A Perfect Spy

Jack Brotherhood and Wendy treated him to a farewell fondue on the Firm; Sandy came and Jack gave Pym two bottles of whisky and hoped their paths would cross. Herr Ollinger accompanied him to the railway station and they drank a last coffee. Frau Ollinger stayed home. Elisabeth served them but she was distracted. She had put on bulk around the tummy, though she wore no ring. As the train pulled out of the station, Pym took a look downward at the circus and its elephant house, then a look upward at the university and its green dome and by the time he reached Basel he knew that Bern had sunk with all hands. Axel was illegal. The Swiss informed against him. I was lucky to get out myself. Standing in the corridor somewhere south of Paris he observed tears on his cheeks and vowed not to be a spy again. At Victoria Mr. Cudlove was waiting for him with a new Bentley.

“What do we call you now, sir? Doctor or Professor?”

“Just Magnus will do fine,” said Pym handsomely as they pumped hands. “How’s Ollie?”

The new Reichskanzlei in Park Lane was a monument to prosperous stability. The bust of TP was back in place. Law books, glass doors and a new jockey with the Pym colours winked assurance at him while he waited on leather cushions for a Lovely to admit him to the State Apartments.

“Our Chairman will see you now, Mr. Magnus.”

They bear-hugged, both for a moment too proud to speak. Rick palmed Pym’s back, moulded his cheeks and wiped away his tears. Mr. Muspole, Perce and Syd were summoned by separate buzzers to pay homage to the returning hero. Mr. Muspole produced a sheaf of documents and Rick read the best bits of them aloud. Pym was appointed International Legal Adviser for life and awarded five hundred pounds a year to be reconsidered as appropriate on the strict understanding he worked for no other firm. His law studies at Oxford were thus taken care of; he need never want for anything again. A second Lovely brought bubbly. She seemed to have nothing else to do. Everybody drank the health of the company’s newest employee. “Come on, Titch, let’s have it in the parley-voo!” cried Syd excitedly, and Pym obliged by saying something fatuous in German. Father and son hugged again, Rick wept again and said if only he had had the advantages. The same evening, at a mansion in Amersham called The Furlong, his homecoming was again celebrated by an intimate party of two hundred old friends, few of whom Pym had seen before, including the heads of several world-famous corporations, leading stars of stage and screen and several Great Barristers who one by one took him aside and claimed the credit for obtaining a place for him at Oxford. The party over, Pym lay wakefully in his fourposter listening to the expensive slamming of car doors.

“You did a fine job out there in Switzerland, son,” said Rick from the dark where he had been standing for some while. “You fought a good fight. It’s been noticed. Enjoy your dinner?”

“It was really good.”

“A lot of people said to me, ‘Rickie,’ they said, ‘you’ve got to get that boy back. Those foreigners will make a whore of him.’ You know what I said to them?”

“What did you say to them?”

“I said I had faith in you. Have you got faith in me, son?”

“Masses.”

“What do you think of the house?”

“It’s wonderful,” said Pym.

“It’s yours. It’s in your name. I bought it from the Duke of Devonshire.”

“Thank you very much, anyway.”

“Nobody can ever take it away from you, son. You can be twenty. You can be fifty. Where your old man is, that’s home. Did you talk to Maxie Moore at all?”

“I don’t think I did.”

“The fellow who scored the winning goal for Arsenal against Spurs? Go on. Of course you did. What do you think of Blottsie?”

“Which one was he?”

“G. W. Blott? One of the most famous names in the retail grocery world you’ll ever meet. That marvellous dignity. He’ll be a lord one day. So will you. What do you think of Sylvia?”

Pym recalled a bulky, middle-aged woman in blue with an aristocratic smile that could have been the bubbly.

“She’s nice,” he said cautiously.

Rick seized on the word as if he had been hunting for it half his life: “Nice. That’s what she is. She’s a damned nice woman with two first-class husbands to her credit.”

“She’s really attractive, even for my age.”

“Did you get yourself involved out there? There’s nothing can’t be put right in this world by good pals.”

“Just the odd affair. Nothing serious.”

“No woman’s ever going to come between us, son. Once those Oxford girls know who your old man is, they’ll be after you like a pack of wolves. Promise you’ll keep yourself clean.”

“I promise.”

“And learn your law as if your life depended on it? You’re being paid, remember.”

“I promise.”

“Well, then.”

The stealthy weight of Rick’s body landed like a sixteen-stone cat at Pym’s side. He pulled Pym’s head towards his own until their two cheeks were pressed stubble to stubble. His fingers found the fatty parts of Pym’s chest under his pyjama top and kneaded them. He wept. Pym wept too, thinking again of Axel.