A Perfect Spy

And today due to unforeseen Circumstances that same Makepeace, Goodman’s only son, is coming down from his mountain-top — though the circumstances have been foreseen by everyone except himself, the circumstances are as palpable as the pews we wait in, as immovable as the Watermaster tiles the pews are bolted to, as fateful as the rasping clock that wheezes and whistles between every chime like a dying sow fighting off the awful end. Picture the gloom of it — how it stultified its young and dragged them down, its prohibition of everything exciting that they cared about: from Sunday newspapers to Popery, from psychology to art, from flimsy underwear to high spirits to low spirits, from love to laughter and back again, I don’t think there was a corner of the human state where their disapproval did not fall. Because if you don’t understand the gloom of it, you’ll not understand the world that Rick was running away from or the world he was running towards, or the twisting relish that buzzes and tickles like a flea in every humble breast this dark sabbath as the last chimes merge with the drumming of the rain and the first great trial of young Rick’s life begins. “Rick Pym’s for the high jump at last,” says the word. And what more awesome executioner than Makepeace himself, Highest in the Land, Justice of the Peace and Liberal Member of Parliament, to adjust the noose around his neck?

With the last chime of all, the strains of the voluntary die also. The congregation holds its breath and starts counting to a hundred while it seeks out its favourite actors. The two Watermaster women have arrived early. They sit shoulder to shoulder in the pew for notables directly beneath the pulpit. On almost any other Sunday, Makepeace would have been roosting there between them, all six foot six of him, his long head cocked to one side while he listened to the voluntary with his moist little rosebud ears. But not today because today is extra, today Makepeace is in the wings conferring with our Minister and certain worried trusties from the Appeal Committee.

Makepeace’s wife, known as Lady Nell, is not yet fifty but already she is hunched and shrivelled like a witch, with a habit of flicking her greying head without warning as if she were shaking off flies. And next to her — a tiny, earnest statue beside Nell’s pecking and stupidity — perches Dorothy, rightly called Dot, an immaculate speck of a lady, young enough to be Nell’s daughter instead of Makepeace’s sister — and she is praying, praying to her Maker, she is pushing her tiny scrumpled fists into her eyes while she pledges her life and death to Him if only He will hear her and make it right. Baptists do not kneel before God, Tom. They squat. But my Dorothy would have stretched herself flat on the Watermaster tiles and kissed the Pope’s big toe that day if God would have let her off the hook.

* * *

I have one photograph of her and there have been times — though no longer, I swear it, she is dead for me — when I would have given my soul for just one more. I found it in an old scuffed Bible when I was Tom’s age, in a suburban mansion we were hastily vacating. “To Dorothy with all my special love, Makepeace,” runs the inscription on the inside page. One in all the world. One spotted sepia-brown photograph is all, taken like a pause in flight as she steps down from the taxi, licence number not in frame, clutching a homemade posy of small flowers that could be wild, and her big eyes have too much behind them for our comfort. Is she on her way to a wedding? To her own? Is she calling on a sick relative — on Nell? Where is she? Where is she escaping to this time? She has the flowers to her chin and her elbows pressed together. Her forearms form a vertical line from waist to neck. Long sleeves nipped at the wrist. Muslin gloves, therefore no rings visible, though I have a suspicion of a bulge in the third joint of the third finger of the left hand. A cloche bonnet covers her hair and throws a shadow like a mask across the scaring eyes. Shoulders on a slant, as if she is on the point of losing her balance, and one tiny foot tipped sideways to prevent her. Her pale stockings have the zigzag sheen of silk; her shoes are of patent leather, pointed, buttoned. And somehow I know they pinch her, that they were bought against the clock like the rest of her outfit, in a shop where she is not known and does not wish to be. Her lower face pale as a plant grown in the dark — think of The Glades, the house she was brought up in! An only child, as I was, you can see it at a glance — never mind she has a brother twenty-five years ahead of her.