A Perfect Spy

Meanwhile word of Rick, though not of Lippsie, reached Pym like the unfinished whispers of a distant radio transmitter. Your father is well. His holiday is doing him good. He has lost weight, lots of good food, we’re not to worry, he’s getting exercise, reading his law books, he’s gone back to school. The source of these priceless snippets was the Other House, which lay in a poorer part of Purgatory down by the coking station and must never be mentioned in front of Uncle Makepeace, since it was the house that had spawned Rick and brought disgrace on the great family of Watermaster, not to mention the memory of TP. Hand in hand, Dorothy and Pym rode there in fireside darkness, sticky mesh against bomb blast on the windows of the trolley-bus, and the lights inside burning blue to baffle German pilots. At the Other House, a steadfast little Irish lady with a rock jaw gave Pym half-a-crown out of a ginger jar and squeezed his arm muscles approvingly and called him “son” like Rick, and on the wall hung a copy of the same tinted photograph of TP, framed not in gold but in coffin wood. Jolly-faced aunts made sweets for Pym out of their sugar ration, and hugged and wept and treated Dorothy like the royalty she once had been, and hooted when Pym did his funny voices and clapped when he sang “Underneath the Arches.” “Go on, Magnus, give us Sir Makepeace then!” But Pym dared not for fear of God’s anger, which he knew from the Aunt Nell affair to be swift and awful.

The aunt he loved most was Bess. “Tell us, Magnus,” whispered Aunt Bess to him, alone in the scullery, drawing his head close to her own. “Is it true your dad ever owned a racehorse called Prince Magnus, after you?”

“It’s not true,” said Pym without a second’s thought, remembering the excitement as he sat beside Lippsie on her bed, listening to the commentary of Prince Magnus coming nowhere. “It is a lie made up by Uncle Makepeace to hurt my father.”

Aunt Bess kissed him and laughed and wept in relief, and held him even tighter. “Never say I asked you. Promise.”

“I promise,” said Pym. “God’s honour.”

The same Aunt Bess, one glorious night, smuggled Pym out of The Glades and into the Theatre Pier, where they saw Max Miller and a row of girls with long bare legs like Lippsie’s. On the trolley-bus back, brimming over with gratitude, Pym told her everything he knew in the world, and made up whatever he didn’t. He said he had written a book by Shakespeare and it was in a green box in a secret house. One day he would find and print it and make a lot of money. He said he would be a policeman and an actor and a jockey, and drive a Bentley like Rick, and marry Lippsie and have six children all called TP like his granddad. This pleased Bess enormously, except for the bit about the jockey, and sent her home saying Magnus was a card, which was what he wanted most. His gratification was short-lived. This time Pym had made God very angry indeed, and as usual He was not slow to do something about it. On the very next day before breakfast the police came and took away his Dorothy for ever, though the reigning mother said they were only ambulance.

And once again — though Pym dutifully wept for Dorothy and refused food for her, and flailed with his fists at the long-suffering mothers — he could not but see their rightness in removing her. They were taking her to a place where she would be happy, the mothers said. Pym envied her luck. Not to the same place as Rick, no, but somewhere nicer and quieter, with kind people to look after her. Pym planned to join her. Escape, till now a fantasy, became his serious aim. A celebrated epileptic at Sunday school acquainted him with his symptoms. Pym waited a day, ran into the kitchen with his eyes rolling, and collapsed dramatically before Mrs. Bannister, shoving his hands into his mouth and writhing for good measure. The doctor, who must have been a rare imbecile, prescribed a laxative. Next day in a further attempt to draw attention to himself, Pym hacked off his forelock with paper scissors. No one noticed. Improvising now, he released Mrs. Bannister’s cockatoo from its cage, sprinkled soap flakes into the Aga cooker and blocked the lavatory with a feather boa belonging to Aunt Nell.