A Perfect Spy

“You can cover Judy too while you’re about it,” says Morrie Washington. The joke, though brilliant, receives only token laughter. The court is uneasy about Judy. It distrusts her composure and resents her claim on their mascot. Barker looks down her nose at you, they complain behind her back. Barker’s not the good scout we thought she was. But Pym these days cares less than he used to about the court’s opinion. He shrugs off their gibes and, while the committee rooms are unguarded, slips down the steps to the cellar where he inserts the Michaels’ dividers in the lock of the chipped green filing cabinet. One prong to hold back the spring, one to turn the chamber. The lock pops open. I am in the presence of a miracle and the miracle is me. I will return. Quickly relocking the cabinet he hastens back upstairs and not one minute after establishing his ascendancy over life’s secrets he is standing innocently on the hotel doorstep in time for Judy’s van to pull up beside him, the loudspeaker fixed to its roof with harvest twine. She smiles but does not speak. This is their third morning together but on the first they were accompanied by another lady helper. Nevertheless Pym contrived several times to brush his hand against Judy’s as she changed gear or passed him the microphone, and when they parted at lunchtime and he made to kiss her cheek, she boldly redirected him to her lips by placing a long hand on the back of his neck. She is a tall, sunny girl with fair skin and an agricultural voice. She has a long mouth and playful eyes inside her serious spectacles.

“Vote for Pym, the People’s Man,” Pym booms into the loudspeaker as they head through Gulworth’s suburbs towards open country. He is holding Judy’s hand quite openly, first on her lap and now, at Judy’s instigation, on his own. “Save Gulworth from the scourge of party politics.” Then he recites a limerick about Mr. Lakin the Conservative Candidate, composed by Morrie Washington the great poet, which the major vows is winning votes everywhere.

“There’s a bossy old buffer called Lakin,

Whose manners are frightfully takin’.

But if he thinks Rickie Pym

Can be beaten by him,

It’s a deuce of a bloomer he’s makin’.”

Reaching across him, Judy switches off the instrument. “I think your dad’s got a cheek,” she says cheerfully when the city is safely behind them. “Who does he think we are? Bloody idiots?”

Steering the car into an empty side lane, Judy turns off the engine, unbuttons her jacket and then her blouse. And where Pym had been expecting more impediments he discovers only her small and perfect breasts with nipples rigid from the cold. She watches him proudly as he puts his hands over them.

For the rest of the day, Pym walked on clouds of light. Judy had to return to the farm to help her father with the milking, so she dropped him at an inn on the road to Norwich, where he had agreed to meet up with Syd and Morrie and Mr. Muspole for a discreet wet on neutral territory clear of the constituency. With polling day so near, an end-of-term hilarity has infected the gathering and, having remained upright until closing time, the four of them piled into Syd’s car and sang “Underneath the Arches” over the loudspeaker all the way to the border, where they once more put on their jackets and their pious faces. In the early evening Pym attended Rick’s final Saturday pep talk to his helpers. Henry V on the eve of Agincourt could have done no better. They should not flinch from the final push. Remember Hitler. They should carry a straight bat to victory, they should keep the left elbow up through life, praise God and give her the whip in the final straight. Their ears ringing with these exhortations, the team scrambled for the cars. By now Pym’s speech is a fully incorporated feature of the programme. The punters love him and inside the court he has the status of a star. In the Bentley, the two champions can squeeze each other’s hands and exchange notes over a glass of warm bubbly to keep them going between triumphs.

“That gloomy woman was there again,” said Pym. “I think she’s following us round.”

“What woman’s that, son?” said Rick.

“I don’t know. She wears a veil.”

And somewhere, amid these pressures and activities, Pym contrived to undertake the most perilous foray of his sexual career till now. Having located an all-night chemist in Ribsdale on the other side of town, he took a tram there and made a series of passes to check his back before marching boldly to the counter and purchasing a packet of three contraceptive sheaths from an old reprobate who neither arrested him nor asked whether he was married. And there is his prize now, winking at him in its mauve-and-white wrapping from its hiding place at the centre of a stack of “Vote Pym” circulars as he tiptoes once more to his bedroom window and looks down.