A Perfect Spy

The train lurched. In the window Mr. Cudlove and other people’s mothers dipped their faces into handkerchiefs and vanished. In his compartment, children larger than himself whimpered and chewed the cuffs of their new grey jackets. But Pym with one turn of his head glanced backward on his life thus far, and forward to the iron path of duty curling into the autumn mist, and he thought: here I come, your best recruit ever. I’m the one you need so take me. The train arrived, school was a mediaeval dungeon of unending twilight, but Saint Pym of the Renunciation was on hand immediately to help his comrades hump their trunks and tuck-boxes up the winding stone staircases, wrestle with unfamiliar collar-studs, find their beds, lockers and clothes-pegs and award himself the worst. And when his turn came to be summoned before his housemaster for an introductory chat Pym made no secret of his pleasure. Mr. Willow was a big homely man in tweeds and a cricket tie, and the Christian plainness of his room after Ascot filled Pym at once with an assurance of integrity.

“Well, well, what’s in here then?” Mr. Willow asked genially as he lifted the parcel to his great ear and shook it.

“It’s scent, sir.”

Mr. Willow misunderstood his meaning. “Sent? I thought you brought it with you,” he said, still smiling.

“It’s for Mrs. Willow, sir. From Monte. They tell me it’s about the best those Frenchies make,” he added, quoting Major Maxwell-Cavendish, a gentleman.

Mr. Willow had a very broad back and suddenly that was all Pym saw. He stooped, there was a sound of opening and closing, the parcel vanished into his enormous desk. If he’d had a nine-foot grappling iron he couldn’t have treated Pym’s gift with greater loathing.

“You want to watch out for Tit Willow,” Sefton Boyd warned. “He beats on Fridays so that you have the weekend to recover.”

But still Pym strove, bled, volunteered for everything and obeyed every bell that summoned him. Terms of it. Lives of it. Ran before breakfast, prayed before running, showered before praying, defecated before showering. Flung himself through the Flanders mud of the rugger field, scrambled over sweating flagstones in search of what passed for learning, drilled so hard to be a good soldier that he cracked his collarbone on the bolt of his vast Lee-Enfield rifle, and had himself punched to kingdom come in the boxing ring. And still he pulled a grin and raised his paw for the loser’s biscuit as he tottered to the dressing-room and you would have loved him, Jack; you would have said that children and horses needed to be broken, public school was the making of me.

I don’t think it was at all. I think it damn near killed me. But not Pym — Pym thought it all perfectly wonderful and shoved out his plate for more. And when it was required of him by the rigid laws of a haphazard justice, which in retrospect seems like every night of the week, he pressed his limp forelock into a filthy washbasin, clutched a tap in each throbbing hand, and expiated a string of crimes he didn’t know he had committed until they were thoughtfully explained to him between each stroke by Mr. Willow or his representatives. Yet when he lay at last in the trembling dark of his dormitory, listening to the creaks and kennel coughs of adolescent longing, he still contrived to persuade himself that he was a prince in the making and, like Jesus, taking the rap for his father’s divinity. And his sincerity, his empathy for his fellow man flourished unabated.

In a single afternoon, he could sit down with Noakes the groundsman, eat cake and biscuits in his cottage beside the cider factory and bring tears to the old athlete’s eyes with his fabricated tales of the antics of the great sportsmen who had let their hair down at the Ascot feasts. All nonsense, yet all perfectly true to him as he spun his magic. “Not the Don?” Noakes would cry incredulously. “The great Don Bradman himself, dancing on the kitchen table? In your house, Pymmie? Go on!” “And singing ‘When I Was a Child of Five’ while he was about it,” said Pym. Then while Noakes was still glowing from these insights, straight up the hill went Pym to faded Mr. Glover, the assistant drawing master, who wore sandals, to help him wash palettes and remove the day’s daubs of powder paint from the genitals of the marble cherub in the main hall. Yet Mr. Glover was the absolute opposite of Noakes. Without Pym the two men were irreconcilable. Mr. Glover thought school sports a tyranny worse than Hitler’s and I wish they’d throw their bloody football boots into the river, I do, and plough up their games fields and get on with some Art and Beauty for a change. And Pym wished they would as well and swore his father was going to send a donation to rebuild the arts school to twice its size — probably millions, but keep it secret.

“I’d shut up about your father if I were you,” said Sefton Boyd. “They don’t like spivs here.”