A Perfect Spy

Father Murgo was a toothy, driven little soul whose unlikely task, considering his proletarian origins, was to act as God’s itinerant talent-spotter to the public schools. Where Willow was thunderous and craggy, a sort of Makepeace Watermaster without a secret, Murgo writhed inside his habit like a ferret roped into a bag. Where Willow’s fearless gaze was unruffled by knowledge, Murgo’s signalled the lonely anguish of the cell.

“He’s nuts,” Sefton Boyd declared. “Look at the scabs on his ankles. The swine picks them while he’s praying.”

“He’s mortifying himself,” said Pym.

“Magnus?” Murgo echoed in his sharp northern twang. “Whoever called you that? God’s Magnus. You’re Parvus.” His quick red smile glinted like a stripe that would not heal. “Come this evening,” he urged. “Allenby staircase. Staff guest-room. Knock.”

“You mad bugger, he’ll touch you up!” Sefton Boyd shouted, beside himself with jealousy. But Murgo never touched anyone as Pym had guessed. His lonely hands remained lashed inside his sleeves by invisible thongs, emerging only to eat or pray. For the rest of that summer term Pym floated on clouds of undreamed freedom. Not a week earlier Willow had sworn to flog a boy who had dared to describe cricket as a recreation. Now Pym had only to mention that he proposed to take a stroll with Murgo to be excused what games he wished. Neglected essays were mysteriously waived, beatings vaguely due to him deferred. On breathless walks, on bicycle rides, in little teahouses in the country, or at night crammed into a corner of Murgo’s miserable bedroom, Pym eagerly offered versions of himself that alternately shocked and thrilled them both. The shiftless materialism of his home life. His quest for faith and love. His fight against the demons of self-abuse and such tempters as Kenneth Sefton Boyd. His brother-and-sister relationship with the girl Belinda.

“And the holidays?” Murgo proposed one evening as they loped down a bridlepath past lovers fondling in the grass. “Fun, are they? High living?”

“The holidays are a desert,” said Pym loyally. “So are Belinda’s. Her father’s a stockbroker.”

The description acted on Murgo like a goad.

“Oh, a desert, are they? A wilderness? All right. I’ll go along with that. Christ was in the wilderness too, Parvus. For a bloody long time. So was Saint Anthony. Twenty years he served, in a filthy little fort on the Nile. Perhaps you’ve forgotten.”

“No I hadn’t at all.”

“Well he did. And it didn’t stop him talking to God or God talking to him. Anthony didn’t have privilege. He didn’t have money or property or fine cars or stockbrokers’ daughters. He prayed.”

“I know,” said Pym.

“Come to Lyme. Answer the call. Be like Anthony.”

“What the fuck have you done to the front of your hair?” Sefton Boyd screamed at him the same evening.

“I’ve cut it off.”

Sefton Boyd stopped laughing. “You’re going to be a monkey Murgo,” he said softly. “You’ve fallen for him, you mad tart.”

Sefton Boyd’s days were numbered. Acting on information received — even now I blush to contemplate the source of it — Mr. Willow had decided that young Kenneth was getting a little too old for the school.

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