John LeCarre - A New Collection of Three Novels Part 12

How Rick won the peace I'll never rightly know, Tom, but win it he did, overnight as usual, and none of us will ever have to worry again, son, there's plenty for everyone and your old man's made it. In the zeal of the new prosperity father and son took tip the profession of country gentleman. With victory in Europe still wet on the h.o.a.rdings the newly adolescent Pym bought himself a charcoal Harrods suit with its coveted long trousers, a black tie and a stiff white collar, all on the account, and steeled himself to have Sefton Boyd's promised fish-hooks poked through his earlobes. Rick meanwhile in his immense maturity acquired a twenty-acre mansion in Ascot with white fencing down the drive, and a row of tweed suits louder than the Admiral's, and a pair of mad red setters, and a pair of two-toned country shoes for walking them, and a pair of Purdey shotguns for his portrait with them, and a mile-long bar to while away his rustic evenings over bubbly and roulette, and a bronze bust of TP's head on a plinth in the hall beside a larger one of his own. A platoon of displaced Poles was hauled in to staff the place, a new mother wore high heels on the lawn, bawled at the servants and gave Pym tips on the hygiene and diction of the upper cla.s.ses. A Bentley appeared and was not changed or hidden for several weeks though a Pole with a grudge contrived to fill it with water from a hose-pipe through a crack in the window and drench Rick's dignity when he opened the door next morning. Mr. Cudlove got a mulberry uniform and a cottage in the grounds where Ollie grew geraniums, sang The Mikado, and painted the kitchen for his nerves. Livestock and a surly cowman supplied the character of a farm, for Rick had become a taxpayer which I know now marked the summit of his heroic struggle for liquidity: "It's a d.a.m.n shame, Maxie," he declared proudly to a Major Maxwell-Cavendish who had been brought in to advise on matters of the Turf. "Lord in Heaven if a man can't enjoy the fruits of his labours these days what the devil did we fight the war for?" The major, who wore a tinted monocle, said "What indeed?" and pursed his lips into a holly leaf. And Pym, agreeing wholeheartedly, topped up the major's gla.s.s. Still waiting to be sent to school, he was going through a faceless period and would have topped up anything.

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, h.o.a.ry 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 t.i.tles 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 bra.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.signs to us. "Our big one was Dobbsie," he recalls. "I'm not saying there wasn't others, t.i.tch, 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 G.o.d knows how many wets can serve as well as any, even if it left the darkest reaches unexplored.

For some time, t.i.tch--says Syd while Meg gives us a drop more pie and turns the log fire up--as the ebb and flow of war, t.i.tch, with G.o.d'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, t.i.tch, 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, t.i.tch, 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 gla.s.s--your dad being away at a conference at the time, t.i.tch--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 court enquires politely. Flora falters. Long words are not her suit. "a.s.sessing the compensation," she replies, quoting something she has not fully understood. Compensation for what, dear? the court asks, p.r.i.c.king 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, t.i.tch," 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, t.i.tch, and never you forget it."

Dimly I remember Dobbsie too, a whipped, untruthful little man plastered on two gla.s.ses 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 a.r.s.enal, admire Joe Louis, think Noel 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 gla.s.ses demands to know what you stripe-a.r.s.ed civilians were doing while I was taking part in a certain contest, sir, risking one's neck amid shot and sh.e.l.l? 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 d.a.m.n 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, c.o.c.kney hairdressers, unlisted maharajahs, drunk magistrates, venal mayors, ruling princes of countries that have ceased to exist, prelates in suede boots and pectoral crosses, radio comedians, lady singers, aristocratic layabouts, war millionaires and film stars--all pa.s.s 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 un.o.btainable 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 pa.s.sed 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 broad-shouldered suits and brown pork-pie hats, calling diem-selves 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 tragi-comedy, 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 ma.s.ses, and for relaxation attends late-night cla.s.ses in radical politics with Ollie and Mr. Cudlove in their cottage, at which it is heartily agreed over stolen canapes 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, t.i.tch, and nothing against your dad ever, won the war for all these capitalist b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.

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 subst.i.tute 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 bra.s.s-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 n.o.body 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 the wealth of Egypt. For our Mediterranean dawns we have the sombre march to the all-night p.a.w.nbroker 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 G.o.d liquidity. For our reflective afternoons, we have the tir aux pigeons at which the court, well lunched, lies face down in the b.u.t.ts 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.

For nothing may stand still, too much is not enough, as Syd himself admits. No income is so sacrosanct that expenditure cannot exceed it, no expenditure is so great that more loans cannot be raised to hold the dam from breaking altogether. If the building boom is put temporarily out of service by the pa.s.sing of an unfriendly Building Act, then Major Maxwell-Cavendish has a plan that speaks deeply to Rick's sporting soul: it is to buy up everyone who has drawn a horse in the Irish Sweep and so win first, second and third prizes automatically. Mr. Muspole knows a derelict newspaper proprietor who has got in with a bad crowd and needs to sell out fast; Rick has ever seen himself as a shaper of the human mind. Perce Loft the great lawyer wants to buy a thousand houses in Fulham; Rick knows a building society whose chairman has Faith. Mr. Cudlove and Ollie are on intimate terms with a young dress designer who has acquired the donkey-ride concession for the projected Festival of Britain; Rick likes nothing better than to give our English kids a break, and my G.o.d, son, if anybody has earned it they have. An amphibious motorcar has been designed by Morrie Washington's nephew, a National Cricket Pool is envisaged to complement the winter Football Pools, Perce has yet another scheme for contracting an Irish village to grow human hair for the wig market which is expanding fast thanks to the munificence of the newly formed National Health Service. Automatic orange-peelers, pens that can write under water, the spent sh.e.l.l cases of temporarily discontinued wars: each project engages the great thinker's interest, attracts its experts and its alchemists, adds another line to the Pym Son Tablet of Honour at the house in Chester Street.

So what went wrong? I ask Syd again, glancing ahead to the inevitable end. What quirk of fate, this time round, Syd, checked the great man's stride? My question sparks unusual anger. Syd sets down his gla.s.s.

"Dobbsie went wrong, that's what. Flora wasn't enough for him any more. He had to have the lot. Dobbsie went woozy in the head from all his women, didn't he, Meg?"

"Dobbsie done his little self too well," says Meg, ever a stern student of human frailty.

Poor Dobbs, it transpires, became so lulled that he awarded a hundred thousand pounds of compensation to a housing estate that had not been built till a year after the bombing ended.

"Dobbsie spoilt it for everyone," says Syd, bristling with moral indignation. "Dobbsie was selfish, t.i.tch. That's what Dobbsie was. Selfish."

One later footnote belongs to this brief but glorious high point of Rick's affluence. It is recorded that in October 1947 he sold his head. I chanced upon this information as I was standing on the steps of the crematorium covertly trying to puzzle out some of the less familiar members of the funeral. A breathless youth claiming to represent a teaching hospital waved a piece of paper at me and demanded I stop the ceremony. "In Consideration of the sum of fifty pounds cash I, Richard T. Pym of Chester Street W., consent that on my death my head may be used for the purposes of furthering medical science." It was raining slightly. Under cover of the porch I scribbled the boy a cheque for a hundred pounds and told him to buy one somewhere else. If the fellow was a confidence trickster, I reasoned, Rick would have been the first to admire his enterprise.

And always somewhere in this clamour the name of Wentworth ringing softly in Pym's secret ear like an operational codename known only to the initiated: Wentworth. And Pym--the outsider, not on the list--struggling to join, to know. Like a buzzword pa.s.sed between older hands in the senior officers' bar at Head Office and Pym the new boy, hearing from the edge, not knowing whether to pretend knowledge or deafness: "We picked it up on Wentworth." "Top Secret and Wentworth-- have you been Wentworth-cleared?" Till the very name became to Pym a teasing symbol of wisdom denied, a challenge to his own desirability. "The b.u.g.g.e.r's doing a Wentworth on us," he hears Perce Loft grumble under his breath one evening. "That Wentworth woman's a tiger," says Syd another time. "Worse than her stupid husband ever was." Each mention spurred Pym to renew his searches. Yet neither Rick's pockets nor his desk drawers, not his bedside table or his pigskin address book or pop-up plastic telephone book, not even his briefcase, which Pym reconnoitred weekly with the key from Rick's Asprey key chain, yielded a single clue. Nor did the impenetrable green filing cabinet which like a travelling icon had come to mark the centre of Rick's migrant faith. No known key fitted it, no fiddling or prising made it yield.

And finally there was school. The cheque was sent, the cheque was cleared.

The train lurched. In the window Mr. Cudlove and other people's mothers dipped their faces into handkerchiefs and vanished. In his compartment, children larger than himself whimpered and chewed the cuffs of their new grey jackets. But Pym with one turn of his head glanced backward on his life thus far, and forward to the iron path of duty curling into the autumn mist, and he thought: here I come, your best recruit ever. I'm the one you need so take me. The train arrived, school was a mediaeval dungeon of unending twilight, but Saint Pym of the Renunciation was on hand immediately to help his comrades hump their trunks and tuck-boxes up the winding stone staircases, wrestle with unfamiliar collar-studs, find their beds, lockers and clothes-pegs and award himself the worst. And when his turn came to be summoned before his housemaster for an introductory chat Pym made no secret of his pleasure. Mr. Willow was a big homely man in tweeds and a cricket tie, and the Christian plainness of his room after Ascot filled Pym at once with an a.s.surance of integrity.

"Well, well, what's in here then?" Mr. Willow asked genially as he lifted the parcel to his great ear and shook it.

"It's scent, sir."

Mr. Willow misunderstood his meaning. "Sent? I thought you brought it with you," he said, still smiling.

"It's for Mrs. Willow, sir. From Monte. They tell me it's about the best those Frenchies make," he added, quoting Major Maxwell-Cavendish, a gentleman.

Mr. Willow had a very broad back and suddenly that was all Pym saw. He stooped, there was a sound of opening and closing, the parcel vanished into his enormous desk. If he'd had a nine-foot grappling iron he couldn't have treated Pym's gift with greater loathing.

"You want to watch out for t.i.t Willow," Sefton Boyd warned. "He beats on Fridays so that you have the weekend to recover."

But still Pym strove, bled, volunteered for everything and obeyed every bell that summoned him. Terms of it. Lives of it. Ran before breakfast, prayed before running, showered before praying, defecated before showering. Flung himself through the Flanders mud of the rugger field, scrambled over sweating flagstones in search of what pa.s.sed for learning, drilled so hard to be a good soldier that he cracked his collarbone on the bolt of his vast Lee-Enfield rifle, and had himself punched to kingdom come in the boxing ring. And still he pulled a grin and raised his paw for the loser's biscuit as he tottered to the dressing-room and you would have loved him, Jack; you would have said that children and horses needed to be broken, public school was the making of me.

I don't think it was at all. I think it d.a.m.n near killed me. But not Pym--Pym thought it all perfectly wonderful and shoved out his plate for more. And when it was required of him by the rigid laws of a haphazard justice, which in retrospect seems like every night of the week, he pressed his limp forelock into a filthy washbasin, clutched a tap in each throbbing hand, and expiated a string of crimes he didn't know he had committed until they were thoughtfully explained to him between each stroke by Mr. Willow or his representatives. Yet when he' lay at last in the trembling dark of his dormitory, listening to the creaks and kennel coughs of adolescent longing, he still contrived to persuade himself that he was a prince in the making and, like Jesus, taking the rap for his father's divinity. And his sincerity, his empathy for his fellow man flourished unabated.

In a single afternoon, he could sit down with Noakes the groundsman, eat cake and biscuits in his cottage beside the cider factory and bring tears to the old athlete's eyes with his fabricated tales of the antics of the great sportsmen who had let their hair down at the Ascot feasts. All nonsense, yet all perfectly true to him as he spun his magic. "Not the Don?" Noakes would cry incredulously. "The great Don Bradman himself, dancing on the kitchen table? In your house, Pymrnie? Go on!" "And singing 'When I Was a Child of Five' while he was about it," said Pym. Then while Noakes was still glowing from these insights, straight up the hill went Pym to faded Mr. Glover, the a.s.sistant drawing master, who wore sandals, to help him wash palettes and remove the day's daubs of powder paint from the genitals of the marble cherub in the main hall. Yet Mr. Glover was the absolute opposite of Noakes. Without Pym the two men were irreconcilable. Mr. Glover thought school sports a tyranny worse than Hitler's and I wish they'd throw their b.l.o.o.d.y football boots into the river, I do, and plough up their games fields and get on with some Art and Beauty for a change. And Pym wished they would as well and swore his father was going to send a donation to rebuild the arts school to twice its size--probably millions, but keep it secret.

"I'd shut up about your father if I were you," said Sefton Boyd. "They don't like spivs here."

"They don't like divorced mothers either," said Pym, biting back for once. But mainly his strategy was to pacify and reconcile, and keep all the threads in his own hands.

Another conquest was Bellog the German master who seemed physically crumpled by the sins of his adopted country. Pym beleaguered him with extra work, bought him an expensive German beer mug on Rick's account at Thomas Goode's, walked his dog and invited him to Monte all expenses paid, which by a mercy he declined. Today I would blush for such an unsophisticated pa.s.s and agonise about whether Bellog had gone sour and been turned. Not Pym. Pym loved Bellog as he loved them all. And he needed that German soul, he had been hard on its path since Lippsie's day. He needed to give himself away to it, right into Mr. Bellog's startled hands, though Germany meant nothing whatever to him, except escape to an unpopular preserve where his talents would be appreciated. He needed the embrace of it, the mystery, the privacy of another side of life. He needed to be able to close the door on his Englishness, love it as he might, and carve a new name somewhere fresh. He even went so far on occasion as to affect a light German accent which drove Sefton Boyd to paroxysms of fury.

And women? Jack, no one was more alive than Pym to the potential virtues of a female agent well handled, but in that school they were the devil to come by and handling anybody, including yourself, was a beatable offence. Mrs, Willow, though he was prepared to love her any time, appeared to be permanently pregnant. Pym's languishing glances were wasted on her. The house matron was personable enough but when he called on her late at night with a fict.i.tious headache in the vague hope of proposing marriage to her, she ordered him sharply back to bed. Only little Miss Hodges who taught the violin showed a short-lived promise: Pym presented her with a pigskin music case from Harrods and said he wished to turn professional, but she wept and advised him to take up a different instrument.

"My sister wants to do it with you," said Sefton Boyd one night as they lay in Pym's bed embracing without enthusiasm. "She read your poem in the school rag. She thinks you're Keats."

Pym was not altogether surprised. His poem was certainly a masterpiece, and Jemima Sefton Boyd had several times scowled at him through the windscreen of the family Land Rover when it came to collect her brother for weekends.

"She's panting for it," Sefton Boyd explained. "She does it with everybody. She's a nympho."

Pym wrote to her at once, a poet's letter."A tale must linger in your soft hair. Do you ever have the feeling beauty is a kind of sin? Two swans have settled on the Abbey moat. I watch them often, dreaming of your hair. I love you."She replied by return, but not before Pym had suffered agonies of remorse at his recklessness."Thank you for your letter. I get a long exeat from school starting twenty-fifth which is one of your exeat weekends also. How fateful that they coincide. Mama will invite you for Sunday night and obtain Mr. Willow's permission for you to sleep with us. Are you considering elopement?"A second letter was more precise:"The servants' staircase is quite safe. I will kindle a light and have wine waiting in case you get thirsty. Bring any work you have in progress and please caress me first. On my door you will find the red rosette I won last holidays for jumping Smokey."Pym was scared stiff. How could he acquit himself with a woman of such experience? b.r.e.a.s.t.s he knew about and loved. But Jemima appeared to have none. The rest of her was an unintelligible thicket of dangers and disease, and his memories of Lippsie in the bath became hazier by the minute.

A card came:"We would all be so pleased if you would visit us at Hadwell for the weekend of the twenty-fifth. I am writing separately to Mr. Willow. Don't worry about clothes as we do not dress in the evenings during summer.

Elizabeth Sefton Boyd"On the hill above Mr. Willow's house stood a girls' school peopled by brown vestals. Boys who penetrated its grounds were flogged and expelled. But Elphick in Nelson House maintained that if you stood beneath the footbridge when the girls were crossing on their way to hockey much could be learned. Alas, all Pym saw when he followed this advice was a few cold knees that looked much like his own. Worse, he had to suffer the coa.r.s.e humour of a games mistress who leaned over the bridge and invited him to come and play. Disgusted, Pym stalked back to his German poets.

The town library was run by an elderly Fabian, a Pym agent. Pym skipped lunch and hunted his way unchecked through the section marked "Adults Only." Guidance on Marriage appeared to be a handbook on mortgages. The Art of the Chinese Pillow Book started well but descended into a description of games of darts and leaping white tigers. Amor and Rococo Woman, on the other hand, richly ill.u.s.trated, was a different matter, and Pym arrived at Hadwell expecting naked Graces frolicking with their gallants in the park. At dinner, which to his relief was taken dressed, Jemima cut Pym dead, hiding her face in her hair and reading Jane Austen. A plain girl called Belinda, billed as Jemima's dearest friend, declined speech in sympathy.

"That's how Jem gets when she's h.o.r.n.y," Sefton Boyd explained within Belinda's hearing, at which Belinda tried to punch him, then stormed off in a rage.

Dispatched to bed Pym wound his way up the great staircase while a dozen clocks tolled his death knell. How often had Rick not warned him against women who wanted nothing but his money? How dearly he longed for the safety of his bed at school. Crossing the landing he saw a rosette glinting like blood in the low light. He climbed another flight and saw Belinda's head scowling at him round her door. "You can come in here if you like," she said rudely.

"It's all right, thanks," said Pym. He entered his room.

On his pillow lay his eight love letters and four poems to Jemima, bound with ribbon and smelling of saddle soap."Please take back your letters which I find oppressive since I regret we are no longer compatible. I do not know what possessed you to slick down your forelock like an errand boy but henceforth we meet as strangers."Dashed down by humiliation and despair Pym hastened back to school and the same night wrote to every mother, active or retired, whose name and address he could put his hands on.

"Dearest Topsie, Cherry, darling Mrs. Ogilvie, Mabel, darling Violet, I am being beaten mercilessly for writing poetry and I am very unhappy. Please take me away from this awful place." But when they answered his appeal, the readiness of their love revolted him and he threw away their letters scarcely read. And when one of them, the best, dropped everything and travelled a hundred expensive miles to buy him a mixed grill at the Feathers, Pym met her enquiries with a remote politeness. "Yes, thank you, school is super, everything is absolutely fine. How are you?" Then led her an hour early to the railway station so that he could be a good chap at kickabout."Dear Belinda"--he wrote in his poet's cursive hand-- "Thanks very much for your letter explaining that Jem is unstable. I know girls are terrifically sensitive at this age and going through all sorts of changes so it's really all right. Our house side won Juniors which is a bit of a sensation here. I often think of your beautiful eyes. Magnus.""Dear Father"--he wrote in a gruff Edwardian manner copied from Sefton Boyd--"I am doing^ lots of essential entertaining here which is very much the thing and gets me on. Everyone is very grateful for what I do, but prices at the tuckshop have risen and I wondered whether you could send me another five pounds to see me right."To his surprise, Rick sent him nothing, but came down from the mountain in person, bringing not money but love, which was what Pym had written to him for in the first place.

It was Rick's first visit. Until now Pym had forbidden him the place, explaining that distinguished parents were considered bad form. And Rick with unwonted diffidence had accepted his exclusion. Now with the same diffidence he came, looking trim and loving and mysteriously humble. He didn't venture into the school but sent a letter in his own hand proposing a rendezvous on the road to Farleigh Abbott, which was on the sea. When Pym arrived by bicycle as instructed, expecting the Bentley and half the court, round the corner instead rode Rick alone, also on a bicycle, with a lovely smile that Pym could see from miles off and humming "Underneath the Arches" out of tune. In the bicycle basket he had brought a picnic of their favourite things, a bottle of ginger pop for Pym, bubbly for himself and a football left over from Paradise.

They rode their bicycles on the sand and skimmed pebbles on the waves. They lay in the dunes munching foie gras and Ryvita. They wandered through the little town and wondered whether Rick should buy it. They stared at the church and promised never to forget their prayers. They made a goal out of a broken gateway and kicked the football at each other all the way across the world. They kissed and wept and bear-hugged and swore to be pals all their lives and go bicycling every Sunday even when Pym was Lord Chief Justice and married with grandchildren.

"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 Cuddle'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, ma.s.ses," 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 ent.i.tled 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 cla.s.s. "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, free-wheeling 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?"