A Perfect Spy

Rick has never been better, more passionate, more sincere. The applause rises like an angry sea, the faithful rise with it. Pym rises with the faithful, pummelling his hands together loudest of us all. Rick weeps. Pym is on the brink. The good people have their Messiah, the Liberals of Gulworth North have too long been a flock without a shepherd; no Liberal candidate has stood here since the war. At Rick’s side our local Liberal Party Chairman is smacking his yeoman’s paws together and rhubarbing ecstatically into Rick’s ear. At Rick’s back, the whole court is following Pym’s example, standing, clapping, rah-rahing “Rick for Gulworth!” Thus reminded, Rick turns to them yet again and, taking his cue from any number of the variety shows he loves, indicates the court to the people, saying: “You owe it to them, not to me.” But once more his blue eyes are on Pym, saying, “Judas, patricide, murderer of your best pal.”

Or so it seems to Pym.

For this is exactly the moment, this is exactly where everyone is standing and beaming and clapping, when the bomb that Pym has planted goes off: Rick with his back to the enemy, his face upon Pym and his beloved helpers, half ready, I think, to break into a rousing song. Not “Underneath the Arches,” it is too secular, but “Onward, Christian Soldiers” will be first rate. When suddenly the din takes sick and dies on its feet in front of us, and a freezing silence slips in after it as if somebody has flung open the great doors of the Town Hall and let in the vengeful angels of the past.

Someone unreliable has spoken from under the minstrel gallery where the press sits. At first the acoustics are so lousy they do not allow us more than a few querulous notes, but already the notes are subversive. The speaker tries again but louder. She is not a person yet, merely a damned woman, with the kind of piping, strident Irish voice that menfolk instinctively detest, wheedling you with its impotence in the same breath as its cause. A man shouts “Silence, woman,” then “Be quiet,” and then “Shut up, you bitch!” Pym recognises the port-fed voice of Major Blenkinsop. The major is a Free-Trader and a rural Fascist from the embarrassing Right of our great movement. But the scratchy Irish voice prevails like a door squeak that will not go away, and no amount of slamming or oiling seems able to silence it. Some tiresome Home-Ruler probably. Ah good, somebody has got hold of her. It is the major again — see his bald head and yellow rosette of office. He is calling her “My good madame,” of all things, and manhandling her towards the door. But the freedom of the press prevents him. The hacks are leaning over the balcony shouting “What’s your name, miss?” and even “Yell it at him again!” Major Blenkinsop is suddenly neither a gentleman nor an officer but an upper-class lout with a screaming Irishwoman on his hands. Other women are yelling “Leave her be!” and “Get your hands off her, you dirty swine.” Somebody shouts “Black and Tan bastard!”

Then we hear her, then we see her, both clearly. She is small and furious in black, a widowed shrew. She wears a pill-box hat. A bit of black veil hangs from it by a corner, ripped aside by herself or someone else. With the perversity of a crowd, everybody wants to hear her. She begins her question for perhaps the third time. Her brogue comes from the front of the mouth and appears to be spoken through a smile, but Pym knows it is no smile but the grimace of a hatred too powerful to be kept inside her. She speaks each word as she has learned it, in the order she has arranged them. The formulation is offensive in its clarity.

“I wish to know please — whether it is true — if you would be so kind, sir — that the Liberal Parliamentary Candidate for the Constituency of Gulworth North — has served a prison sentence for swindle and embezzlement. Thank you very much for your consideration.”

And Rick’s face on Pym while her arrow shoots him in the back. Rick’s blue eyes opening wide on impact, but still steady on Pym — exactly as they were five days ago, when he lay in his ice-bath with his feet crossed and his eyes open, saying, “Killing me is not enough, old son.”

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