Part 13 (1/2)
”I suppose he does, sir.”
”Suppose?”
”He does, sir.”
”Do you disapprove of his life-style?”
”I do a bit, I suppose.”
”Does it occur to you that you may one day be obliged to choose between G.o.d and Mammon?”
”Yes, sir.”
”Have you discussed this with Father Murgo?”
”No, sir.”
”Do so.”
”Yes, sir.”
”Have you ever thought of entering the Church?”
”Often, sir,” said Pym, putting on his soulful face.
”We have a fund here, Pym, for impecunious boys wis.h.i.+ng to enter the Church. It occurs to the Bursar that you might be eligible to benefit from this fund.”
”Yes, sir.”
Father Murgo was a toothy, driven little soul whose unlikely task, considering his proletarian origins, was to act as G.o.d's itinerant talent-spotter to the public schools. Where Willow was thunderous and craggy, a sort of Makepeace Watermaster without a secret, Murgo writhed inside his habit like a ferret roped into a bag. Where Willow's fearless gaze was unruffled by knowledge, Murgo's signalled the lonely anguish of the cell.
”He's nuts,” Sefton Boyd declared. ”Look at the scabs on his ankles. The swine picks them while he's praying.”
”He's mortifying himself,” said Pym.
”Magnus?” Murgo echoed in his sharp northern tw.a.n.g. ”Whoever called you that? G.o.d's Magnus. You're Parvus.” His quick red smile glinted like a stripe that would not heal. ”Come this evening,” he urged. ”Allenby staircase. Staff guest-room. Knock.”
”You mad b.u.g.g.e.r, he'll touch you up!” Sefton Boyd shouted, beside himself with jealousy. But Murgo never touched anyone as Pym had guessed. His lonely hands remained lashed inside his sleeves by invisible thongs, emerging only to eat or pray. For the rest of that summer term Pym floated on clouds of undreamed freedom. Not a week earlier Willow had sworn to flog a boy who had dared to describe cricket as a recreation. Now Pym had only to mention that he proposed to take a stroll with Murgo to be excused what games he wished. Neglected essays were mysteriously waived, beatings vaguely due to him deferred. On breathless walks, on bicycle rides, in little teahouses in the country, or at night crammed into a corner of Murgo's miserable bedroom, Pym eagerly offered versions of himself that alternately shocked and thrilled them both. The s.h.i.+ftless materialism of his home life. His quest for faith and love. His fight against the demons of self-abuse and such tempters as Kenneth Sefton Boyd. His brother-and-sister relations.h.i.+p with the girl Belinda.
”And the holidays?” Murgo proposed one evening as they loped down a bridlepath past lovers fondling in the gra.s.s. ”Fun, are they? High living?”
”The holidays are a desert,” said Pym loyally. ”So are Belinda's. Her father's a stockbroker.”
The description acted on Murgo like a goad.
”Oh, a desert, are they? A wilderness? All right. I'll go along with that. Christ was in the wilderness too, Parvus. For a b.l.o.o.d.y long time. So was Saint Anthony. Twenty years he served, in a filthy little fort on the Nile. Perhaps you've forgotten.”
”No I hadn't at all.”
”Well he did. And it didn't stop him talking to G.o.d or G.o.d talking to him. Anthony didn't have privilege. He didn't have money or property or fine cars or stockbrokers' daughters. He prayed.”
”I know,” said Pym.
”Come to Lyme. Answer the call. Be like Anthony.”
”What the f.u.c.k have you done to the front of your hair?” Sefton Boyd screamed at him the same evening.
”I've cut it off.”
Sefton Boyd stopped laughing. ”You're going to be a monkey Murgo,” he said softly. ”You've fallen for him, you mad tart.”
Sefton Boyd's days were numbered. Acting on information received--even now I blush to contemplate the source of it--Mr. Willow had decided that young Kenneth was getting a little too old for the school.
So there's yet another Pym for you, Jack, and you had better add him to my file even if he is neither admirable nor, I suspect, comprehensible to you, though Poppy knew him inside out from the first day. He's the Pym who can't rest till he's touched the love in people, then can't rest till he's hacked his way out of it, the more drastically the better. The Pym who does nothing cynically, nothing without conviction. Who sets events in motion in order to become their victim, which he calls decision, and ties himself into pointless relations.h.i.+ps, which he calls loyalty. Then waits for the next event to get him out of the last one, which he calls destiny. It's the Pym who pa.s.ses up a two-week invitation to stay with the Sefton Boyds in Scotland, all found including Jemima, because he is pledged to hurl himself over the Dorset hills in the wake of a tortured Mancunian zealot, preparing for a life he has not the smallest intention of leading, among people who chill him to the root. It's the Pym who writes daily to Belinda because Jemima has cast doubts on his divinity. It's Pym the Sat.u.r.day night juggler bounding round the table and spinning one stupid plate after another because he can't bear to let anyone down for one second and so lose their esteem. So off he goes and half chokes himself on incense and sleeps in a cell that stinks like a wet dog and nearly dies of nettle stew in order to become pious and pay his school fees and be adored by Murgo. Meanwhile he heaps fresh promises on old and convinces himself that he is on the path to Heaven while he digs himself deeper into his own mess. By the end of a week he is promised to a boys' camp in Hereford, a pan-denominational retreat in Shrops.h.i.+re, a Trade Unionists' pilgrimage in Wakefield and a Celebration of Witness in Derby. By the end of two weeks there isn't a county in England where he hasn't pledged his holiness six different ways--which is not to deny that intermittently he has visions of himself as a haggard apostle of the life renounced, converting beautiful women and millionaires to Christian poverty.
It was a full month before G.o.d provided the escape that Pym was waiting for.YOUR IMMEDIATE PRESENCE CHESTER STREET ESSENTIAL IN MATTER OF VITAL NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL IMPORTANCE RICHARD T. PYM MANAGING DIRECTOR PYMCORP.
”You must go,” said Murgo with tears of misery rolling down his hollowed cheeks as he handed him the fatal telegram after Terce.
”I don't think I can face it,” said Pym, no less affected. ”It's just money, money all the time.”
They walked past the print shop and the basket shop, through the kitchen gardens to the little wicker gate that kept Rick's world at bay.
”You didn't send it to yourself, did you, Parvus?” Murgo asked.
Pym swore he had not, which was the truth.
”You don't understand what a force you are,” Murgo said. ”I don't think I'll be the same again.”
It had never occurred to Pym until now that Murgo was capable of change.
”Well,” said Murgo with a last sad writhe.
”Goodbye,” said Pym. ”And thanks.”
But there is cheer in sight for both of them. Pym has promised to be back for Christmas, when the tramps come.
Mad swings, Tom. Mad leaps and loves, madder round the corner. I wrote to Dorothy too somewhere in that time. Care of Sir Makepeace Watermaster at the House of Commons, though I knew he was dead. I waited a week then forgot until one day out of the blue my ploy was rewarded with a tatty little letter, blotchy with tears or drink, on ruled paper torn from a notepad, no address but postmark East London, a country I had never visited. It is before me now.”Yours was a voice down many Coridors of Years, my dear, I put it in the kitchen cuboard with my Tableware to view at leasure. I will be at Euston Station the up platform 3 p.m. Thursday without my Herbie and I will be carrying a posy of lavender which you always loved.”Already greatly regretting his decision, Pym arrived at the station late and placed himself in the gunman's corner beneath an iron arch close to some mail bags. Quite a bevy of mothers was milling about, some eligible, some less so, but there was none he wanted and several who were drunk. And one of them seemed to be clutching a posy of flowers wrapped in newspaper but by then he had decided he had the wrong platform. It was his darling Dorothy that Pym had wanted, not some lolloping old biddy in a pantomime hat.
A weekday evening, Tom. The traffic in Chester Street burps and crackles in the rain, but inside the Reichskanzlei it is a Green Hill Sunday. Still pious from his monastery Pym presses the bell but hears no answering chime. He drives the great bra.s.s door knocker against its stud. A lace curtain parts and closes. The door opens, but not far.
”Cunningham's the name, squire,” says a heavy man in a thick expatriate c.o.c.kney, as he shuts the door fast after him as if scared of letting in germs. ”Half cunning, half ham. You'll be the son and heir. Greetings, squire, Salaams.”
”How do you do,” says Pym.
”I'm optimistic, squire, thank you,” Mr. Cunningham replies with a Middle-European literalness. ”I think we're on a road to understanding. Some resistance at first is to be expected. But I believe I see a light begin to s.h.i.+ne.”
It is more than Pym does for the pa.s.sage down which Mr. Cunningham leads him with such a.s.surance is pitch black and the only light comes from the pale patches on the wall left by the departed law books.
”You're a German scholar, I understand, squire,” says Mr. Cunningham more thickly, as if the exertion has affected his adenoids. ”A fine language. The people, I'm not sure. But a lovely tongue in the right hands, you can quote me.”