A Perfect Spy

“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.”