled the Magnus Star Equitable Insurance Company Ltd., with a share capital of two thousand pounds. Its stated purpose was the Provision of life insurance to the Needy, Disabled, and Elderly. Its accountant was Mr. Muspole, its legal adviser Perce Loft. Morrie Washington was company secretary, and the late Alderman Thomas Pym, affectionately known as TP, its patron saint.

* * *

“So was there really a coach then or was it all flannel?” I ask Syd.

Syd is always cautious in how he replies. “Now there could have been a coach, Titch. I’m not saying there wasn’t, I’d be a liar if I did. I’m just saying I never heard about a coach till your dad happened to mention it in church that morning. Put it that way.”

“So what had he done with the money — if there was no coach?”

Syd really doesn’t know. So many thousands of pounds have floated under the bridge since then. So many great visions come and gone. Maybe Rick gave it away, Syd says awkwardly. Your dad couldn’t say no to anyone, specially the Lovelies. Never right with himself unless he was giving. Maybe a con came and took it off him, your dad always loved a con. Then to my amazement Syd blushes. And I hear faintly but clearly from the side of his mouth the ratta-tat-tat he used to make for me when I was a child and wanted him to do the clip of horses’ hoofs.

“You mean he used the Appeal money to lay bets?” I ask.

“Titch, I’m only saying that that coach of his could have been horse-drawn. That’s all I’m saying, isn’t it, Meg?”

* * *

Oh but there was a coach all right! And it was not horse-drawn at all. That coach was the most splendid, powerful ever made. The golden lettering of the Pym & Salvation Coach Company shone from its lustrous sides like the illuminated chapter headings of all the Bibles of Rick’s youth. Its green was the racing green of England. Sir Malcolm Campbell himself was going to drive it. The Highest in the Land would ride in it. When the people of our town saw that coach they were going to go down on their knees and put their hands together and thank God and Rick in equal portion for it. The grateful crowds would gather outside Rick’s house and call him out on to his balcony till late into the night. I have seen him practising his wave in expectation of them. With both hands as if rocking me above his head, while he beams and weeps into the middle distance: “I owe it all to old TP.” And if, as doubtless happened, it turned out that Balham’s of Brinkley, some of the finest Liberals in the county, had never strictly speaking heard of Rick’s coach, let alone painted it for cost out of the goodness of their hearts, then they were in the same state of provisional reality as the coach was. They were waiting for Rick’s wand to beckon them into being. It was only when meddlesome unbelievers such as Makepeace Watermaster had difficulty accepting this state of affairs that Rick found himself with a religious war on his hands, and like others before him was compelled to defend his faith by unpleasant means. All he demanded was the totality of your love. The least you could do in return was give it to him blindly. And wait for him, as God’s Banker, to double it over six months.