A Perfect Spy

After the Fall came, very properly, Purgatory, and Purgatory possessed no Lippsies — I guess she was trying to make one of her breaks from me, using Rick’s absence to cut herself off. Purgatory was where Dorothy and I served out our sentence, Tom, and Purgatory is just over the hill from here, a few of Rick’s fare-stages along the coast, though the new time-share apartments have removed much of its sting. Purgatory was the same wooded hollow of clefts and chines and dripping laurels where Pym had been conceived, with red windswept beaches always out of season, and creaking swings and sodden sandpits that were closed to enjoyment on the sabbath and for Pym on any other day as well. Purgatory was Makepeace Watermaster’s great sad house, The Glades, where Pym was forbidden to leave the walled orchard if it was dry or enter the main rooms if it was raining. Purgatory was the Tabernacle with the Night School Boys written clean out of the history books; and Makepeace Watermaster’s frightful sermons; and Mr. Philpott’s sermons; and sermons from every aunt, cousin and neighbourhood philosopher who felt moved to words by Rick’s misfortune and saw the young criminal as the proper person to address.

Purgatory possessed no cocktail cabinets, television sets, jockeys, Bentleys or neverwozzers, and served bread and margarine instead of buttered toast. When we sang, we droned, “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” and never “Underneath the Arches” or one of Lippsie’s Lieder. Contemporary photographs show a grinning toothy child, well grown and well looking enough, but stooped as if from living under low ceilings. All are out of focus; all have a furtive, stolen look about them, and I try to love them only because I believe Dorothy must have taken them, though it was Lippsie whom Pym was missing. In a couple the child is tugging at the arm of whatever mother happens to attend him, probably trying to persuade her to come away with him. In one he is wearing sloppy white gloves like puppets’ hands, so I suppose he suffered from some skin disease, unless Makepeace was worried about fingerprints. Or perhaps he was intending to become a waiter.

The mothers, all large, all dressed in the same strict uniform, have such an air of the wardress about them that I seriously wonder whether Makepeace obtained them from an agency specialising in the care of delinquents. One wears a medal like an Iron Cross. I do not mean they are without kindness. Their smiles are alight with pious optimism. But there is something in their glance that assures me they are alert at all times to the latent criminality of their charge. Lippsie is not featured, and my poor Dorothy, Pym’s one cellmate in the dark rear wing to which the two of them were confined, was even more useless than before. If Pym was thrashed, Dorothy would dress his wounds but never question the need for them. If he was put into shameful nappies as a punishment for wetting his bed, Dorothy would urge him not to drink in the second part of the day. And if he was denied tea altogether, Dorothy would save him her biscuits and pass them to him in the privacy of their upper room, poking them one by one between the invisible bars. In Paradise on good days Pym and Dorothy had managed to share the occasional joke together. Now the guilty silence of her house reclaimed her. Each day drove her further into herself and though he told her his best jokes and did his best acts for her, and painted the best pictures for her that he knew, nothing he could do was able to wake her smile for long. At night she moaned and ground her teeth and when she switched the light on, Pym lay awake beside her, thinking of Lippsie and watching Dorothy’s unblinking eyes staring up at the parchment star of Bethlehem that was their lampshade.

If Dorothy had been dying Pym could have gone on nursing her for ever, no question. But she wasn’t so he resented her instead. In fact soon he began to weary of her altogether and wonder whether the wrong parent had gone on holiday, and whether Lippsie was his real mother and he had made an awful mistake, the one that accounted for everything. When war broke out Dorothy was incapable of rejoicing at the marvellous news. Makepeace turned on the wireless and Pym heard a solemn man saying he had done everything he could to prevent it. Makepeace turned off the wireless and Mr. Philpott, who had come for tea, asked mournfully where, oh where, would the battlefield be? Makepeace, never at a loss, replied that God would decide. But Pym, spilling over with excitement, for once presumed to question him.

“But Uncle Makepeace! If God can decide where the battlefield is, why doesn’t He stop the battle altogether? He doesn’t want to. He could if He wanted to, easy. He doesn’t!” Even to this day, I do not know which was the greater sin: to question Makepeace or to question God. In either case the remedy was the same: put him on bread and water like his father.