A Perfect Spy

“How charming. And do you like having grease up to your elbows?”

Pym said he didn’t mind grease either, actually, but by then he was being guided to a second window that gave on to spires and a lawn.

“I’ve a menial librarianship at the British Museum and a sort of third assistant clerkship to the House of Commons, which is the proletarian version of the Lords. I’ve bits and bobs in Kenya, Malaya, and the Sudan. I can do you nothing in India, they’ve taken it away from me. Do you like abroad or hate it?”

Pym said abroad was super, he had been to university in Bern. His interlocuter was puzzled. “I thought you went to university here.”

“Here too,” said Pym.

“Ah. Now do you like danger?”

“I love it, actually.”

“You poor boy. Don’t keep saying ‘actually.’ And will you give unquestioning allegiance to whoever is rash enough to employ you?”

“I will.”

“Will you adore your country right or wrong so help you God and the Tory Party?”

“I will again,” said Pym, laughing.

“Do you also believe that to be born British is to be born a winner in the great lottery of life?”

“Well, yes, to be honest, that too.”

“Then be a spy,” his interlocutor suggested and drew from his desk yet another application form and handed it to Pym. “Jack Brotherhood sends his love, and says why on earth haven’t you been in touch with him, and why won’t you have lunch with his nice recruiter?”

I could write whole essays for you, Tom, on the voluptuous pleasures of being interviewed. Of all the arts of affiliation Pym mastered, and throughout his life improved upon, the interview must stand in first place. We didn’t have Office trick-cyclists in those days, as your Uncle Jack likes to call them. We didn’t have anybody who wasn’t himself a citizen of the secret world, blessed with the unlined innocence of privilege. The nearest they had come to life’s experience was the war, and they saw the peace as its continuation by other means. Yet in the terms of the world outside their heads they had led lives so untested, so childlike and tender in their simplicities, so inward in their connections, that they required echelons of cut-outs to reach the society they honestly believed they were protecting. Pym sat before them, calm, reflective, resolute, modest. Pym composed his features in one mould after another, now of reverence, now of awe, zeal, passionate sincerity or spiritual good humour. He paraded pleasurable surprise when he heard that his tutors thought the world of him, and a stern-jawed pride on learning that the army loved him too. He modestly demurred or modestly boasted. He weeded out the half-believers from the believers and did not rest until he had converted the pack of them to paid-up life membership of the Pym supporters’ club.

“Now tell us about your father, will you, Pym?” said a man with a droopy moustache uncomfortably reminiscent of Axel’s. “Sounds a bit of a colourful sort of type to me.”

Pym smiled ruefully, sensing the mood. Pym delicately faltered before rallying.

“I’m afraid he’s a bit too colourful sometimes, sir,” he said amid a hubble-bubble of male laughter. “I don’t see a lot of him to be honest. We’re still friends, but I rather steer clear of him. I have to, actually.”

“Yes. Well, I don’t think we can hold you responsible for the sins of your old man, can we?” said the same questioner indulgently. “It’s you we’re interviewing, not your papa.”

How much did they know of Rick, or care? Even today I can only guess, for the question was never raised again and I am sure that in any formal way it went forgotten within days of Pym’s acceptance. English gentlemen, after all, do not discriminate against each other on the grounds of percentage, only of breeding. Occasionally they must have read of one of Rick’s more lurid collapses, and perhaps allowed themselves an amused smile. Here and there, presumably, word trickled down to them by way of their commercial contacts. But my suspicion is that Rick was an asset. A healthy streak of criminality in a young spy’s background never did him any harm, they reasoned. “Grown up in a hard school,” they told one another. “Could be useful.”

The last question of the interview and Pym’s answer echo for ever in my head. A military man in tweeds put it.

“Look here, young Pym,” he demanded, with a thrust of his bucolic head. “You’re by way of being a Czech buff. Speak their language a bit, know their people. What d’you say to these purges and arrests they’re having over there? Worry you?”

“I think the purges are quite appalling, sir. But they are to be expected,” said Pym, fixing his earnest gaze upon a distant, unreachable star.

“Why expected?” demanded the military man, as if nothing ought to be.

“It’s a rotten system. It’s superimposed on tribalism. It can only survive by the exercise of oppression.”

“Yes, yes. Granted. So what would you do about it—do?”

“In what capacity, sir?”

“As one of us, you fool. Officer of this service. Anyone can talk. We do.”