A Perfect Spy

Rick gave Pym’s hand a fierce squeeze. “Son. With you beside me, and God sitting up there with His stars, and the Bentley underneath us, I’m the most all-right fellow in the world.” And he meant it, every word as ever, and his proudest day was going to be when Pym was at the Old Bailey on the right side of the rails wearing the full regalia of the Lord Chief Justice, handing down the sentences that had once been handed down to Rick in the days we never owned to.

“Father,” said Pym. And stopped.

“What is it, son? You can tell your old man.”

“It’s just that — well, if you can’t pay the first term’s boarding fees in advance, it’s all right. I mean I’ll go to day school. I just think I ought to go somewhere.”

“Is that all you’ve got to say to me?”

“It doesn’t matter. Really.”

“You’ve been reading my correspondence, haven’t you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Have you ever wanted for anything? In your whole life?”

“Never.”

“Well then,” said Rick and nearly broke Pym’s neck with an armlock embrace.

* * *

“So where did the money come from, Syd?” I insist again and again. “Why did it ever end?” Even today in my incurable earnestness I long to find a serious centre to the mayhem of these years, even if it is only the one great crime that lies, according to Balzac, behind every fortune. But Syd was never an objective chronicler. His bright eye mists over, a far smile lights his birdy little face as he takes a sip of his wet. Deep down he still sees Rick as a great wandering river which each of us can only ever know the stretch that Fate assigns to us. “Our big one was Dobbsie,” he recalls. “I’m not saying there wasn’t others, Titch, there was. There was fine projects, many very visionary, very fantastic. But old Dobbsie was our big one.”

With Syd there must always be the big one. Like gamblers and actors he lived for it all his life, does still. But the Dobbsie story as he told it to me that night over God knows how many wets can serve as well as any, even if it left the darkest reaches unexplored.

For some time, Titch — says Syd while Meg gives us a drop more pie and turns the log fire up — as the ebb and flow of war, Titch, with God’s help, naturally, increasingly favours the Allies, your dad has been very concerned to find a new opening to suit those fantastic talents of his that we are all fully aware of and rightly. By 1945 the shortages cannot be counted on to last for ever. Shortages have become, let’s face it, Titch, a risk business. With the hazards of peace upon us, your chocolate, nylons, dried fruit and petrol could flood the market in a day. The coming thing, Titch, says Syd — out of whom Rick’s cadences ring like tunes I cannot shake off — is your Reconstruction. And your dad, with that brain of his he’s got, is as keen as any other fine patriot to get his piece of it, which is only right. The snag, as ever, is to find the toehold, for not even Rick can corner the British property market without a penny piece of capital. And quite by accident, says Syd, this toehold is provided through the unlikely agency of Mr. Muspole’s sister Flora — well you remember Flora! Of course I do. Flora is a good scout, a favourite with the jockeys on account of her stately breasts and the generous use she puts them to. But her true allegiance, Syd reminds me, is pledged to a gentleman named Dobbs, who works for Government. And one evening in Ascot over a glass — your dad being away at a conference at the time, Titch — Flora casually lets slip that her Dobbsie is by vocation a city architect and that he has landed this important job. What job is that, dear? the court enquires politely. Flora falters. Long words are not her suit. “Assessing the compensation,” she replies, quoting something she has not fully understood. Compensation for what, dear? the court asks, pricking up its ears, for compensation never hurt anyone yet. “Bomb-damage compensation,” says Flora and glowers round her with growing uncertainty.

“It was a natural, Titch,” says Syd. “Dobbsie hops on his bicycle, slips round to a bombed house, picks up the blower to Whitehall. ‘Dobbs here,’ he says. ‘I’ll have twenty thousand quids’ worth by Thursday and no backchat.’ And Government pays up like a lady. Why?” Syd jabs my upper knee with his forefinger — Rick’s gesture to the life. “Because Dobbsie is impartial, Titch, and never you forget it.”

Dimly I remember Dobbsie too, a whipped, untruthful little man plastered on two glasses of bubbly. I remember being ordered to be nice to him — and when was Pym ever not? “Son, if Mr. Dobbs here asks you for something — if he wants that fine picture off the wall there — you give it to him. Understand?”

Pym eyed the picture of ships on a red sea in a different light from that day on but Dobbsie never asked for it.