A Perfect Spy

by John le Carré

For nothing may stand still, too much is not enough, as Syd himself admits. No income is so sacrosanct that expenditure cannot exceed it; no expenditure is so great that more loans cannot be raised to hold the dam from breaking altogether. If the building boom is put temporarily out of service by the passing of an unfriendly Building Act, then Major Maxwell-Cavendish has a plan that speaks deeply to Rick’s sporting soul: it is to buy up everyone who has drawn a horse in the Irish Sweep and so win first, second and third prizes automatically. Mr. Muspole knows a derelict newspaper proprietor who has got in with a bad crowd and needs to sell out fast; Rick has ever seen himself as a shaper of the human mind. Perce Loft the great lawyer wants to buy a thousand houses in Fulham; Rick knows a building society whose chairman has Faith. Mr. Cudlove and Ollie are on intimate terms with a young dress designer who has acquired the donkey-ride concession for the projected Festival of Britain; Rick likes nothing better than to give our English kids a break, and my God, son, if anybody has earned it they have. An amphibious motorcar has been designed by Morrie Washington’s nephew, a National Cricket Pool is envisaged to complement the winter Football Pools, Perce has yet another scheme for contracting an Irish village to grow human hair for the wig market which is expanding fast thanks to the munificence of the newly formed National Health Service. Automatic orange-peelers, pens that can write under water, the spent shell cases of temporarily discontinued wars: each project engages the great thinker’s interest, attracts its experts and its alchemists, adds another line to the Pym & Son Tablet of Honour at the house in Chester Street.

  So what went wrong? I ask Syd again, glancing ahead to the inevitable end. What quirk of fate, this time round, Syd, checked the great man’s stride? My question sparks unusual anger. Syd sets down his glass.

  “Dobbsie went wrong, that’s what. Flora wasn’t enough for him any more. He had to have the lot. Dobbsie went woozy in the head from all his women, didn’t he, Meg?”

  “Dobbsie done his little self too well,” says Meg, ever a stern student of human frailty.

  Poor Dobbs, it transpires, became so lulled that he awarded a hundred thousand pounds of compensation to a housing estate that had not been built till a year after the bombing ended.

  “Dobbsie spoilt it for everyone,” says Syd, bristling with moral indignation. “Dobbsie was selfish, Titch. That’s what Dobbsie was. Selfish.”

  One later footnote belongs to this brief but glorious high point of Rick’s affluence. It is recorded that in October 1947 he sold his head. I chanced upon this information as I was standing on the steps of the crematorium covertly trying to puzzle out some of the less familiar members of the funeral. A breathless youth claiming to represent a teaching hospital waved a piece of paper at me and demanded I stop the ceremony. “In Consideration of the sum of fifty pounds cash I, Richard T. Pym of Chester Street W., consent that on my death my head may be used for the purposes of furthering medical science.” It was raining slightly. Under cover of the porch I scribbled the boy a cheque for a hundred pounds and told him to buy one somewhere else. If the fellow was a confidence trickster, I reasoned, Rick would have been the first to admire his enterprise.

  And always somewhere in this clamour the name of Wentworth ringing softly in Pym’s secret ear like an operational codename known only to the initiated: Wentworth. And Pym—the outsider, not on the list—struggling to join, to know. Like a buzzword passed between older hands in the senior officers’ bar at Head Office and Pym the new boy, hearing from the edge, not knowing whether to pretend knowledge or deafness: “We picked it up on Wentworth.” “Top Secret and Wentworth—have you been Wentworth-cleared?” Till the very name became to Pym a teasing symbol of wisdom denied, a challenge to his own desirability. “The bugger’s doing a Wentworth on us,” he hears Perce Loft grumble under his breath one evening. “That Wentworth woman’s a tiger,” says Syd another time. “Worse than her stupid husband ever was.” Each mention spurred Pym to renew his searches. Yet neither Rick’s pockets nor his desk drawers, not his bedside table or his pigskin address book or pop-up plastic telephone book, not even his briefcase, which Pym reconnoitred weekly with the key from Rick’s Asprey key chain, yielded a single clue. Nor did the impenetrable green filing cabinet which like a travelling icon had come to mark the centre of Rick’s migrant faith. No known key fitted it, no fiddling or prising made it yield.

  And finally there was school. The cheque was sent, the cheque was cleared.

  The train lurched. In the window Mr. Cudlove and other people’s mothers dipped their faces into handkerchiefs and vanished. In his compartment, children larger than himself whimpered and chewed the cuffs of their new grey jackets. But Pym with one turn of his head glanced backward on his life thus far, and forward to the iron path of duty curling into the autumn mist, and he thought: here I come, your best recruit ever. I’m the one you need so take me. The train arrived, school was a mediaeval dungeon of unending twilight, but Saint Pym of the Renunciation was on hand immediately to help his comrades hump their trunks and tuck-boxes up the winding stone staircases, wrestle with unfamiliar collar-studs, find their beds, lockers and clothes-pegs and award himself the worst. And when his turn came to be summoned before his housemaster for an introductory chat Pym made no secret of his pleasure. Mr. Willow was a big homely man in tweeds and a cricket tie, and the Christian plainness of his room after Ascot filled Pym at once with an assurance of integrity.

  “Well, well, what’s in here then?” Mr. Willow asked genially as he lifted the parcel to his great ear and shook it.

  “It’s scent, sir.”

  Mr. Willow misunderstood his meaning. “Sent? I thought you brought it with you,” he said, still smiling.

  “It’s for Mrs. Willow, sir. From Monte. They tell me it’s about the best those Frenchies make,” he added, quoting Major Maxwell-Cavendish, a gentleman.

  Mr. Willow had a very broad back and suddenly that was all Pym saw. He stooped, there was a sound of opening and closing, the parcel vanished into his enormous desk. If he’d had a nine-foot grappling iron he couldn’t have treated Pym’s gift with greater loathing.

  “You want to watch out for Tit Willow,” Sefton Boyd warned. “He beats on Fridays so that you have the weekend to recover.”

  But still Pym strove, bled, volunteered for everything and obeyed every bell that summoned him. Terms of it. Lives of it. Ran before breakfast, prayed before running, showered before praying, defecated before showering. Flung himself through the Flanders mud of the rugger field, scrambled over sweating flagstones in search of what passed for learning, drilled so hard to be a good soldier that he cracked his collarbone on the bolt of his vast Lee-Enfield rifle, and had himself punched to kingdom come in the boxing ring. And still he pulled a grin and raised his paw for the loser’s biscuit as he tottered to the dressing-room and you would have loved him, Jack; you would have said that children and horses needed to be broken, public school was the making of me.

  I don’t think it was at all. I think it damn near killed me. But not Pym—Pym thought it all perfectly wonderful and shoved out his plate for more. And when it was required of him by the rigid laws of a haphazard justice, which in retrospect seems like every night of the week, he pressed his limp forelock into a filthy washbasin, clutched a tap in each throbbing hand, and expiated a string of crimes he didn’t know he had committed until they were thoughtfully explained to him between each stroke by Mr. Willow or his representatives. Yet when he lay at last in the trembling dark of his dormitory, listening to the creaks and kennel coughs of adolescent longing, he still contrived to persuade himself that he was a prince in the making and, like Jesus, taking the rap for his father’s divinity. And his sincerity, his empathy for his fellow man flourished unabated.

  In a single afternoon, he could sit down with Noakes the groundsman, eat cake and biscuits in his cottage beside the cider factory and bring tears to the old athlete’s eyes with his fabricated tales of the antics of the great sportsmen who had let their hair down a
t the Ascot feasts. All nonsense, yet all perfectly true to him as he spun his magic. “Not the Don?” Noakes would cry incredulously. “The great Don Bradman himself, dancing on the kitchen table? In your house, Pymmie ? Go on!” “And singing ‘When I Was a Child of Five’ while he was about it,” said Pym. Then while Noakes was still glowing from these insights, straight up the hill went Pym to faded Mr. Glover, the assistant drawing master, who wore sandals, to help him wash palettes and remove the day’s daubs of powder paint from the genitals of the marble cherub in the main hall. Yet Mr. Glover was the absolute opposite of Noakes. Without Pym the two men were irreconcilable. Mr. Glover thought school sports a tyranny worse than Hitler’s and I wish they’d throw their bloody football boots into the river, I do, and plough up their games fields and get on with some Art and Beauty for a change. And Pym wished they would as well and swore his father was going to send a donation to rebuild the arts school to twice its size—probably millions, but keep it secret.

  “I’d shut up about your father if I were you,” said Sefton Boyd. “They don’t like spivs here.”

  “They don’t like divorced mothers either,” said Pym, biting back for once. But mainly his strategy was to pacify and reconcile, and keep all the threads in his own hands.

  Another conquest was Bellog the German master who seemed physically crumpled by the sins of his adopted country. Pym beleaguered him with extra work, bought him an expensive German beer mug on Rick’s account at Thomas Goode’s, walked his dog and invited him to Monte all expenses paid, which by a mercy he declined. Today I would blush for such an unsophisticated pass and agonise about whether Bellog had gone sour and been turned. Not Pym. Pym loved Bellog as he loved them all. And he needed that German soul, he had been hard on its path since Lippsie’s day. He needed to give himself away to it, right into Mr. Bellog’s startled hands, though Germany meant nothing whatever to him, except escape to an unpopular preserve where his talents would be appreciated. He needed the embrace of it, the mystery, the privacy of another side of life. He needed to be able to close the door on his Englishness, love it as he might, and carve a new name somewhere fresh. He even went so far on occasion as to affect a light German accent which drove Sefton Boyd to paroxysms of fury.

  And women? Jack, no one was more alive than Pym to the potential virtues of a female agent well handled, but in that school they were the devil to come by and handling anybody, including yourself, was a beatable offence. Mrs. Willow, though he was prepared to love her any time, appeared to be permanently pregnant. Pym’s languishing glances were wasted on her. The house matron was personable enough but when he called on her late at night with a fictitious headache in the vague hope of proposing marriage to her, she ordered him sharply back to bed. Only little Miss Hodges who taught the violin showed a short-lived promise: Pym presented her with a pigskin music case from Harrods and said he wished to turn professional, but she wept and advised him to take up a different instrument.

  “My sister wants to do it with you,” said Sefton Boyd one night as they lay in Pym’s bed embracing without enthusiasm. “She read your poem in the school rag. She thinks you’re Keats.”

  Pym was not altogether surprised. His poem was certainly a masterpiece, and Jemima Sefton Boyd had several times scowled at him through the windscreen of the family Land Rover when it came to collect her brother for weekends.

  “She’s panting for it,” Sefton Boyd explained. “She does it with everybody. She’s a nympho.”

  Pym wrote to her at once, a poet’s letter.

  “A tale must linger in your soft hair. Do you ever have the feeling beauty is a kind of sin? Two swans have settled on the Abbey moat. I watch them often, dreaming of your hair. I love you.”

  She replied by return, but not before Pym had suffered agonies of remorse at his recklessness.

  “Thank you for your letter. I get a long exeat from school starting twenty-fifth which is one of your exeat weekends also. How fateful that they coincide. Mama will invite you for Sunday night and obtain Mr. Willow’s permission for you to sleep with us. Are you considering elopement?”

  A second letter was more precise:“The servants’ staircase is quite safe. I will kindle a light and have wine waiting in case you get thirsty. Bring any work you have in progress and please caress me first. On my door you will find the red rosette I won last holidays for jumping Smokey.”

  Pym was scared stiff. How could he acquit himself with a woman of such experience? Breasts he knew about and loved. But Jemima appeared to have none. The rest of her was an unintelligible thicket of dangers and disease, and his memories of Lippsie in the bath became hazier by the minute.

  A card came:“We would all be so pleased if you would visit us at Hadwell for the weekend of the twenty-fifth. I am writing separately to Mr. Willow. Don’t worry about clothes as we do not dress in the evenings during summer.

  Elizabeth Sefton Boyd”

  On the hill above Mr. Willow’s house stood a girls’ school peopled by brown vestals. Boys who penetrated its grounds were flogged and expelled. But Elphick in Nelson House maintained that if you stood beneath the footbridge when the girls were crossing on their way to hockey much could be learned. Alas, all Pym saw when he followed this advice was a few cold knees that looked much like his own. Worse, he had to suffer the coarse humour of a games mistress who leaned over the bridge and invited him to come and play. Disgusted, Pym stalked back to his German poets.

  The town library was run by an elderly Fabian, a Pym agent. Pym skipped lunch and hunted his way unchecked through the section marked “Adults Only.” Guidance on Marriage appeared to be a handbook on mortgages. The Art of the Chinese Pillow Book started well but descended into a description of games of darts and leaping white tigers. Amor and Rococo Woman, on the other hand, richly illustrated, was a different matter, and Pym arrived at Hadwell expecting naked Graces frolicking with their gallants in the park. At dinner, which to his relief was taken dressed, Jemima cut Pym dead, hiding her face in her hair and reading Jane Austen. A plain girl called Belinda, billed as Jemima’s dearest friend, declined speech in sympathy.

  “That’s how Jem gets when she’s horny,” Sefton Boyd explained within Belinda’s hearing, at which Belinda tried to punch him, then stormed off in a rage.

  Dispatched to bed Pym wound his way up the great staircase while a dozen clocks tolled his death knell. How often had Rick not warned him against women who wanted nothing but his money? How dearly he longed for the safety of his bed at school. Crossing the landing he saw a rosette glinting like blood in the low light. He climbed another flight and saw Belinda’s head scowling at him round her door. “You can come in here if you like,” she said rudely.

  “It’s all right, thanks,” said Pym. He entered his room.

  On his pillow lay his eight love letters and four poems to Jemima, bound with ribbon and smelling of saddle soap.

  “Please take back your letters which I find oppressive since I regret we are no longer compatible. I do not know what possessed you to slick down your forelock like an errand boy but henceforth we meet as strangers.”

  Dashed down by humiliation and despair Pym hastened back to school and the same night wrote to every mother, active or retired, whose name and address he could put his hands on.

  “Dearest Topsie, Cherry, darling Mrs. Ogilvie, Mabel, darling Violet, I am being beaten mercilessly for writing poetry and I am very unhappy. Please take me away from this awful place.” But when they answered his appeal, the readiness of their love revolted him and he threw away their letters scarcely read. And when one of them, the best, dropped everything and travelled a hundred expensive miles to buy him a mixed grill at the Feathers, Pym met her enquiries with a remote politeness. “Yes, thank you, school is super, everything is absolutely fine. How are you?” Then led her an hour early to the railway station so that he could be a good chap at kickabout.

  “Dear Belinda”—he wrote in his poet’s cursive hand—“Thanks very much for your lette
r explaining that Jem is unstable. I know girls are terrifically sensitive at this age and going through all sorts of changes so it’s really all right. Our house side won Juniors which is a bit of a sensation here. I often think of your beautiful eyes. Magnus.”

  “Dear Father”—he wrote in a gruff Edwardian manner copied from Sefton Boyd—“I am doing lots of essential entertaining here which is very much the thing and gets me on. Everyone is very grateful for what I do, but prices at the tuckshop have risen and I wondered whether you could send me another five pounds to see me right.”

  To his surprise, Rick sent him nothing, but came down from the mountain in person, bringing not money but love, which was what Pym had written to him for in the first place.

  It was Rick’s first visit. Until now Pym had forbidden him the place, explaining that distinguished parents were considered bad form. And Rick with unwonted diffidence had accepted his exclusion. Now with the same diffidence he came, looking trim and loving and mysteriously humble. He didn’t venture into the school but sent a letter in his own hand proposing a rendezvous on the road to Farleigh Abbott, which was on the sea. When Pym arrived by bicycle as instructed, expecting the Bentley and half the court, round the corner instead rode Rick alone, also on a bicycle, with a lovely smile that Pym could see from miles off and humming “Underneath the Arches” out of tune. In the bicycle basket he had brought a picnic of their favourite things, a bottle of ginger pop for Pym, bubbly for himself and a football left over from Paradise. They rode their bicycles on the sand and skimmed pebbles on the waves. They lay in the dunes munching foie gras and Ryvita. They wandered through the little town and wondered whether Rick should buy it. They stared at the church and promised never to forget their prayers. They made a goal out of a broken gateway and kicked the football at each other all the way across the world. They kissed and wept and bear-hugged and swore to be pals all their lives and go bicycling every Sunday even when Pym was Lord Chief Justice and married with grandchildren.