A Perfect Spy

Somewhere near Aberdeen, without warning, the court became interested only in chemists’ shops. We were a limited company by then, which to Pym was as good as being a policeman. Rick had found a new banker with Faith, Mr. Cudlove’s live-in friend Ollie signed the cheques. And our product was a concoction of dried fruit that we pulped with a handpress in the kitchens of a great country house belonging to a dashing new mother called Cherry. It was a large house with white pillars at the front door and white statues all like Lippsie in the garden. Even in Paradise the court had never stayed anywhere so grand. First we stewed the fruit and pulped it in the press, which was the best bit; then we added gelatine to make lozenges out of it, which Pym rolled round and round in Company sugar with his bare palm, licking it clean between batches. Cherry had evacuees and horses, and gave parties for American soldiers who presented her with cans of petrol in the tithe barn. She owned farms and a great park with deer, and an absent husband in the Navy whom Syd referred to as “the Admiral.” In the evenings before dinner, a pack of King Charles spaniels was whipped by an old gamekeeper. They swarmed over the sofas yapping till they were whipped out again. At Cherry’s, for the first time since St. Moritz, Pym saw silver candles on the dinner table lighting bare shoulders.

“There’s a lady called Lippsie who’s in love with my father and they’re going to marry and have babies,” Pym told Cherry helpfully one evening as they walked together down the ride; and was greatly impressed by how seriously Cherry took this news, and how intently she questioned Pym concerning Lippsie’s accomplishments. “I’ve seen her in the bath and she’s beautiful,” said Pym.

And when they left a few days later, Rick took something of the dignity of the place with him, and something of its proprietor also, for I remember him striding down the great stone steps with a white hide suitcase in each hand — Rick always loved a fine suitcase — and sporting a smart country outfit of the sort no admiral would wear to sea. Syd and Mr. Muspole followed after him like circus midgets, clutching the chipped green filing cabinet between them and shouting, “Your end, Deirdre!” and “Gently down the stairs, Sybil!”

“Don’t you ever talk to Cherry about Lippsie again, son,” Rick warned him, in his heaviest moralistic tone. “It’s high time you learned it’s not polite to mention one woman to another. Because if you don’t learn that, you’ll waste your advantages and that’s a fact.”

It was through Cherry also, I suspect, that Rick formed the determination to turn Pym into a gentleman. Until now it has been assumed that Pym was already of the aristocracy. But Cherry, a forceful and superior woman, taught Rick that true English privilege was obtained by hardship, and that the best hardship was to be found at English boarding-schools. She also had a nephew at Mr. Grimble’s academy by the name of Sefton Boyd, but better known to her as my darling Kenny. A second and less tender influence was the army. First Muspole became its casualty, then Morrie Washington, then Syd. Each with a rueful smile of failure packed his little suitcase and disappeared, returning only seldom and with very short hair. Then one day to his hurt surprise Rick himself was summoned to the flag. In later life he took a more tolerant view of the pettiness of the society entrusted to his care, but the sight of his call-up papers on the breakfast table provoked an outburst of righteous anger.

“God damn it, Loft, I thought we’d taken care of all that,” he raged at Perce, who was exempt from everything.

“We did take care of it,” said Perce, jabbing a thumb in my direction. “Delicate kid, mother in the nut-house, it’s watertight compassion.”

“Well where the devil’s their compassion now then?” Rick demanded, shoving the buff document under Perce’s nose. “It’s a damn shame, Loft. That’s what it is. Get after it.”

“You never ought to have told old Cherry about Lippsie,” Perce Loft fumed at Pym later. “She went and peached on your dad out of spite.”

But the army declined to surrender, and the depleted court, consisting of Perce Loft, a clutch of mothers, Ollie and Mr. Cudlove, duly uprooted itself to a drab hotel in Bradford, where Rick was obliged to reconcile the ignominy of the parade ground with the burdens of financial generalship. Using the hotel’s coin box and the hotel’s credit, typing and filing in the hotel’s bedrooms, storing their mysterious wares in the hotel’s garage, the court fought a gallant rearguard action against dissolution, but in vain. It was Sunday evening in the hotel. Rick in his private’s uniform, freshly pressed, was preparing to return to barracks. A new dartsboard was wedged under his arm, which he planned to present to the sergeants’ mess, for Rick had his heart set on the post of catering clerk, which would enable him to see us right in the shortages.