A Perfect Spy

by John le Carré

  “Son. It’s time for you to set those fine feet of yours on the hard road of becoming Lord Chief Justice and a credit to your old man. There’s been too much lazy fare about and you’re part of it. Cudlove, look at his shirt. No man ever did business in a dirty shirt. Look at his hair. He’ll be an airy-fairy before you can say Jack Robinson. It’s boarding-school for you, son, and God bless you and God bless me too.”

  One more bear-hug, a final staunching of the tears, one noble handshake for the absent cameras as, dartsboard at the ready, the great man rode away to war. Pym watched him out of sight, then stealthily climbed the stairs to the provisional State Apartments. The door was unlocked. He smelt woman and talc. The double bed was in disarray. He pulled the pigskin briefcase from beneath it, tipped out the contents and, as he had often done before, puzzled over unintelligible files and correspondence. The Admiral’s country suit, donned for a few hours and still warm, was hanging in the wardrobe. He poked in the pockets. The green filing cabinet, more chipped than ever, lurked in its habitual darkness. Why does he always keep it in cupboards? Pym tugged vainly at the locked drawers. Why does it travel separately from everything as if it had a disease?

  “Looking for money, are we, Titch?” a woman’s voice asked him, from the bathroom doorway. It was Doris, typist elect and good scout. “Spare yourself the trouble, I would. It’s all tick with your dad. I’ve looked.”

  “He told me he’d left me a bar of chocolate in his room,” Pym replied resolutely, and continued delving while she watched.

  “There’s three gross of army milk-and-nut sitting in the garage. Help yourself,” Doris advised. “Petrol coupons too, if you’re thirsty.”

  “It was a special kind of bar,” said Pym.

  I have never fathomed the machinations that sent Pym and Lippsie to the same school. Were they infiltrated singly or as a package, the one to be taught, the other to supply her labour in payment? I suspect as a package but have no proof beyond a general knowledge of Rick’s methods. All his life, Rick maintained a work-force of devoted women whom he regularly discarded and revived. When they were not required in the court they were put out to work for him in the great world, easing his crusade with remittances they could ill afford, selling their jewellery for him, cashing their savings and lending their names to bank accounts from which Rick’s name was banned. But Lippsie had no jewellery and no credit with the banks. She had only her lovely body and her music and her brooding guilt, and a little English schoolboy who held her to the world. I suspect now that Rick had already read the warning signs collecting in her, and decided to give her to me to look after. Nevertheless there was profit to our partnership and Rick was nothing if not an opportunist.

  If Pym possessed any learning by the time he presented himself to Mr. Grimble’s country academy for the sons of gentlemen, then he owed it to Lippsie and not to any of the dozen or so infant schools, Bible schools and kindergartens scattered along the hectic road of Rick’s progress. Lippsie taught him writing, and to this day I write a German “t” and put a stroke through my small “z”s. She taught him spelling, and it was always a great joke between them that they could not remember how many “d”s there were in the English version of “address,” and to this day I can’t be sure of the answer until I have written out the German first. Whatever else Pym knew, apart from meaningless passages of the Scriptures, was contained in her cardboard suitcase, for she never came to see him anywhere without whisking him to her room and foisting some piece of geography or history on him, or making him play scales on her flute.

  “See, Magnus, without informations we are nothing. But with informations we can go anywhere in the world, we are like turtles, our houses always on our backs. You learn to paint, you can paint anywhere. A sculptor, a musician, a painter, they need no permits. Only their heads. Our world must be inside our heads. That is the only safe way. Now you play Lippsie a nice tune.”

  The arrangement at Mr. Grimble’s was the perfect flowering of this relationship. Their world was inside their heads, but it was also contained in a brick-and-flint gardener’s cottage at the end of Mr. Grimble’s long drive, designated the Overflow House and occupied by the Overflow Boys of whom Pym was the newest recruit. And Lippsie, his lovely lifelong Lippsie, their best and most attentive mother. They knew at once they were outcasts. If they didn’t, the eighty boys up the drive made it plain to them. They had a pallid grocer’s son without an “h” to his name, and tradesmen were ridiculous. They had three Jews whose speech was spattered with Polish, and a hopeless stammerer called M-M-Marlin, and an Indian with knock-knees whose father was killed when the Japanese took Singapore. They had Pym with his spots and wet beds. Yet under Lippsie they contrived to glory in all these disadvantages. If the boys up the drive were the crack regiment, the Overflow Boys were the irregulars who fought all the harder for their medals. For staff, Mr. Grimble took what he could get, and what he could get was whatever the country didn’t need. A Mr. O’Mally punched a boy so hard across the ear he knocked him out cold, a Mr. Farbourne beat heads together and fractured someone’s skull. A science master thought the marauding village boys were Bolsheviks and fired his shotgun into their retreating rumps. At Grimble’s, boys were flogged for tardiness and flogged for untidiness, flogged for apathy and flogged for cheek, and flogged for not improving from the flogging. The fever of war encouraged brutality, the guilt of our noncombatant staff intensified it, the intricacies of the British hierarchical system provided a natural order for the exercise of sadism. Their God was the protector of English country gentlemen and their justice was the punishment of the ill-born and disadvantaged, and it was meted out with the collaboration of the strong, of whom Sefton Boyd was the strongest and most handsome. It is the saddest of all the ironies of Lippsie’s death, as I see it now, that she died in the service of a Fascist state.

  Each leave-out day, on Rick’s standing orders, Pym presented himself at the entrance to the school drive in readiness for Mr. Cudlove’s arrival. When nobody appeared, he hurried gratefully to the woods in search of privacy and wild strawberries. Come evening he returned to the school boasting of the great day he had had. Just occasionally the worst happened and a carload would appear—Rick, Mr. Cudlove, Syd in private’s uniform, and a couple of jockeys crammed in anyhow—all well refreshed after a pause at the Brace of Partridges. If a school match was in progress they would roar support for the home side and hand round unheard-of oranges from a crate in the boot of the car. If none, then Syd and Morrie Washington would press-gang any boy who happened to be passing on his bicycle, and mount a handicap race round the playing fields while Syd belted out the commentary through his cupped hands. And Rick personally, dressed in the Admiral’s suit, would start them off with a mayoral wave of his handkerchief, and Rick personally would present an unimaginable box of chocolates to the winner, while the pound notes changed hands around the court. And when evening came Rick never failed to install himself at the Overflow House, bringing a bottle of bubbly along to cheer old Lippsie up because she seemed so glum—“What’s got into her, son?” And Rick cheered her up all right; Pym heard it going on, thump, creak and scream, while he crouched outside her door in his dressing-gown wondering whether they were fighting or pretending. Back in bed, he would hear Rick tiptoeing down the stairs, though Rick could tread as lightly as a cat.

  Till a morning came when Rick did not leave quietly at all. Not for Pym, not for the rest of the Overflow Boys, who were greatly excited to be woken by the clamour. Lippsie was bawling and Rick was trying to quell her, but the nicer he was to her the more unreasonable she became. “You made me to be a teef!” she was yelling between great big whoops while she took another gulp of air. “You made me teef to punish me. You were bad priest, Rickie Pym. You made me to steal. I was honest woman. I was refugee but I was honest woman.” Why did she speak as if it was all last year? “My father was honest man. My broder also was honest man. They was good men, not bad like me. You made me to steal until I wa
s criminal like you. Maybe God punish you one day, Rickie Pym. Maybe He make you to weep, too. I hope He will. I hope, I hope!”

  “Old Lippsie’s having a touch of her wobblies, son,” Rick explained to Pym, finding him on the stairs as he made to leave. “Slip in there and see if you can make her laugh with one of your stories. Is old Grimble feeding you up there?”

  “It’s super,” said Pym.

  “Your old man is seeing them right, know that? The healthiest school in Britain, this is. Ask them at the Ministry. Want a half-crown? Well then.”

  To reach Lippsie’s bicycle Pym used a walk he had acquired from Sefton Boyd. You kept your hands lightly linked behind your back, shoved your head forward and fixed your eyes upon some vaguely pleasing object on the horizon. You stalked wide and high, smiling slightly, as if listening to other voices, which is how the flower of us wear authority. He was too small to sit on the tartan saddle but a lady’s bicycle has a hole and not a bar, as Sefton Boyd was always happy to point out, and Pym swayed through the hole pumping his legs from side to side as he swung the handlebars between the rain-filled craters in the tarmac. I am the official bicycle collector. To his right was the kitchen garden where he and Lippsie had Dug for Victory, to his left the coppice where the German bomb had fallen, hurling bits of blackened twig against the window of the bedroom he shared with the Indian and the grocer’s boy. But behind him in his terrified imagination was Sefton Boyd with his lictors in full cry, mimicking Lippsie at him because they knew he loved her: “Vere are you goink, mein little black market? Vot are you doink mit your sweetheart, mein little black market, now she be dead?” Ahead of him was the gate where he had waited for Mr. Cudlove, and to the left of the gate was the Overflow House with its iron railings ripped away for the war effort, and a policeman standing in the gap.

  “I’ve been sent to collect my nature-study book,” said Pym to the policeman, looking him straight in the eye as he leaned Lippsie’s bicycle against a brick post. Pym had lied to policemen before and knew you must look honest.

  “Your nature book, have you?” said the policeman. “What’s your name, then?”

  “Pym, sir. I live here.”

  “Pym who?”

  “Magnus.”

  “Hop along then, Pym Magnus,” said the policeman but Pym still walked slowly, refusing to show any sign of eagerness. Lippsie’s silver-framed family was queued up on the bedside table, but Rick’s heavy head dominated the lot of them, sensitive and political in its pigskin frame, and Rick’s sage eyes followed him wherever he went. He opened Lippsie’s wardrobe and breathed the smell of her, he shoved aside her frilly white dressing-gown, her fur cape and the camel-hair overcoat with the pixie’s hood that Rick had bought her in St. Moritz. From the back of her wardrobe he pulled out her cardboard suitcase. He set it on the floor and opened it with the key she kept hidden in the Toby jug on the tiled mantelpiece next to the soft toy chimp who was Little Audrey who laughed and laughed and laughed. He took out the book like a Bible that was written in little black sword blades, and the music books and reading books he didn’t understand and the passport with her picture in it when she was young, and the wads of letters in German from her sister Rachel, pronounced “Ra-ha-el,” who no longer wrote to her, and from the very bottom of the case Rick’s letters, tied into bundles with bits of harvest twine. Some he knew almost by heart, though he had difficulty unravelling the portent seething beneath their verbiage:“It is a matter of weeks no days my darling before the present besetting clouds will be dispersed away as a permanency. Loft will have obtained my Discharge and you and I can enjoy our well-deserved Reward.... Look after that boy of mine who regards you as a Mother and make sure he doesn’t turn out airy-fairy. . . .

  “Your doubts regarding Trust completely misplaced . . . you should not trouble your Head as it is a further worry to me here waiting for the Bugle’s summons Perhaps never to Return . . . what is involved here will bring untold benefits to Many such as Wentworth . . . don’t go on at me about W or his wife, that woman is a professional troublemaker of the worst kind out....

  “My regards to Ted Grimble whom I consider a great Educationist and Headmaster. Tell him a further Hundredweight of prunes on its way . . . he should prepare kitchen for Two gross best fresh oranges also. Loft has got me Out on three weeks compassionate which means I Recommence my basic from scratch if I am recalled. Regarding Another Matter, Muspole says to continue sending items as before. Please oblige quickly owing purely Temporary problem of liquidity this end which is preventing decent people like Wentworth being seen right....

  “If you don’t send more fee cheques immediately, you may as well send me back to Prison and all the Boys excepting Perce as usual and that’s a Fact.... Talk about killing yourself is Foolishness with so many Killing each other round the World in this Senseless and Tragic war. . . . Muspole says if you send post restaurant express Tomorrow he will be at P.O. when they open Saturday and send on to Wentworth immediately. . . .”

  Lippsie’s letter, which he had left till last, was by contrast a marvel of conciseness:“My dear darling Magnus,

  “You must be good boy always, darling, play your music and be strong like a man to your father, I love you.

  Lippsie”

  Pym made a bundle of them, Lippsie’s included, stuffed them inside his nature book and the nature book inside his belt. He rode past the policeman slowly, feeling cats’ claws on his back. The school boiler was a brick furnace built into the basement, fed by a chute in the kitchen yard. To approach the chute was a beatable offence, to burn paper was a Quisling act and sailors would drown for it. A fierce rain was blowing from the Downs, the chalk hills were olive against the storm-clouds. Standing before the open chute, shoulders high against his neck, Pym shoved the letters into it and watched them disappear. A dozen people must have seen him, staff and inmates, and some for sure were allies of Sefton Boyd. But the openness with which he had proceeded convinced them he was acting on authority. Certainly it convinced Pym. He shoved in the last letter, which was the one that told him to be strong, and walked away without once turning to see if he was being noticed.

  He needed the staff lavatory again. He needed his secret St. Moritz with its panelled seclusion, he needed the secret majesty of its brass taps and mahogany-framed mirror, for Pym loved luxury as only those can who have had love taken from them. He gained the forbidden staircase to the staffroom; he reached the half-landing. The lavatory door was ajar. He pushed it, slipped inside, locked it behind him. He was alone. He stared at his face, making it harder, then softer, then harder. He ran the taps and washed his cheeks till they shone. His sudden isolation, added to the grandeur of his achievement, made him unique in his own eyes. His mind whirled with the vertigo of greatness. He was God. He was Hitler. He was Wentworth. He was the king of the green filing cabinet, TP’s noble descendant. Henceforth, nothing on earth need happen without his intervention. He took out his penknife, opened it and held its big blade uppermost before his face in the mirror, taking an Arthurian vow. By Excalibur I swear. The lunch bell rang but there was no roll-call for lunch and he was not hungry; he would never be hungry again, he was an immortal knight. He thought of cutting his throat but his mission was too important. He thought of names. Who has the best family in the school? I have. The Pyms are crackerjack and Prince Magnus is the fastest horse in the world. He pressed his cheek against the wood panelling, smelling cricket bats and Swiss forests. The knife was still in his hand. His eyes went hot and blurred, his ears sang. The divine voice inside him told him to look, and he saw the initials “KS-B” carved very deeply into the best panel. Stooping, he gathered the splinters at his feet and put them into the lavatory where they floated. He pulled the plug but they still floated. He left them there, went to the arts hut and completed his Dornier bomber.

  All afternoon he waited, confident nothing had happened. I didn’t do it. If I went back it wouldn’t be there. It was Maggs in third form. It was Jameson who owns a kukri,
I saw him go in. An oik from the village did it, I saw him sneaking round the grounds with a dagger in his belt, his name is Wentworth. At evensong he prayed that a German bomb would destroy the staff lavatory. None did. Next day, he presented Sefton Boyd with his greatest treasure, the koala bear Lippsie had given him after his appendix operation. In break he buried his penknife in the loose earth behind the cricket pavilion. Or as I would say today, cached it. It was not until evening line-up that the full name of the Honourable Kenneth Sefton Boyd was called out in a voice of doom by the duty master, the sadist O’Mally. Mystified, the young nobleman was led to Mr. Grimble’s study. Mystified himself, Pym watched him go. Whatever can they want him for—my friend, my best friend, the owner of my koala bear? The mahogany door closed, eighty pairs of eyes fixed upon its fine workmanship, Pym’s also. Pym heard Mr. Grimble’s voice, then Sefton Boyd’s raised in protest. Then a great silence while God’s justice was administered, blow by blow. Counting, Pym felt cleansed and vindicated. So it wasn’t Maggs, it wasn’t Jameson and it wasn’t me. Sefton Boyd did it himself, otherwise he would not have been beaten. Justice, he was beginning to learn, is only as good as her servants.

  “It had a hyphen,” Sefton Boyd told him next day. “Whoever did it gave us a hyphen when we haven’t got one. If I ever find the sod I’ll kill him.”

  “So will I,” Pym promised loyally and meant every word. Like Rick he was learning to live on several planes at once. The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment.