A Perfect Spy

A summer term was devoted entirely to women. Pym had never been so in love. He swore his love to every girl he met, he was so anxious to overcome what he assumed would be their poor opinion of him. In intimate cafés, on park benches or strolling beside the Isis on glorious afternoons, Pym held their hands and stared into their puzzled eyes and told them everything he had ever dreamed of hearing. If he felt awkward today with the one, he swore he would feel better tomorrow with the next, for women of his own age and intelligence were a novelty to him and he became disconcerted when they did not assume a subordinate position. If he felt awkward with all of them he wrote to Belinda, who never failed to reply. His love-talk was never duplicated; he was not a cynic. To one he spoke of his ambitions to return to the Swiss stage, where he had been such a runaway success. She should learn German and come with him, he said; they would act together. To another he painted himself as a poet of the futile and described his persecution at the hands of the murderous Swiss police.

“But I thought they were so terrifically neutral and humane!” she cried, appalled by his descriptions of the beatings he had received before being marched over the border into Austria.

“Not if you’re different,” Pym said grimly. “Not if you refuse to conform with the bourgeois norm. Those Swissies have two laws that really matter out there. Thou shalt not be poor and thou shalt not be foreign. I was both.”

“You’ve really been through it,” she said. “It’s fantastic. I haven’t done anything at all.”

And to a third he portrayed himself as a novelist of the tortured life, with work that he had yet to show his publishers, all stashed away in an old filing cabinet at home.

One day Jemima came. Her mother had sent her to an Oxford secretarial college to learn typing and go to dances. She was long-legged and distraught like someone always late. She was more beautiful than ever.

“I love you,” Pym told her, handing her bits of fruitcake in his room. “Wherever I was, whatever I was having to endure, I loved you all the time.”

“But what were you having to endure?” Jemima asked.

For Jemima an extra kind of specialness was needed. Pym’s reply took him by surprise. Afterwards, he decided that it had been lying in wait inside him and leapt out before he could prevent it. “It was for England,” he said. “I’m lucky to be alive. If I tell anyone about it they’ll kill me.”

“Why ever will they do that?”

“It’s secret. I swore never to tell.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

“I love you. I had to do awful things to people. You can’t imagine what it’s like, carrying secrets like that alone.”

As Pym heard himself saying this he remembered something that Axel had told him shortly before the end: There is no such thing as a life that does not return.

The next time he met Jemima, he described a brave girl he had worked with when he was doing his terribly secret work. He had in mind one of those muddy war photographs of beautiful women who win George Medals for being parachuted weekly into France.

“Her name was Wendy. We did secret missions into Russia together. We became partners.”

“Did you do it with her?”

“It wasn’t that kind of relationship. It was professional.”

Jemima was fascinated. “You mean she was a tart?”

“Of course she wasn’t. She was a secret agent like me.”

“Have you ever done it with a tart?”

“No.”

“Kenneth has. He’s done it with two. One each end.”

Each end of what? thought Pym, in rampant indignation. Me a secret hero, and she talks to me about sex! In his despair he wrote Belinda a twelve-pager about his platonic love for her, but by the time her reply came he had forgotten the context of his feelings. Sometimes Jemima came uninvited, wearing no make-up and her hair shoved behind her ears. She lay on the bed and read Jane Austen on her tummy, while she kicked a bare leg in the air or yawned.

“You can put your hand up my skirt if you like,” she said.

“I’m fine, thanks,” said Pym.

Too polite to disturb her further he sat in the chair and read A Handbook of Old High German Literature till she made a grimace and left. For a while after that, she didn’t visit him. He kept glimpsing her in cinemas of which there were seven so he got round them nicely in a week. Always she was with another man and once, like her brother, she had two. Once during this same period Belinda came to stay with her, but told Pym she should keep away from him because it wasn’t fair on Jem. Pym’s need to impress Jemima now took on wild dimensions. He ate his meals alone and looked haunted, but she still didn’t come to him. One evening, passing a brick wall, he deliberately dashed his knuckles against it until they bled, then hurried to her expensive lodgings in Merton Street, where he found her drying her long hair before the electric fire.

“Who’ve you been fighting?” she asked as she dabbed on iodine.

“I can’t talk about it. Some things never go away.”