I won’t give you much of our courtship, Jack. When two people have decided to go to bed with each other, what passes between them before the event is a matter of form rather than of content. Nor do I remember very clearly what justifications we cooked up, for Michael was a shy man who had spent most of his life at sea, and his rare snatches of philosophy came out of him like escaping steam signals while he pummelled his mouth with a check handkerchief. “Somebody’s got to dredge the drains, o’ boy — fire with fire, only way. Unless we want the buggers to steal the ship from under us, which I
“How’s the colonel?” Pym ventured one day, belatedly recalling that Michael was still officially the stand-in for a Colonel Gaunt.
“Not a question I ever ask, personally, old boy,” said Michael and to Pym’s surprise began snapping his fingers as if he were summoning a dog.
Did Rob Gaunt exist? Pym never met him and later, when he was in a better position to ask, he could find nobody who would admit to having heard of him.
* * *
Now the brown envelopes flow in thick and fast, often two or three a week. The college porter grows so used to them he chucks them into Pym’s pigeonhole without reading the address and Pym has to gouge out the centre of another dictionary to accommodate them. Always they contain instructions, and sometimes they contain small sums of cash, which the Michaels call his hard-lying money. Better still is Pym’s float for operational expenses, which is kept at a fabulous twenty pounds: to entertaining secretary O. U. Hegelian Society, seven and ninepence. . contribution to Peace in Korea campaign, five shillings. . bottle of sherry for Society of Cultural Relations with the USSR get-together, fourteen shillings. . coach trip to Cambridge for good-will visit to C.U. Branch members, plus entertainment, one pound fifteen shillings and ninepence. At first Pym is timid of these claims, fearing that by making them he is straining his masters’ indulgence. The colonel will find someone cheaper, someone richer, someone who knows that gentlemen do not count the cost. But slowly he comes to realise that, far from displeasing his masters, his expenditures are taken as evidence of his industry.