A Perfect Spy

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A Perfect Spy Page 14

by John le Carré


  The effects of Lippsie’s death upon the young Pym were many and not by any means all negative. Her demise entrenched him as a self-reliant person, confirming him in his knowledge that women were fickle and liable to sudden disappearances. He learned the great lesson of Rick’s example, namely the importance of a respectable appearance. He learned that the only safety was in seeming legitimacy. He developed his determination to be a secret mover of life’s events. It was Pym, for instance, who let down Mr. Grimble’s tyres and poured three six-pound bags of cooking salt into the swimming-pool. But it was Pym who led the hunt for the culprit too, throwing up many tantalising clues and casting doubt on many solid reputations. With Lippsie gone, his love for Rick became once more unobstructed and, better, he could love him from a distance, for Rick had once more disappeared.

  Had he gone back to prison, as he had promised Lippsie that he would? Had the police found the green filing cabinet? Pym did not know then and Syd, I suspect by choice, does not know now. Army records grant Rick an abrupt discharge six months before the period in question, referring the reader to the Criminal Records Office for an explanation. None is available, perhaps because that Perce had a friend who worked there, a lady who thought the world of him. Whatever the reason Pym floated out alone once more, and had a fair amount of fun. For weekend leave Ollie and Mr. Cudlove received him at their basement flat in Fulham and pampered him in every imaginable way. Mr. Cudlove, fit as ever from his exercises, taught him how to wrestle, and when they all went out for a toot on the river together, Ollie wore ladies’ clothes and did a squeaky voice so well that only Pym and Mr. Cudlove in all the world ever knew there was a man inside them. For his longer holidays, Pym was obliged to trek over Cherry’s vast estates with Sefton Boyd, listening to ever more awful stories about the great public school of which he would soon become a member : how new boys were tied into laundry baskets and flung down flights of stone stairs, how they were harnessed to pony traps with fish-hooks through their ears and made to haul the prefect round school yard.

  “My father’s gone to prison and escaped,” Pym told him in return. “He’s got a pet jackdaw that looks after him.” He imagined Rick in a cave on Dartmoor, with Syd and Meg taking him pies wrapped in a handkerchief while the hounds sniffed his trail.

  “My father’s in the Secret Service,” Pym told him another time. “He’s been tortured to death by the Gestapo but I’m not allowed to say. His real name is Wentworth.”

  Having surprised himself by this pronouncement Pym worked on it. A different name and a gallant death suited Rick excellently. They gave him the class Pym was beginning to suspect he lacked and made things right with Lippsie. So when Rick came bouncing back one day, not tortured or altered in any way, but accompanied by two jockeys, a box of nectarines and a brand-new mother with a feather in her hat, Pym thought seriously of working for the Gestapo and wondered how you joined. And would have done so, too, for sure, had not the peace ungraciously robbed him of the chance.

  A last word is also needed here about Pym’s politics during this instructive period. Churchill sulked and was too popular. De Gaulle, with his tilted pineapple head, was too much like Uncle Makepeace, while Roosevelt, with his stick and spectacles and wheelchair, was clearly Aunt Nell in disguise. Hitler was so wretchedly unloved that Pym had more than a fair regard for him, but it was Joseph Stalin whom he appointed to be his proxy father. Stalin neither sulked nor preached. He spent his time chuckling, and playing with dogs, and picking roses in news cinemas while his loyal troops won the war for him in the snows of St. Moritz.

  Putting down his pen, Pym stared at what he had written, first in fear, then gradually in relief. Finally he laughed.

  “I didn’t break,” he whispered. “I stayed above the fray.”

  And poured himself a Poppy-sized vodka for old times’ sake.

  5

  Frau Bauer’s bed was as narrow and lumpy as a servant’s bed in a fairy-tale and Mary lay in it exactly as Brotherhood had dumped her there, roly-polyed in the eiderdown, knees drawn up in self-protection, clutching her shoulders with her hands. He had slid off her, she could no longer smell his sweat and breath. But she could feel his bulk at the foot of the bed and sometimes she had a hard time remembering that they had not made love a few moments earlier, for his habit in those days had been to leave her dozing while he sat as he was sitting now, making his phone calls, checking his expenses or doing whatever else served to restore the order of his all-male life. He had found a tape-recorder somewhere and Georgie had a second in case his didn’t work.

  For a hangman Nigel was small but extremely dapper. He wore a waisted pinstripe suit and a silk handkerchief in his sleeve.

  “Ask Mary to make a voluntary statement, will you, Jack?” Nigel said, as if he did this every week. “Voluntary but formal is the tone. Could be used, I’m afraid. The decision is not Bo’s alone.”

  “Who the hell says voluntary?” said Brotherhood. “She signed the Official Secrets Act when she joined, she signed it again when she left. She signed it again when she married Pym. Everything you know is ours, Mary. Whether you heard it on top of a bus or saw the smoking gun in his hand.”

  “And your nice Georgie can witness it,” said Nigel.

  Mary heard herself talking but didn’t understand a lot of what she said because she had one ear in the pillow and the other was listening to the morning sounds of Lesbos through the open window of their little brown terrace house halfway up the hill that Plomari was built on, to the clatter of mopeds and boats and bouzouki music and lorries revving in the alleys. To the scream of sheep having their throats cut at the butcher’s and the slither of donkey hoofs on cobble and the yells of the vendors in the harbour market. If she squeezed her eyes tight enough, she could look over the orange rooftops across the street, past the chimneys and the clotheslines and the roof gardens full of geraniums, down to the waterfront and out to the long jetty with its red light winking on the point and its evil ginger cats soaking themselves in the sunshine while they watched the tramper putter out of the mist.

  And that was how Mary saw her story henceforth as she told it to Jack Brotherhood: as a nightmarish film she dared look at only piecemeal, with herself as the meanest villain ever. The tramper draws alongside, the cats stretch, the gangway is lowered, the English family Pym—Magnus, Mary and son Thomas—file ashore in search of yet another perfect place away from it all. Because nowhere is far enough any more, nowhere is remote enough. The Pyms have become the Flying Dutchmen of the Aegean, scarcely landing before they pack again, changing boats and islands like driven souls, though only Magnus knows the curse, only Magnus knows who is pursuing them and why, and Magnus has locked that secret behind his smile with all his others. She sees him striding gaily ahead of her, clutching his straw hat against the breeze and his briefcase dangling from his other hand. She sees Tom stalking after him in the long grey flannels and school blazer with his Cub colours on the pocket, which he insists on wearing even when the temperature is in the eighties. And she sees herself still doped with last night’s drink and oil fumes, already planning to betray them both. And following them in their bare feet she sees the native bearers with the Pyms’ too-much luggage, the towels and bed linen and Tom’s Weetabix and all the other junk she packed in Vienna for their great sabbatical, as Magnus calls this once-in-a-lifetime family holiday they have all apparently been dreaming of, though Mary cannot remember it being mentioned until a few days before they left, and to be honest she would rather have gone back to England, collected the dogs from the gardener and the long-haired Siamese from Aunt Tab, and spent the time in Plush.

  The bearers set down their burdens. Magnus, generous as ever, tips each of them from Mary’s handbag while she holds it open for him. Stooped gawkily over the reception committee of Lesbos cats, Tom declares they have ears like celery. A whistle sounds, the bearers hop up the gangway, the tramper is returned to the mist. Magnus, Tom and Mary the traitor stare after it like every sad story of
the sea, their life’s luggage dumped around them and the red beacon dripping slow fire on their heads.

  “Can we go back to Vienna after this?” asks Tom. “I’d like to see Becky Lederer.”

  Magnus does not answer him. Magnus is too busy being enthusiastic. He will be enthusiastic for his own funeral and Mary loves him for this as she loves him for too much else, does still. Sometimes his sheer goodness accuses me.

  “This is it, Mabs!” he cries, waving an arm grandly at the treeless conical hill of brown houses that is their newest home. “We’ve found it. Plush-sur-mer.” And he turns to her with the smile she has not seen until this very holiday—so gallant, so tired-bright in its despair. “We’re safe here, Mabs. We’re okay.”

  He throws an arm around her, she lets him. He draws her to him, they hug. Tom squeezes between, an arm round each of them. “Hey, let me have some of that,” he says. Locked together like the closest allies in the world, the three move off down the jetty, leaving their luggage till they have found a place to put it. Which they achieve within the hour, for clever Magnus knows just the right taverna to go to first time, whom to charm and whom to recruit in the surprisingly passable Greek identity he has somehow cobbled together for himself on their journeying. But there is the evening yet to come and the evenings are getting worse and worse, they hang over her from when she wakes, she can feel them creeping up on her all through her day. To celebrate their new home Magnus has brought a bottle of scotch though they have agreed several times in the last few days to lay off the hard stuff and stick to local wine. The bottle is nearly empty and Tom, thank God, is finally asleep in his new bedroom. Or so Mary prays, for Tom has recently become a fag-ender, as her father would have said, hanging around them for whatever he can pick up.

  “Hey, come on, Mabs, that’s a bit of a bad face, isn’t it?” says Magnus, jollying her up. “Don’t you like our new Schloss?”

  “You were being funny and I smiled.”

  “Didn’t look like a smile,” says Magnus, smiling himself to show her how. “More like a bit of a grimace from where I sits, m’dear.”

  But Mary’s blood is rising and as usual she cannot stop herself. The prospect of her uncommitted crime is already laying its guilt on her.

  “That’s what you’re writing about, is it?” she snaps. “How you waste your wit on the wrong woman?”

  Appalled by her own unpleasantness Mary bursts out weeping and drives her fists on to the arms of the rush chair. But Magnus is not appalled at all. Magnus puts down his glass and comes to her, he taps her gently on the arm with his fingertips, waiting to be let in. He puts her glass delicately out of reach. Moments later the springs of their new bed are pinging and whining like a brass band tuning up, for a desperate erotic fervour has latterly come to Magnus’s aid. He makes love to her as if he will never see her again. He buries himself in her as if she is his only refuge and Mary goes with him blindly. She climbs, he draws her after him, she is shouting at him—“Please, oh Christ!” He hits the mark for her, and for a blessed moment Mary can kiss the whole bloody world goodbye.

  “We’re using Pembroke, by the way,” Magnus says later but not quite late enough. “I’m sure it’s unnecessary but I want to be on the safe side in case.”

  Pembroke is one of Magnus’s worknames. He keeps the Pembroke passport in his briefcase, she has already located it. It has an artfully muddy photograph that might be Magnus or might not. In the forgery workshop in Berlin they used to call photographs like that floaters.

  “What do I tell Tom?” she asks.

  “Why tell him anything?”

  “Our son’s name is Pym. He might take a little oddly to being told he’s Pembroke.”

  She waits, hating herself for her intractability. It is not often that Magnus has to hunt for an answer even when it concerns guidance on how to deceive their child. But he hunts now, she can feel him do it as he lies wakefully beside her in the dark.

  “Yes, well tell him the Pembrokes own the house we’re in, I should. We’re using their name to order things from the shop. Only if asked, naturally.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Those two men are still there,” says Tom from the door, who turns out to have been part of their conversation all this while.

  “What men?” says Mary.

  But her skin is pricking on her nape, her body is clammy with panic. How much has Tom heard? Seen?

  “The ones who are mending their motorbike by the river. They’ve got special army sleeping-bags and a torch and a special tent.”

  “There are campers all over the island,” says Mary. “Go back to bed.”

  “They were on our ship too,” says Tom. “Behind the lifeboat, playing cards. Watching us. Speaking German.”

  “Lots of people were on the ship,” says Mary. Why don’t you say something, you bastard? she screams at Magnus in her head. Why do you lie dead instead of helping me when I’m still wet from you?

  With Tom on one side of her, Magnus on the other, Mary listens to the bells of Plomari tolling out the hours. Four more days, she tells herself. On Sunday, Tom flies back to London for the new school term. And on Monday I’ll do it and be damned.

  Brotherhood was shaking her. Nigel had said something to him: ask her about the beginning—pin her down.

  “We want you to come back a stage, Mary. Can you do that? You’re running ahead of yourself.”

  She heard murmuring, then the sound of Georgie changing a reel on her tape-recorder. The murmuring was her own.

  “Tell us how you came to be taking the holiday in the first place, will you, dear? Who proposed it? . . . Oh Magnus, did he? I see. And was that here in this house? . . . It was.... Now what time of day would that have been? Sit up, will you?”

  So Mary sat up and began again where Jack had told her: on a sweet, early summer evening in Vienna when everything was still absolutely fine and neither Lesbos nor all the islands that came before it were a glint in clever Magnus’s eye. Mary was in the basement in her overalls, binding a first edition of Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, by Karl Kraus which Magnus had found in Leoben while meeting a Joe there and Mary—

  “That a regular one—Leoben?”

  “Yes, Jack, Leoben was regular.”

  “How often did he go there?”

  “Twice a month. Three times. It was an old Hungarian he had, no one special.”

  “He told you that, did he? I thought he kept his Joes to himself.”

  “An old Hungarian wine dealer from way back, with offices in Leoben and Budapest. Mostly Magnus kept his secrets to himself. Sometimes he told me. Now can I go on?”

  Tom was at school, Frau Bauer was out praying, said Mary. It was some kind of Catholic bean feast, Assumption, Ascension, Prayer and Repentance, Mary had lost count. Magnus was supposed to be at the American Embassy. The new committee had just started meeting and she wasn’t expecting him back till late. She was bang in the middle of glueing when suddenly, without hearing a sound, she saw him standing in the doorway—God knows how long he’d been there—looking very pleased with himself and watching her the way he liked to.

  “How was that, dear? Watched you how?” Brotherhood cut in.

  Mary had surprised herself. She faltered. “Superior, somehow. Pained superiority. Jack, don’t make me hate him, please.”

  “All right, he’s watching you,” said Brotherhood.

  He is watching her and when she catches sight of him he bursts out laughing and shuts her mouth with passionate kisses doing his Fred Astaire number, then it’s upstairs for a full and frank exchange of views, as he calls it. They make love, he hauls her to the bath, washes her, hauls her out and dries her, and twenty minutes later Mary and Magnus are bounding across the little park on the top of Döbling like the happy couple they nearly are, past the sandpits and the climbing-frame that Tom is too big for, past the elephant cage where Tom kicks his football, down the hill towards the Restaurant Teheran which is their improbable pub because Magnus so adores
the black-and-white videos of Arab romances they play for you with the sound down while you eat your couscous and drink your Kalterer. At the table he holds her arm fiercely and she can feel his excitement racing through her like a charge, as if having her has made him want her more.

  “Let’s get away, Mabs. Let’s really get away. Let’s live life for a change instead of acting it. Let’s take Tom and all our mid-tour leave and bugger off for the whole of the summer. You paint, I’ll write my book, and we’ll make love until we fall apart.”

  Mary says where to, Magnus says who cares, I’ll go to the travel agent on the Ring tomorrow. Mary says what about the new committee. He is holding her hand inside his own, touching it with his fingertips into little peaks, and she is going mad for him again, which is what he likes.

  “The new committee, Mary,” Magnus pronounces, “is the most stupid bloody charade I’ve been mixed up in, and believe me, I’ve seen a few. All it is, it’s a talking-shop to goose up the Firm’s ego and allow them to tell whoever will listen to them that we’re hugger-mugger in bed with the Americans. Lederer can’t possibly imagine we’re going to unveil our networks to him, and as for Lederer, he wouldn’t tell me the name of his tailor, let alone his agents—assuming he’s got either, which I doubt.”

  Brotherhood again: “Did he tell you why Lederer mightn’t be inclined to talk to him?”

  “No,” said Mary.

  Nigel for a change: “And no other reasons offered as to why or how the committee might be a charade?”

  “It was a charade, it was a sham, it was makework. That’s all he said. I asked about his Joes, he said the Joes could look after themselves and if Jack was bothered about them he could send a locum. I asked what Jack would think—”

  “And what would Jack think?” said Nigel, all open curiosity.

  “He said Jack’s a sham too: ‘I’m not married to Jack, I’m married to you. The Firm should have retired him ten years ago. Sod Jack.’ Sorry. That’s what he said.”

 

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