A Perfect Spy

“The football crowds. Setting such a bad example to the foreigners. You’d never have let that happen, would you, Mr. Canterbury?”

“Of course I wouldn’t.”

Warm orange juice from the bottle, oh glory! Chalky water from the tap, where else would you find it? He sat with her for an hour, bubbling on about the charms of Naples, before he returned to his task of saving the country.

* * *

How Rick won the peace I’ll never rightly know, Tom, but win it he did, overnight as usual, and none of us will ever have to worry again, son, there’s plenty for everyone and your old man’s made it. In the zeal of the new prosperity father and son took up the profession of country gentleman. With victory in Europe still wet on the hoardings the newly adolescent Pym bought himself a charcoal Harrods suit with its coveted long trousers, a black tie and a stiff white collar, all on the account, and steeled himself to have Sefton Boyd’s promised fish-hooks poked through his earlobes. Rick meanwhile in his immense maturity acquired a twenty-acre mansion in Ascot with white fencing down the drive, and a row of tweed suits louder than the Admiral’s, and a pair of mad red setters, and a pair of two-toned country shoes for walking them, and a pair of Purdey shotguns for his portrait with them, and a mile-long bar to while away his rustic evenings over bubbly and roulette, and a bronze bust of TP’s head on a plinth in the hall beside a larger one of his own. A platoon of displaced Poles was hauled in to staff the place, a new mother wore high heels on the lawn, bawled at the servants and gave Pym tips on the hygiene and diction of the upper classes. A Bentley appeared and was not changed or hidden for several weeks though a Pole with a grudge contrived to fill it with water from a hose-pipe through a crack in the window and drench Rick’s dignity when he opened the door next morning. Mr. Cudlove got a mulberry uniform and a cottage in the grounds where Ollie grew geraniums, sang The Mikado, and painted the kitchen for his nerves. Livestock and a surly cowman supplied the character of a farm, for Rick had become a taxpayer which I know now marked the summit of his heroic struggle for liquidity: “It’s a damn shame, Maxie,” he declared proudly to a Major Maxwell-Cavendish who had been brought in to advise on matters of the Turf. “Lord in Heaven if a man can’t enjoy the fruits of his labours these days what the devil did we fight the war for?” The major, who wore a tinted monocle, said “What indeed?” and pursed his lips into a holly leaf. And Pym, agreeing wholeheartedly, topped up the major’s glass. Still waiting to be sent to school, he was going through a faceless period and would have topped up anything.