A Perfect Spy

If Pym is resisting, he is not aware of it. I have fainted. I am an accident. Syd’s ginger ale has knocked me out. The crowd separates, strong hands bear him towards the dais, floating voters gaze down on him. Pym ascends, Rick seizes him in a bear-hug; a yellow rosette is nailed to Pym’s collarbone by the ward chairman. Pym is speaking, and a cast of thousands is staring up at him — well, sixty, at least — smiling at his first brave words.

“I expect you are all asking yourselves,” Pym begins long before anything has occurred to him. “I expect that many of you here tonight, even after that fine speech, are asking yourselves, what manner of man my father is.”

They are. He can see it in their faces. They want the confirmation of their faith, and Maggus the Oggsford lawyer supplies it without a blush. For Rick, for England, and for fun. As he speaks he believes as usual every word he says. He paints Rick as Rick has painted himself, but with the authority of a loving son and legal brain who picks his words but never splits them. He refers to Rick as the plain man’s honest friend—“and I should know, he’s been the best friend I’ve had these twenty years or more.” He depicts him as the reachable star in his childlike firmament, shining before him as an example of chivalrous humility. The image of the singer Wolfram von Eschenbach wanders through his mind and he considers offering them Rick as Little Chedworth’s soldier-poet, wooing and jousting his way to victory. Caution prevails. He describes the influence of our patron saint TP, “marching on long after the old soldier has fought his last fight.” How whenever we had to move house — a nervous moment — TP’s portrait was the first thing to be hung up. He speaks of a father blessed with a fair man’s sense of justice. With Rick as my father, he asks, how could I have contemplated any other calling than the law? He turns to Sylvia, who roosts at Rick’s side in her rabbitskin collar and stay-press smile. With a choke he thanks her for taking up the burdens of motherhood where my own poor mother was obliged to lay them down. Then, as quickly as it all began, it is over, and Pym is hastening after Rick down the aisle towards the door, brushing away his tears and clasping hands in Rick’s wake. He reaches the door and takes a misty look back. He sees again the woman in the veiled pill-box hat, seated by herself. He catches the glint of her eye inside the mask and it seems to him baleful and disapproving just when everyone else is being so admiring. A guilty fret replaces his elation. She is not a widow, she is the risen Lippsie. She is E. Weber. She is Dorothy, and I have wronged them all. She is an emissary of the Oggsford Communist Party here to observe my treacherous conversion. The Michaels sent her.

“How was I, son?”

“Fantastic!”

“So were you, son. By God, if I’m spared to be a hundred, I’ll never be a prouder man. Who cut your hair?”

Nobody has cut it for a long time, but Pym lets this go. They are crossing the carpark with difficulty for Rick is holding Pym’s arm in an ambulant bear-hug and they are advancing at an angle like a pair of crookedly hung overcoats. Mr. Cudlove has the Bentley door open and is weeping a teacher’s tears of pride.

“Beautiful, Mr. Magnus,” he says. “It was Karl Marx come alive, sir. We shall never forget it.”

Pym thanks him distractedly. As so often when on the crest of a phoney triumph, he is gripped by an unfocussed sense of God’s approaching retribution. What have I done wrong to her? he keeps asking himself. I’m young and fluent and Rick’s son. I’m wearing my new unpaid-for suit from Hall Brothers, the tailor. Why won’t she love me like the rest of them? He is thinking, like every artist before or since him, of the only member of the audience who did not applaud.

* * *