A Perfect Spy

Tom was a very tall boy and affected already the British administrator’s bobbing walk that characterised his father. His receding hair-line gave him an air of maturity that may have accounted for his advancement to high position in the school. To watch him, hands linked behind his back, detach himself from the prefect’s pew, step into the aisle, duck his head at the altar and mount the two steps to the lectern, you could have been forgiven for wondering whether this was a pupil at all and not a member of Mr. Caird’s impressively youthful staff. Only his froggy voice as he barked the day’s text betrayed the changeling inside the senatorial exterior. Tom heard little of what he was reading. The Lesson was the first he had read and he had practised it till he knew it by heart. Yet now that he came to perform it, the red and black print before him had neither sound nor meaning. Only the sight of his chewed thumbs stuck either side of him on the lectern, and the white head floating above them in the back row of the congregation, held him to the world at all. Without them, he decided, he could have taken off, smack through the chapel ceiling and into the sky, and thereafter levitated, like his gas balloon on Commemoration Day, which flew all the way to Maidenhead and landed with his name on it in an old lady’s back garden, earning him five pounds in book tokens and a letter from her saying she too had a son called Tom, who worked at Lloyd’s.

“I have trodden the winepress alone,” he bellowed to his surprise. “And of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger and trample them in my fury.” The threat alarmed him and he wondered why he had uttered it and to whom. “And their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment.”

Still reading, feeling the backs of his knees batting against his trousers, Tom considered a number of other matters that turned out to be weighing on his mind, some of which were new to him until this moment. He had no expectation any more that his mind would be ruled by what was going on around it, even in work. In Friday’s gym class he had found himself thinking out a problem of Latin grammar. In yesterday’s Latin he had worried about his mother’s drinking. And in the middle of French construe he had discovered that he was no longer in love with Becky Lederer, despite their ardent correspondence, but preferred instead one of the Bursar’s daughters. Under the pressures of high office his mind had become a slice of undersea cable like the one in the science lab. First there was this bunch of wires, all carrying their proper messages and doing their appointed jobs; and then, swimming around them like a shoal of invisible fish, ran a whole lot more messages which for some reason did not need wires at all. And that was how his mind felt now, while he honked out the sacred words in his deepest possible voice only to hear them tinkling like cracked bells in a distant room.

“For the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come,” he said.

He thought of gas balloons and of the Tom who worked in Lloyd’s, and of the forthcoming apocalypse when he failed his common entrance examination, and of the Bursar’s daughter when she rode her bicycle with her blouse flattened against her chest by the wind. And he fretted about whether Carter Major, who was Pandas’ vice-captain, had the qualities of democratic leadership to handle afternoon kickabout. But there was one thought he refused to have at all because really all these other thoughts were surrogates for it. There was one thought he could not put in words or even pictures, because it was so bad that even thinking it could turn it into truth.

“How’s your beef, son?” Jack Brotherhood asked, what seemed about twenty seconds later, over lunch in the Digby Hotel where they always went.

“Super, Uncle Jack, thank you,” said Tom.

Otherwise they ate in the silence that they mostly observed till lunch was past. Brotherhood had his Sunday Telegraph, Tom a fantasy novel he was reading over and over again, because it was a book in which everything came right and other books could be dangerous. Nobody understands better than Uncle Jack how you take people out from school, Tom decided, while he read and ate and thought of his mother. Not even his father had such a clear idea of how everything should be the same each time yet exquisitely different in tiny ways. How you had to be completely calm and unfussed yet draw out the day by doing masses of different things until the last moment. How school was a place that for most of the day must not exist, so that there was never any question of going back there. Only during the last countdown must it be sufficiently reconstructed to make return a possibility.

“Want a second?”

“No, thank you.”

“More Yorkshire?”

“Yes, please. A bit.”

Brotherhood lifted his eyebrows to the waiter and the waiter came at once, which was what waiters did for Uncle Jack.