A Perfect Spy

Having waited till his voice has settled to a reassuring flow Pym returns to the ground floor. The darkness of the committee rooms smells of tea and deodorant. The door to the courtyard is locked from the inside. Pym softly turns the key and pockets it. The cellar staircase stinks of cat. Boxes are stored on the steps. Groping his way down, unwilling to put on the light lest it be visible from the courtyard, Pym has an unmistakable mental reprise of a day in Bern when he carried his damp washing down the stone steps to another cellar and was scared of tripping over Herr Bastl. And as he reaches the bottom step he does indeed miss his footing. Lurching forward he falls heavily on to the cellar door and pushes it open with both hands as he tries to steady himself. The door screeches in the grime. The impetus of his body is enough to carry him into the cellar which to his surprise is lit by a pale light. By its glow Pym makes out the green filing cabinet and standing before it a woman holding what appears to be a chisel, examining its locks by the ailing beam of a bicycle lamp. Her eyes, which are turned to him, are dark and pugnacious. There is not a flicker of guilt about her. And it is a thing I wonder at still that it never seriously occurred to him to doubt that she was the same woman, with the same gaze, and the same intense and disapproving quietness, whose veiled face had fixed on him after his triumph on the hustings of Little Chedworth, and stalked him through a dozen meetings since. Even asking her name Pym realises that he knows it already though he is blessed with no faculty of premonition. She wears a long skirt that could have been her mother’s. She has a hard, pebble face and young hair turned to grey. Her eyes are disconcertingly straight and bright, even in the gloom.

“My name is Peggy Wentworth,” she replies defiantly in a tough Irish brogue. “Shall I spell it for you, Magnus? Peggy short for Margaret, have you heard that? Your father, Mr. Richard Thomas Pym, killed my husband John, and as good as killed me too. And if it takes me the rest of my living death till they put me in the grave beside him, I’ll find the proof of it, and bring the brute to justice.”

Seeing a flicker of moving light Pym glances sharply behind him. Mattie Searle is standing in the doorway with a blanket over his shoulders. His head is hung sideways to favour his good ear while he squints first at Pym then at Peggy over the top of his spectacles. How much has he heard? Pym has no idea. But his mind is made fertile by alarm.

“This is Emma from Oxford, Mattie,” he says boldly. “Emma, this is Mr. Searle who owns the hotel.”

“Pleased to meet you,” says Peggy calmly.

“Emma and I are in a college play next month, Mattie. She came up to Gulworth so that we could rehearse together. We thought we’d be out of your way down here.”

“Oh yes,” says Mattie. His eyes slip from Peggy to Pym and back again, with a knowledge that makes nonsense of Pym’s lies. They hear his lazy shuffle going up the stairs.

* * *

I can’t tell you very accurately any more, Tom, which bits she told Pym where. His first thought on escaping the hotel was to keep going, so they hopped a bus and went as far as it took them, which turned out to be the oldest, most broken-down bit of waste dockland you could imagine: gutted warehouses with windows you could see the moon through, idle cranes that rose like gallows straight out of the sea. A bunch of roving knife-bladers had pitched camp there, they must have worked at night and slept by day, because I remember their Romany faces rocking over their wheels as they trod their treadles, and the sparks gushing over the watching children. I remember girls with men’s muscles flinging fish baskets while they yelled ribaldries at each other, and fishermen strutting among them in their oilskins, too grand to be bothered with anyone but themselves. I remember with a leap of gratitude every flash of face or voice outside the windows of the prison she had locked me in with her relentless monologue.