John LeCarre - A New Collection of Three Novels Part 26

10.

Once again a willed brightness was overtaking Pym as he listened to the many voices in his mind. To be king, he repeated to himself. To look with favour on this child that was myself. To love his defects and his strivings, and pity his simplicity.

If there was such a thing as a perfect time in Pym's life, a time when all the versions of himself were appreciated and playing nicely and he would never want for anything again, then surely it was his first few terms at Oxford University whither Rick had dispatched him as a necessary interlude to having him appointed Lord Chief Justice and thus securing him a place among the Highest in the Land. The relations.h.i.+p between the two pals had never been better. Following Axel's departure, Pym's final lonely months in Bern had seen a dramatic flowering of their correspondence. With Frau Ollinger barely speaking to him and Herr Ollinger increasingly absorbed in the problems of Ostermundigen, Pym walked the city streets alone, much as he had done at the beginning. But at night, with the wall beside him silent, he penned long and intimate letters of affection to Belinda and his one true anchor, Rick. Stimulated by his attentions, Rick's letters in reply took on a sudden stylishness and prosperity. The anguished missives from outer England ceased. The stationery thickened, stabilised and acquired ill.u.s.trious headings. First the Richard T. Pym Endeavour Company wrote to him from Cardiff, advising him that the Clouds of Misfortune which had appeared to Gather had been swept Away one and All by a Providence I can only regard as crackerjack. A month later, the Pym Partners Property and Finance Enterprise of Cheltenham was advising him that certain Steps were now in Hand for Pym's future with a view to Insuring that he would never want for Anything again. Most recently a printed card of regal elegance was pleased to announce that following a Merger Agreeable to all Parties, matters relating to the above Companies should henceforth be referred to the Pym Permanent Mutual Property Trust (Na.s.sau), of Park Lane W. Jack Brotherhood and Wendy treated him to a farewell fondue on the Firm; Sandy came and Jack gave Pym two bottles of whisky and hoped their paths would cross. Herr Ollinger accompanied him to the railway station and they drank a last coffee. Frau Ollinger stayed home. Elisabeth served them but she was distracted. She had put on bulk around the tummy, though she wore no ring. As the train pulled out of the station, Pym took a look downward at the circus and its elephant house, then a look upward at the university and its green dome and by the time he reached Basel he knew that Bern had sunk with all hands. Axel was illegal. The Swiss informed against him. I was lucky to get out myself. Standing in the corridor somewhere south of Paris he observed tears on his cheeks and vowed not to be a spy again. At Victoria Mr. Cudlove was waiting for him with a new Bentley.

"What do we call you now, sir? Doctor or Professor?" "Just Magnus will do fine," said Pym handsomely as they pumped hands. "How's Ollie?"

The new Reichskanzlei in Park Lane was a monument to prosperous stability. The bust of TP was back in place. Law books, gla.s.s doors and a new jockey with the Pym colours winked a.s.surance at him while he waited on leather cus.h.i.+ons for a Lovely to admit him to the State Apartments. "Our Chairman will see you now, Mr. Magnus." They bear-hugged, both for a moment too proud to speak. Rick palmed Pym's back, moulded his cheeks and wiped away his tears. Mr. Muspole, Perce and Syd were summoned by separate buzzers to pay homage to the returning hero. Mr. Muspole produced a sheaf of doc.u.ments and Rick read the best bits of them aloud. Pym was appointed International Legal Adviser for life and awarded five hundred pounds a year to be reconsidered as appropriate on the strict understanding he worked for no other firm. His law studies at Oxford were thus taken care of; he need never want for anything again. A second Lovely brought bubbly. She seemed to have nothing else to do. Everybody drank the health of the company's newest employee. "Come on, t.i.tch, let's have it in the parley-voo!" cried Syd excitedly, and Pym obliged by saying something fatuous in German. Father and son hugged again, Rick wept again and said if only he had had the advantages. The same evening, at a mansion in Amersham called The Furlong, his homecoming was again celebrated by an intimate party of two hundred old friends, few of whom Pym had seen before, including the heads of several world-famous corporations, leading stars of stage and screen and several Great Barristers who one by one took him aside and claimed the credit for obtaining a place for him at Oxford. The party over, Pym lay wakefully in his fourposter listening to the expensive slamming of car doors.

"You did a fine job out there in Switzerland, son," said Rick from the dark where he had been standing for some while. "You fought a good fight. It's been noticed. Enjoy your dinner?"

"It was really good."

"A lot of people said to me, 'Rickie,' they said, 'you've got to get that boy back. Those foreigners will make a wh.o.r.e of him.' You know what I said to them?"

"What did you say to them?"

"I said I had faith in you. Have you got faith in me, son?"

"Ma.s.ses."

"What do you think of the house?"

"It's wonderful," said Pym.

"It's yours. It's in your name. I bought it from the Duke of Devons.h.i.+re."

"Thank you very much, anyway."

"n.o.body can ever take it away from you, son. You can be twenty. You can be fifty. Where your old man is, that's home. Did you talk to Maxie Moore at all?"

"I don't think I did."

"The fellow who scored the winning goal for a.r.s.enal against Spurs? Go on. Of course you did. What did you think of Blottsie?"

"Which one was he?"

"G. W. Blott? One of the most famous names in the retail grocery world you'll ever meet. That marvellous dignity. He'll be a lord one day. So will you. What do you think of Sylvia?"

Pym recalled a bulky, middle-aged woman in blue with an aristocratic smile that could have been the bubbly.

"She's nice," he said cautiously.

Rick seized on the word as if he had been hunting for it half his life. "Nice. That's what she is. She's a d.a.m.ned nice woman with two first-cla.s.s husbands to her credit."

"She's really attractive, even for my age."

"Did you get yourself involved out there? There's nothing can't be put right in this world by good pals."

"Just the odd affair. Nothing serious."

"No woman's ever going to come between us, son. Once those Oxford girls know who your old man is, they'll be after you like a pack of wolves. Promise you'll keep yourself clean."

"I promise."

"And learn your law as if your life depended on it? You're being paid, remember."

"I promise."

"Well, then."

The stealthy weight of Rick's body landed like a sixteen-stone cat at Pym's side. He pulled Pym's head towards his own until their two cheeks were pressed stubble to stubble. His fingers found the fatty parts of Pym's chest under his pyjama top and kneaded them. He wept. Pym wept too, thinking again of Axel.

The next day Pym moved hastily into his college, claiming a variety of urgent reasons for going up two weeks early. Declining the services of Mr. Cudlove, he travelled by bus and gazed in mounting wonder on flowing hills and mown cornfields glowing in the autumn sunlight. The bus pa.s.sed through country towns and villages, down lanes of russet beech trees and dancing hedgerows, till slowly the golden stone of Oxford replaced the Buckinghams.h.i.+re brick, the hills flattened and the city's spires lifted into the thickening rays of afternoon. He dismounted, thanked the driver, and drifted through the enchanted streets, asking his way at every corner, forgetting, asking again, not caring. Girls in bell skirts skimmed past him on their bicycles. Dons in billowing gowns clutched their mortarboards against the wind; bookshops beckoned to him like houses of delight. He was lugging a suitcase but it weighed no more than a hat. The college porter said staircase five, across the Chapel Quad. He climbed the winding wooden stairs until he saw his name written on an old oak door: M. R. Pym. He pushed the door and saw darkness and another door beyond. He pushed the second door and closed the first. He found the switch and closed the second door on his whole life till now. I am safe inside the city walls. n.o.body will find me, n.o.body will recruit me. He tripped over a case of legal tomes. A vaseful of orchids wished him "G.o.dspeed, son, from your best pal." A Harrods invoice debited them to the newest Pym consortium.

University was a conventional sort of place in those days, Tom. You would have a good laugh at the way we dressed and talked and the things we put up with, though we were the blessed of the earth. They shut us in at night and let us out in the morning. They gave us girls for tea but not for dinner and G.o.d knows not for breakfast. The college scouts doubled as the Dean's Joes and ratted on us if we broke the rules. Our parents had won the war--or most people's had--and since we couldn't beat them our best revenge was to imitate them. Some of us had done national service. The rest of us dressed like officers anyway, hoping no one would notice the difference. With his first cheque, Pym bought a dark blue blazer with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons. With his second, a pair of cavalry twill trousers and a blue tie with crowns that radiated patriotism. After that there was a moratorium because the third cheque took a month to clear. Pym polished his brown shoes, sported a handkerchief in his sleeve, and groomed his hair like a gentleman's. And when Sefton Boyd, who was a year ahead of him, feasted him in the exalted Gridiron Club, Pym made such strides with the language that in no time he was talking it like a native, referring to his inferiors as Charlies, and to our own lot as the Chaps, and p.r.o.nouncing bad things Harry Awful, and vulgar things Poggy, and good things Fairly Decent.

"Where did you pick up that Vincent's tie, by the by?" Sefton Boyd asked him kindly enough as they sauntered down the Broad for a game of shove-ha'penny with some Charlies at the Trinity pub. "Didn't know you were a boxing blue in your spare time."

Pym said he had admired it in the window of a shop called Hall Brothers in the High Street.

"Well, put it on ice for a bit, I should. You can always get it out again when they elect you." Carelessly he put a hand on Pym's shoulder. "And while you're about it, get your scout to sew some ordinary b.u.t.tons on that jacket. Don't want people thinking you're the Pretender to the Hungarian throne, do we?"

Once more Pym embraced everything, loved everything, stretched every sinew to excel. He joined the societies, paid more subscriptions than there were clubs, became college secretary of everything from the Philatelists to the Euthanasians. He wrote sensitive articles for university journals, lobbied distinguished speakers, met them at the railway station, dined them at the society's expense and brought them safely to empty lecture halls. He played college rugger, college cricket, rowed in his college eight, got drunk in college bar and was by turn rootlessly cynical towards society and stalwartly British and protective of it, depending on whom he happened to be with. He threw himself afresh upon the German muse and scarcely faltered when he discovered that at Oxford she was about five hundred years older than she had been in Bern, and that anything written within living memory was unsound. But he quickly overcame his disappointment. This is quality, he reasoned. This is academia. In no time he was immersing himself in the garbled texts of mediaeval minstrels with the same energy that, in an earlier life, he had bestowed on Thomas Mann. By the end of his first term he was an enthusiastic student of Middle and Old High German. By the end of his second he could recite the Hildebrandslied and intone Bishop Ulfila's Gothic translation of the Bible in his college bar to the delight of his modest court. By the middle of his third he was romping in the Parna.s.sian fields of comparative and putative philology, Where youthful creativity has ever had its fling. And when he found himself briefly transported into the perilous modernisms of the seventeenth century, he was pleased to be able to report, in a twenty-page a.s.sault on the upstart Grimmelshausen, that the poet had marred his work with popular moralising and undermined his validity by fighting on both sides in the Thirty Years' War. As a final swipe he suggested that Grimmelshausen's obsession with false names cast doubt upon his authors.h.i.+p.

I shall stay here for ever, he decided. I shall become a don and be hero to my pupils. To entrench this ambition he worked up a selective stammer and a self-denying smile, and at night sat long hours at his desk keeping himself awake on Nescafe. When daylight came he ventured downstairs unshaven so that all might see the lines of study etched upon his eager face. It was on one such morning that he was surprised to find a case of vintage port waiting for him, accompanied by a note from the Regius Professor of Law:"Dear Mr. Pym, "Yesterday, Messrs. Harrods delivered the enclosed to me, together with a charming letter from your father which appears to commend you to me as my pupil. While it is not my habit to turn away such generosity, I fear that the gesture is better directed to my colleague in the Modern Languages school, since I understand from your Senior Tutor that you are reading German."For half the day, Pym did not know where to put himself. He turned up his collar, wandered miserably in Christ Church Meadows, cut his tutorial for fear of being arrested and wrote letters to Belinda who was working as an unpaid secretary to a London charity. In the afternoon he sat in a dark cinema. In the evening, still in despair, he carted his guilty parcel to Balliol, determined to tell Sefton Boyd the whole story. But by the time he got there he had thought of a better version.

"Some rich s.h.i.+t in Merton is trying to get me to go to bed with him," he protested, in the tone of healthy exasperation he had been practising all the way to the gates. "He sent me a Harry great case of port to buy me over."

If Sefton Boyd doubted him he did not let it show.

Between them they carried their booty to the Gridiron Club where six of them drank it at a sitting, fitfully toasting Pym's virginity till morning. A few days later Pym was elected a member. When the vacation came he took a job selling carpets at a shop in Watford. A lawyers' vacation course, he told Rick. Similar to the holiday seminars he had attended in Switzerland. In reply Rick sent him a five-page homily, warning him against airy-fairy intellectuals, and a cheque for fifty pounds that bounced.

A summer term was devoted entirely to women. Pym had never been so in love. He swore his love to every girl he met, he was so anxious to overcome what he a.s.sumed would be their poor opinion of him. In intimate cafes, on park benches or strolling beside the Isis on glorious afternoons, Pym held their hands and stared into their puzzled eyes and told them everything he had ever dreamed of hearing. If he felt awkward today with the one, he swore he would feel better tomorrow with the next, for women of his own age and intelligence were a novelty to him and he became disconcerted when they did not a.s.sume a subordinate position. If he felt awkward with all of them he wrote to Belinda, who never failed to reply. His love-talk was never duplicated; he was not a cynic. To one he spoke of his ambitions to return to the Swiss stage, where he had been such a runaway success. She should learn German and come with him, he said, they would act together. To another he painted himself as a poet of the futile and described his persecution at the hands of the murderous Swiss police.

"But I thought they were so terrifically neutral and humane!" she cried, appalled by his descriptions of the bearings he had received before being marched over the border into Austria.

"Not if you're different," Pym said grimly. "Not if you refuse to conform with the bourgeois norm. Those Swissies have two laws that really matter out there. Thou shalt not be poor and thou shalt not be foreign. I was both."

"You've really been through it," she said. "It's fantastic. I haven't done anything at all."

And to a third he portrayed himself as a novelist of the tortured life, with work that he had yet to show his publishers, all stashed away in an old filing cabinet at home.

One day Jemima came. Her mother had sent her to an Oxford secretarial college to learn typing and go to dances. She was long-legged and distraught like someone always late. She was more beautiful than ever.

"I love you," Pym told her, handing her bits of fruitcake in his room. "Wherever I was, whatever I was having to endure, I loved you all the time."

"But what were you having to endure?" Jemima asked.

For Jemima an extra kind of specialness was needed. Pym's reply took him by surprise. Afterwards, he decided that it had been lying in wait inside him and leapt out before he could prevent it. "It was for England," he said. "I'm lucky to be alive. If I tell anyone about it they'll kill me."

"Why ever will they do that?"

"It's secret. I swore never to tell."

"Then why are you telling me?"

"I love you. I had to do awful things to people. You can't imagine what it's like, carrying secrets like that alone."

As Pym heard himself saying this he remembered something that Axel had told him shortly before the end: There is no such thing as a life that does not return.

The next time he met Jemima, he described a brave girl he had worked with when he was doing his terribly secret work. He had in mind one of those muddy war photographs of beautiful women who win George Medals for being parachuted weekly into France.

"Her name was Wendy. We did secret missions into Russia together. We became partners."

"Did you do it with her?"

"It wasn't that kind of relations.h.i.+p. It was professional."

Jemima was fascinated. "You mean she was a tart?"

"Of course she wasn't. She was a secret agent like me."

"Have you ever done it with a tart?"

"No."

"Kenneth has. He's done it with two. One each end."

Each end of what? thought Pym, in rampant indignation. Me a secret hero, and she talks to me about s.e.x! In his despair he wrote Belinda a twelve-pager about his platonic love for her, but by the time her reply came he had forgotten the context of his feelings. Sometimes Jemima came uninvited, wearing no make-up and her hair shoved behind her ears. She lay on the bed and read Jane Austen on her tummy, while she kicked a bare leg in the air or yawned.

"You can put your hand up my skirt if you like,'* she said.

"I'm fine, thanks," said Pym.

Too polite to disturb her further he sat in the chair and read A Handbook of Old High German Literature till she made a grimace and left. For a while after that, she didn't visit him. He kept glimpsing her in cinemas of which there were seven so he got round them nicely in a week. Always she was with another man and once, like her brother, she had two. Once during this same period Belinda came to stay with her, but told Pym she should keep away from him because it wasn't fair on Jem. Pym's need to impress Jemima now took on wild dimensions. He ate his meals alone and looked haunted, but she still didn't come to him. One evening, pa.s.sing a brick wall, he deliberately dashed his knuckles against it until they bled, then hurried to her expensive lodgings in Merton Street, where he found her drying her long hair before the electric fire.

"Who've you been fighting?" she asked as she dabbed on iodine.

"I can't talk about it. Some things never go away."

Laying the fire on its back she cooked him toast while she went on brus.h.i.+ng her hair and watching him through the strands.

"If Z were a man," she said, "I wouldn't waste my energy hitting anybody. I wouldn't play rugger, I wouldn't box, I wouldn't spy for people. I wouldn't even ride. I'd save everything I had for f.u.c.king, again and again and again."

Pym departed, once more smouldering at the frivolity of those who failed to perceive his higher calling."Dearest Bel, "Is there nothing you can do for Jemima? I simply cannot bear to see her go to the devil like this."Did Pym know that he had tempted G.o.d? Certainly I know it now, this blowy night beside the sea as I try to write it so many years later. Whom else but his Maker was he provoking as he spun his stupid stories? Pym was calling down his fete on himself as surely as if he had begged for it by name in his prayers, and G.o.d dealt him the favour as G.o.d often did. Pym's fantasy version of himself waited out there like a decoy that no celestial eye could overlook, and the divine response was lying in his cubbyhole in the porter's lodge not twenty-four hours later when he came down to see who loved him this Sat.u.r.day morning before breakfast. Ah! A letter! Blue in colour! Can it be perhaps from Jemima? Or is it from the virtuous Belinda, Jemima's friend? Is it from Lalage, perhaps-- or Polly, or Prudence, or Anne? The answer, Jack, was none of them. It came, like so many bad things, from you. You were writing to Pym from Oman, care of the Trucial-Oman Scouts, though the stamp was true-blue British and the postmark Whitehall, because it had come to England by bag.

"My dear Magnus, "As you will see from the letter heading, I have abandoned the fleshpots of Bern for harsher fare and am presently attached to the Military Mission here, where life is certainly a little more exciting! I still do the odd spot of church work, and I must say some of these Arabs sing pretty nicely. The purpose of my letter is twofold.

"1. To wish you all the best with your studies and to repeat my interest in your progress.

"2. To tell you that I have pa.s.sed your name to our sister church back in the old country, since I gather they are a bit short of tenors in your region. So if you should chance to hear from a chap called Rob Gaunt, who tells you he is a friend of mine, I trust you will allow him to buy you a meal on my behalf, and make sure he does you proud! Incidentally, he is a Lieutenant Colonel, nominally a Gunner."Pym had not long to wait, though every minute seemed a year. On the following Tuesday, returning from a testing tutorial on the theory of Ablaut, he found a second envelope waiting for him. This one was brown and of exceptional thickness, of a type I never saw in later years. Faint lines ran across it, giving it the appearance of corrugated cardboard though the texture was oily and smooth. There was no crest on the back, no address of sender. Even the manufacturer was secret. Yet Pym's name and address were immaculately typed, the stamp perfectly centred, and when he probed at the flap in the safety of his room, he discovered that it was stuck down with a rubberised bonding, which smelt of acid drops and parted in sticky threads like chewing gun. Inside lay a single sheet of thick white paper that was not so much folded as ironed. Prising it open the great spy observed at once the absence of a watermark. The type was large, as if for the partially sighted, the alignment faultless:Box 777 The War Office Whitehall S.W. 1My dear Pym, Our mutual friend Jack tells me excellent things about you and I would greatly like the opportunity to get to know you, as there are important matters of mutual interest that you might help us out with. Unfortunately I have a full programme at the moment, and shall be abroad by the time you receive this letter. I wonder therefore whether as an interim measure you would care to have a conversation with a colleague of mine who will be down your way on Monday of next week. If you are willing, why not take the bus to Burford and be in the saloon bar of the Monmouth Arms a little before midday? For ease of recognition he will be carrying a copy of Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain, and I suggest you provide yourself with a Financial Times, which has a distinctive pink. His name is Michael, and, like Jack, he had a valuable war. I have no doubt the two of you will hit it off famously.

With all good wishes, Yours sincerely, R. Gaunt (Lt. Col., R.A., ret.)For the next five days Pym abandoned work. He paced the back streets of the city, turning in his tracks to see who was following him. He bought a sheath knife and practised throwing it at trees until the blade broke. He wrote a Will and sent it to Belinda. When he entered his rooms he did so with circ.u.mspection, never descending or climbing his staircase without first listening for unfamiliar sounds. Where should he hide the secret letters? They were far too precious to throw away. Remembering something he had read, he gouged out the centre of his brand-new copy of Kluge's Etymological Dictionary to make a nest for them. From then on, his eviscerated Kluge became the first thing his eye fell upon when he returned from his sorties. To buy his copy of the Financial Times without attracting notice, he walked all the way to Littlemore but the village post office had never heard of it. By the time he returned to Oxford everything was shut. After a sleepless night he made a dawn raid on the Junior Common Room before anyone was up, and stole a back number from the racks.

Two buses went to Burford on weekday mornings but the second left him only twenty minutes to find the Monmouth Arms, so he took the first and got there at nine-forty, only to discover that the bus dropped him at the door. In his overalert condition the inn sign with its bold lettering struck him as a breach of national security and he strode past it with averted eyes. The rest of the morning crawled by on feet of lead. By eleven o'clock his notebook was already crammed with the number of every parked car in Burford, as well as copious notes on suspicious pa.s.sers-by. By two minutes to twelve, duly seated in the saloon bar of the Monmouth Arms, he was seized by panic. Was he in the Monmouth Arms or the Golden Pheasant? Had Colonel Gaunt said the Horn of Plenty? In the furnace of Pym's mind these possibilities fused themselves into a brilliant and appalling alloy. He stepped into the forecourt and covertly reread the inn sign before hastening to the outdoor gentlemen's to throw cold water in his face. Standing at a stall he heard the sound of wind breaking and divined a bulky figure in a navy-blue mackintosh standing at his side. The body was tilted backwards and sideways, the eyes were cast upward in agony. For a frightful moment Pym feared the man was shot, until he realised that these contortions were caused by the difficulties of retaining a thick volume wedged under his armpit. Unable to perform, Pym b.u.t.toned himself, hurried back to the saloon and, laying Financial Times on the bar, ordered himself a bitter.

"Make that two, will you, sport?" a breezy voice told the barman. "Uncle's in the chair today. How are you? What about over there in the corner? Don't forget your paper."

I won't give you much of our courts.h.i.+p, Jack. When two people have decided to go to bed with each other, what pa.s.ses between them before the event is a matter of form rather than of content. Nor do I remember very clearly what justifications we cooked up, for Michael was a shy man who had spent most, of his life at sea, and his rare s.n.a.t.c.hes of philosophy came out of him like escaping steam signals while he pummelled his mouth with a check handkerchief. "Somebody's got to dredge the drains, o' boy--fire with fire, only way. Unless we want the b.u.g.g.e.rs to steal the s.h.i.+p from under us, which I don't, thank you." This last being a tensely underplayed statement of personal faith, which he at once smothered with a swig of beer. Michael was the first of your surrogates, Jack, so let him do duty for the rest. After Michael, if I remember, came David, and after David an Alan, and after Alan I forget. Pym would see no flaw in any of them. Or if he did, he translated it at once into a fiendishly clever piece of deception. Today of course I know the poor souls for what they were: members of that large, lost family of the British unprofessional cla.s.ses that seems to wander by right between the secret services, the automobile clubs and the richer private charities. Not bad men by any means. Not dishonest men. Not stupid. But men who see the threat to their cla.s.s as synonymous with the threat to England and never wandered far enough to know the difference. Modest men, practical, filling in their expense accounts and collecting their salaries, and impressing their Joes with their quiet expertise beneath the banter. Yet still, in their secret hearts, nouris.h.i.+ng themselves on the same illusions that in those days nourished Pym. And needing their Joes to help them do it. Worried men, touched with an odour of pub meals and club squash, and a habit of looking round them while they paid, as if wondering whether there was a better way to live. And Pym, as he was pa.s.sed from hand to hand, did his best to honour and obey each one of them. He believed in them; he cheered them with witty stories from his ever-increasing store. He strained to give them treats and make their day exciting. And when it was time for them to go he was always careful to have saved for them some last nugget of information to take home to their parents, even if he sometimes had to make it up.

"How's the colonel?" Pym ventured one day, belatedly recalling that Michael was still officially the stand-in for a Colonel Gaunt.

"Not a question I ever ask, personally, old boy," said Michael and to Pym's surprise began snapping his fingers as if he were summoning a dog.

Did Rob Gaunt exist? Pym never met him and later, when he was in a better position to ask, he could find n.o.body who would admit to having heard of him.Now the brown envelopes flow in thick and fast, often two or three a week. The college porter grows so used to them he chucks them into Pym's pigeonhole without reading the address and Pym has to gouge out the centre of another dictionary to accommodate them. Always they contain instructions, and sometimes they contain small sums of cash, which the Michaels call his hard-lying money. Better still is Pym's float for operational expenses, which is kept at a fabulous twenty pounds: to entertaining secretary O. U. Hegelian Society, seven and ninepence... contribution to Peace in Korea campaign, five s.h.i.+llings... bottle of sherry for Society of Cultural Relations with the USSR get-together, fourteen s.h.i.+llings... coach trip to Cambridge for goodwill visit to C.U. Branch members, plus entertainment, one pound fifteen s.h.i.+llings and ninepence. At first Pym is timid of these claims, fearing that by making them he is straining his masters' indulgence. The colonel will find someone cheaper, someone richer, someone who knows that gentlemen do not count the cost. But slowly he comes to realise that, far from displeasing his masters, his expenditures are taken as evidence of his industry."Dear Old Friend," wrote Michael--observing his own dictum that names must be avoided lest the enemy intercept our correspondence-- "Eleven. Thanks for your Eight safely to hand, a pearl as usual. I took the liberty of pa.s.sing your rendering of the clans' latest choral to our lord and master upstairs and I haven't seen the old boy laugh so much since his aunt caught her left doodah in the you've-got-it. Brilliant and informative, dear sir, and be advised that the great man himself remarked upon your perseverance. Now to the usual shopping list.

"1. Are you certain that our distinguished clan treasurer spells his name with a Z and not an S? The Doomsday Book contains an Abraham S, mathematician, late of Manchester Grammar School who fits the bill, but definitely no Z. (Though it's always possible of course that a gentleman of his tartan spells it both ways anyway...) Don't force it, as the Bishop said, but if Lady Luck pushes the answer your way, let us know....

"2. Please keep your Eversharp ear open for talk about our gallant Scottish brethren getting up a delegation to attend the Sarajevo Youth Festival in July. The powers that be are getting unaccountably miffed about gents who accept large government grants only to oil off abroad and spit on said government's shadow.

"3. Regarding the distinguished visiting vocalist from Leeds University who is slated to address the clan on March 1st, do please keep an eye and an ear open for his faithful spouse, Magdalene (G.o.d bless us!), who by repute is quite as musical as her old man, but prefers to keep her head down owing to her delicate scientific interests. All comments gleefully received..."Why did Pym do it, Tom? In the beginning was the deed. Not the motive, least of all the word. It was his own choice. It was his own life. No one forced him. Anywhere along the line, or right at the start of it, he could have yelled no and surprised himself. He never did. It took another ten university generations before he threw in the sponge, and by then the lines were drawn for good, all the lines. Why chuck away his freedom and good luck, you will ask, his good looks and good humour and good heart, just when they were coming into their own at last? Why befriend a bunch of grimy and unhappy people of alien background and mentality, press himself upon them, all smiling and obliging--because, believe me, there was no glamour to the university Left by then; Berlin and Korea had put paid to that for good--merely in order to be able to betray them? Why sit whole nights away in back rooms among sullen girls from the provinces who scowled and ate nut cutlets and took Firsts in Economics, in order to profess a view of the world that he had to learn as he went along, twisting his mind inside out, killing himself on cheap cigarettes while pa.s.sionately agreeing that everything that was fun in life was a d.a.m.n shame? Why do a Father Murgo on them, offering his bourgeois origins for their condemnation, abasing himself, revelling in their disapproval, yet gaining no absolution from it--only to rush off and bang the scales down the other way in a gush of embellished reports of the night's proceedings? I should know. I have done it and I have made others do it, and I was never less than cogent in my persuasion. For England. So that the free world can sleep safely in its bed at night while the secret watchers guard her in their rugged care. For love. To be a good chap, a good soldier.

Abie Ziegler's name, whether with a Z or an S, was written, you may be sure, in capitals on every left wing poster in every college lodge of the university. Abie was a publicity-crazed pipe-smoking s.e.x maniac about four feet high. His one ambition in life was to be noticed and he saw the depleted Left as a fast lane to this end. There were a dozen painless ways in which Michael and his people could have found out whatever they wanted about Abie, but Pym had to be their man. The great spy would have walked all the way to Manchester just to look up Siegler or Ziegler in the phone book, such was the drive with which he had flung himself into his secret mission. This is not betrayal, he told himself when he was being the Michaels' man; this is the real thing. These strident men and women with their college scarves and funny accents who refer to me as our bourgeois friend are my own countrymen planning to upset our social order.

For his country, or whatever he called it, Pym addressed envelopes and memorised the addresses, played steward at public meetings, marched in dispirited processions, and afterwards wrote down whoever came. For his country he took any menial job going if it earned him favour. For his country or for love or for the Michaels, he stood at street corners late at night, offering unreadable Marxist pamphlets to pa.s.sers-by who told him he ought to be in bed. Then dumped the surplus copies in a ditch and put his own money into the Party kitty because he was too proud to reclaim it from the Michaels. And if occasionally, as he sat up still later writing his meticulous reports on tomorrow's revolutionists, the ghost of Axel materialised before him and Axel's cry of "Pym you b.a.s.t.a.r.d where are you" whispered in his ear, Pym had only to wave him away with a combination of the Michaels' logic and his own: "You were my country's enemy even if you were my friend. You were unsound. You had no papers. Sorry."

"h.e.l.l are you running with all those Reds for?" Sefton Boyd asked drowsily one day, face downward in the gra.s.s. They had driven out to G.o.dstow in his sports car for lunch, and were lying in a meadow above the weir. "Somebody told me they'd seen you at the Cole Group. You made a p.i.s.s-awful speech about the madness of war. h.e.l.l's the Cole Group when it's at home?"

"It's a discussion group run by G.D.H.Cole. It explores avenues of Socialism."

"Are they queer?"

"Not that I know of."

"Well, explore somebody else's avenue. I also saw your nasty name on a poster. College secretary of the Socialist Club. I mean, Christ, you're supposed to be in the Grid."

"I like to see all sides," said Pym.

"They're not all sides. We are. They're one side. They've pinched half Europe and they're a band of absolute s.h.i.+ts. Take my words for it."

"I'm doing it for my country," Pym said. "It's secret."

"b.o.l.l.o.c.ks," said Sefton Boyd.

"It's true. I get instructions from London every week. I'm in the Secret Service."