A Perfect Spy

by John le Carré

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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