A Perfect Spy

So far so good, but tonight is our final curtain and Rick has worked up something special. Daringly he turns his back to the punters and addresses his faithful supporters ranged behind him on the dais. He is about to thank us. Watch. “First my darling Sylvia, without whom nothing could have been accomplished — thank you, Sylvia, thank you! Let’s have a big hand for Sylvia my Queen!” The punters oblige with enthusiasm. Sylvia pulls the gracious smile for which she is retained. Pym is expecting to be called next but he is not. Rick’s blue gaze has steel in it tonight, the glow is on him. More voice and less breath to his bombast. Shorter sentences but the champ throws them harder. He thanks the Chairman of the Gulworth Liberal Party and his very lovely lady wife — Marjory, my dear, don’t be shy, where are you? — He thanks our miserable Liberal agent, an unbeliever called Donald Somebody, see the caption, who since the court’s arrival on his territory has retired into a fuming sulk from which he has only tonight emerged. He thanks our transport lady whom Mr. Muspole claims to have favoured in the snooker room, and a Miss Somebody Else who made sure Your Candidate was never once late for a meeting — laughter — though Morrie Washington swears she isn’t safe to be sat with in the back. He passes “to these other gallant and faithful helpers of mine.” Morrie and Syd leer like a pair of reprieved murderers from the back row, Mr. Muspole and Major Maxwell-Cavendish prefer to scowl. It is there in the photograph, Tom, look for yourself. Next to Morrie roosts an inebriated radio comedian whose failing reputation Rick has contrived to harness to our campaign, just as in the last weeks he has wheeled in witless cricketers and titled owners of hotel chains and other so-called Liberal personalities, marching them through town like prisoners and tossing them back to London when they have served their brief span of usefulness.

Now take another look at Magnus seated on the right hand of his maker. Rick arrives at him last and every word he shouts at him is replete with secret knowledge and reproach. “He won’t tell you himself so I will. He’s too modest. This boy of mine here is one of the finest students of law this country has yet seen and not only this country either. He could hold this speech in five different languages and do it better than I can in any one of them.” Laughter. Cries of “Shame!” and “No, no.” “But that never stopped him from working his feet off for his old man throughout this campaign. Magnus, you’ve been crackerjack, old son, and your old man’s best pal. Here’s to you!”

But the dinning ovation does nothing to alleviate Pym’s anguish. In the lonely reality of being Pym and listening to Rick resume his speech, his heart is beating in terror while he counts off the clichés and waits for the explosion that will destroy the candidate and his bold tissue of deceptions forevermore. It will blow the wagon roof and its gilded bearings into the night sky. It will smash the very stars that provide the grand finale of Rick’s speech.

“People will say to you,” cries Rick, on a note of ever-mounting humility, “and they’ve said it to me — they’ve stopped me in the street — touched my arm—‘Rick,’ they say, ‘what is Liberalism except a package of ideals? We can’t eat ideals, Rick,’ they say. ‘Ideals don’t buy us a cup of tea or a nice touch of English lamb chop, Rick, old boy. We can’t put our ideals in the collection box. We can’t pay for our son’s education with ideals. We can’t send him out into the world to take his place in the highest law courts of the land with nothing but a few ideals in his pocket. So what’s the point, Rick?’ they say to me, ‘in this modern world of ours, of a party of ideals?’” The voice drops. The hand, till now so agitated, reaches out palm downward to cup the head of an invisible child. “And I say to them, good people of Gulworth, and I say to you too!” The same hand flies upward and points to Heaven as Pym in his sickly apprehension sees the ghost of Makepeace Watermaster leap from its pulpit and fill the Town Hall with a dismal glow. “I say this. Ideals are like the stars. We cannot reach them, but we profit by their presence!”