A Perfect Spy

But the worst monster in The Glades was not rubbery Uncle Makepeace with his little rose ears, but mad Aunt Nell in her liver-coloured spectacles, who chased after Pym with no reason, waving her stick at him and calling him “my little canary” because of the yellow pullover Dorothy had managed to knit him while she wept. Aunt Nell had a white stick for seeing with and a brown stick for walking with. She could see perfectly well, except when she carried her white stick.

“Aunt Nell gets her wobblies out of a bottle,” Pym told Dorothy one day, thinking it might make her smile. “I’ve seen. She’s got a bottle hidden in the greenhouse.”

Dorothy did not smile but became very frightened, and made him swear never to say such a thing again. Aunt Nell was ill, she said. Her illness was a secret and she took secret medicine for it, and nobody must ever know or Aunt Nell would die and God would be very angry. For weeks afterwards Pym carried this wonderful knowledge round with him much as, briefly, he had carried Rick’s, but this was better and more disgraceful. It was like the first money he had ever owned, his first piece of power. Who to spend it on? he wondered. Who to share it with? Shall I let Aunt Nell live or shall I kill her for calling me her little canary? He decided on Mrs. Bannister, the cook. “Aunt Nell gets her wobblies out of a bottle,” he told Mrs. Bannister, careful to use exactly the form of words that had so appalled Dorothy. But Aunt Nell did not die, and Mrs. Bannister knew about the bottle already and cuffed him for his forwardness. Worse still, she must have taken his story to Uncle Makepeace who that night made a rare visit to the prison wing, swaying and roaring and sweating and pointing at Pym while he talked about the Devil who was Rick. When he had gone Pym made his bed across the door in case Makepeace decided to come back and do some more roaring, but he never did. Nevertheless the burgeoning spy had acquired an early lesson in the dangerous business of intelligence: everybody talks.

His next lesson was no less instructive and concerned the perils of communication in occupied territory. By now Pym was writing to Lippsie daily and posting his letters in a box that stood at the rear gate of the house. They contained to his later shame priceless information, almost none of it in code. How to break into The Glades at night. His hours of exercise. Maps. The character of his persecutors. The money he had saved. The precise location of the German guards. The route to be followed through the back garden and where the kitchen key was kept. “I have been kidnapped to a dangerous house, please get me quick,” he wrote, and enclosed a drawing of Aunt Nell with canaries coming out of her mouth as a further warning of the hazards that surrounded him. But there was a snag. Having no address for Lippsie, Pym could only hope that somebody at the post office would know where she was to be found. His confidence was misplaced. One day the postman delivered the whole top-secret bundle to Makepeace personally, who summoned the prevailing mother, who summoned Pym, and led him like the convict he was to Makepeace for chastisement, though he simpered and begged and blandished him for all he was worth, for Pym somewhat unsportingly hated the lash and was seldom gallant about receiving it. After that he contented himself with looking for Lippsie on buses and, where he could do so deniably, asking people who happened to be passing the rear gate whether they had seen her. Particularly he asked policemen, whom he now smiled at richly wherever he found them.

“My father’s got an old green box with secrets in,” he told a constable one day, strolling in the memorial gardens with a mother.

“Has he then, son? Well, thanks for telling us,” said the constable and pretended to write in his notebook.