A Perfect Spy

“Son. It’s time for you to set those fine feet of yours on the hard road of becoming Lord Chief Justice and a credit to your old man. There’s been too much lazy fare about and you’re part of it. Cudlove, look at his shirt. No man ever did business in a dirty shirt. Look at his hair. He’ll be an airy-fairy before you can say Jack Robinson. It’s boarding-school for you, son, and God bless you and God bless me too.”

One more bear-hug, a final staunching of the tears, one noble handshake for the absent cameras as, dartsboard at the ready, the great man rode away to war. Pym watched him out of sight, then stealthily climbed the stairs to the provisional State Apartments. The door was unlocked. He smelt woman and talc. The double bed was in disarray. He pulled the pigskin briefcase from beneath it, tipped out the contents and, as he had often done before, puzzled over unintelligible files and correspondence. The Admiral’s country suit, donned for a few hours and still warm, was hanging in the wardrobe. He poked in the pockets. The green filing cabinet, more chipped than ever, lurked in its habitual darkness. Why does he always keep it in cupboards? Pym tugged vainly at the locked drawers. Why does it travel separately from everything as if it had a disease?

“Looking for money, are we, Titch?” a woman’s voice asked him, from the bathroom doorway. It was Doris, typist elect and good scout. “Spare yourself the trouble, I would. It’s all tick with your dad. I’ve looked.”

“He told me he’d left me a bar of chocolate in his room,” Pym replied resolutely, and continued delving while she watched.

“There’s three gross of army milk-and-nut sitting in the garage. Help yourself,” Doris advised. “Petrol coupons too, if you’re thirsty.”

“It was a special kind of bar,” said Pym.

* * *

I have never fathomed the machinations that sent Pym and Lippsie to the same school. Were they infiltrated singly or as a package, the one to be taught, the other to supply her labour in payment? I suspect as a package but have no proof beyond a general knowledge of Rick’s methods. All his life, Rick maintained a work-force of devoted women whom he regularly discarded and revived. When they were not required in the court they were put out to work for him in the great world, easing his crusade with remittances they could ill afford, selling their jewellery for him, cashing their savings and lending their names to bank accounts from which Rick’s name was banned. But Lippsie had no jewellery and no credit with the banks. She had only her lovely body and her music and her brooding guilt, and a little English schoolboy who held her to the world. I suspect now that Rick had already read the warning signs collecting in her, and decided to give her to me to look after. Nevertheless there was profit to our partnership and Rick was nothing if not an opportunist.

If Pym possessed any learning by the time he presented himself to Mr. Grimble’s country academy for the sons of gentlemen, then he owed it to Lippsie and not to any of the dozen or so infant schools, Bible schools and kindergartens scattered along the hectic road of Rick’s progress. Lippsie taught him writing, and to this day I write a German “t” and put a stroke through my small “z”s. She taught him spelling, and it was always a great joke between them that they could not remember how many “d”s there were in the English version of “address,” and to this day I can’t be sure of the answer until I have written out the German first. Whatever else Pym knew, apart from meaningless passages of the Scriptures, was contained in her cardboard suitcase, for she never came to see him anywhere without whisking him to her room and foisting some piece of geography or history on him, or making him play scales on her flute.

“See, Magnus, without informations we are nothing. But with informations we can go anywhere in the world, we are like turtles, our houses always on our backs. You learn to paint, you can paint anywhere. A sculptor, a musician, a painter, they need no permits. Only their heads. Our world must be inside our heads. That is the only safe way. Now you play Lippsie a nice tune.”