A Perfect Spy

So there’s yet another Pym for you, Jack, and you had better add him to my file even if he is neither admirable nor, I suspect, comprehensible to you, though Poppy knew him inside out from the first day. He’s the Pym who can’t rest till he’s touched the love in people, then can’t rest till he’s hacked his way out of it, the more drastically the better. The Pym who does nothing cynically, nothing without conviction. Who sets events in motion in order to become their victim, which he calls decision, and ties himself into pointless relationships, which he calls loyalty. Then waits for the next event to get him out of the last one, which he calls destiny. It’s the Pym who passes up a two-week invitation to stay with the Sefton Boyds in Scotland, all found including Jemima, because he is pledged to hurl himself over the Dorset hills in the wake of a tortured Mancunian zealot, preparing for a life he has not the smallest intention of leading, among people who chill him to the root. It’s the Pym who writes daily to Belinda because Jemima has cast doubts on his divinity. It’s Pym the Saturday night juggler bounding round the table and spinning one stupid plate after another because he can’t bear to let anyone down for one second and so lose their esteem. So off he goes and half chokes himself on incense and sleeps in a cell that stinks like a wet dog and nearly dies of nettle stew in order to become pious and pay his school fees and be adored by Murgo. Meanwhile he heaps fresh promises on old and convinces himself that he is on the path to Heaven while he digs himself deeper into his own mess. By the end of a week he is promised to a boys’ camp in Hereford, a pan-denominational retreat in Shropshire, a Trade Unionists’ pilgrimage in Wakefield and a Celebration of Witness in Derby. By the end of two weeks there isn’t a county in England where he hasn’t pledged his holiness six different ways — which is not to deny that intermittently he has visions of himself as a haggard apostle of the life renounced, converting beautiful women and millionaires to Christian poverty.

It was a full month before God provided the escape that Pym was waiting for.

YOUR IMMEDIATE PRESENCE CHESTER STREET ESSENTIAL IN MATTER OF VITAL NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL IMPORTANCE RICHARD T. PYM MANAGING DIRECTOR PYMCORP.

“You must go,” said Murgo with tears of misery rolling down his hollowed cheeks as he handed him the fatal telegram after Terce.

“I don’t think I can face it,” said Pym, no less affected. “It’s just money, money all the time.”

They walked past the print shop and the basket shop, through the kitchen gardens to the little wicker gate that kept Rick’s world at bay.

“You didn’t send it to yourself, did you, Parvus?” Murgo asked.

Pym swore he had not, which was the truth.

“You don’t understand what a force you are,” Murgo said. “I don’t think I’ll be the same again.”

It had never occurred to Pym until now that Murgo was capable of change.

“Well,” said Murgo with a last sad writhe.

“Goodbye,” said Pym. “And thanks.”

But there is cheer in sight for both of them. Pym has promised to be back for Christmas, when the tramps come.

Mad swings, Tom. Mad leaps and loves, madder round the corner. I wrote to Dorothy too somewhere in that time. Care of Sir Makepeace Watermaster at the House of Commons, though I knew he was dead. I waited a week then forgot until one day out of the blue my ploy was rewarded with a tatty little letter, blotchy with tears or drink, on ruled paper torn from a notepad, no address but postmark East London, a country I had never visited. It is before me now.

“Yours was a voice down many Coridors of Years, my dear, I put it in the kitchen cuboard with my Tableware to view at leasure. I will be at Euston Station the up platform 3 p.m. Thursday without my Herbie and I will be carrying a posy of lavender which you always loved.”

Already greatly regretting his decision, Pym arrived at the station late and placed himself in the gunman’s corner beneath an iron arch close to some mail bags. Quite a bevy of mothers was milling about, some eligible, some less so, but there was none he wanted and several who were drunk. And one of them seemed to be clutching a posy of flowers wrapped in newspaper but by then he had decided he had the wrong platform. It was his darling Dorothy that Pym had wanted, not some lolloping old biddy in a pantomime hat.

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