A Perfect Spy

Nothing happened. He was beating the air. What he needed was a great dramatic crime. All night he waited, then early in the morning when his courage was highest, Pym walked the length of the house to Makepeace Watermaster’s study in his dressing-gown and slippers and relieved himself prolifically over the centre of the white carpet. Terrified, he threw himself on to the patch he had created, hoping to dry it out with the heat of his body. A maid entered and screamed. A mother was summoned and from his anguished position on the carpet Pym was treated to a formative example of how history rewrites itself in a crisis. The mother touched his shoulder. He groaned. She asked him where it hurt. He indicated his groin, the literal cause of his distress. Makepeace Watermaster was fetched. What were you doing in my study in the first place? The pain, sir, the pain, I wanted to tell you about the pain. With a screech of tyres the doctor returned and now everything was remembered while he bent over Pym and probed his stomach with his stupid fingertips. The collapse before Mrs. Bannister. The nightly moans, the daily pallor. Dorothy’s madness, discussed in hushed terms. Even Pym’s bed-wetting was taken down and used in evidence on his behalf.

“Poor boy, it’s got him here as well,” said the mother as the patient was lifted cautiously to the sofa and the maid was hurried off to fetch Jeyes disinfectant and a floor-cloth. Pym’s temperature was read and grimly observed to be normal. “Doesn’t mean a thing,” said the doctor, now battling to make good his earlier negligence, and ordered the mother to pack the poor boy’s things. She did so and in the course of it must inevitably have discovered a number of small objects that Pym had taken from other people’s lives in order to improve his own: Nell’s jet earrings, Cook’s letters from her son in Canada and Makepeace Watermaster’s Travels with a Donkey which Pym had selected for its title, the only part he had read. In the crisis even this black evidence of his criminality was ignored.

The outcome was more effective than Pym could have hoped. Not a week later, in a hospital newly fitted to receive victims of the approaching blitz, Magnus Pym, aged eight and a half years, yielded up his appendix in the interests of operational cover. When he came round, the first thing he saw was a blue and black koala bear larger than himself seated on the end of his bed. The second was a basket of fruit bigger than the bear, which looked like a piece of St. Moritz that had landed by mistake in wartime England. The third was Rick, slim and smart as a sailor, standing to attention with his right hand lifted in salute. Beside Rick again, like a scared ghost dragged unwillingly from the shades of Pym’s chloroformed realm, came Lippsie, hunched at the shoulders by a new fur cape, and supported by Syd Lemon looking like his own younger brother.

Lippsie knelt to me. The two men looked on while we embraced.

“That’s the way then,” Rick kept saying approvingly. “Give him a good old English hug. That’s the way.”

Softly, like a bitch recovering her pup, Lippsie picked me over, lifting the remains of my forelock and staring gravely into my eyes as if fearing that bad things had got into them.

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