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 cour
t 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 th
e 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.
A Perfect Spy Page 18
