A Perfect Spy

“Your old man is seeing them right, know that? The healthiest school in Britain, this is. Ask them at the Ministry. Want a half-crown? Well then.”

* * *

To reach Lippsie’s bicycle Pym used a walk he had acquired from Sefton Boyd. You kept your hands lightly linked behind your back, shoved your head forward and fixed your eyes upon some vaguely pleasing object on the horizon. You stalked wide and high, smiling slightly, as if listening to other voices, which is how the flower of us wear authority. He was too small to sit on the tartan saddle but a lady’s bicycle has a hole and not a bar, as Sefton Boyd was always happy to point out, and Pym swayed through the hole pumping his legs from side to side as he swung the handlebars between the rain-filled craters in the tarmac. I am the official bicycle collector. To his right was the kitchen garden where he and Lippsie had Dug for Victory, to his left the coppice where the German bomb had fallen, hurling bits of blackened twig against the window of the bedroom he shared with the Indian and the grocer’s boy. But behind him in his terrified imagination was Sefton Boyd with his lictors in full cry, mimicking Lippsie at him because they knew he loved her: “Vere are you goink, mein little black market? Vot are you doink mit your sweetheart, mein little black market, now she be dead?” Ahead of him was the gate where he had waited for Mr. Cudlove, and to the left of the gate was the Overflow House with its iron railings ripped away for the war effort, and a policeman standing in the gap.

“I’ve been sent to collect my nature-study book,” said Pym to the policeman, looking him straight in the eye as he leaned Lippsie’s bicycle against a brick post. Pym had lied to policemen before and knew you must look honest.

“Your nature book, have you?” said the policeman. “What’s your name, then?”

“Pym, sir. I live here.”

“Pym who?”

“Magnus.”

“Hop along then, Pym Magnus,” said the policeman but Pym still walked slowly, refusing to show any sign of eagerness. Lippsie’s silver-framed family was queued up on the bedside table, but Rick’s heavy head dominated the lot of them, sensitive and political in its pigskin frame, and Rick’s sage eyes followed him wherever he went. He opened Lippsie’s wardrobe and breathed the smell of her, he shoved aside her frilly white dressing-gown, her fur cape and the camel-hair overcoat with the pixie’s hood that Rick had bought her in St. Moritz. From the back of her wardrobe he pulled out her cardboard suitcase. He set it on the floor and opened it with the key she kept hidden in the Toby jug on the tiled mantelpiece next to the soft toy chimp who was Little Audrey who laughed and laughed and laughed. He took out the book like a Bible that was written in little black sword blades, and the music books and reading books he didn’t understand and the passport with her picture in it when she was young, and the wads of letters in German from her sister Rachel, pronounced “Ra-ha-el,” who no longer wrote to her, and from the very bottom of the case Rick’s letters, tied into bundles with bits of harvest twine. Some he knew almost by heart, though he had difficulty unravelling the portent seething beneath their verbiage:

“It is a matter of weeks no days my darling before the present besetting clouds will be dispersed away as a permanency. Loft will have obtained my Discharge and you and I can enjoy our well-deserved Reward…. Look after that boy of mine who regards you as a Mother and make sure he doesn’t turn out airy-fairy. .

“Your doubts regarding Trust completely misplaced. . you should not trouble your Head as it is a further worry to me here waiting for the Bugle’s summons Perhaps never to Return. . what is involved here will bring untold benefits to Many such as Wentworth. . don’t go on at me about W or his wife, that woman is a professional troublemaker of the worst kind out….