A Perfect Spy

by John le Carré

  “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 des
tiny. 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 h
ere 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.