A Perfect Spy

In my memory, however, she is anything but no trace. She is a tall, soft-haired, vital girl with large scared eyes and an air of flounce about her stride, nothing happening slowly. And I remember — it must have been a summer holiday in some house where we were temporarily sheltering — I remember how Pym longed more than anything to see her naked, and devoted his waking hours to contriving it. Which Lippsie must have guessed somehow for one afternoon she suggested he share her bath with her to save hot water. She even measured the water with her hand: patriots were allowed five inches and Lippsie was never less than a patriot. She stooped, naked, and let me watch her while she put her hand’s span in the tub, I’m sure she did, and brought it out again: “See, Magnus!”—showing me the wet spread hand—“how we may be sure we do not help the Germans.”

Or so I fervently believe, though try as I may I cannot to this day remember what she looked like. And I know that in the same house or one like it her room was opposite to Pym’s own across a corridor, and that it contained her cardboard suitcase and photographs of her bearded brother and solemn sisters in black hats and silver frames which stood like tiny polished gravestones on her dressing-table. And there was the room where she screamed at Rick and warned him she would rather die than be a thief, and where Rick laughed his brown rich laugh, the one that went on longer than it needed and made everything all right again until next time. And though I do not remember a single lesson, she must have taught Pym German because years later when he came to learn the language formally he discovered that he possessed a repository of information about her—Aaron war mein Bruder. Mein Vater war Architekt—all in the same past tense to which she herself by then belonged. He also realised still later in life that when she had called him her Mönchlein she had meant her “little monk” and was referring to the hard path of Martin Luther—“little monk, go your own way”—whereas at the time he had thought she had cast him as the organ-grinder’s tethered monkey and Rick as his organ-grinder. The discovery raised his self-respect no end, until he realised she had been telling him that he must get along without her.

And I know she was in Paradise with us because without Lippsie there was no Paradise. Paradise was a golden land between Gerrard’s Cross and the sea, where Dorothy wore an angora pullover for her ironing and a blue ulster for her shopping. Paradise was where Rick and Dorothy fled after their runaway marriage, a Metroland of new beginnings and exciting futures, but I don’t remember a day of it without Lippsie flouncing somewhere at the edge, or telling me what was right and wrong in a voice I didn’t mind. One hour eastward by Bentley motorcar lay Town and in Town lay the West End and that was where Rick had his office; the office had a big tinted photograph of Granddad TP wearing his mayor’s necklace, and the office was what kept Rick late at night, which was the infant Pym’s best thing because he was allowed to climb into Dorothy’s bed and keep her warm, she was so small and shivery even to a child. Sometimes Lippsie stayed behind with us, sometimes she went to London with Rick because she had to qualify and, as I now understand, justify her own survival when so many of her kind were dead.

Paradise was a string of shiny racehorses that Syd called “neverwozzers” and a succession of even shinier Bentleys which, like the houses, wore out as fast as the credit they were bought on and had to be changed with thrilling rapidity for yet newer and more expensive models. Sometimes the Bentleys were so precious they had actually to be driven round the side of the house and hidden in the back garden for fear they might become tarnished by the gaze of the Unfaithful. At other times Pym drove them at a thousand miles an hour sitting on Rick’s lap, down sandy unmade roads lined with cement mixers, hammering the big deep horn at the builders while Rick shouted “How are you, boys?” and invited them all back to the house for a glass of bubbly. And Lippsie was there beside us in the passenger seat, straight as a coachman and as distant, until Rick chose to speak to her or make a joke. Then her smile was like holiday sunshine and she loved us both.