A Perfect Spy

She is doing Rick’s voice again: “‘ Let’s sort this matter out once and for all, Peggy my dear. I’m not having a sour bit of business come between us when all I ever wanted was to see you right.’ Well, you go, don’t you?” Her voice is echoing in the empty square and out over the water. “My God, you go. You pack your bag, you take your boy and lock the door because you’re off to get your money and some justice. You scurry up there bursting to have the fight of your life just the moment you set eyes on him. You leave the washing and the dishes and the milking and the penny-pinching life he’s put you to. And you tell the stupid bailiff to mind the shop for you, me and Alastair we’re going up to London. And when you arrive, instead of a business conference with Mr. Percy Loft and Mr. Bloody Muspole and the gang of them, the man buys you fine clothes in Bond Street and treats you like a princess, with the limousines and the restaurants and the fancy petticoats and silks — well you can always have your row with him later, can’t you?”

“No,” says Pym. “You can’t. You’ve got to have it then or never.”

“If he’s trodden you into the mud these years the least you can do is get a bit back from him, in exchange for all the misery, take him for every penny he’s robbed you of.” Yet again she does Rick’s voice: “‘ I always fancied you, Peggy, you know that. You’re a good scout, the best. Always had my eye on that pretty Irish smile of yours and not only the smile either.’ So all right, he’s got a treat prepared for the boy as well. Takes him to the Arsenal and we sit up there like gods in the special box with the lords and grandees, and dinner at Quaglino’s after, him the People’s Man, with a two-foot cake with the boy’s name written on it, you should see Alastair’s face. And next day a Harley Street specialist laid on to listen to his cough and a gold watch for the boy after, for being the brave one, with his initials on it, ‘From RTP to a fine young man.’ Come to think of it, it’s not at all unlike the one you’re wearing now — is that a gold one too? So when a man’s done all that for you and been a bastard — well you have to admit to yourself after a couple of days of it, there’s many worse bastards than him in the world. Most of them wouldn’t split their bloody Bath bun with you, let alone a two-foot cake at Quaglino’s and somebody to take the boy home to bed after, so that the grown-ups can go to a nightclub and have a bit of fun — why not if he always fancied me? There’s not many women wouldn’t put off a fight for a day or two for some of that, I suppose — so why not?”

She is speaking as if Pym is no longer there and she is right. She has deafened him but he can still hear her. As I hear her still, an endless, needling babble of destruction. She is speaking to the derelict cattle market with its broken pens and stopped clock, but Pym is numb and dead and anywhere but here. He is in the Overflow House at his prep school and Rick’s raised voice and Lippsie’s weeping keep waking him in his sleep. He is on Dorothy’s bed at The Glades and bored to bloody death, with his head against her shoulder staring at the white sky through the window all day long. He is in an attic somewhere in Switzerland, wondering to God why he has killed his friend to please an enemy.

She is describing Rick’s madness with her own. Her voice is a nagging, querulous torrent and he hates it to distraction. The way the man boasted. He’d not a foot on the earth when he started with his lying. How he had been Lady Mountbatten’s lover and she’d assured him he was better than Noël Coward. How they’d wanted him for Ambassador in Paris but he’d turned it down; he’d no patience with the airy-fairies. And about the stupid green filing cabinet with his rotten secrets in it, imagine the madness of a fellow who spends his hours weaving the rope they ought to hang him with! How he’d led her barefoot to it in her nightdress, look at this my child. The record, he called it. All the rights and the wrongs he’d done. All the evidence of his innocence — his bloody righteousness. How, when he was judged, as judged he would surely be, everything in this stupid cabinet would be put into the balance, rights and wrongs together, and we would see him for what he was, up alongside of the angels while us poor sinners down here bleed and starve for the glory of him. It’s what he’s put together to con the Almighty with and that’s the short of it — imagine the impertinence, and him a bloody Baptist too!