Part 26 (1/2)

10.

Once again a willed brightness was overtaking Pym as he listened to the many voices in his mind. To be king, he repeated to himself. To look with favour on this child that was myself. To love his defects and his strivings, and pity his simplicity.

If there was such a thing as a perfect time in Pym's life, a time when all the versions of himself were appreciated and playing nicely and he would never want for anything again, then surely it was his first few terms at Oxford University whither Rick had dispatched him as a necessary interlude to having him appointed Lord Chief Justice and thus securing him a place among the Highest in the Land. The relations.h.i.+p between the two pals had never been better. Following Axel's departure, Pym's final lonely months in Bern had seen a dramatic flowering of their correspondence. With Frau Ollinger barely speaking to him and Herr Ollinger increasingly absorbed in the problems of Ostermundigen, Pym walked the city streets alone, much as he had done at the beginning. But at night, with the wall beside him silent, he penned long and intimate letters of affection to Belinda and his one true anchor, Rick. Stimulated by his attentions, Rick's letters in reply took on a sudden stylishness and prosperity. The anguished missives from outer England ceased. The stationery thickened, stabilised and acquired ill.u.s.trious headings. First the Richard T. Pym Endeavour Company wrote to him from Cardiff, advising him that the Clouds of Misfortune which had appeared to Gather had been swept Away one and All by a Providence I can only regard as crackerjack. A month later, the Pym Partners Property and Finance Enterprise of Cheltenham was advising him that certain Steps were now in Hand for Pym's future with a view to Insuring that he would never want for Anything again. Most recently a printed card of regal elegance was pleased to announce that following a Merger Agreeable to all Parties, matters relating to the above Companies should henceforth be referred to the Pym Permanent Mutual Property Trust (Na.s.sau), of Park Lane W. Jack Brotherhood and Wendy treated him to a farewell fondue on the Firm; Sandy came and Jack gave Pym two bottles of whisky and hoped their paths would cross. Herr Ollinger accompanied him to the railway station and they drank a last coffee. Frau Ollinger stayed home. Elisabeth served them but she was distracted. She had put on bulk around the tummy, though she wore no ring. As the train pulled out of the station, Pym took a look downward at the circus and its elephant house, then a look upward at the university and its green dome and by the time he reached Basel he knew that Bern had sunk with all hands. Axel was illegal. The Swiss informed against him. I was lucky to get out myself. Standing in the corridor somewhere south of Paris he observed tears on his cheeks and vowed not to be a spy again. At Victoria Mr. Cudlove was waiting for him with a new Bentley.

”What do we call you now, sir? Doctor or Professor?” ”Just Magnus will do fine,” said Pym handsomely as they pumped hands. ”How's Ollie?”

The new Reichskanzlei in Park Lane was a monument to prosperous stability. The bust of TP was back in place. Law books, gla.s.s doors and a new jockey with the Pym colours winked a.s.surance at him while he waited on leather cus.h.i.+ons for a Lovely to admit him to the State Apartments. ”Our Chairman will see you now, Mr. Magnus.” They bear-hugged, both for a moment too proud to speak. Rick palmed Pym's back, moulded his cheeks and wiped away his tears. Mr. Muspole, Perce and Syd were summoned by separate buzzers to pay homage to the returning hero. Mr. Muspole produced a sheaf of doc.u.ments and Rick read the best bits of them aloud. Pym was appointed International Legal Adviser for life and awarded five hundred pounds a year to be reconsidered as appropriate on the strict understanding he worked for no other firm. His law studies at Oxford were thus taken care of; he need never want for anything again. A second Lovely brought bubbly. She seemed to have nothing else to do. Everybody drank the health of the company's newest employee. ”Come on, t.i.tch, let's have it in the parley-voo!” cried Syd excitedly, and Pym obliged by saying something fatuous in German. Father and son hugged again, Rick wept again and said if only he had had the advantages. The same evening, at a mansion in Amersham called The Furlong, his homecoming was again celebrated by an intimate party of two hundred old friends, few of whom Pym had seen before, including the heads of several world-famous corporations, leading stars of stage and screen and several Great Barristers who one by one took him aside and claimed the credit for obtaining a place for him at Oxford. The party over, Pym lay wakefully in his fourposter listening to the expensive slamming of car doors.

”You did a fine job out there in Switzerland, son,” said Rick from the dark where he had been standing for some while. ”You fought a good fight. It's been noticed. Enjoy your dinner?”

”It was really good.”

”A lot of people said to me, 'Rickie,' they said, 'you've got to get that boy back. Those foreigners will make a wh.o.r.e of him.' You know what I said to them?”

”What did you say to them?”

”I said I had faith in you. Have you got faith in me, son?”

”Ma.s.ses.”

”What do you think of the house?”

”It's wonderful,” said Pym.

”It's yours. It's in your name. I bought it from the Duke of Devons.h.i.+re.”

”Thank you very much, anyway.”

”n.o.body can ever take it away from you, son. You can be twenty. You can be fifty. Where your old man is, that's home. Did you talk to Maxie Moore at all?”

”I don't think I did.”

”The fellow who scored the winning goal for a.r.s.enal against Spurs? Go on. Of course you did. What did you think of Blottsie?”

”Which one was he?”

”G. W. Blott? One of the most famous names in the retail grocery world you'll ever meet. That marvellous dignity. He'll be a lord one day. So will you. What do you think of Sylvia?”

Pym recalled a bulky, middle-aged woman in blue with an aristocratic smile that could have been the bubbly.

”She's nice,” he said cautiously.

Rick seized on the word as if he had been hunting for it half his life. ”Nice. That's what she is. She's a d.a.m.ned nice woman with two first-cla.s.s husbands to her credit.”

”She's really attractive, even for my age.”

”Did you get yourself involved out there? There's nothing can't be put right in this world by good pals.”

”Just the odd affair. Nothing serious.”

”No woman's ever going to come between us, son. Once those Oxford girls know who your old man is, they'll be after you like a pack of wolves. Promise you'll keep yourself clean.”

”I promise.”

”And learn your law as if your life depended on it? You're being paid, remember.”

”I promise.”

”Well, then.”

The stealthy weight of Rick's body landed like a sixteen-stone cat at Pym's side. He pulled Pym's head towards his own until their two cheeks were pressed stubble to stubble. His fingers found the fatty parts of Pym's chest under his pyjama top and kneaded them. He wept. Pym wept too, thinking again of Axel.

The next day Pym moved hastily into his college, claiming a variety of urgent reasons for going up two weeks early. Declining the services of Mr. Cudlove, he travelled by bus and gazed in mounting wonder on flowing hills and mown cornfields glowing in the autumn sunlight. The bus pa.s.sed through country towns and villages, down lanes of russet beech trees and dancing hedgerows, till slowly the golden stone of Oxford replaced the Buckinghams.h.i.+re brick, the hills flattened and the city's spires lifted into the thickening rays of afternoon. He dismounted, thanked the driver, and drifted through the enchanted streets, asking his way at every corner, forgetting, asking again, not caring. Girls in bell skirts skimmed past him on their bicycles. Dons in billowing gowns clutched their mortarboards against the wind; bookshops beckoned to him like houses of delight. He was lugging a suitcase but it weighed no more than a hat. The college porter said staircase five, across the Chapel Quad. He climbed the winding wooden stairs until he saw his name written on an old oak door: M. R. Pym. He pushed the door and saw darkness and another door beyond. He pushed the second door and closed the first. He found the switch and closed the second door on his whole life till now. I am safe inside the city walls. n.o.body will find me, n.o.body will recruit me. He tripped over a case of legal tomes. A vaseful of orchids wished him ”G.o.dspeed, son, from your best pal.” A Harrods invoice debited them to the newest Pym consortium.

University was a conventional sort of place in those days, Tom. You would have a good laugh at the way we dressed and talked and the things we put up with, though we were the blessed of the earth. They shut us in at night and let us out in the morning. They gave us girls for tea but not for dinner and G.o.d knows not for breakfast. The college scouts doubled as the Dean's Joes and ratted on us if we broke the rules. Our parents had won the war--or most people's had--and since we couldn't beat them our best revenge was to imitate them. Some of us had done national service. The rest of us dressed like officers anyway, hoping no one would notice the difference. With his first cheque, Pym bought a dark blue blazer with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons. With his second, a pair of cavalry twill trousers and a blue tie with crowns that radiated patriotism. After that there was a moratorium because the third cheque took a month to clear. Pym polished his brown shoes, sported a handkerchief in his sleeve, and groomed his hair like a gentleman's. And when Sefton Boyd, who was a year ahead of him, feasted him in the exalted Gridiron Club, Pym made such strides with the language that in no time he was talking it like a native, referring to his inferiors as Charlies, and to our own lot as the Chaps, and p.r.o.nouncing bad things Harry Awful, and vulgar things Poggy, and good things Fairly Decent.

”Where did you pick up that Vincent's tie, by the by?” Sefton Boyd asked him kindly enough as they sauntered down the Broad for a game of shove-ha'penny with some Charlies at the Trinity pub. ”Didn't know you were a boxing blue in your spare time.”

Pym said he had admired it in the window of a shop called Hall Brothers in the High Street.

”Well, put it on ice for a bit, I should. You can always get it out again when they elect you.” Carelessly he put a hand on Pym's shoulder. ”And while you're about it, get your scout to sew some ordinary b.u.t.tons on that jacket. Don't want people thinking you're the Pretender to the Hungarian throne, do we?”

Once more Pym embraced everything, loved everything, stretched every sinew to excel. He joined the societies, paid more subscriptions than there were clubs, became college secretary of everything from the Philatelists to the Euthanasians. He wrote sensitive articles for university journals, lobbied distinguished speakers, met them at the railway station, dined them at the society's expense and brought them safely to empty lecture halls. He played college rugger, college cricket, rowed in his college eight, got drunk in college bar and was by turn rootlessly cynical towards society and stalwartly British and protective of it, depending on whom he happened to be with. He threw himself afresh upon the German muse and scarcely faltered when he discovered that at Oxford she was about five hundred years older than she had been in Bern, and that anything written within living memory was unsound. But he quickly overcame his disappointment. This is quality, he reasoned. This is academia. In no time he was immersing himself in the garbled texts of mediaeval minstrels with the same energy that, in an earlier life, he had bestowed on Thomas Mann. By the end of his first term he was an enthusiastic student of Middle and Old High German. By the end of his second he could recite the Hildebrandslied and intone Bishop Ulfila's Gothic translation of the Bible in his college bar to the delight of his modest court. By the middle of his third he was romping in the Parna.s.sian fields of comparative and putative philology, Where youthful creativity has ever had its fling. And when he found himself briefly transported into the perilous modernisms of the seventeenth century, he was pleased to be able to report, in a twenty-page a.s.sault on the upstart Grimmelshausen, that the poet had marred his work with popular moralising and undermined his validity by fighting on both sides in the Thirty Years' War. As a final swipe he suggested that Grimmelshausen's obsession with false names cast doubt upon his authors.h.i.+p.

I shall stay here for ever, he decided. I shall become a don and be hero to my pupils. To entrench this ambition he worked up a selective stammer and a self-denying smile, and at night sat long hours at his desk keeping himself awake on Nescafe. When daylight came he ventured downstairs unshaven so that all might see the lines of study etched upon his eager face. It was on one such morning that he was surprised to find a case of vintage port waiting for him, accompanied by a note from the Regius Professor of Law:”Dear Mr. Pym, ”Yesterday, Messrs. Harrods delivered the enclosed to me, together with a charming letter from your father which appears to commend you to me as my pupil. While it is not my habit to turn away such generosity, I fear that the gesture is better directed to my colleague in the Modern Languages school, since I understand from your Senior Tutor that you are reading German.”For half the day, Pym did not know where to put himself. He turned up his collar, wandered miserably in Christ Church Meadows, cut his tutorial for fear of being arrested and wrote letters to Belinda who was working as an unpaid secretary to a London charity. In the afternoon he sat in a dark cinema. In the evening, still in despair, he carted his guilty parcel to Balliol, determined to tell Sefton Boyd the whole story. But by the time he got there he had thought of a better version.

”Some rich s.h.i.+t in Merton is trying to get me to go to bed with him,” he protested, in the tone of healthy exasperation he had been practising all the way to the gates. ”He sent me a Harry great case of port to buy me over.”

If Sefton Boyd doubted him he did not let it show.

Between them they carried their booty to the Gridiron Club where six of them drank it at a sitting, fitfully toasting Pym's virginity till morning. A few days later Pym was elected a member. When the vacation came he took a job selling carpets at a shop in Watford. A lawyers' vacation course, he told Rick. Similar to the holiday seminars he had attended in Switzerland. In reply Rick sent him a five-page homily, warning him against airy-fairy intellectuals, and a cheque for fifty pounds that bounced.

A summer term was devoted entirely to women. Pym had never been so in love. He swore his love to every girl he met, he was so anxious to overcome what he a.s.sumed would be their poor opinion of him. In intimate cafes, on park benches or strolling beside the Isis on glorious afternoons, Pym held their hands and stared into their puzzled eyes and told them everything he had ever dreamed of hearing. If he felt awkward today with the one, he swore he would feel better tomorrow with the next, for women of his own age and intelligence were a novelty to him and he became disconcerted when they did not a.s.sume a subordinate position. If he felt awkward with all of them he wrote to Belinda, who never failed to reply. His love-talk was never duplicated; he was not a cynic. To one he spoke of his ambitions to return to the Swiss stage, where he had been such a runaway success. She should learn German and come with him, he said, they would act together. To another he painted himself as a poet of the futile and described his persecution at the hands of the murderous Swiss police.

”But I thought they were so terrifically neutral and humane!” she cried, appalled by his descriptions of the bearings he had received before being marched over the border into Austria.

”Not if you're different,” Pym said grimly. ”Not if you refuse to conform with the bourgeois norm. Those Swissies have two laws that really matter out there. Thou shalt not be poor and thou shalt not be foreign. I was both.”

”You've really been through it,” she said. ”It's fantastic. I haven't done anything at all.”

And to a third he portrayed himself as a novelist of the tortured life, with work that he had yet to show his publishers, all stashed away in an old filing cabinet at home.

One day Jemima came. Her mother had sent her to an Oxford secretarial college to learn typing and go to dances. She was long-legged and distraught like someone always late. She was more beautiful than ever.

”I love you,” Pym told her, handing her bits of fruitcake in his room. ”Wherever I was, whatever I was having to endure, I loved you all the time.”

”But what were you having to endure?” Jemima asked.