“What time did he die?” says Pym, before remembering that he knows.
“Evening, dearie. The pubs was just opening,” says one of the Lovelies through her cigarette as she heaves another batch of paper on to the rubbish heap.
“He was having a nice drop next door,” says the other, who like the first has not for one moment relaxed her labours.
“What’s next door?” says Pym.
“Bedroom,” says the first Lovely, tossing aside another spent file.
“So who was with him?” Pym asks. “Were you with him? Who was with him, please?”
“We both were, dearie,” says the second. “We was having a little cuddle, if you want to know. Your dad loved a drink and it always made him amorous. We’d had a nice tea early because of his commitments, steak with onion, and he’d had a bit of a barney on the blower with the telephone exchange about a cheque that was in the post to them. He was depressed, wasn’t he, Vi?”
The first Lovely, if reluctantly, suspends her researches. The second does likewise. Suddenly they are decent London women, with kindly faces and puffed, overworked bodies.
“It was over for him, dearie,” she says, pushing away a hank of hair with her chubby wrist.
“What was?”
“He said if he couldn’t have that phone no more, he’d have to go. He said that phone was his lifeline and if he couldn’t have it, it was a judgment on him, how would he do his business without a blower and a clean shirt?”
Mistaking Pym’s silence for rebuke, her companion flares at him. “Don’t look at us like that, darling. He’d had all we’ve got long ago. We done the gas, we done the electric, we cooked his dinners, didn’t we, Vi?”
“We done all we could,” says Vi. “And given him the comfort, too.”
“We pulled tricks for him more than was natural, didn’t we, Vi? Three a day for him, sometimes.”
“More,” says Vi.
“He was very lucky to have you,” says Pym sincerely. “Thank you very much for looking after him.”
This pleases them, and they smile shyly.
“You haven’t got a nice bottle in that big black briefcase of yours, I suppose, dearie?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Vi goes to the bedroom. Through the open doorway Pym sees the great imperial bed from Chester Street, its upholstery ripped and stained with use. Rick’s silk pyjamas lie sprawled across the coverlet. He smells Rick’s body lotion and Rick’s hair oil. Vi returns with a bottle of Drambuie.
“Did he talk about me at all, in the last days?” says Pym while they drink.
“He was proud of you, dear,” says Vi’s friend. “Very proud.” But she seems dissatisfied with her reply. “He was going to catch you up, mind. That was nearly his last words, wasn’t it, Vi?”
“We was holding him,” says Vi, with a sniff. “You could see he was going from the breathing. ‘Tell them I forgive them at the telephone exchange,’ he says. ‘And tell my boy Magnus we’ll both be ambassadors soon.’”
“And after that?” says Pym.
“‘ Give us another touch of the Napoleon, Vi,’” says Vi’s friend, now weeping also. “It wasn’t Napoleon though, it was the Drambuie. Then he says: ‘There’s enough in those files, girls, to see you right till you join me.’”
“He just nodded off really,” says Vi, into her handkerchief. “He mightn’t have been dead at all, if it hadn’t been for his heart.”
There is a rustle at the door. Three knocks. Vi opens it an inch, then all the way, then stands back disapprovingly to admit Ollie and Mr. Cudlove, armed with buckets of ice. The years have not been kind to Ollie’s nerves, and the tears at the corners of his eyes are stained with mascara. But Mr. Cudlove is unchanged, down to his chauffeur’s black tie. Transferring the bucket to his left side, Mr. Cudlove seizes Pym’s right hand in a manly grip. Pym follows them down a narrow corridor lined with photographs of neverwozzers. Rick is lying in the bath with a towel round his middle, his marbled feet crossed over each other as if in accordance with some Oriental ritual. His hands are curled and cupped in readiness to harangue his Maker.
“It’s just that there wasn’t the funds, sir,” Mr. Cudlove murmurs while Ollie pours in the ice. “Not a penny piece anywhere, to be frank, sir. I think those ladies may have taken a liberty.”
“Why didn’t you close his eyes?” says Pym.
“We did, sir, to be frank, but they would open again, and it didn’t seem respectful.”
On one knee before his father, Pym writes out a cheque for two hundred pounds, and nearly makes it dollars by mistake.
Pym drives to Chester Street. The house has been in other hands for years but tonight it stands in darkness, as if once more waiting for the Distraining Bailiffs. Pym approaches gingerly. On the doorstep, a nightlight burns despite the rain. Beside it like a dead animal lies an old boa in the mauve of half mourning, similar to the one belonging to Aunt Nell that he had used to block the lavatory at The Glades so long ago. Is it Dorothy’s? Or Peggy Wentworth’s? Is it some child’s game? Is it put there by Lippsie’s ghost? No card attaches to its dew-soaked feathers. No sequestrator has pinned his claim to it. The only clue is the one word “Yes,” scrawled in trembling chalklines on the door, like a safety signal in a target town.
Turning his back on the deserted square Pym strode angrily to the bathroom and opened the skylight that years ago he had daubed with green paint for Miss Dubber’s greater decency. Through a gun slit, he examined the gardens at the side of the house and concluded that they too were unnaturally empty. No Stanley, the Alsatian, tethered to the rain tub of number 8. No Mrs. Aitken, the butcher’s wife, who spends every waking hour at her roses. Closing the skylight with a bang, he stooped over the basin and sluiced water in his face, then glowered at his reflection till it gave him a false and brilliant smile. Rick’s smile, put on to taunt him, the one that is too happy even to blink. The one that cuddles up against you and presses into you like a thrilled child. The one Pym hated most.
“Fireworks, old son,” said Pym, mimicking Rick’s cadences at their holy worst. “Remember how you loved a firework? Remember dear old Guy Fawkes night, and the great setpiece there, with your old man’s initials on it, RTP, going up in lights all over Ascot? Well then.”
Well then, Pym echoed in his soul.
Pym is writing again. Joyously. No pen can take the strain of this. Reckless free letters are careering over the paper. Lightpaths, rocket tails, stars and stripes are zipping above his head. The music of a thousand transistor radios plays around him; the bright faces of strangers laugh into his own, and he is laughing back at them. It is July 4th. It is Washington’s night of nights. The diplomatic Pyms have arrived a week ago to take up his appointment as Deputy Head of Station. The island of Berlin is sunk at last. They have a spell in Prague behind them, Stockholm, London. The path to America was never easy, but Pym has gone the distance, Pym has made it, he is assumed and almost risen into the reddened dark that is repeatedly blasted into whiteness by the floodlights, fireworks and searchlights. The crowd is bobbing round him and he is part of it, the free people of the earth have taken him among them. He is one with all these grown-up happy children celebrating their independence of things that never held them. The Marine Band, the Breckenridge Boys Choir and the Metropolitan Area Symposium Choral Group have wooed and won him unopposed. At party after party Magnus and Mary have been celebrated by half the intelligence aristos of Georgetown, have eaten swordfish by candlelight in red-brick yards, chatted under lights strung in overhanging branches, have embraced and been embraced, shaken hands and filled their heads with names and gossip and champagne. Heard a lot about you, Magnus—Magnus, welcome aboard! Jesus, is that your wife? That’s criminal! Till Mary, worried about Tom—the fireworks have overexcited him—is determined to go home and Bee Lederer has gone with her.
“I’ll join you soon, darling,” Pym murmurs as she leaves. “Must pop in on the Wexlers or they’ll think I’m cutting them.
”
Where am I? In the Mall? On the Hill? Pym has no idea. The bare arms and thighs and unhampered breasts of young American womanhood are brushing contentedly against him. Friendly hands make space for him to pass; laughter, pot-smoke, din pack the scalding night. “What’s your name, man?” “You British? Here, let’s shake your hand—take a swig of this.” Pym adds a mouthful of bourbon to the impressive mixture he has already taken in. He is climbing a slope, whether of grass or tarmac he cannot determine. The White House glistens below him. Before it, erect and floodlit, the white needle of the Washington Monument cuts its light-path to the unreachable stars. Jefferson and Lincoln, each in his eternal patch of Rome, lie to either side of him. Pym loves them both. All the patriarchs and founding fathers of America are mine. He crests the slope. A black man offers him popcorn. It is salt and hot like his own sweat. Further up the valley, the harmless battles of other firework shows boom and splash into the sky. The crowd is denser up here but still they smile at him and part for him while they ooh and aah at the fireworks, call friendship to each other, break into patriotic song. A pretty girl is teasing him. “Hey, man, why won’t you dance?” “Well, thank you, I will with pleasure but just let me take off my coat,” Pym replies. His answer is too woody, she has found another partner. He is shouting. At first he does not hear himself but as he enters a quieter place his own voice bursts on him with startling distinctness. “Poppy! Poppy! Where are you?” Helpfully, the good people round him take up the cry. “Hurry on over, Poppy, your boyfriend’s here!” “Come on, Poppy, you bad bitch, where you bin?” Behind and above him the rockets become a ceaseless fountain against the swirling crimson clouds. Before him a gold umbrella opens, embracing the whole white mountain and lighting the emptying street. Instructions are ringing remotely in Pym’s head. He is reading the numbers of the streets and doorways. He finds the door and with a final surge of joy feels the familiar bony hand close round his wrist and the familiar voice admonishing him.
“Your friend Poppy cannot come tonight, Sir Magnus,” says Axel softly. “So will you please stop shouting her name?”
Shoulder to shoulder the two men sit on the steps of the Capitol, gazing down into the Mall on the uncountable thousands they have taken into their protection. Axel has a basket containing a thermos flask of ice-cold vodka, and the best gherkins and brown bread America can supply.
“We made it, Sir Magnus,” he breathes. “We are home at last.”
“My dearest Father,
“I am very pleased to be able to tell you of my new appointment. Cultural Counsellor may not sound much to you, but it is a post that commands a deal of respect among the highest circles here, and even gets me into the White House. I am also the proud owner of what is called a Cosmic Pass, which means literally that no doors are closed to me any more.”
17
Oh my heaven, Tom, the fun we had! The glorious freewheeling last honeymoon, even as the clouds gathered!
You would be pardoned for thinking that the duties of a Deputy Head of Station, though elevated, are inferior to those of his boss. Not so. The Head of Station in Washington floats in the upper air of intelligence diplomacy. His task is to massage the corpse of the Special Relationship and convince everybody, including himself, that it is alive and well. Every morning, poor Hal Tresider rose early, put on his old Shirburnian tie and sweat-patched tropical suit, and pedalled his push-bike earnestly away to the sodden dreamland of the committee rooms, leaving your father free to ransack the Station Registry, supervise the out-stations in San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago, or dart off to welfare a field agent in transit to Central America, China, or Japan. Another chore was shepherding grey-faced British boffins through the battery farms of American high technology, where the scientific secrets that are traded in Washington have their artificial conception. Dining the poor souls, Tom, where others would have left them mouldering in their motels. Consoling them in their woman-less, under-financed foreign exile. Chatting hastily memorised jargon at them, about nose cones, turning radius, underwater communication and captive-carry. Borrowing their working documents from them to give back in the morning. “Hullo— that looks interesting. Mind if I sneak a sight of that for our Naval Attaché? He’s been badgering the Pentagon about that one for years, but they’ve been holding out on him.”
The Naval Attaché had a sight, London had a sight, Prague had a sight. For what use is a Cosmic Pass without a Cosmic readership?
Poor stolid, worthy Hal! How meticulously Pym misused your trust and torpedoed your innocent ambitions! Never mind. If the National Trust won’t have you, you can always count on the Royal Automobile Club or a favoured City company.
“I say, Pymmie, there’s some ghastly group of physicists visiting the Livermore weapons laboratory next month,” you would say, all apology and diffidence. “You don’t think you could pop down there and feed and water a few of them and see they don’t blow their noses on the tablecloth, could you? Why on earth this service has to behave like a lot of flat-footed security officers these days, I really don’t know. I’ve a good mind to do a letter to London about it, if I can squeeze a moment.”
No country was ever easier to spy on, Tom, no nation so openhearted with its secrets, so quick to air them, share them, confide them, or consign them too early to the junk heap of planned American obsolescence. I am too young to know whether there was a time when Americans were able to restrain their admirable passion to communicate, but I doubt it. Certainly the path has been downhill since 1945, for it was quickly apparent that information which ten years ago would have cost Axel’s service thousands of dollars in precious hard currency could by the mid-seventies be had for a few coppers from the Washington Post. We could have resented this sometimes, if we had been smaller natures, for there are few things more vexing in the spy world than landing a great scoop for Prague and London one week, only to read the same material in Aviation Weekly the next. But we did not complain. In the great fruit garden of American technology, there were pickings enough for everyone and none of us need ever want for anything again.
Cameos, Tom, little tiles for your mosaic are all I need to give you now. See the two friends romping under a darkening sky, catching the last rays of the sunlight before the game is over. See them thieving like children, knowing the police are round the corner. Pym did not take to America in a night, not in a month, for all the splendid fireworks of the Fourth. His love of the place grew with Axel’s. Without Axel he might never have seen the light. Pym set out, believe it or not, determined to disapprove of everything he saw. He found no holding point, no stern judgment to revolt against. These vulgar pleasure-seeking people, so frank and clamorous, were too uninhibited for his shielded and involuted life. They loved their prosperity too obviously, were too flexible and mobile, too little the slaves of place, origin and class. They had no sense of that hush which all Pym’s life had been the background music of his inhibition. In committee, it was true, they reverted soon enough to type, and became the warring princelings of the European countries they had left behind. They could run you up a cabal that would make mediaeval Venice blush. They could be Dutch and stubborn, Scandinavian and gloomy, Balkan and murderous and tribal. But when they mixed with one another they were American and loquacious and disarming, and Pym was hard put to find a centre to betray.
Why had they done him no harm? Why had they not cramped him, frightened him, forced his limbs into impossible positions from the cradle up? He found himself longing for the empty, darkened streets of Prague and the reassuring embrace of chains. He wanted his dreadful schools back. He wanted anything but the marvellous horizons that led to lives he had not lived. He wanted to spy upon hope itself, look through keyholes at the sunrise and deny the possibilities he had missed. And all this time, ironically, Europe was coming to get him. He knew that. So did Axel. Not a year had passed before the first insidious whispers of suspicion began to reach their ears. Yet it was this very intimation of mortality that shook Pym out of h
is reluctance, and inspired him to take the upper hand in their relationship just as Axel was saying, “End it, get out.” A mysterious gratitude for America the Just and her impending retribution seized him as, like a ponderous, puzzled giant, she bore steadily down on him, clutching in her great soft fist the multiplying evidence of his duplicity.
“Certain aristos in Langley and London are getting worried about our Czecho networks, Sir Magnus,” Axel warned him in his stiff, dry English at a crash meeting at the carpark of the Robert F. Kennedy Stadium. “They have begun to discern certain unfortunate patterns.”
“What patterns? There are no patterns.”
“They have noticed that the Czecho networks provide better intelligence when we are running them and almost nothing when we are not. That is the pattern. They have computers these days. It takes them five minutes to turn everything upside down and wonder what is the right way up. We have been careless, Sir Magnus. We were too greedy. Our parents were right. If you want a thing done well, you must do it yourself.”
A Perfect Spy Page 59
