A Perfect Spy

by John le Carré

  Pym tore the boarding-card into small pieces and put them in the ashtray. How much did I plan, how much was spontaneous? It scarcely mattered. I am here to act, not brood. One coach ticket, Heathrow-Reading. It had rained on the journey. One single rail ticket, Reading-London, unused, bought to deceive. One night-sleeper ticket, Reading-Exeter, issued on board the train. He had worn a beret and kept his face in shadow while buying it from the drunk attendant. Tearing these also into small pieces, Pym added them to the pile in the ashtray and, whether out of habit or for some more aggressive reason, set a match to them and gazed into the flames with an unblinking fixity. He’d half a mind to burn his passport, too, but a residual squeamishness restrained him, which he found quaint about himself and rather endearing. I planned it to the last detail—I who have never taken a conscious decision in my life. I planned it on the day I joined the Firm in a part of my head I never knew about until Rick died. I planned everything except Miss Dubber’s cruise.

  The flames dwindled, he broke up the ash, took off his coat and hung it over the back of the chair. From a chest of drawers he hauled an old cardigan, hand-knitted by Miss Dubber, and put it on.

  I’ll talk to her about it again, he thought. I’ll think of something she’d like more. I’ll pick my moment better. The important thing for her is to have a change of scene, he thought. Somewhere she doesn’t have to worry.

  Suddenly needing an activity, he switched out the lights, slipped quickly to the window, opened the curtains and set to work checking out the little square, life by life and window by window as the morning woke it, while he searched for tell-tale signs of watchers. In her kitchen, the wife of the Baptist minister, wearing her lovat dressing-gown, is unpegging her son’s football gear from the washing line in preparation for today’s match. Pym draws back swiftly. He has caught a glint of steel in the manse gateway, but it is only the minister’s bicycle still chained to the trunk of a monkey-puzzle tree as a precaution against unchristian covetousness. In the frosted bathroom window of Sea View a woman in a grey slip is stooped over a handbasin soaping her hair. Celia Venn, the doctor’s daughter who wants to paint the sea, is evidently expecting company today. Next door to her at number 8 Mr. Barlow the builder and his wife are watching breakfast television. Pym’s eye passes methodically on, until a parked van holds his attention. The passenger door opens, a girlish figure flits stealthily through the central gardens and vanishes into number 28. Ella, the daughter of the undertaker, is discovering life.

  Pym closed the curtains and put the lights back on. I will make my own daytime and my own night. The briefcase stood where he had left it, strangely rigid from its steel lining. Everybody carried cases, he remembered, as he stared at it. Rick’s was pigskin, Lippsie’s was cardboard, Poppy’s was a scruffy grey thing with marks printed on it to look like hide. And Jack—dear Jack—you have your marvellous old attaché case, faithful as the dog you had to shoot.

  Some people, you see, Tom, they leave their bodies to a teaching hospital. The hands go to this class, the heart to that one, the eyes to another, everyone gets something, everyone is grateful. Your father, however, has only his secrets. They’re his provenance and his curse.

  With a bump, he sat down at the desk.

  To tell it straight, he rehearsed. Word for word the truth. No evasions, no fictions, no devices. Just my overpromised self set free.

  To tell it to no one in particular, and to everyone. To tell it to all of you who own me, to whom I have given myself with such unthinking liberality. To my handlers and paymasters. To Mary and all the other Marys. To anyone who had a piece of me, was promised more and duly disappointed. And to whatever of myself remained after the great Pym share-out.

  To all my creditors and co-owners incorporated, here once and for all the settlement of arrears that Rick so often dreamed of and that shall now be achieved in his only acknowledged son. Whoever Pym was to you, whoever you are or were, here is the last of many versions of the Pym you thought you knew.

  Pym took a deep breath and puffed it out again.

  You do it once. Once in your life and that’s it. No rewrites, no polishing, no evasions. No would-it-be-better-this-ways. You’re the male bee. You do it once, and die.

  He took up a pen, then a single sheet of paper. He scribbled some lines, whatever came into his head. All work and no play makes Jack a dull spy. Poppy, Poppy, on the wall. Miss Dubber must a-cruising go. Eat good bread, poor Rickie’s dead. Rickie-Tickie father. His hand ran smoothly, not a crossing-out. Sometimes, Tom, we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.

  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 windi
ng 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 Ba
nd 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.