A Perfect Spy

How they celebrated their release! Shorn of all possessions except the clothes they stood up in and the credit they could muster as they went along, Rick’s reconstituted court took to the open road and became crusaders through wartime Britain. Petrol was rationed, Bentleys had vanished for the duration, all over the country posters asked “Is Your Journey Really Necessary?” and every time they passed one they slowed down to yell back, “Yes, it is!” in chorus through the open windows of their cab. Drivers either became accomplices or left in a hurry. A Mr. Humphries threw them all into the street in Aberdeen after a week, calling them crooks, and drove away without his money, never to be seen again. But a Mr. Cudlove whom Rick had met on holiday — and who got the court a week’s tick at the Imperial at Torquay on the strength of an aunt who worked in the accounts department — he stayed for ever, sharing their food and fortunes and teaching Pym tricks with string. Sometimes they had one taxi, sometimes Mr. Cudlove’s special friend Ollie brought his Humber and they had day-long races for Pym’s sole benefit, with Syd leaning out of the back window giving the car the whip. Of mothers they had a dazzling and varying supply and often acquired them at such short notice they had to cram them into the back two deep, with Pym squeezed into an exciting, unfamiliar lap. There was a lady called Topsie who smelt of roses and made Pym dance with his head against her breast; there was Millie who let him sleep with her in her siren-suit because he was frightened of the black cupboard in his hotel bedroom, and who bestowed frank caresses on him while she bathed him. And Eileens and Mabels and Joans, and a Violet who got carsick on cider, some into her gas-mask case and the rest over Pym. And when they were all got out of the way, Lippsie materialised, standing motionless in the steam of a railway station, her cardboard suitcase hanging from her slim hand. Pym loved her more than ever, but her deepening melancholy was too much for him and in the whirl of the great crusade he resented being the object of it.

“Old Lippsie’s got a touch of the what’s-its,” Syd would say kindly, noting Pym’s disappointment, and they’d heave a bit of a sigh of relief together when she left.

“Old Lippsie’s on about her Jews again,” said Syd sadly another time. “They keep telling her another lot’s been done.”

And once: “Old Lippsie’s got the guilts she isn’t dead like them.”

Pym’s intermittent enquiries after Dorothy led him nowhere. Your mum’s poorly, Syd would say; she’ll be back soon, and the best thing our Magnus here can do for her meantime is not fret over her, because it will only get to her and make her worse.

Rick took a wounded line. “You’ll just have to put up with your old man for a while. I thought we were having fun then. Aren’t we having fun?”

“All the fun in the world,” said Pym.

On the subject of his recent absence Rick was as sparing as the rest of the court, so that soon Pym began to wonder whether they had ever been on holiday at all. Only the occasional hint convinced him that they had shared a cementing experience. Winchester had been worse than Reading because of those bloody gypsies off of Salisbury Plain, Pym once overheard Morrie Washington tell Perce Loft. Syd backed him up. “Those Winchester gyppos was rough you wouldn’t believe,” said Syd with feeling. “The screws was no better, either.” And Pym noticed that their holiday had made hearty eaters of them. “Eat your peas now, Magnus,” Syd urged him amid much laughter. “There’s worse hotels than this one, we can tell you.”

It wasn’t till a year or more later, when Pym’s vocabulary had grown equal to his intelligence gathering, that he realised they had been talking about prison.

But their leader did not share these jokes and they ceased abruptly, for Rick’s gravitas was something no man tampered with lightly, least of all those appointed to uphold it. Rick’s superiority was manifest in everything he did. In the way he dressed even when we were very broke, his clean laundry and clean shoes. In the food he required and the style to eat it in. The rooms he had in the hotel. In the way he needed brandy for his snooker, and scared everyone into silence with his brooding. In his preoccupation with good works, which involved visiting hospitals where people had taken bad knocks and seeing the old people right while their children were away at the war.

“Will you see Lippsie right too, when the war’s over?” Pym asked one day.

“Old Lippsie’s crackerjack,” said Rick.