A Perfect Spy

How long you had been tracking Pym I don’t know. I’ll bet you don’t either. You liked the way he read the Lesson, you said, so you must have had your eye on him from at least before Christmas because it was an early Advent text. You seemed surprised when he told you he was studying at the university, so I guess your first enquiries were made before he enrolled there and you hadn’t topped them up. It was on Christmas Day after matins that Pym shook your hand for the first time. The church porch was like a crowded lift with everyone rattling umbrellas and making rah-rah English noises, and the diplomatic kids pelting each other with snowballs in the street. Pym was wearing his E. Weber jacket, and you, Jack, you were a tweedy, unscalable English mountain of twenty-four. In terms of war and peace the seven years between us were a generation, more like two. Much as they were with Axel, as a matter of fact; you both had those crucial years on me, still do.

Do you know what else you wore apart from your good brown suit? Your Airborne tie. Prancing silver-winged horses and crowned Britannias on a maroon field, congratulations. You never told me where you had been for it, but the reality as I now know it is no less impressive than my imaginings: with the Partisans in Yugoslavia and the Resistance in Czechoslovakia, behind the lines with the Long Range Desert Group in Africa and even, if I remember right, in Crete. You are an inch taller than I, but I remember as if it were yesterday how, as Pym grasped your great dry hand, that Airborne tie looked him in the eye. He lifted his head, he saw your rock jaw and your blue eyes — the ferocious bushy eyebrows even then — and he knew he was standing face to face with the character he was supposed to have become at all his schools, and sometimes in his fancy had: a straight-backed English brave of the officer class, the one who keeps his head when all about him are losing theirs. You wished him Happy Christmas and when you spoke your name he thought you were making a sort of Everyman’s joke to do with Christmas Day — you are Good Fellowship and I will be Brotherhood.

“No, no, old boy, it’s real,” you insisted with a laugh. “Why should a nice chap like me use a false name?”

Why indeed, when you had diplomatic cover? You invited him for a glass of sherry before lunch tomorrow, Boxing Day, and you said you would have sent him an invitation if you’d known his address, which was clever of you, because of course you knew it perfectly well: address, date of birth, education and all the other nonsense we imagine gives us ascendancy over those we seek to obtain. Then you did an amusing thing. You took an invitation card from your pocket and in the crammed porch while everyone went on woof-woofing you spun Pym round and, using his back to press on, wrote his name along the middle line and handed it to him: “Captain and Mrs. Jack Brotherhood request the pleasure.” You scratched out the “RSVP” to emphasise that the deal was done, and you scratched out the “Captain” to show what pals we were. “If you want to stay on afterwards you can help us eat up the cold turkey. Rough clothes,” you added. Pym watched you stride off through the rain exactly as he knew you had carried yourself through the gunfire of all the battlefields where you had triumphed single-handed over Jerry, while Pym was doing nothing braver than carve Sefton Boyd’s initials on the wall of the staff lavatory.

Next day he presented himself punctually at your little diplomatic house, and as he pressed the bell he read your visiting card framed in the panel above it. “Captain J. Brotherhood, Assistant Passport Officer, British Embassy, Bern.” You were married to Felicity in those days, you may remember. Adrian was six months old. Pym played with him for hours in order to impress you, a habit that soon became a feature of his dealings with the younger members of your trade. You questioned him in a perfectly agreeable way and, where you left off, Felicity as the good Secret Service squaw took over, God forgive her: “But what friends have you got, Magnus, you must be so lonely here?” she cried. “What do you do for fun, Magnus?” And was there much in the way of an extracurricular life at the university, for instance — she asked — political groups and so forth? Or was it all a bit flat and dreary like the rest of Bern? Pym didn’t find Bern flat or dreary at all, but for Felicity he pretended he did. In the chronology, Pym’s friendship with Axel was by now twelve hours old, but he didn’t give him a thought — why should he when he was so taken up with impressing you both with himself?