A Perfect Spy
Page 23
“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.
“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?”
“Pitch the launcher right next to the pylon and shoot away from it!” Tom had shouted back joyfully, and as he shouted he felt the last bits of worry go out of his chest, and his shoulders settle on his back, and he knew that with a wind like this whipping over the hilltop he could tell anything he wanted to anybody. Uncle Jack launched ten clays for him and he brought down eight with eleven cartridges, which was his absolute best yet considering the wind. And when it was Tom’s turn to launch, Uncle Jack had a fight on his hands just to match him. But match him he did and Tom loved him for it. He didn’t want to beat Uncle Jack. His father maybe, but not Uncle Jack; there would be nothing left. In his second ten Tom did less well but he didn’t mind because his arms were aching, which wasn’t his fault. But Uncle Jack stayed steady as a castle. Even when he was reloading, the white head stayed forward to meet the rising butt.
“Fourteen eighteen to you,” Tom shouted as he galloped about collecting empty cartridges. “Well shot!” And then, just as loud and cheerful: “And Dad’s all right, is he?”
“Why wouldn’t he be?” Brotherhood shouted back.
“He seemed a bit down when he came to see me after Granddad’s funeral, that’s all.”
“I should think he bloody well was down. How would you feel if you had just buried your old man?”
Still shouting in the wind, both of them. Small talk while they loaded the 20-bore and cranked back the launcher for another go.
“He talked about freedom all the time!” Tom yelled. “He said nobody could ever give it to us, we’ve got to grab it for ourselves. I got rather bored with it, actually.”
Uncle Jack was so busy reloading that Tom even wondered whether he had heard. Or if he had, whether he was interested.
“He’s dead right,” said Brotherhood snapping the gun shut. “Patriotism’s a dirty word these days.”
Tom released the clay and watched it curl and burst to powder under Uncle Jack’s perfect aim.
“He wasn’t talking about patriotism exactly,” Tom explained, delving for another couple of cartridges.
“Oh?”
“I think he was telling me that if I was unhappy I should run away. He said it in his letter too. It’s sort—”
“Well?”
“It’s as if he wanted me to do something he hadn’t done himself when he was at the school. It’s a bit weird actually.”
Tom fired and missed.
“What do you mean letter, anyway?” said Brotherhood. “I thought he came and saw you.”
“He did. But he wrote to me as well. A great long letter. I just thought it was weird,” he said again, unable to get away from a favourite new adjective.
“All right, he was cut up. What’s wrong with that? His old man dies, he sits down and writes to his son. You should feel honoured—good shot, boy. Good shot.”
“Thanks,” said Tom and looked on proudly while Uncle Jack marked a hit on his scorecard. Uncle Jack always kept the score.
“That’s not what he said, though,” Tom added awkwardly. “He wasn’t cut up. He was pleased.”
“He wrote that, did he?”
“He said Granddad had gobbled up the natural humanity in him and he didn’t want to gobble it up in me.”
“That’s just another way of being cut up,” said Brotherhood, unbothered. “Your dad ever talk about a secret place, by the by? Somewhere he could find his well-earned peace and quiet, ever?”
“Not really.”
“He had one though, didn’t he.”
“Not really.”
“Where is it?”
“He said I was never to tell anyone.”
“Then don’t,” said Uncle Jack firmly.
Suddenly, after that, talking about one’s father became the necessary function of a democratic prefect. Mr. Caird had said it was the duty of people of privilege to sacrifice what they held most dear in life, and Tom loved his father beyond bearing. He felt Brotherhood’s gaze on him and was pleased to have aroused his interest even though it did not seem to be particularly approving.
“You’ve known him a very long time, haven’t you, Uncle Jack?” said Tom, getting into the car.
“If thirty-five years is a long time.”
“It is,” said Tom, for whom a week was still an age. Inside the car there was suddenly no wind at all. “So if Dad’s all right,” he said with false boldness as he buckled on his seat belt, “why are the police looking for him? That’s what I want to know.”
“Going to tell our fortunes today, Mary Lou?” Uncle Jack asked.
“Not today, darling, I’m not in the mood.”
“You’re always in the mood,” said Uncle Jack, and the two of them had a huge laugh while Tom blushed.
Mary Lou was a gypsy, Uncle Jack said, though Tom thought her more like a pirate. She was fat-bottomed and black-haired and had false lips drawn over her mouth like Frau Bauer in Vienna. She cooked cakes and served cream teas in a wooden café at the edge of the Common. Tom asked for poached eggs on toast and the eggs were creamy and fresh like the eggs at Plush. Uncle Jack had a pot of tea and a piece of her best fruitcake. He seemed to have forgotten everything Tom had been talking about, which Tom was grateful for, because he was feeling headachey from the fresh air and embarrassed by his own thoughts. It was two hours and eight minutes till he had to ring the bell for evensong. He was thinking he might take his father’s advice and run away.
“So what was all this about the police again?” said Brotherhood a little vaguely, long after Tom had decided he had forgotten or not heard.
“They came and saw Caird. Then Caird sent for me.”
“Mr. Caird, son,” Brotherhood corrected him perfectly kindly and took a grateful pull of tea. “When?”
“On Friday. After house rugger. Mr. Caird sent for me and there was this man in a raincoat sitting in Mr. Caird’s armchair, and he said he was from Scotland Yard about Dad, and did I by any chance have his leave address because in his absentmindedness after Granddad’s funeral Dad had taken leave and not told anyone where he was.”
“Bollocks,” Brotherhood said after a long time.
“It’s true, sir. It really is.”
“You said they.”
“I meant he.”
“Height?”
“Five foot ten.”
“Age?”
“Forty.”
“Colour of hair?”
“Like mine.”
“Clean-shaven?”
“Yes.”
“Eyes?”
“Brown.”
It was a game they had played often in the past.
“Car?”
“He took a taxi from the station.”
“How do you know?”
“Mr. Mellor brought him. He takes me to cello and works from the station cab-rank.”
“Be accurate, boy. He came in Mr. Mellor’s car. Did he tell you he’d come by train?”
“No.”
“Did Mellor?”
“No.”
“So who says he was a policeman?”
“Mr. Caird, sir. When he introduced me.”
“What was he wearing?”
“A suit, sir. Grey.”
“Did he give his rank?”
“Inspector.”
Brotherhood smiled. A wonderful, comforting afifectionate smile. “You silly chump, he was a Foreign Office inspector. That’s just a flunkey from your dad’s shop. That’s not a policeman, son; that’s a half-arsed clerk from Personnel Department with too little to do. Caird got it wrong as usual.”
Tom could have kissed him. He nearly did. He straightened up and felt about nine feet taller, and he wanted to bury his face in the thick tweed of Uncle Jack’s sports coat. Of course he wasn’t a policeman! He didn’t talk like a policeman, he didn’t feel like a policeman, he didn’t have big feet or short hair like a policeman, or a policeman’s way of being separate from you even when he was being nice. It’s all right, Tom told himself in glory. Uncle Jack’s made it right, the way he always can.
Brotherhood was holding out his handkerchief and Tom scrubbed his eyes with it.
“So what did you tell him anyway?” Brotherhood said. And Tom explained that he didn’t know where his father was either, he’d talked about losing himself in Scotland for a few days before returning to Vienna. Which had made Dad somehow seem at fault, a sort of criminal or worse. And when Tom had told his Uncle Jack everything else he remembered about the interview, the questions, and the telephone number in case Dad surfaced—Tom didn’t have it, but Mr. Caird did—Uncle Jack went to the phone in Mary Lou’s parlour and rang Mr. Caird, and got an extension for Tom till nine o’clock, on the grounds that there were family matters that needed talking about.
“But what about my bells?” said Tom in alarm.
“Carter Major’s doing them,” said Uncle Jack, who understood absolutely everything.
He must have rung London too, because he took a long time and gave Mary Lou an extra five pounds to fill what he called her Christmas stocking, which had them both in fits again, and this time Tom joined in.
How they came to be talking about Corfu, Tom was afterwards never sure and perhaps there was no real path to their conversation any more; it was just chat about what they had both been up to since they had last met, which after all was before the summer holidays so there was masses to talk about if you were in a talking mood. And Tom was; he hadn’t talked like this for ages, maybe ever, but Uncle Jack had the ease, he had that mixture of tolerance and discipline that for Tom was the perfect blend, for he loved to feel the strength of Uncle Jack’s frontiers as well as the safe ground inside.
“How’s your confirmation going?” Brotherhood had asked.
“All right, thanks.”
“You’re of an age now, Tom. Got to face it. In some countries you’d be in uniform already.”
“I know.”
“Work still a problem?”
“A bit, sir.”
“Still got your eye on Sandhurst?”
“Yes, sir. And my uncle’s regiment says they’d take me if I do all right.”
“Well you’ll have to swot, won’t you?”
“I’m really trying actually.”
Then Uncle Jack drew nearer and his voice dropped. “I’m not sure I should tell you this, son. But I’m going to anyway because I think you’re ready to keep a secret. Can you do that?”
“I’ve got lots of secrets I’ve never told to anyone, sir.”
“Your father is rather a secret man himself actually. I expect you knew that, didn’t you?”
“You are too, aren’t you?”
“Quite a great man as well, he is. But he’s got to keep it quiet. For his country.”
“And for you,” said Tom.
“A lot of his life is blocked off completely. You could almost say from human gaze.”
“Does Mummy know?”
“In principle, yes, she does. In detail, next to nothing. That’s the way we work. And if your father has ever given the impression of lying, or being evasive, less than truthful sometimes, you can bet your boots it was his work and his loyalty that were the reason. It’s a strain for him. It is for all of us. Secrets are a strain.”
“Is it dangerous?” Tom asked.
“Can be. That’s why we give him bodyguards. Like boys on motorbikes who follow him round Greece and hang about outside his house.”
“I saw them!” Tom declared excitedly.
“Like tall thin men with moustaches who come up to him at cricket matches—”
“He did, he did! He had a straw hat!”
“And sometimes what your dad does is so secret he has to disappear completely. And not even the bodyguards can have his address. I know. But the rest of the world doesn’t and it mustn’t. And if that inspector comes to you again, or to Mr. Caird, or if anybody else does, you must tell them whatever you know and report to me immediately afterwards. I’m going to give you a special phone number and have a special word with Mr. Caird too. He deserves a lot of help, your father does. And gets it.”