A Perfect Spy

CHAPTER 6

A dark sea rain had enveloped Pym’s England and he strode in it warily. It was early evening and he had been writing for longer than he had written in his whole life and now he was empty and accessible and afraid. A foghorn sounded — one short, two long — a lighthouse or a ship. Pausing under a lamp he again studied his watch. A hundred and ten minutes to go, fifty-three years gone. Bandstand empty, bowling green awash. Shop-windows still wearing their fly-blown yellow cellophane against the summer’s sun.

He was heading out of town. He had bought a plastic cape from Blandy the haberdasher. “Good evening, Mr. Canterbury, sir, what can we be doing you for?” In the rain its hood pattered round him like a tin roof. Inside its skirts he carried his shopping for Miss Dubber: the bacon from Mr. Aitken, only mind and tell him he’s to cut it on number five, give him half a chance he’ll make it thicker. And tell that Mr. Crosse three of his tomatoes were rotten last week, not just bad, rotten. If I don’t have replacements I’ll never go to him again. Pym had followed her instructions to the letter, though not with the ferocity she would have wished, for both Crosse and Aitken were recipients of his secret subventions, and for years had been sending Miss Dubber bills for only half what she had spent. From Farways the travel agent he had also obtained details of a senior citizens’ tour of Italy departing Gatwick in six days. I’ll phone her cousin Melanie in Bognor, he thought. If I offer to pay for Melanie as well, Miss Dubber won’t be able to refuse.

A hundred and six minutes. Only four gone. From countless pressing memories in his head clamouring to be acknowledged, Pym selected instead Washington and the balloon. Of all the crazy ways we ever had of talking, really that balloon took the biscuit. You wanted a chat, I wouldn’t meet you. I was running scared and had appointed you my unperson. But you wouldn’t be put down, you never would. To humour me, you launched a miniature silver-coated gas balloon over the rooftops of Washington, D.C. Half a metre diameter; sometimes Tom gets them free at the supermarkets. As we drove our separate cars on either side of town, you told me in German what a fool I was to do a Garbo on you. Over matched handsets that hopped like bedbugs between the frequencies and must have sent the listeners just as frantic.

He was climbing the cliff path, past lighted bungalows cut from the gardens of a great house. I’ll phone that doctor of hers and get him to persuade her that a break is what she needs. Or the vicar, she’d listen to him. Below him the fairy lights of the Amusement Palace glowed like fat berries in the mist. Alongside them he could make out the blue-white neons of the Softa Ice Parlour. Penny, he thought. You’ll never see me again unless it’s my face in the newspaper. Penny belonged to his secret army of lovers, so secret she didn’t know she was a member. Five years ago she was selling fish and chips from a Portacabin on the promenade and was in love with a leather-boy called Bill who beat her up, until Pym ran the licence number of Bill’s motorbike across the Firm computer and established he was married and had kids in Taunton. In a disguised hand he sent the details to the local vicar and a year later Penny was married to a jolly Italian ice-cream seller called Eugenio. But not tonight she wasn’t. Tonight, as Pym had approached her café for his regular two scoops of Cornish, she was head to head with a burly man in a trilby whom Pym hadn’t liked the look of one bit. It was just an ordinary traveller, he told himself as a gust of wind filled his cape. A food salesman, a taxman. Who hunts alone these days apart from Jack? And Jack it isn’t, not by thirty years. It was the car, he thought. Those clean wings, the smart aerial. The pitch of his head as he listened.

“Any callers, Miss D?” said Pym, setting out his packages on the sideboard.

Miss Dubber was sitting in the kitchen watching American soap-opera and having her one of the day. Toby sat in her lap.

“They’re so wicked, Mr. Canterbury,” she said. “There’s not one among them we’d have here even for a night, would we, Toby? What’s that tea you bought? I said Assam, you silly man, take it back.”

“It is Assam,” Pym said gently, stooping to show her. “They’ve put it in a new packing and given you three pence off. Any callers while I was out?”

“Only the gasman for the meter.”

“That usual? Or someone new?”

“New, dear. They’re all new these days.” Lightly kissing her cheek he straightened her new shawl over her shoulders. “Give yourself a nice stiff vodka, darling,” she said.

But Pym declined, saying he must work.

Regaining his room he checked the papers on his desk. Stapler to handle of teacup. Book matches to pencil. Burnbox aligned to desk leg, ignore. Miss Dubber is no Mary. Shaving, he caught himself thinking of Rick. I saw your ghost, he thought. Not here but in Vienna. Just as I used to see you in the flesh in Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington. I saw your ghost in every shop-window and autumn doorway while I tried to clear my itchy back. You were wearing your camel-hair coat and smoking the cigar you never drew on without frowning. Following me, you were, and your blue eyes shadowed like a drowned man’s, the pupils stuck against the upper lids to scare me. “Where are you off to, old son, where are those fine legs of yours taking you so late at night? Got a nice lady, have you? Someone who thinks the world of you? Come on, old son. You can tell your old man. Give us a hug.” In London you were lying on your deathbed but I wouldn’t go to you, I wouldn’t know about you or talk about you, it was my way of mourning you. “No, I will not. No, I will not,” I used to say each time my heel hit the cobble. So you came to me instead. To Vienna and did a Wentworth on me. Every corner I turned you were there. Until I felt your loving stare like a heat on the back I could never clear. Get off me, damn you, I whispered. What death was I wishing you? All of them by turns. Die, I told you. Do it on the pavement where everyone can see. Stop adoring me. Stop believing in me. Did you want money? Not any more. You had waived your claim to it in favour of the greatest claim of all. You wanted Magnus. You wanted my living spirit to enter your dying body and give you back the life I owed you. “Having a bit of fun, are we, son? Old Poppy’s crackerjack, I can see that for openers. What are you two hatching up together there? Come on, you can tell your old pal! Got some piece of business, have you? Putting a few bob in your pockets, are you, the way your old man taught you?”

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

He was already mixing it.

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

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

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

“Of course I wouldn’t.”

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Father,” said Pym. And stopped.

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

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

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

“It doesn’t matter. Really.”

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

“No, of course not.”

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

“Never.”

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

* * *

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

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

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

“It was a natural, Titch,” says Syd. “Dobbsie hops on his bicycle, slips round to a bombed house, picks up the blower to Whitehall. ‘Dobbs here,’ he says. ‘I’ll have twenty thousand quids’ worth by Thursday and no backchat.’ And Government pays up like a lady. Why?” Syd jabs my upper knee with his forefinger — Rick’s gesture to the life. “Because Dobbsie is impartial, Titch, and never you forget it.”

Dimly I remember Dobbsie too, a whipped, untruthful little man plastered on two glasses of bubbly. I remember being ordered to be nice to him — and when was Pym ever not? “Son, if Mr. Dobbs here asks you for something — if he wants that fine picture off the wall there — you give it to him. Understand?”

Pym eyed the picture of ships on a red sea in a different light from that day on but Dobbsie never asked for it.

With Flora’s amazing secret on the table, Syd continues, the wheels of commerce are flung into top gear. Rick is recalled from his conference, a meeting with Dobbsie is arranged, a mutuality established. Both men are Liberals or Masons or the Sons of Great Men, both follow Arsenal, admire Joe Louis, think Noël Coward is a sissy or share the same vision of men and women of all races marching arm in arm towards the one great Heaven which, let’s face it, is big enough for all of us, whatever our colour or creed may be — this being one of Rick’s set speeches, guaranteed to make him weep. Dobbs becomes an honorary member of the court and within days introduces a loved colleague named Fox, who also likes to do good for mankind, and whose job is selecting building land for the post-war Utopia. Thus the ripples of conspiracy multiply, find each other and spread.

The next to be blessed is Perce Loft. While pursuing a line of business in the Midlands Perce has heard voices about a moribund Friendly Society that is sitting on a fortune, and makes enquiries. The Chairman of the Society, name of Higgs — Destiny has decreed that all conspirators bear monosyllables — turns out to be a lifelong Baptist. So is Rick; he could never have got where he is today without it. The fortune derives from a family trust watched over by a country solicitor named Crabbe, who went off to the war the moment it became available, leaving the trust to watch over itself as it thought best. As a Baptist, Higgs can fiddle no funds without Crabbe to cover him. Rick secures Crabbe’s release from his regiment, whisks him by Bentley to Chester Street where he can inspect the Wall of Fame, the law books and the Lovelies, and thence to the dear old Albany where he can have a nice talk and relax.

Crabbe turns out to be a cantankerous, idiotic little man who sticks out his elbow to take his drink, sir, wiggles his moustache to demonstrate his military shrewdness and after a few glasses demands to know what you stripe-arsed civilians were doing while I was taking part in a certain contest, sir, risking one’s neck amid shot and shell? At the Goat some drinks later, however, he declares Rick to be the kind of chap he’d have liked to have as commandant and if need be die for, which one damn nearly did a few times but mum’s the word. He even calls Rick “Colonel,” thus triggering a bizarre interlude in the great man’s rise, for Rick is so taken with the rank that he decides to award it to himself in earnest, much as in later life he convinces himself he has been knighted secretly by the Duke of Edinburgh and keeps a set of calling-cards for those admitted to this confidence.

Yet none of these added responsibilities holds up Rick’s breathless waltz for one minute. All night long, all weekend, the house in Ascot receives a pageant of the great, the beautiful and the gullible, for Rick has become a collector of celebrities as well as fools and horses. Test cricketers, jockeys, footballers, fashionable Counsel, corrupt parliamentarians, glistening Under Secretaries from helpful Whitehall Ministries, Greek shipowners, cockney hairdressers, unlisted maharajahs, drunk magistrates, venal mayors, ruling princes of countries that have ceased to exist, prelates in suède boots and pectoral crosses, radio comedians, lady singers, aristocratic layabouts, war millionaires and film stars — all pass across our stage as the bemused beneficiaries of Rick’s great vision. Lubricious bank managers and building-society chairmen who have never danced before throw off their jackets, confess to barren lives and worship Rick the giver of their sun and rain. Their wives receive unobtainable nylons, perfumes, petrol coupons, discreet abortions, fur coats and, if they are among the lucky ones, Rick himself — for everyone must have something, everyone must be taken care of, everyone must think the world of him. If they have savings, Rick will double them. If they like a flutter, Rick will get them better odds than the bookies — slip me the cash, I’ll see you right. Their children are passed to Pym for entertainment, exempted from National Service by the intervention of dear old somebody, given gold watches, tickets to the Cup Final, red setter puppies and, if they are ailing, the finest doctors to attend them. There was a time when such liberality dismayed the growing Pym and made him envious. Not today. Today I would call it no more than normal agent welfare.

And among them, casual as cats, stalk the quiet men of the enlarged court, the men from Mr. Muspole’s side, in broadshouldered suits and brown pork-pie hats, calling themselves consultants and holding the telephone receiver to their ear but not speaking into the mouthpiece. Who they were, how they came there, where they went — to this day only the Devil and Rick’s ghost know, and Syd refuses point-blank to speak of them, though with time I think I have put together a fair idea of what they did. They are the axemen of Rick’s tragicomedy, now yielding at the knees and covered in false smiles, now posted like Shakespearean sentries round his stage, white-eyed in the gloom as they wait to disembowel him.

And tiptoeing between this entire menagerie — as if between their legs, although he was already as tall as half of them — I glimpse Pym again, willing potboy, blank page, Lord Chief Justice designate, clipping their cigars and topping them all up. Pym the credit to his old man, the diplomat in embryo, scurrying to every summons: “Here, Magnus — what have they done to you at that new school of yours, poured fertiliser over you?” “Here, Magnus, who cut your hair then?” “Here, Magnus, tell us the one about the cabbie who puts his wife in the family way!” And Pym — the most compelling raconteur for his age and weight in all of Greater Ascot — obliges, smiles and sidesteps between their anomalous, colliding masses, and for relaxation attends late-night classes in radical politics with Ollie and Mr. Cudlove in their cottage, at which it is heartily agreed over stolen canapés and cocoa that all men are brothers but nothing against your dad. And though political doctrines are at root as meaningless to me today as they were to Pym then, I remember the simple humanity of our discussions as we promised to mend the world’s ills, and the truthful goodheartedness with which, as we went off to bed, we wished each other peace in the spirit of Joe Stalin who, let’s face it, Titch, and nothing against your dad ever, won the war for all these capitalist bastards.

Court holidays are restored to the curriculum, for no man can give of his best without relaxation. St. Moritz is off the map following Rick’s unsuccessful bid to buy the resort as a substitute for paying his bills there, but as compensation, now a favourite word, Rick and his advisers have espoused the South of France, sweeping down on Monte in the Train Bleu, banqueting the journey away in a brass-and-velvet dining-car, only pausing to tip the Froggie engine driver, who’s a first-rate Liberal, before dashing off to the Casino, illicit currency at the ready. There, standing at Rick’s shoulder in the grande salle, Pym can watch a year’s school fees vanish in seconds and nobody has learned a thing. If he prefers the bar he can exchange views with a Major de Wildman of Lord knew whose army, who calls himself King Farouk’s equerry and claims to have a private telephone link to Cairo so that he can report the winning numbers and take royal orders inspired by soothsayers on how to dissipate the wealth of Egypt. For our Mediterranean dawns we have the sombre march to the all-night pawnbroker on the waterfront, where Rick’s gold watch, gold cigarette case, gold swizzle-stick and gold cufflinks with the Pym sporting colours are sacrificed to the elusive god liquidity. For our reflective afternoons, we have the tir aux pigeons at which the court, well lunched, lies face down in the butts and pots away at luckless doves as they emerge from their tunnels and start out into the blue sky before crashing into the sea in a crumpled swirl. Then home again to London with the bills all taken care of, which meant signed, and the concierges and headwaiters seen right, which meant tipped lavishly with the last of our cash, to resume the ever-mounting cares of the Pym & Son empire.

For nothing may stand still, too much is not enough, as Syd himself admits. No income is so sacrosanct that expenditure cannot exceed it; no expenditure is so great that more loans cannot be raised to hold the dam from breaking altogether. If the building boom is put temporarily out of service by the passing of an unfriendly Building Act, then Major Maxwell-Cavendish has a plan that speaks deeply to Rick’s sporting soul: it is to buy up everyone who has drawn a horse in the Irish Sweep and so win first, second and third prizes automatically. Mr. Muspole knows a derelict newspaper proprietor who has got in with a bad crowd and needs to sell out fast; Rick has ever seen himself as a shaper of the human mind. Perce Loft the great lawyer wants to buy a thousand houses in Fulham; Rick knows a building society whose chairman has Faith. Mr. Cudlove and Ollie are on intimate terms with a young dress designer who has acquired the donkey-ride concession for the projected Festival of Britain; Rick likes nothing better than to give our English kids a break, and my God, son, if anybody has earned it they have. An amphibious motorcar has been designed by Morrie Washington’s nephew, a National Cricket Pool is envisaged to complement the winter Football Pools, Perce has yet another scheme for contracting an Irish village to grow human hair for the wig market which is expanding fast thanks to the munificence of the newly formed National Health Service. Automatic orange-peelers, pens that can write under water, the spent shell cases of temporarily discontinued wars: each project engages the great thinker’s interest, attracts its experts and its alchemists, adds another line to the Pym & Son Tablet of Honour at the house in Chester Street.

So what went wrong? I ask Syd again, glancing ahead to the inevitable end. What quirk of fate, this time round, Syd, checked the great man’s stride? My question sparks unusual anger. Syd sets down his glass.

“Dobbsie went wrong, that’s what. Flora wasn’t enough for him any more. He had to have the lot. Dobbsie went woozy in the head from all his women, didn’t he, Meg?”

“Dobbsie done his little self too well,” says Meg, ever a stern student of human frailty.

Poor Dobbs, it transpires, became so lulled that he awarded a hundred thousand pounds of compensation to a housing estate that had not been built till a year after the bombing ended.

“Dobbsie spoilt it for everyone,” says Syd, bristling with moral indignation. “Dobbsie was selfish, Titch. That’s what Dobbsie was. Selfish.”

One later footnote belongs to this brief but glorious high point of Rick’s affluence. It is recorded that in October 1947 he sold his head. I chanced upon this information as I was standing on the steps of the crematorium covertly trying to puzzle out some of the less familiar members of the funeral. A breathless youth claiming to represent a teaching hospital waved a piece of paper at me and demanded I stop the ceremony. “In Consideration of the sum of fifty pounds cash I, Richard T. Pym of Chester Street W., consent that on my death my head may be used for the purposes of furthering medical science.” It was raining slightly. Under cover of the porch I scribbled the boy a cheque for a hundred pounds and told him to buy one somewhere else. If the fellow was a confidence trickster, I reasoned, Rick would have been the first to admire his enterprise.

* * *

And always somewhere in this clamour the name of Wentworth ringing softly in Pym’s secret ear like an operational codename known only to the initiated: Wentworth. And Pym — the outsider, not on the list — struggling to join, to know. Like a buzzword passed between older hands in the senior officers’ bar at Head Office and Pym the new boy, hearing from the edge, not knowing whether to pretend knowledge or deafness: “We picked it up on Wentworth.” “Top Secret and Wentworth — have you been Wentworth-cleared?” Till the very name became to Pym a teasing symbol of wisdom denied, a challenge to his own desirability. “The bugger’s doing a Wentworth on us,” he hears Perce Loft grumble under his breath one evening. “That Wentworth woman’s a tiger,” says Syd another time. “Worse than her stupid husband ever was.” Each mention spurred Pym to renew his searches. Yet neither Rick’s pockets nor his desk drawers, not his bedside table or his pigskin address book or pop-up plastic telephone book, not even his briefcase, which Pym reconnoitred weekly with the key from Rick’s Asprey key chain, yielded a single clue. Nor did the impenetrable green filing cabinet which like a travelling icon had come to mark the centre of Rick’s migrant faith. No known key fitted it, no fiddling or prising made it yield.

* * *

And finally there was school. The cheque was sent, the cheque was cleared.

The train lurched. In the window Mr. Cudlove and other people’s mothers dipped their faces into handkerchiefs and vanished. In his compartment, children larger than himself whimpered and chewed the cuffs of their new grey jackets. But Pym with one turn of his head glanced backward on his life thus far, and forward to the iron path of duty curling into the autumn mist, and he thought: here I come, your best recruit ever. I’m the one you need so take me. The train arrived, school was a mediaeval dungeon of unending twilight, but Saint Pym of the Renunciation was on hand immediately to help his comrades hump their trunks and tuck-boxes up the winding stone staircases, wrestle with unfamiliar collar-studs, find their beds, lockers and clothes-pegs and award himself the worst. And when his turn came to be summoned before his housemaster for an introductory chat Pym made no secret of his pleasure. Mr. Willow was a big homely man in tweeds and a cricket tie, and the Christian plainness of his room after Ascot filled Pym at once with an assurance of integrity.

“Well, well, what’s in here then?” Mr. Willow asked genially as he lifted the parcel to his great ear and shook it.

“It’s scent, sir.”

Mr. Willow misunderstood his meaning. “Sent? I thought you brought it with you,” he said, still smiling.

“It’s for Mrs. Willow, sir. From Monte. They tell me it’s about the best those Frenchies make,” he added, quoting Major Maxwell-Cavendish, a gentleman.

Mr. Willow had a very broad back and suddenly that was all Pym saw. He stooped, there was a sound of opening and closing, the parcel vanished into his enormous desk. If he’d had a nine-foot grappling iron he couldn’t have treated Pym’s gift with greater loathing.

“You want to watch out for Tit Willow,” Sefton Boyd warned. “He beats on Fridays so that you have the weekend to recover.”

But still Pym strove, bled, volunteered for everything and obeyed every bell that summoned him. Terms of it. Lives of it. Ran before breakfast, prayed before running, showered before praying, defecated before showering. Flung himself through the Flanders mud of the rugger field, scrambled over sweating flagstones in search of what passed for learning, drilled so hard to be a good soldier that he cracked his collarbone on the bolt of his vast Lee-Enfield rifle, and had himself punched to kingdom come in the boxing ring. And still he pulled a grin and raised his paw for the loser’s biscuit as he tottered to the dressing-room and you would have loved him, Jack; you would have said that children and horses needed to be broken, public school was the making of me.

I don’t think it was at all. I think it damn near killed me. But not Pym — Pym thought it all perfectly wonderful and shoved out his plate for more. And when it was required of him by the rigid laws of a haphazard justice, which in retrospect seems like every night of the week, he pressed his limp forelock into a filthy washbasin, clutched a tap in each throbbing hand, and expiated a string of crimes he didn’t know he had committed until they were thoughtfully explained to him between each stroke by Mr. Willow or his representatives. Yet when he lay at last in the trembling dark of his dormitory, listening to the creaks and kennel coughs of adolescent longing, he still contrived to persuade himself that he was a prince in the making and, like Jesus, taking the rap for his father’s divinity. And his sincerity, his empathy for his fellow man flourished unabated.

In a single afternoon, he could sit down with Noakes the groundsman, eat cake and biscuits in his cottage beside the cider factory and bring tears to the old athlete’s eyes with his fabricated tales of the antics of the great sportsmen who had let their hair down at the Ascot feasts. All nonsense, yet all perfectly true to him as he spun his magic. “Not the Don?” Noakes would cry incredulously. “The great Don Bradman himself, dancing on the kitchen table? In your house, Pymmie? Go on!” “And singing ‘When I Was a Child of Five’ while he was about it,” said Pym. Then while Noakes was still glowing from these insights, straight up the hill went Pym to faded Mr. Glover, the assistant drawing master, who wore sandals, to help him wash palettes and remove the day’s daubs of powder paint from the genitals of the marble cherub in the main hall. Yet Mr. Glover was the absolute opposite of Noakes. Without Pym the two men were irreconcilable. Mr. Glover thought school sports a tyranny worse than Hitler’s and I wish they’d throw their bloody football boots into the river, I do, and plough up their games fields and get on with some Art and Beauty for a change. And Pym wished they would as well and swore his father was going to send a donation to rebuild the arts school to twice its size — probably millions, but keep it secret.

“I’d shut up about your father if I were you,” said Sefton Boyd. “They don’t like spivs here.”

“They don’t like divorced mothers either,” said Pym, biting back for once. But mainly his strategy was to pacify and reconcile, and keep all the threads in his own hands.

Another conquest was Bellog the German master who seemed physically crumpled by the sins of his adopted country. Pym beleaguered him with extra work, bought him an expensive German beer mug on Rick’s account at Thomas Goode’s, walked his dog and invited him to Monte all expenses paid, which by a mercy he declined. Today I would blush for such an unsophisticated pass and agonise about whether Bellog had gone sour and been turned. Not Pym. Pym loved Bellog as he loved them all. And he needed that German soul, he had been hard on its path since Lippsie’s day. He needed to give himself away to it, right into Mr. Bellog’s startled hands, though Germany meant nothing whatever to him, except escape to an unpopular preserve where his talents would be appreciated. He needed the embrace of it, the mystery, the privacy of another side of life. He needed to be able to close the door on his Englishness, love it as he might, and carve a new name somewhere fresh. He even went so far on occasion as to affect a light German accent which drove Sefton Boyd to paroxysms of fury.

And women? Jack, no one was more alive than Pym to the potential virtues of a female agent well handled, but in that school they were the devil to come by and handling anybody, including yourself, was a beatable offence. Mrs. Willow, though he was prepared to love her any time, appeared to be permanently pregnant. Pym’s languishing glances were wasted on her. The house matron was personable enough but when he called on her late at night with a fictitious headache in the vague hope of proposing marriage to her, she ordered him sharply back to bed. Only little Miss Hodges who taught the violin showed a short-lived promise: Pym presented her with a pigskin music case from Harrods and said he wished to turn professional, but she wept and advised him to take up a different instrument.

“My sister wants to do it with you,” said Sefton Boyd one night as they lay in Pym’s bed embracing without enthusiasm. “She read your poem in the school rag. She thinks you’re Keats.”

Pym was not altogether surprised. His poem was certainly a masterpiece, and Jemima Sefton Boyd had several times scowled at him through the windscreen of the family Land Rover when it came to collect her brother for weekends.

“She’s panting for it,” Sefton Boyd explained. “She does it with everybody. She’s a nympho.”

Pym wrote to her at once, a poet’s letter.

“A tale must linger in your soft hair. Do you ever have the feeling beauty is a kind of sin? Two swans have settled on the Abbey moat. I watch them often, dreaming of your hair. I love you.”

She replied by return, but not before Pym had suffered agonies of remorse at his recklessness.

“Thank you for your letter. I get a long exeat from school starting twenty-fifth which is one of your exeat weekends also. How fateful that they coincide. Mama will invite you for Sunday night and obtain Mr. Willow’s permission for you to sleep with us. Are you considering elopement?”

A second letter was more precise:

“The servants’ staircase is quite safe. I will kindle a light and have wine waiting in case you get thirsty. Bring any work you have in progress and please caress me first. On my door you will find the red rosette I won last holidays for jumping Smokey.”

Pym was scared stiff. How could he acquit himself with a woman of such experience? Breasts he knew about and loved. But Jemima appeared to have none. The rest of her was an unintelligible thicket of dangers and disease, and his memories of Lippsie in the bath became hazier by the minute.

A card came:

“We would all be so pleased if you would visit us at Hadwell for the weekend of the twenty-fifth. I am writing separately to Mr. Willow. Don’t worry about clothes as we do not dress in the evenings during summer.

Elizabeth Sefton Boyd”

On the hill above Mr. Willow’s house stood a girls’ school peopled by brown vestals. Boys who penetrated its grounds were flogged and expelled. But Elphick in Nelson House maintained that if you stood beneath the footbridge when the girls were crossing on their way to hockey much could be learned. Alas, all Pym saw when he followed this advice was a few cold knees that looked much like his own. Worse, he had to suffer the coarse humour of a games mistress who leaned over the bridge and invited him to come and play. Disgusted, Pym stalked back to his German poets.

The town library was run by an elderly Fabian, a Pym agent. Pym skipped lunch and hunted his way unchecked through the section marked “Adults Only.” Guidance on Marriage appeared to be a handbook on mortgages. The Art of the Chinese Pillow Book started well but descended into a description of games of darts and leaping white tigers. Amor and Rococo Woman, on the other hand, richly illustrated, was a different matter, and Pym arrived at Hadwell expecting naked Graces frolicking with their gallants in the park. At dinner, which to his relief was taken dressed, Jemima cut Pym dead, hiding her face in her hair and reading Jane Austen. A plain girl called Belinda, billed as Jemima’s dearest friend, declined speech in sympathy.

“That’s how Jem gets when she’s horny,” Sefton Boyd explained within Belinda’s hearing, at which Belinda tried to punch him, then stormed off in a rage.

Dispatched to bed Pym wound his way up the great staircase while a dozen clocks tolled his death knell. How often had Rick not warned him against women who wanted nothing but his money? How dearly he longed for the safety of his bed at school. Crossing the landing he saw a rosette glinting like blood in the low light. He climbed another flight and saw Belinda’s head scowling at him round her door. “You can come in here if you like,” she said rudely.

“It’s all right, thanks,” said Pym. He entered his room.

On his pillow lay his eight love letters and four poems to Jemima, bound with ribbon and smelling of saddle soap.

“Please take back your letters which I find oppressive since I regret we are no longer compatible. I do not know what possessed you to slick down your forelock like an errand boy but henceforth we meet as strangers.”

Dashed down by humiliation and despair Pym hastened back to school and the same night wrote to every mother, active or retired, whose name and address he could put his hands on.

“Dearest Topsie, Cherry, darling Mrs. Ogilvie, Mabel, darling Violet, I am being beaten mercilessly for writing poetry and I am very unhappy. Please take me away from this awful place.” But when they answered his appeal, the readiness of their love revolted him and he threw away their letters scarcely read. And when one of them, the best, dropped everything and travelled a hundred expensive miles to buy him a mixed grill at the Feathers, Pym met her enquiries with a remote politeness. “Yes, thank you, school is super, everything is absolutely fine. How are you?” Then led her an hour early to the railway station so that he could be a good chap at kickabout.

“Dear Belinda”—he wrote in his poet’s cursive hand—“Thanks very much for your letter explaining that Jem is unstable. I know girls are terrifically sensitive at this age and going through all sorts of changes so it’s really all right. Our house side won Juniors which is a bit of a sensation here. I often think of your beautiful eyes. Magnus.”

“Dear Father”—he wrote in a gruff Edwardian manner copied from Sefton Boyd—“I am doing lots of essential entertaining here which is very much the thing and gets me on. Everyone is very grateful for what I do, but prices at the tuckshop have risen and I wondered whether you could send me another five pounds to see me right.”

To his surprise, Rick sent him nothing, but came down from the mountain in person, bringing not money but love, which was what Pym had written to him for in the first place.

* * *

It was Rick’s first visit. Until now Pym had forbidden him the place, explaining that distinguished parents were considered bad form. And Rick with unwonted diffidence had accepted his exclusion. Now with the same diffidence he came, looking trim and loving and mysteriously humble. He didn’t venture into the school but sent a letter in his own hand proposing a rendezvous on the road to Farleigh Abbott, which was on the sea. When Pym arrived by bicycle as instructed, expecting the Bentley and half the court, round the corner instead rode Rick alone, also on a bicycle, with a lovely smile that Pym could see from miles off and humming “Underneath the Arches” out of tune. In the bicycle basket he had brought a picnic of their favourite things, a bottle of ginger pop for Pym, bubbly for himself and a football left over from Paradise. They rode their bicycles on the sand and skimmed pebbles on the waves. They lay in the dunes munching foie gras and Ryvita. They wandered through the little town and wondered whether Rick should buy it. They stared at the church and promised never to forget their prayers. They made a goal out of a broken gateway and kicked the football at each other all the way across the world. They kissed and wept and bear-hugged and swore to be pals all their lives and go bicycling every Sunday even when Pym was Lord Chief Justice and married with grandchildren.

“Has Mr. Cudlove resigned?” Pym asked.

Rick just managed to hear, though his face had already acquired the dreamy expression that overcame it at the approach of a direct question.

“Well, son,” he conceded, “old Cuddie’s been having his ups and downs over the years and he’s decided it’s time to give himself a bit of a rest.”

“How’s the swimming-pool coming along?”

“Nearly done. Nearly done. We must be patient.”

“Super.”

“Tell me, son,” said Rick, now at his most venerable. “Have you got a pal or two who might like to do you the favour of supplying you with a bed and some accommodation during the school holidays that are already looming on the horizon?”

“Oh, masses,” said Pym, striving to sound careless.

“Well I think you would be well advised to accept their invitations, because with all that rebuilding going on at Ascot, I don’t think you’re going to enjoy the rest and privacy that fine mind of yours is entitled to.”

Pym at once said he would, and made an even greater fuss of Rick in order to persuade him that he did not suspect anything was amiss.

“I’m in love with a rather super girl too,” said Pym when it was nearly time to part, in a further effort to persuade Rick of his happiness. “It’s quite amusing. We write to each other every day.”

“Son, there’s no finer thing in this life than the love of a good woman and if anybody’s earned it, you have.”

* * *

“Tell me, boy,” said Willow one evening, during an intimate confirmation class. “What does your father do, exactly?”

To which Pym with a natural instinct for the way to Willow’s heart replied that he appears to be some kind of, well, freewheeling businessman, sir, I don’t know. Willow changed the subject but at their next session obliged Pym to give an account of his mother. His first instinct was to say she had died of syphilis, an ailment that featured large in Mr. Willow’s lectures on Sowing the Seed of Life. But he restrained himself.

“She just sort of vanished when I was young, sir,” he confessed with more truth than he intended.

“Who with?” said Mr. Willow. So Pym, for no particular reason he could afterwards think of, said, “With an army sergeant, sir, he was already married so he took her off to Africa to elope.”

“Does she write to you, boy?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“I suppose she’s too ashamed, sir.”

“Does she send you money?”

“No, sir. She hasn’t any. He swindled her out of everything she had.”

“We are speaking of the sergeant still, I take it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Willow pondered. “Are you familiar with the activities of a company known as The Muspole Friendly and Academic Limited?”

“No, sir.”

“You appear to be a director of this company.”

“I didn’t know, sir.”

“Then you also have no knowledge, presumably, as to why this company should be paying your school fees? Or not paying them, perhaps?”

“No, sir.”

Mr. Willow pushed up his jaw and narrowed his eyes, indicating a sharpening of his interrogation technique. “And does your father live in some luxury, would you say, by comparison with the kind of standards that apply to other parents here?”

“I suppose he does, sir.”

“Suppose?”

“He does, sir.”

“Do you disapprove of his life-style?”

“I do a bit, I suppose.”

“Does it occur to you that you may one day be obliged to choose between God and Mammon?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you discussed this with Father Murgo?”

“No, sir.”

“Do so.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you ever thought of entering the Church?”

“Often, sir,” said Pym, putting on his soulful face.

“We have a fund here, Pym, for impecunious boys wishing to enter the Church. It occurs to the Bursar that you might be eligible to benefit from this fund.”

“Yes, sir.”

Father Murgo was a toothy, driven little soul whose unlikely task, considering his proletarian origins, was to act as God’s itinerant talent-spotter to the public schools. Where Willow was thunderous and craggy, a sort of Makepeace Watermaster without a secret, Murgo writhed inside his habit like a ferret roped into a bag. Where Willow’s fearless gaze was unruffled by knowledge, Murgo’s signalled the lonely anguish of the cell.

“He’s nuts,” Sefton Boyd declared. “Look at the scabs on his ankles. The swine picks them while he’s praying.”

“He’s mortifying himself,” said Pym.

“Magnus?” Murgo echoed in his sharp northern twang. “Whoever called you that? God’s Magnus. You’re Parvus.” His quick red smile glinted like a stripe that would not heal. “Come this evening,” he urged. “Allenby staircase. Staff guest-room. Knock.”

“You mad bugger, he’ll touch you up!” Sefton Boyd shouted, beside himself with jealousy. But Murgo never touched anyone as Pym had guessed. His lonely hands remained lashed inside his sleeves by invisible thongs, emerging only to eat or pray. For the rest of that summer term Pym floated on clouds of undreamed freedom. Not a week earlier Willow had sworn to flog a boy who had dared to describe cricket as a recreation. Now Pym had only to mention that he proposed to take a stroll with Murgo to be excused what games he wished. Neglected essays were mysteriously waived, beatings vaguely due to him deferred. On breathless walks, on bicycle rides, in little teahouses in the country, or at night crammed into a corner of Murgo’s miserable bedroom, Pym eagerly offered versions of himself that alternately shocked and thrilled them both. The shiftless materialism of his home life. His quest for faith and love. His fight against the demons of self-abuse and such tempters as Kenneth Sefton Boyd. His brother-and-sister relationship with the girl Belinda.

“And the holidays?” Murgo proposed one evening as they loped down a bridlepath past lovers fondling in the grass. “Fun, are they? High living?”

“The holidays are a desert,” said Pym loyally. “So are Belinda’s. Her father’s a stockbroker.”

The description acted on Murgo like a goad.

“Oh, a desert, are they? A wilderness? All right. I’ll go along with that. Christ was in the wilderness too, Parvus. For a bloody long time. So was Saint Anthony. Twenty years he served, in a filthy little fort on the Nile. Perhaps you’ve forgotten.”

“No I hadn’t at all.”

“Well he did. And it didn’t stop him talking to God or God talking to him. Anthony didn’t have privilege. He didn’t have money or property or fine cars or stockbrokers’ daughters. He prayed.”

“I know,” said Pym.

“Come to Lyme. Answer the call. Be like Anthony.”

“What the fuck have you done to the front of your hair?” Sefton Boyd screamed at him the same evening.

“I’ve cut it off.”

Sefton Boyd stopped laughing. “You’re going to be a monkey Murgo,” he said softly. “You’ve fallen for him, you mad tart.”

Sefton Boyd’s days were numbered. Acting on information received — even now I blush to contemplate the source of it — Mr. Willow had decided that young Kenneth was getting a little too old for the school.

* * *

So there’s yet another Pym for you, Jack, and you had better add him to my file even if he is neither admirable nor, I suspect, comprehensible to you, though Poppy knew him inside out from the first day. He’s the Pym who can’t rest till he’s touched the love in people, then can’t rest till he’s hacked his way out of it, the more drastically the better. The Pym who does nothing cynically, nothing without conviction. Who sets events in motion in order to become their victim, which he calls decision, and ties himself into pointless relationships, which he calls loyalty. Then waits for the next event to get him out of the last one, which he calls destiny. It’s the Pym who passes up a two-week invitation to stay with the Sefton Boyds in Scotland, all found including Jemima, because he is pledged to hurl himself over the Dorset hills in the wake of a tortured Mancunian zealot, preparing for a life he has not the smallest intention of leading, among people who chill him to the root. It’s the Pym who writes daily to Belinda because Jemima has cast doubts on his divinity. It’s Pym the Saturday night juggler bounding round the table and spinning one stupid plate after another because he can’t bear to let anyone down for one second and so lose their esteem. So off he goes and half chokes himself on incense and sleeps in a cell that stinks like a wet dog and nearly dies of nettle stew in order to become pious and pay his school fees and be adored by Murgo. Meanwhile he heaps fresh promises on old and convinces himself that he is on the path to Heaven while he digs himself deeper into his own mess. By the end of a week he is promised to a boys’ camp in Hereford, a pan-denominational retreat in Shropshire, a Trade Unionists’ pilgrimage in Wakefield and a Celebration of Witness in Derby. By the end of two weeks there isn’t a county in England where he hasn’t pledged his holiness six different ways — which is not to deny that intermittently he has visions of himself as a haggard apostle of the life renounced, converting beautiful women and millionaires to Christian poverty.

It was a full month before God provided the escape that Pym was waiting for.

YOUR IMMEDIATE PRESENCE CHESTER STREET ESSENTIAL IN MATTER OF VITAL NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL IMPORTANCE RICHARD T. PYM MANAGING DIRECTOR PYMCORP.

“You must go,” said Murgo with tears of misery rolling down his hollowed cheeks as he handed him the fatal telegram after Terce.

“I don’t think I can face it,” said Pym, no less affected. “It’s just money, money all the time.”

They walked past the print shop and the basket shop, through the kitchen gardens to the little wicker gate that kept Rick’s world at bay.

“You didn’t send it to yourself, did you, Parvus?” Murgo asked.

Pym swore he had not, which was the truth.

“You don’t understand what a force you are,” Murgo said. “I don’t think I’ll be the same again.”

It had never occurred to Pym until now that Murgo was capable of change.

“Well,” said Murgo with a last sad writhe.

“Goodbye,” said Pym. “And thanks.”

But there is cheer in sight for both of them. Pym has promised to be back for Christmas, when the tramps come.

Mad swings, Tom. Mad leaps and loves, madder round the corner. I wrote to Dorothy too somewhere in that time. Care of Sir Makepeace Watermaster at the House of Commons, though I knew he was dead. I waited a week then forgot until one day out of the blue my ploy was rewarded with a tatty little letter, blotchy with tears or drink, on ruled paper torn from a notepad, no address but postmark East London, a country I had never visited. It is before me now.

“Yours was a voice down many Coridors of Years, my dear, I put it in the kitchen cuboard with my Tableware to view at leasure. I will be at Euston Station the up platform 3 p.m. Thursday without my Herbie and I will be carrying a posy of lavender which you always loved.”

Already greatly regretting his decision, Pym arrived at the station late and placed himself in the gunman’s corner beneath an iron arch close to some mail bags. Quite a bevy of mothers was milling about, some eligible, some less so, but there was none he wanted and several who were drunk. And one of them seemed to be clutching a posy of flowers wrapped in newspaper but by then he had decided he had the wrong platform. It was his darling Dorothy that Pym had wanted, not some lolloping old biddy in a pantomime hat.

* * *

A weekday evening, Tom. The traffic in Chester Street burps and crackles in the rain, but inside the Reichskanzlei it is a Green Hill Sunday. Still pious from his monastery Pym presses the bell but hears no answering chime. He drives the great brass door knocker against its stud. A lace curtain parts and closes. The door opens, but not far.

“Cunningham’s the name, squire,” says a heavy man in a thick expatriate cockney, as he shuts the door fast after him as if scared of letting in germs. “Half cunning, half ham. You’ll be the son and heir. Greetings, squire, Salaams.”

“How do you do,” says Pym.

“I’m optimistic, squire, thank you,” Mr. Cunningham replies with a Middle-European literalness. “I think we’re on a road to understanding. Some resistance at first is to be expected. But I believe I see a light begin to shine.”

It is more than Pym does for the passage down which Mr. Cunningham leads him with such assurance is pitch black and the only light comes from the pale patches on the wall left by the departed law books.

“You’re a German scholar, I understand, squire,” says Mr. Cunningham more thickly, as if the exertion has affected his adenoids. “A fine language. The people, I’m not sure. But a lovely tongue in the right hands, you can quote me.”

“Why are we going upstairs?” says Pym, who has by now recognised several familiar omens of impending pogrom.

“Trouble with the lift, squire,” Mr. Cunningham replies. “I understand an engineer has been sent for and is at this moment hastening on his way.”

“But Rick’s office is on the ground floor.”

“But upstairs has the privacy, squire,” Mr. Cunningham explains, pushing open a double door. They enter a gutted State Apartment lit by the glow of street lamps. “Your son, sir, fresh from his worship,” Mr. Cunningham announces, and bows Pym ahead of him.

At first Pym sees only Rick’s brow glinting in the candlelight. Then the great head forms round it, followed by the broad bulk of the body as it advances swiftly to envelop him in a damp and fervent bear-hug.

“How are you, old son?” he asks urgently. “How was the train?”

“Fine,” says Pym, who has hitchhiked owing to a temporary problem of liquidity.

“Did they give you a bit to eat then? What did they give you?”

“Just a sandwich and a glass of beer,” says Pym who has had to make do on a piece of rocklike bread from Murgo’s refectory.

“My own boy, as you see me!” Mr. Cunningham exclaims with zest. “Never satisfied unless he’s eating.”

“Son, you want to watch that drinking of yours,” says Rick in an almost unconscious reflex, as he clutches Pym under the armpit and marches him over bare floorboards towards an imperial-sized bed. “There’s five thousand pounds for you in cash if you don’t smoke or take liquor until you’re twenty-one. All right, my dear, what do you think of this boy of mine?”

A darkly dressed figure has risen like a shade from the bed.

It’s Dorothy, thinks Pym. It’s Lippsie. It’s Jemima’s mother lodging a complaint. But as the darkness lifts, the aspiring monk observes that the figure before him is wearing neither Lippsie’s headscarf nor Dorothy’s cloche hat, nor has she the daunting authority of Lady Sefton Boyd. Like Lippsie she sports the antiquarian uniform of pre-war Europe but there the comparison ends. Her flared skirt has a nipped waist. She wears a blouse with a lace ruff and a feathery bit of hat that makes the whole outfit jaunty. Her breasts are in the best tradition of Amor and Rococo Woman, and the dim light flatters their roundness.

“Son, I want you to meet a noble and heroic lady who has known great advantages and misfortunes and fought great battles and suffered cruelly at the hands of fate. And who has paid me the greatest compliment a woman can pay a man by coming to see me in her hour of need.”

“Rot-schilt, darling,” the lady says softly, lifting her limp hand to a level where Pym may kiss or shake it.

“Heard that name anywhere, have you, son, with your fine education? Baron Rothschild? Lord Rothschild? Count Rothschild? Rothschild’s Bank? Or are you going to tell me you’re not conversant with the name of a certain great Jewish family with all the wealth of Solomon at its fingertips?”

“Well yes, of course I’ve heard of it.”

“Well then. Just you sit yourself here and listen to what she has to say because this is the baroness. Sit down, my dear. Come here between us. What do you think of him, Elena?”

“Beautiful, darling,” says the baroness.

He’s selling me to her, thinks Pym, not at all unwilling. I’m his last desperate deal.

So there we all are, Tom. Everyone on the go and madness here to stay. Your father and grandfather seated buttock to buttock with a Jewish baroness in the half-furnished director’s knocking-shop of a West End palace without electricity, and Mr. Cunningham, as I gradually realise, keeping guard at the door. An air of daft conspiracy comparable only with later daft conspiracies mounted by the Firm, as her soft voice embarks on one of those patient refugee monologues that your Uncle Jack and I have listened to more times than either of us can remember, except that tonight Pym is a virgin in these matters, and the baroness’s thigh is pressed cosily against that of the aspiring monk.

“I am a humble widow of simple but pious family, married happily but oh so briefly to the late Baron Luigi Svoboda-Rothschild, the last of the great Czech line. I was seventeen, he twenty-one, imagine our pleasure. My greatest regret is I bore him no child. Our country seat was the Palais of Nymphs at Brno, which first the Germans then the Russians rape worse than a woman literally. My Cousin Anna she marry to the head man from De Beers diamonds Cape Town, got houses like you not imagine, too much luxury I don’t approve.” Pym does not approve either, as he tries to tell her with a monkish smirk of sympathy. “With my Uncle Wolfram I never speak and thanks God I say. He collaborate with the Nazis. The Jews hang him upside down.” Pym sets his jaw in grim approval. “My Granduncle David give all his tapestries to the Prado. Now he is poor like a kulak, why don’t the museum give him something so he can eat?” Pym rolls his head in despair at the baseness of the Spanish soul. “My Auntie Waldorf—” She breaks down beautifully while Pym wonders whether the agitation of his body is visible to her in the darkness.

“It’s a damn shame!” cries Rick, while the baroness composes herself. “My God, son, those Bolsheviks could swoop down on Ascot tomorrow without a by-your-leave and help themselves to a fortune. Go on, my dear. Son, tell her to go on. Call her Elena, she likes it. She’s not a snob. She’s one of us.”

“Weiter, bitte,” says Pym.

“Weiter,” the baroness echoes approvingly and pats her eyes with Rick’s handkerchief. “Jawohl, darling. Sehr gut!”

“Oh but you should hear his accent,” Mr. Cunningham calls from the door. “Not a wrinkle, you can quote me, same as my own boy.”

“What does she say, son?”

“She can manage,” says Pym. “She can handle it.”

“She’s a damned gem. I’m going to see her right, you mark my words.”

So is Pym. He is going to marry her at least. But meanwhile, to his irritation, he must hear more praise for my dear late husband the baron. My Luigi was not only the proprietor of a great palace, he was a financial genius and until the outbreak of war the Chairman of the House of Rothschild in Prague.

“They were the richest of the lot,” says Rick. “Weren’t they, son? You’ve read your history. What’s your verdict?”

“They couldn’t even count it,” Mr. Cunningham confirms from the door with the pride of an impresario. “Could they, Elena? Ask her. Don’t be shy.”

“We give such concerts, darling,” the baroness confides to Pym. “Princes from all countries. We got house from marble. We got mirrors, culture. Like here,” she adds graciously, indicating a priceless oil painting of Prince Magnus in his paddock, done from a photograph. “We lose everything.”

“Not quite everything,” says Rick under his breath.

“When the Germans come, my Luigi he refuse to flee. He face the Nazi pigs from the balcony, got a pistol in his hand, don’t never been heard of since.”

Another necessary break follows in which the baroness allows herself a delicate sip of brandy from a row of crystal decanters on the floor, and Rick to Pym’s fury takes over the story, partly because Rick is already tired of listening, but more particularly because a secret is approaching, and secrets in court etiquette are Rick’s alone to divulge.

“That baron was a fine man and a fine husband, son, and he did what any fine husband would do, and believe me, if your mother was in a position to appreciate it, I’d do the same for her tomorrow—”

“I know you would,” says Pym hastily.

“That baron got some of the best treasures out of that palace, he put them in a box and he gave that box to certain very good friends of his and friends of this fine lady here, and he gave orders that when the British won the war this same box should be handed over to his lovely young wife, with everything it contained, however much it may have risen in value in the meantime.”

The baroness knows the menu from memory and again selects Pym as her audience, for which purpose it is necessary for her to arrest his attention with a delicate hand placed on his wrist.

“One Gutenberg Bible, nice condition, darling, one Renoir early, two Leonardo medical. One first edition Goya caprices, artist annotation, three hundred best gold American dollar, Rubens a couple cartoons.”

“Cunningham says it’s worth a bomb,” says Rick when she seems to have finished.

“It’s Hiroshima,” says Mr. Cunningham from the door.

Pym contrives an ethereal smile intended to indicate that great art knows no price. The baroness intercepts it and understands.

* * *

It is an hour later. The baroness and her protector have departed, leaving father and son alone in the great unlighted room. The traffic below the window has subsided. Shoulder to shoulder on the bed they are eating fish and chips which Pym has been dispatched to buy with precious pound notes from Rick’s back pocket. They wash it down with a bottle of Château d’Yquem from a Harrods crate.

“Are they still there, son?” says Rick. “Did they see you? Those men in the Riley. Heavy built.”

“I’m afraid they are,” says Pym.

“You believe in her, don’t you, son? Don’t spare my feelings. Do you believe in that fine woman or do you think she’s a blackhearted liar and adventuress to boot?”

“She’s fantastic,” says Pym.

“You don’t sound convinced. Spit it out, son. She’s our last chance, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”

“It’s just I wasn’t quite sure why she hadn’t gone to her own people.”

“You don’t know those Jews the way I do. They’re some of the finest people in the world. There’s others, they’d have the coat off her back as soon as look at her. I asked her the same question. I didn’t pull my punches either.”

“Who’s Cunningham?” says Pym, barely able to conceal his distaste.

“Old Cunnie’s first class. I’m bringing him into the business when this is over. Exports and Foreign. He’ll be a tear-away. His sense of humour alone is worth five thousand a year to us. He wasn’t on form tonight. He was tense.”

“What’s the deal?” says Pym.

“Faith in your old man, that’s the deal. ‘Rickie,’ she says to me — that’s what she calls me, she doesn’t pull her punches either—‘Rickie, I want you get that box for me, sell the contents and invest the money in one of your fine enterprises, and I want you to take the cares off my shoulders and give me ten percent a year for life for as long as I’m spared, with all the necessary provisions of insurance and endowment if you go before me. I want that money to be yours to see the world right in whatever way you deem in your wisdom.’ That’s a big responsibility, son. If I had a passport I’d go myself. I’d send Syd if he was available. Syd would go. Cattle and pigs. That’s what I’m going to do after this. Just a few acres and some livestock. I’m retiring.”

“What’s happened to your passport?” said Pym.

“Son, I’m going to level with you, which I always do. That airy-fairy school of yours are hard bargainers. They want cash and they want it on the due day and that’s it. You speak her language, that’s the point. She likes you. She trusts you. You’re my son. I could send Muspole but I’d never be sure he’d come back. Perce Loft’s too legal. He’d scare her. Now slip to the window and see if that Riley’s gone. Don’t get the light on your face. They can’t come in. They haven’t got a warrant. I’m an honest citizen.”

Half hidden behind the chipped green filing cabinet, Pym squints steeply downward into the street in covert counter-surveillance. The Riley is still there.

There are no blankets for the bed so they make do with curtains and dust-sheets. Pym sleeps fitfully and freezes, dreaming of the baroness. Once Rick’s arm falls violently across him, once he is roused by Rick’s strangled voice calling out invective against a bitch called Peggy. And some time in the early hours he feels the soft female weight of Rick’s nether body in silk shirt and underpants backing inexorably against him, which persuades him it is more restful on the floor. In the morning Rick still will not leave the house, so Pym walks alone to Victoria Station carrying his few possessions in a splendid white box-calf suitcase with Rick’s initials in brass underneath the handle. He wears one of Rick’s camel-hair coats though it is too large for him. The baroness, looking more delectable than ever, is waiting on the platform. Mr. Cunningham is there to wave them off. In the train lavatory, Pym opens the envelope Rick gave him and extracts a wad of white ten-pound notes and his first-ever instructions for a clandestine encounter.

“You are to proceed to Bern and take Rooms at the Grand Palace Hotel. Mr. Bertl the under-manager is first Rate, the Bill is taken care of. Signor Lapadi will Contact the Baroness and guide you to the Austrian border. When Lapadi has given you the Box and you have Confirmed in our Language that it’s all there, see him right with the Enclosed and not until. This is going to be the Saving of us, son. That Money you are Carrying took a lot of earning, but when this is over none of us will ever have to Worry again.”

* * *

I shall be brisk with the operational details of the Rothschild assignment, Jack — the days of hope, the days of doubt, the sudden leaps from one to the other. And I truly forget which street corners or codewords preceded the slow descent into inconclusion that has been my memory of so many operations since — just as I forget, if I ever knew, in what quantities of skepticism and blind faith Pym pursued his mission to its inevitable end. Certainly I have known operations since that have been mounted on quite as little likelihood of success, and have cost a great deal more than money. Signor Lapadi spoke only to the baroness, who relayed his information with disdain.

“Lapadi he talk mit his Vertrauensmann, darling.” She smiles indulgently when Pym asks what a Vertrauensmann is. “The Vertrauensmann is man we are trusting. Not yesterday, maybe not tomorrow. But today we are trusting him for ever.”

“Lapadi he need one hundred pound, darling”—a day or two later—“the Vertrauensmann know a man whose sister know the head from customs. Better he pay him now for friendship.”

Remembering Rick’s instructions Pym offers token resistance but the baroness already has her hand out and is rubbing her finger and thumb together with delightful insinuation. “You want to paint the house, darling, first you got to buy the brush,” she explains and to Pym’s amazement lifts her skirts to the waist and pops the banknotes into the top of her stocking. “Tomorrow we buy you nice suit.”

“Gave her the money, son?” Rick roars that night across the Channel. “God in Heaven, what do you think we are? Fetch me Elena.”

“Don’t shout me, darling,” the baroness says calmly into the telephone. “You got lovely boy here, Rickie. He very strict with me. I think one day he be great actor.”

“The baroness says you’re first rate, son. Are you talking our language with her out there?”

“All the time,” says Pym.

“Have you had an honest-to-God English mixed grill yet?”

“No, we’re sort of saving it.”

“Well have one on me. Tonight.”

“We will, Father. Thanks.”

“God bless you, son.”

“And you too, Father,” says Pym politely and, butler-like, keeps his knees and feet together while he puts the phone down.

More important to me by far are my memories of Pym’s first platonic honeymoon with a wise lady. With Elena beside him, Pym wandered Bern’s old city, drank the light small wines of the Valais, watched thés dansants in the great hotels and consigned his past to history. In scented, frilly boutiques that she seemed to find by instinct, they exchanged her battered wardrobe for fur capes and Anna Karenina riding boots that slithered on the frosty cobble, and Pym’s dismal school habit for a leather jacket and trousers without buttons for his braces. Even in her disarray, the baroness would insist on Pym’s judgment, beckoning him into the little mirrored box to help her choose, and permitting him, as if unknowingly, delicious glimpses of her Rococo charms: now a nipple, now the cup of a buttock carelessly uncurtained, now an amazing shadow at the centre of her rounded thighs as she whisked from one skirt to another. She is Lippsie, he thought excitedly; she is how Lippsie would have been if she hadn’t thought so much of death.

“Gefall’ ich dir, darling?”

“Du gefällst mir sehr.”

“One day you have pretty girl, you talk to her just like this, she go crazy. You don’t think too tarty?”

“I think perfect.”

“Okay, we buy two. One for my sister Zsa-Zsa, she my size.”

A tilt of the white shoulders, a careless pull at a straying hem of lingerie, the bill was brought, Pym signed it and addressed it to the provident Herr Bertl, turning his back on her and crouching forward in order to conceal the evidence of his perturbation. From a jeweller in the Herrengasse they bought a pearl necklace for another sister in Budapest and as an afterthought a topaz ring for her mother in Paris which the baroness would take to her on her way home. And I see that ring now, winking on her freshly manicured finger as she traces a trout back and forth across the fish tank in the grill-room of our grand hotel while the headwaiter stands above her with his net poised to strike.

“Nein, nein, darling, nicht this one, that one! Ja, ja, prima.”

It was at one such dinner, in the event their last, that Pym was so moved by love and confusion that he felt obliged to confide to the baroness his intention of leading a monastic life. She put down her knife and fork with a clatter.

“Don’t tell me no more from monks!” she commanded him angrily. “I see too many of monks. I see monks of Croatia, monks of Serbia, Russia. God He ruin the damn world with monks.”

“Well, it’s not completely certain,” said Pym.

It took a lot of funny voices from him, and a lot of intimate fabrications, before the light came cautiously back to her brown eyes.

“And her name was Lippsie?”

“Well that’s what we called her. I mustn’t tell you her real name.”

“And she slept with such a young boy like you? You made love with her so young? She was a whore, I think.”

“Probably just lonely,” said Pym wisely.

But her thoughtfulness remained and when Pym as usual saw her to her bedroom door she studied him closely before taking his head between her hands and kissing him on the mouth. Suddenly her mouth opened, Pym’s also. The kiss became intense, he felt an unfamiliar mound plying irresistibly against his thigh. He felt its warmth, he felt soft hair slipping against silk as she pressed more rhythmically. She whispered “Schatz,” he heard a squeak and wondered whether he had hurt her somehow. Her head twisted, her neck pressed against his lips. With confiding fingers she handed him the key to her bedroom door and looked away while he opened it. He found the keyhole, turned the key and held the door for her. He put the key into her palm and saw the light in her eyes fade.

“So, my dear,” she said. She kissed him, one cheek other cheek, she stared at him as if searching for something she had lost. It was not till next morning that he discovered she had been kissing him goodbye.

“Darling”—she wrote—“You are good man, got body from Michelangelo but your Papi got bad problems. Better you stay in Bern. Never mind. E. Weber love you always.”

In the envelope were the gold cufflinks we had bought for her cousin in Oxford, and two hundred of the five hundred pounds that Pym had given her for the invisible Mr. Lapadi. I wear the cufflinks as I write. Gold with tiny diamonds in a crown. The baroness always loved a touch of royalty.

* * *

It was morning at Miss Dubber’s also. Through the closed curtains, Pym heard the milk van clinking on its rounds. Pen in hand he drew a pink file towards him marked simply “R.T.P.,” licked his forefinger and thumb and began methodically turning through the entries until he had extracted some half dozen.

Copy letter Richard T. Pym to Father Guardian, Lyme Regis, dated 1 October 1948, threatening legal proceedings for the abduction of his son Magnus. (Ex R.T.P.’s files.)

Memorandum of 15 September 1948, Fraud Squad to Passport Control Department, recommending impounding of R.T.P.’s passport pending criminal investigations in the matter of one J. R. Wentworth. (Obtained informally through Head Office police liaison section.)

Letter from school bursar to R.T.P. declining to accept either dried fruit, tinned peaches or any other commodity in part or full payment of fees and regretting that the governing board cannot see its way to educating Pym for nothing. “I note also with regret that you refuse to describe yourself as an impecunious parent whose son is destined for the clergy.” (Ex R.T.P.’s files.)

Furious letter from lawyers representing Herr Eberhardt Bertl, sometime under-manager of the Grand Palace Hotel in Bern, addressed to Colonel Sir Richard T. Pym, D.S.O., one of a succession, demanding payment in the order of eleven thousand and eighteen Swiss francs forty centimes, plus interest at four percent per month. (Ex R.T.P.’s files.)

Extract from London Chronicle dated November 8, 1949, declaring personal bankruptcy R.T.P., and compulsory liquidation of the eighty-three companies of the Pym empire including, no doubt, The Muspole Friendly & Academic Ltd.

Extract from Daily Telegraph dated October 9, 1948, recording the death in Truro Hospital, Cornwall, of one John Reginald Wentworth, after a long illness resulting from his injuries, beloved husband to Peggy.

And a quaint little cutting, culled from God knows where, recording the arrest at sea, on the cruise ship S.S. Grande Bretagne, of the notorious confidence tricksters Weber and Woolfe alias Cunningham, masquerading as the Duke and Duchess of Seville.

One by one, with a red pen, Pym numbered each document in the top right corner, then entered the same numbers at the appropriate points in his text by way of reference. With a bureaucrat’s neat manners he stapled the exhibits together and inserted them in a file marked “Annexe.” Closing the file he stood up, gave an unrestrained sigh and thrust down his arms behind him like a man slipping off a harness. The ghostly formlessness of adolescence was over. Manhood and maturity beckoned, even if he never made the distance. He was in his beloved Switzerland at last, the spiritual home of natural spies. Crossing to the window he made a last inspection of the square, the tired lights of England fading as he watched. Gravely he undressed, drank a last vodka, gravely took a look at himself in the mirror and prepared to put himself to bed. But lightly, very lightly. Almost on tiptoe. Almost as if he were afraid to wake himself up. On his way he paused at the desk and read again the decoded message that for once he had not bothered to destroy.

Poppy, he thought, stay exactly where you are.