A Perfect Spy

In Paradise when Rick was in residence there was no night and nobody went to bed but Dorothy, the court’s self-appointed Sleeping Beauty. Pym could join the festival any time he chose and there they all were, Rick and Syd and Morrie Washington and Perce Loft and Mr. Muspole and Lippsie and the jockeys, lying on the floor amid piles of money, watching the roulette ball hopping over the tin walls while TP in his regalia looked down on them, so there must have been a picture of him in the houses too. And I see us all dancing to the gramophone and telling stories about a chimpanzee called Little Audrey who laughed and laughed at jokes that were beyond Pym’s intellectual reach. But he laughed louder than anyone because he was learning to be a pleaser, with funny voices, acts and anecdotes to make himself attractive. In Paradise everybody loved everybody because once Pym found Lippsie sitting on Rick’s lap and another time he was dancing cheek to cheek with her, a cigar between his teeth, while he sang “Underneath the Arches” with his eyes shut. And it seemed a pity that Dorothy was once again too tired to put on the frilly dressing-gown Rick had bought her — pink for Dorothy, white for Lippsie — and come on down and have some fun. But the louder Rick yelled to her up the stairs the deeper Dorothy slept, as Pym discovered for himself when he was dispatched on Rick’s instruction to talk her round. He knocked and had no answer. He tiptoed to the enormous bed and brushed what looked at first like cobwebs from her cheek. He whispered to her, then he tried shouting at her, but with no useful result. Dorothy was crying in her sleep, he reported when he returned downstairs. But next morning everything was all right again because there they were the three of them in bed together with Rick in the middle, and Pym was allowed to wriggle in beside Lippsie while Dorothy went down and made the toast and Lippsie held him gravely to her, and gave him her troubled, moral frown, which I suppose now was her way of telling me she was ashamed of her weakness and infatuation, and wished to cleanse it with her concern for me.

In Paradise, it was true, Rick roared but never at Pym. He never once raised his voice at me; his will was strong enough without it and his love was stronger still. He roared at Dorothy, he cajoled and warned her about things Pym could not understand. More than once he carted her bodily to the telephone and made her talk to people — to Uncle Makepeace, to shops, and to others who were threatening us somehow, and only Dorothy could appease them, because Lippsie refused to do that, and anyway her accent wasn’t right. I believe now that this was the first time Pym heard the name Wentworth, for I remember Dorothy holding my hand for courage while she told Mrs. Wentworth it would be all right about the money if only everyone would stop pressing. So the name Wentworth was ugly to Pym from early. It became synonymous with fear and an end to things.

“Who’s Wentworth?” Pym asked Lippsie, and it was the only time she told him to be quiet.

And I remember how Dorothy knew all the operators’ names at the exchange, and what their husbands and fiancés did, and where their children were at school, because when she was alone with Pym and shaky in her angora pullover, she’d pick up the white phone and have a good chat with them, she seemed to find comfort in a world of disembodied voices. Rick roared at Lippsie too when she stood up to him, and I think now that she stood up to him more as I grew up. And sometimes he roared at Dorothy and Lippsie together, making them both weep at the same time until they all patched it up in the great bed where he had his toast for breakfast and dripped the butter on the pink sheets. But no one hurt Pym or made him cry. I think, even in those days, Pym understood that Rick measured his relationships with women against his relationship with Pym, and found them wanting by comparison. Sometimes Rick took Dorothy and Lippsie skating. Rick wore a black tail suit and a white tie, but Dorothy and Lippsie dressed like pantomime boys, each holding an arm of him, and avoiding one another’s eye.

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