A Perfect Spy

“Heard from your father?”

Tom did not answer at once because his eyes suddenly hurt and he couldn’t breathe.

“Here, now,” said Brotherhood softly, putting down his newspaper. “What’s this, then?”

“It’s just the Lesson,” said Tom, fighting away his tears. “It’s all right now.”

“You made a damn good job of reading that Lesson. Anyone tells you different, knock him down.”

“It was the wrong day’s,” Tom explained, still fighting to get back above water. “I should have turned to the next bookmark and I forgot.”

“Bugger the wrong day’s,” Brotherhood growled, so emphatically that the old couple at the next table swung their heads round at him. “If yesterday’s Lesson was any good, it won’t do anyone an ounce of harm to hear it twice. Have another ginger beer.”

Tom nodded and Brotherhood ordered it before once more taking up his Sunday Telegraph. “Probably didn’t even understand it the first time anyway,” he said with contempt.

But the real trouble was Tom had not read the wrong Lesson; he had read the right one. He knew very well he had, and he had a suspicion Uncle Jack knew it too. He just needed something easier to cry about than the fish that were swimming round the cable in his head and the thought he refused to have.

They agreed to do without pudding so as not to waste the fine weather.

Sugarloaf Hill was a chalky hump in the Berkshire Downs with Ministry of Defence barbed wire round it and a warning to the public to keep out, and probably in all Tom’s life there was nowhere better in the world to be, except at home in Plush at lambing time. Not Lech and skiing with his father, not Vienna and riding with his mother: nowhere he had ever been or dreamed of was as private, as amazingly privileged, as this secret hilltop compound with barbed wire to keep out enemies, where Jack Brotherhood and Tom Pym, godfather and godson and the best friends ever, could take turns to loose off clay pigeons from the launcher, and shoot them down or miss them with Tom’s 20-bore. The first time they had come here, Tom hadn’t believed it. “It’s all locked, Uncle Jack,” he had objected as Uncle Jack stopped the car. It had been a good day till then. Now suddenly it had gone all wrong. They had driven ten miles by the map and to his chagrin ended at a pair of high white gates that were locked and forbidden by order. The day was over. He had wished he could be back at school again, doing his voluntary-punishment prep.

“Then go over and yell ‘Open sesame!’ at it,” Uncle Jack had advised, handing Tom a key from his pocket. And the next thing was, the white gates of authority had closed again behind them and they were special people with a special pass to be up here on the hilltop with the boot open, pulling out the rusted launcher that Uncle Jack had kept secret all through lunch. And the next thing after that was that Tom scored nine clays out of twenty, and Uncle Jack nineteen, because Uncle Jack was the best shot ever, the best at everything, although he was so old, and he wouldn’t give away a match to please anybody, not even Tom. If Tom ever beat Uncle Jack, he would beat him fair, which was what they both wanted without needing to say it. And it was what Tom wanted more than anything today: a normal exchange, a normal competition, with normal conversation, the kind that Uncle Jack was brilliant at. He wanted to hide his worst thoughts in a deep hole and not have to show them to anybody ever until he died for England.

It was the outdoors that set Tom free. Uncle Jack had nothing to do with it. He didn’t like too much talk and certainly not about things that were private. It was the sense of daytime that was like a resurrection. It was the din of gunfire, the clatter of the October wind that buffeted his cheeks and slid inside his school pullover. Suddenly these things got him talking like a man instead of whimpering under the bedclothes with the stuffed animals which progressive Mr. Caird encouraged. Down in the river valley there had been no wind at all, just a tired autumn sun and brown leaves along the towpath. But up here on the bare chalk hilltop the wind was going like a train through a tunnel, taking Tom with it. It was clanking and laughing in the new Ministry of Defence pylon that had gone up since they had last come here.

“If we shoot the pylon down we’ll let the bloody Russians in!” Uncle Jack yelled at him through cupped hands. “Don’t want to do that, do we?”

“No!”

“All right, then. What do we do?”