Part 43 (2/2)

”Happy Christmas, old son,” says Rick as Pym picks up the bedroom phone.

”And Happy Christmas to you, too, Father. What are you doing in New Jersey?”

”G.o.d's the twelfth man on the cricket team, son. It's G.o.d who tells us to keep the left elbow up through life. No one else.”

”So you always said. But it's not the cricket season. Are you drunk?”

”He's umpire, judge and jury rolled into one and never you forget it. There's no conning G.o.d. There never was. Are you glad I paid for your education, then?”

”I'm not conning G.o.d, Father, I'm trying to celebrate with my family.”

”Say hullo to Miriam,” says Rick, and there is m.u.f.fled protest before Miriam comes on the line.

”Hullo, Magnus,” says Miriam.

”Hullo, Miriam,” says Pym.

”Hullo,” says Miriam a second time.

”They feed you all right in that Emba.s.sy of yours, son, or is it all Thousand Island and French fries?”

”We have a perfectly decent canteen for the lower staff but at the moment I'm trying to eat at home.”

”Turkey?”

”Yes.”

”English bread sauce?”

”I expect so.”

”That grandson of mine all right then, is he? He's got the forehead, has he, the one I gave you that everybody talks about?”

”He's got a very good brow.”

”Blue eyes, same as mine?”

”Mary's eyes.”

”I hear she's first cla.s.s, son. I hear first-rate reports of her. They say she's got a fine piece of property down in Dorset that's worth a bob or two.”

”It's in trust,” says Pym sharply.

But Rick has already begun drowning in the gulf of his own self-pity. He weeps, the weep becomes a howl. In the background, Miriam is weeping, too, in a high-pitched whimper, like a small dog locked in a big house.

”But darling,” says Mary as Pym resumes his place as head of the family. ”Magnus. You're upset. What's the matter?”

Pym shakes his head, smiling and crying at once. He grabs his winegla.s.s and lifts it.

”To absent friends,” he calls out. ”To all our absent friends!” And later, for a wife's ears only: ”Just an old, old Joe, darling, who managed to track me down and wish me happy b.l.o.o.d.y Yule.”

Would you ever have supposed, Tom, that the greatest country in the world could be too small for one son and his old man? Yet that is what happened. That Rick should head for wherever he could use his son's protection was, I suppose, only natural and after Berlin, probably inevitable. He went first, as I now know, to Canada, unwisely trusting in the bonds of Commonwealth. The Canadians quickly tired of him and when they threatened to repatriate him he made a small down payment on a Cadillac and headed south. In Chicago, my enquiries show that he succ.u.mbed to the many enticing offers from property companies to move into new developments on the edge of town and live rent-free for three months as an inducement. A Colonel Hanbury resided at Farview Gardens, a Sir William Forsyth graced Sunleigh Court, where he extended his tenancy by conducting protracted negotiations to buy the penthouse for his butler. What either of them did for liquidity is, as ever, a mystery, though no doubt there were grateful Lovelies in the background. The one clue is a p.r.i.c.kly letter from the stewards of a local turf club, advising Sir William that his horses will be welcome when his stable fees have been settled. Pym was still only vaguely aware of these distant rumblings, and his absences from Was.h.i.+ngton gave him a false sense of protection. But in New Jersey something changed Rick for ever, and whatever it was, from then on Pym became his only industry. Was the same wind of reckoning blowing over both men simultaneously? Was Rick really ill? Or was he, like Pym, merely conscious of impending judgment? Certainly Rick thought he was ill. Certainly he thought he ought to be: ”Am obliged to use strong walking-stick (twenty-nine dollars cash) at all times owing to Heart and other more sinister Ailments”--he wrote--”My doctor keeps the Worst from me and recommends that Frugal diet (plain foods and Champagne only, no Californian) could Prolong this Meagre existence and enable me to Fight back for a few more Months before I am Called.”Certainly he took to wearing liver-coloured spectacles like Aunt Nell. And when he fell foul of the law in Denver, the prison doctor was so impressed by him that he was released the moment Pym had paid the medical fees.

And after Denver you decided you were already dead, didn't you, and set out to haunt me with your smallness? Every town I went to, I walked in fear of your pathetic ghost. Every safe house I entered, I expected to see you waiting at the gate, parading your willed, deliberate littleness. You knew where I would be before I got there. You would con a ticket and travel five thousand miles just to show me how small you had become. And off we'd go to the best restaurant in town, and I would buy you your treat and boast to you about my diplomatic doings and listen to your boastings in return. I would shower you with all the money I could afford, praying that it would enable you to add a few more Wentworths to the green cabinet. But even while I fawned on you and exchanged radiant smiles with you and held hands with you and bolstered you in your idiotic schemes, I knew that you had pulled the best con of them all. You were nothing any more. Your mantle had pa.s.sed to me, leaving you a naked little man, and myself the biggest con I knew.

”Why don't those fellows give you your knighthood, then, old son? They tell me you ought to be Permanent Under Secretary by now. Got a skeleton in your cupboard, have you? Maybe I should slip over to London and have a word with those Personnel boys of yours.”

How did he find me? How could it be that his systems of intelligence were better than those of the Agency's leash dogs who were fast becoming my regular, unwelcome companions? At first I thought he was using private detectives. I began collecting the numbers of suspicious cars, noting the times of dead-end phone calls, trying to distinguish them from Langley's. I bearded my secretary: has someone calling himself my sick father been pestering you for information? Eventually I discovered that the Emba.s.sy travel clerk had an addiction to playing English snooker at some Masonic hostel in the dirty part of town. Rick had found him there and pitched him a fatuous cover story: ”I've got this d.i.c.ky heart,” he'd said to the fool. ”It could get me any time, you see, but don't you go telling my boy. I don't like to bother him when he's got enough on his plate as it is. What you're to do, you're to get on the blower to me and give me the wink whenever that boy of mine leaves town, so that I know where to find him when the end comes.” And no doubt there was a gold watch in it somewhere. And tickets for next year's Cup Final. And seeing the boy's dear old mother right next time Rick slipped home for a drop of English air.

But my discovery had come too late. We had had San Francis...o...b.. then, and Denver, and Seattle, and Rick had homed on every one of them, weeping and shrinking before my very eyes, until all that was left of Rick was what he owned of Pym; and all that was left of Pym, it seemed to me, as I wove my lies and blandished, and perjured myself before one kangaroo court after another, was a failing con man tottering on the last legs of his credibility.

And that's how it was, Tom. Betrayal is a repet.i.tious trade and I will not bother you with more of it. We have reached the end, though it seems from here to look quite like the beginning. The Firm pulled Pym out of Was.h.i.+ngton and sent him to Vienna so that he could take back his networks and so that his growing army of accusers could draw its wretched computer pattern tighter round his neck. There was no saving him. Not in the end. Poppy knew that. So did Pym, though he would never admit it, even to himself. Just one more con, Pym kept saying to himself; one more con will see me right. Poppy pressed him, begged him, threatened him. Pym was adamant: Leave me in place, I'll win through, they love me, I've given my life to them.

But the truth is, Tom, that Pym preferred to test the limits of the tolerance of those he loved. He preferred to sit here in Miss Dubber's upper room and wait for G.o.d to come, while he looked down the gardens to the beach where the best pals ever had kicked a football from one end of the world to the other, and ridden their Harrods bicycles across the sea.

18.

It's fireworks night at Plush, thought Mary, staring into the darkness of the square. It's an unlit bonfire waiting for Tom. Through the windscreen of their parked car she gazed at the empty bandstand and pretended she saw the last of her family and retainers crammed into the old cricket pavilion. The m.u.f.fled footsteps were the footsteps of the gamekeepers as they gathered to her brother Sam, back for his last leave. She pretended she could hear her brother's voice, a little too parade-ground for her liking, still scratchy from the strain of Ireland. ”Tom?” he calls. ”Where's old Tom?”... Not a move. Tom is stuck inside Mary's sheepskin coat, his head jammed against her thigh and nothing short of Christmas is going to lure him out. ”Come on, Tom Pym, you're the youngest!” cries Sam. ”Where is he?... You'll be too old next year, you know, Tom.” Then his brutal dismissal. ”f.u.c.k it. Let's have someone else.” Tom is shamed, the Pyms are disgraced, Sam as usual is angry that Tom has no taste for blowing up the universe. A braver child puts the match and the world ignites. Her brother's military rockets race over it in perfect salvoes. Everyone is small, looking at the night sky.

She sat at Brotherhood's side and he was holding her wrist the way the doctor held it when she was about to bear her little coward. To rea.s.sure her. To steady her. To say ”I am in charge here.” The car was parked in a side street and behind them stood the police van and behind the police van stood a caravan of about six hundred parked police cars and radio vans and ambulances and bomb lorries, all occupied by Sam's familiars who spoke soundlessly to one another without moving their eyes. Beside her was a shop called Sugar Novelties with a neon-lit window and a plastic gnome pus.h.i.+ng a wheelbarrow laden with dusty sweets, and next to it a granite workhouse with ”Public Library” engraved over a funereal door. Across the street stood a hideous Baptist church that told you G.o.d was no fun either. Beyond the church lay G.o.d's square and His bandstand and His monkey-puzzle trees, and between the fourth and fifth tree from the left, as she had counted twenty times, and three-quarters of the way up, hung an arched lighted window with the orange curtains drawn, which my officers advise me is where your husband's room is situated, madam, though our enquiries indicate that he is known locally by the name of Canterbury and is well liked in the community.

”He's always liked,” Mary snapped.

But the superintendent was saying this to Brotherhood. He was speaking through Brotherhood's window and deferring to Brotherhood as her keeper. And Mary knew that the superintendent had been ordered to speak to her as little as possible, which came hard to him. And that Brotherhood had given himself the job of answering for her, which the superintendent seemed to accept was as near to G.o.dliness as he was likely to get without having his ears blasted off. The superintendent was a Devon man, and ponderously traditional. I'm so frightfully glad he's being arrested by a Devon man, she thought cruelly, in Caroline Lumsden's Sloane-Ranger twitter. I always think it's so much nicer to be taken prisoner by a man of the soil.

”Are you quite sure you wouldn't like to come into the Church Hall, madam?” the superintendent was saying for the hundredth time. ”It's much warmer in the Church Hall and there's some quite fine company. Cosmopolitan, counting the Americans.”

”She's best here,” Brotherhood murmured in reply.

”Only we can't allow the gentleman to switch on the engine, you see, to be truthful, madam. And if he can't switch on the engine, well you can't have the heating, if you see what I mean.”

”I'd like you to go away,” Mary said.

”She's all right as she is,” said Brotherhood.

”Only it could be all night, you see, madam. Could be all tomorrow too. If our friend decides to stick it out, kind of thing, to be truthful.”

”We'll play it as it comes,” Brotherhood said. ”When you need her, this is where she'll be.”

”Well I'm afraid she won't, sir, to be truthful, not when we go in, if we have to. I'm afraid she'll have to withdraw to a somewhat safer position, to be truthful, same as you. Only the rest of them are back in the Church Hall, if you follow me, sir, and the chief constable says that's where all non-combatants have got to be at that stage in the proceedings including the Americans.”

”She doesn't want to be with the rest of them,” said Mary before Brotherhood could speak. ”And she's not American. She's his wife.”

The superintendent went away and came back almost immediately. He's the go-between. They've chosen him for his bedside manner.

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