A Perfect Spy

Abie Ziegler’s name, whether with a Z or an S, was written, you may be sure, in capitals on every left wing poster in every college lodge of the university. Abie was a publicity-crazed pipe-smoking sex maniac about four feet high. His one ambition in life was to be noticed and he saw the depleted Left as a fast lane to this end. There were a dozen painless ways in which Michael and his people could have found out whatever they wanted about Abie, but Pym had to be their man. The great spy would have walked all the way to Manchester just to look up Siegler or Ziegler in the phone book, such was the drive with which he had flung himself into his secret mission. This is not betrayal, he told himself when he was being the Michaels’ man; this is the real thing. These strident men and women with their college scarves and funny accents who refer to me as our bourgeois friend are my own countrymen planning to upset our social order.

For his country, or whatever he called it, Pym addressed envelopes and memorised the addresses, played steward at public meetings, marched in dispirited processions, and afterwards wrote down whoever came. For his country he took any menial job going if it earned him favour. For his country or for love or for the Michaels, he stood at street corners late at night, offering unreadable Marxist pamphlets to passers-by who told him he ought to be in bed. Then dumped the surplus copies in a ditch and put his own money into the Party kitty because he was too proud to reclaim it from the Michaels. And if occasionally, as he sat up still later writing his meticulous reports on tomorrow’s revolutionists, the ghost of Axel materialised before him and Axel’s cry of “Pym you bastard where are you” whispered in his ear, Pym had only to wave him away with a combination of the Michaels’ logic and his own: “You were my country’s enemy even if you were my friend. You were unsound. You had no papers. Sorry.”

* * *

“Hell are you running with all those Reds for?” Sefton Boyd asked drowsily one day, face downward in the grass. They had driven out to Godstow in his sports car for lunch, and were lying in a meadow above the weir. “Somebody told me they’d seen you at the Cole Group. You made a piss-awful speech about the madness of war. Hell’s the Cole Group when it’s at home?”

“It’s a discussion group run by G. D. H. Cole. It explores avenues of Socialism.”

“Are they queer?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well, explore somebody else’s avenue. I also saw your nasty name on a poster. College secretary of the Socialist Club. I mean, Christ, you’re supposed to be in the Grid.”

“I like to see all sides,” said Pym.

“They’re not all sides. We are. They’re one side. They’ve pinched half Europe and they’re a band of absolute shits. Take my words for it.”

“I’m doing it for my country,” Pym said. “It’s secret.”

“Bollocks,” said Sefton Boyd.

“It’s true. I get instructions from London every week. I’m in the Secret Service.”

“Like you were in the German Army at Grimble’s,” Sefton Boyd suggested. “Like you were Himmler’s aunt at Willow’s. Like you fucked Willow’s wife and your father carried messages for Winston Churchill.”

A day came, long spoken of and frequently postponed, when Michael took Pym home to meet his family. “Double First material,” Michael warned him in an advance write-up of his spouse. “Mind like a dart. No mercy.” Mrs. Michael turned out to be a ravenous, fast-fading woman in a slashed skirt and a low blouse over an unappetising chest. While her husband did things in his shed, where he appeared to live, Pym inexpertly mixed the Yorkshire pudding and fought off her embraces until he was obliged to take refuge with the children on the lawn. When it rained he marched them to the drawing-room and posted them round him in self-defence while he pushed their Dinky toys.

“Magnus, what are your father’s initials?” Mrs. Michael said bossily from the doorway. I remember her voice, querulous and interrogative, as if I had just eaten her last chocolate instead of refusing to pop upstairs with her to bed.

“R.T.,” said Pym.

She was trailing a copy of a Sunday newspaper in her hand and must have been reading it in the kitchen.

“Well, it says here that there’s an R. T. Pym standing as Liberal Candidate for Gulworth North. He’s described as a philanthropist and property broker. There can’t be two, can there?”

Pym took the paper from her. “No,” he agreed, staring at Rick’s Portrait of Self with Red Setter. “There can’t.”

“Only you could have told us. I mean you’re terribly rich and superior, I know, but a thing like that is jolly exciting if you’re people like us.”

Sick with apprehension Pym returned to Oxford and forced himself to read, if only glancingly, the last four letters from Rick that he had tossed unopened in his desk drawer, next to Axel’s copy of Grimmelshausen and other unpaid bills.

* * *