John LeCarre - A New Collection of Three Novels Part 39

"What of it?"

"Magnus told him he'd put his mother in a house beside the sea in Devon."

"Told who?"

"Poppy. His Czech controller. They were students together in Bern. He thinks Magnus is going to kill himself. I suddenly realised. That's what's in the burnbox with the secrets. The Station gun. Isn't it?"

"How do you know it's Farleigh Abbott?"

"He talked about his mother in Devon. He hasn't got a b.l.o.o.d.y mother. His only place in Devon is Farleigh Abbott. 'When I was in Devon,' he'd say. 'Let's go to Devon for a holiday.' It was Farleigh Abbott, always. We never went and he stopped talking about it. Rick used to take him there from school. They used to picnic and bicycle on the beach. It's one of his ideal places. He's there with a woman. I know he is."

15.

You will imagine, Tom, with what glory in his youthful heart the brilliant intelligence officer and lover celebrated the completion of his two years of devoted service to the flag in distant Austria and set about returning to civilian England. His leave-taking from Sabina was not as heart-rending as he had feared, for as the day approached she feigned a Slav indifference to his departure.

"I shall be happy woman, Magnus. Your English wives will not make sour faces at me. I shall be economist and free woman, not the courtesan of a frivolous soldier." n.o.body had ever called Pym frivolous before. She even took herself on leave ahead of him to forestall the agony of parting. She is being brave, Pym told himself. His farewell from Axel, though haunted by rumours of fresh purges, had a similarly rounded feel to it.

"Sir Magnus, whatever happens to me, we have done a great work together," he said as, in the evening light, they faced each other outside the barn that had become Pym's second home. "Never forget you owe me two hundred dollars."

"I never will," Pym said.

He began the long walk back to Sergeant Kaufmann's jeep. He turned to wave but Axel had vanished into the forest.

The two hundred dollars were a reminder of their increasing closeness during the final months of their relations.h.i.+p.

"My father's pressing me for money again," Pym had said one evening while they photographed a codebook he had borrowed from Membury's cricket locker. "The Burmese police are proposing to arrest him."

"Then send it to him," Axel had replied, winding back the film of his camera. He slipped the film in his pocket and inserted a fresh one. "How much does he want?"

"Whatever it is, I haven't got it. I'm a subaltern on thirteen s.h.i.+llings a day, not a millionaire."

Axel had appeared to pay no further interest, and they turned instead to the topic of Sergeant Pavel. Axel said it was time to stage a fresh crisis in Pavel's life.

"But he had a crisis only last month," Pym had objected. "His wife threw him out of his apartment for drunkenness and we had to help him buy his way in again."

"We need a crisis," Axel had repeated firmly. "Vienna is beginning to take him for granted and I do not care for the tone of their follow-up questions."

Pym found Membury sitting at his desk. The afternoon sun was s.h.i.+ning on one side of his friendly head while he read a fish book.

"I'm afraid Greensleeves wants a bonus of two hundred dollars cash," he said.

"But my dear chap, we've paid him a pot of money this month already! What on earth can he want two hundred dollars for?"

"He's got to buy his daughter an abortion. The doctor only takes U.S. dollars and it's getting urgent.""But the child's a mere fourteen. Who's the man? They ought to throw him into prison."

"It's that Russian captain from headquarters."

"The pig. The utter swine."

"Pavel's a Roman Catholic too, you know," Pym reminded him. "Not a very good one, I agree. But it's not easy for him either."

The next night Pym counted two hundred dollars across the barn table. Axel tossed them back at him.

"For your father," he said. "A loan from me to you."

"I can't do that. Those are operational funds."

"Not any more. They belong to Sergeant Pavel." Pym still did not pick up the money. "And Sergeant Pavel lends them to you as your friend," Axel said, tearing a sheet of paper from his notebook. "Here--write me an I.O.U. Sign it and one day I shall make you pay it back."

Pym rode away in good heart, confident that Graz and all its responsibilities, like Bern, would cease to exist the moment he entered the first tunnel.

Laying down his arms at the Intelligence Corps Depot in Suss.e.x, Pym was handed the following PRIVATE CONFIDENTIAL letter by the demobilisation officer:The Government Overseas Research Group P. O. Box 777 The Foreign Office London, S.W. 1 Dear Pym, Mutual friends in Austria have pa.s.sed your name to me as someone who might be interested in longer term employment. If this is so, would you care to lunch with me at the Travellers' Club for an informal chat on Friday the nineteenth at 12:45?

(Signed) Sir Alwyn Leith, C.M.G.For several days a mysterious squeamishness held Pym back from replying. I need new horizons, he told himself. They are good people but limited. Feeling strong one morning, he wrote regretting he was considering a career in the Church.

"There's always Sh.e.l.l, Magnus," said Belinda's mother, who had taken Pym's future much to heart. "Belinda's got an uncle in Sh.e.l.l, haven't you, darling?"

"He wants to do something worthwhile, Mummy," Belinda said, stamping her foot and making the breakfast table rattle.

"Time somebody did," said Belinda's father from behind his Telegraph, and for some reason found this very funny, and went on laughing through his gapped teeth while Belinda stormed into the garden in a rage.

A more interesting contender for Pym's services was Kenneth Sefton Boyd, who had come into an inheritance and was proposing that he and Pym should open a nightclub. Keeping this intelligence from Belinda, who had views on nightclubs and the Sefton Boyds, Pym pleaded an engagement at his old school and took himself to the family estate in Scotland, where Jemima met him at the station. She was driving the very Land Rover from which she had glowered at him when they were children. She was more beautiful than ever.

"How was Austria?" she asked as they b.u.mped cheerfully over purple Highlands towards a monstrous Victorian castle.

"Super," said Pym.

"Did you box and play rugger all the time?"

"Well not all the time, actually," Pym confessed.

Jemima cast him a look of protracted interest.

The Sefton Boyds lived in a parentless world. A disapproving retainer served them dinner. Afterwards they played backgammon until Jemima was tired. Pym's bedroom was as large as a football field and as cold. Sleeping lightly, he woke without stirring to see a dismembered red spark switching like a firefly across the darkness. The spark descended and disappeared. A pale shape advanced on him. He smelt cigarette and toothpaste and felt Jemima's naked body arrange itself softly around him, and Jemima's lips find his own.

"You won't mind if we turf you out on Friday, will you?" said Jemima while the three breakfasted in bed from a tray brought in by Sefton Boyd. "Only we've got Mark coming for the weekend."

"Who's Mark?" said Pym.

"Well I'm going to sort of marry him, actually," said Jemima. "I'd marry Kenneth if I could, but he's so conventional about those things."

Renouncing women, Pym wrote to the British Council offering to distribute culture among primitives, and to his old housemaster, Willow, asking for a position teaching German. "I greatly miss the school's discipline and have felt a keen loyalty towards it ever since my father failed to pay my fees." He wrote to Murgo booking himself in for an extended retreat, though he had the prudence to be vague about dates. He wrote to the Catholics of Farm Street asking to continue the instruction he had begun in Graz. He wrote to an English school in Geneva and an American school in Heidelberg, and to the BBC, all in a spirit of self-negation. He wrote to the Inns of Court about opportunities for reading law. When he had thus surrounded himself with a plethora of choices, he filled in an enormous form detailing his brilliant life till now and followed it to the Oxford Appointments Board in search of more. The morning was sunny; his old university city dazzled him with carefree memories of his days as a Communist informer. His interlocutor was whimsical if not downright fey. He pushed his spectacles to the top of his nose. He shoved them into his greying locks like an effeminate racing driver. He gave Pym sherry and put a hand on his backside in order to propel him to a long window that gave on to a row of council houses.

"How about a life in filthy industry?" he suggested.

"Industry would be fine," said Pym.

"Not unless you like eating with the crew. Do you like eating with the crew?"

"I'm really not very cla.s.s-conscious actually, sir."

"How charming. And do you like having grease up to your elbows?"

Pym said he didn't mind grease either, actually, but by then he was being guided to a second window that gave on to spires and a lawn.

"I've a menial librarians.h.i.+p at the British Museum and a sort of third a.s.sistant clerks.h.i.+p to the House of Commons, which is the proletarian version of the Lords. I've bits and bobs in Kenya, Malaya, and the Sudan. I can do you nothing in India, they've taken it away from me. Do you like abroad or hate it?"

Pym said abroad was super, he had been to university in Bern. His interlocutor was puzzled. "I thought you went to university here."

"Here too," said Pym.

"Ah. Now do you like danger?"

"I love it, actually."

"You poor boy. Don't keep saying 'actually.' And will you give unquestioning allegiance to whoever is rash enough to employ you?"

"I will."

"Will you adore your country right or wrong so help you G.o.d and the Tory Party?"

"I will again," said Pym, laughing.

"Do you also believe that to be born British is to be born a winner in the great lottery of life?"

"Well, yes, to be honest, that too."

"Then be a spy," his interlocutor suggested and drew from his desk yet another application form and handed it to Pym. "Jack Brotherhood sends his love, and says why on earth haven't you been in touch with him, and why won't you have lunch with his nice recruiter?"

I could write whole essays for you, Tom, on the voluptuous pleasures of being interviewed. Of all the arts of affiliation Pym mastered, and throughout his life improved upon, the interview must stand in first place. We didn't have Office trick-cyclists in those days, as your Uncle Jack likes to call them. We didn't have anybody who wasn't himself a citizen of the secret world, blessed with the unlined innocence of privilege. The nearest they had come to life's experience was the war, and they saw the peace as its continuation by other means. Yet in the terms of the world outside their heads they had led lives so untested, so childlike and tender in their simplicities, so inward in their connections, that they required echelons of cut-outs to reach the society they honestly believed they were protecting. Pym sat before them, calm, reflective, resolute, modest. Pym composed his features in one mould after another, now of reverence, now of awe, zeal, pa.s.sionate sincerity or spiritual good humour. He paraded pleasurable surprise when he heard that his tutors thought the world of him, and a stern-jawed pride on learning that the army loved him too. He modestly demurred or modestly boasted. He weeded out the half-believers from the believers and did not rest until he had converted the pack of them to paid-up life members.h.i.+p of the Pym supporters' club.

"Now tell us about your father, will you, Pym?" said a man with a droopy moustache uncomfortably reminiscent of Axel's. "Sounds a bit of a colourful sort of type to me."

Pym smiled ruefully, sensing the mood. Pym delicately faltered before rallying.

"I'm afraid he's a bit too colourful sometimes, sir," he said amid a hubble-bubble of male laughter. "I don't see a lot of him to be honest. We're still friends, but I rather steer clear of him. I have to, actually."

"Yes. Well, I don't think we can hold you responsible for the sins of your old man, can we?" said the same questioner indulgently. "It's you we're interviewing, not your papa."

How much did they know of Rick, or care? Even today I can only guess, for the question was never raised again and I am sure that in any formal way it went forgotten within days of Pym's acceptance. English gentlemen, after all, do not discriminate against each other on the grounds of percentage, only of breeding. Occasionally they must have read of one of Rick's more lurid collapses, and perhaps allowed themselves an amused smile. Here and there, presumably, word trickled down to them by way of their commercial contacts. But my suspicion is that Rick was an a.s.set. A healthy streak of criminality in a young spy's background never did him any harm, they reasoned. "Grown up in a hard school," they told one another. "Could be useful."

The last question of the interview and Pym's answer echo for ever in my head. A military man in tweeds put it.

"Look here, young Pym," he demanded, with a thrust of his bucolic head. "You're by way of being a Czech buff. Speak their language a bit, know their people. What d'you say to these purges and arrests they're having over there? Worry you?"

"I think the purges are quite appalling, sir. But they are to be expected," said Pym, fixing his earnest gaze upon a distant, unreachable star.

"Why expected?" demanded the military man, as if nothing ought to be.

"It's a rotten system. It's superimposed on tribalism. It can only survive by the exercise of oppression."

"Yes, yes. Granted. So what would you do about it--do?"

"In what capacity, sir?"

"As one of us, you fool. Officer of this service. Anyone can talk. We do."

Pym had no need to think. His patent sincerity was out there speaking for him already.

"I'd play their game, sir. I'd divide them against themselves. Spread rumour, false accusation, suspicion. I'd let dog eat dog."

"You mean you wouldn't mind getting innocent chaps chucked into prison by their own police, then? Being a bit harsh, aren't you? Bit immoral?"

"Not if it shortens the life of the system. No, sir, I don't think I am. And I'm not persuaded about the innocence of these men of yours either, I'm afraid."

In life, says Proust, we end up doing whatever we do second best. What Pym might have done better, I shall never know. He accepted the Firm's offer. He opened his Times and read with a similar detachment of his engagement to Belinda. That's me taken care of, then, he thought. With the Firm getting one half of me and Belinda the other, I'll never want for anything again.

Turn your eye to Pym's first great wedding, Tom. It occurs largely without his partic.i.p.ation, in his last months of training, in a break between silent killing and a three-day seminar ent.i.tled Know Your Enemy, led by a vibrant young tutor from the London School of Economics. Imagine Pym's enjoyment of this unlikely preparation for his married state. The fun of it. The free-wheeling unreality! He has chased Buchan's ghost across the moors of Argyll. He has messed about in rubber boats, made night landings on sandy sh.o.r.es, with hot chocolate awaiting him in the vanquished enemy's headquarters. He has fallen out of aeroplanes, dipped into secret inks, learned Morse and tapped scatological radio signals into the bracing Scottish air. He has watched a Mosquito aeroplane glide a hundred feet above him through the darkness, dropping a boxful of boulders in place of genuine supplies. He has played secret games of fox-and-geese in the streets of Edinburgh, photographed innocent citizens without their knowledge, fired live bullets at pop-up targets in simulated drawing-rooms, and plunged his dagger into the midriff of a swinging sandbag, all for England and King Harry. In spells of quiet he has been dispatched to genteel Bath to improve his Czech at the feet of an ancient lady called Frau Kohl, who lives in a crescent house of impoverished splendour. Over tea and m.u.f.fins, Frau Kohl shows him alb.u.ms of her childhood in Carlsbad, now called Karlovy Vary.

"But you know Karlovy Vary very well, Mr. Sanderstead!" she cries when Pym shows off his knowledge. "You have been there, yes?"

"No," says Pym. "But I have a friend who has."

Then back to base camp Somewhere in Scotland to resume the red thread of violence that has been spun into every new thing he is learning. This violence is not only of the body. It is the ravishment that must be done to truth, friends.h.i.+p and, if need be, honour in the interest of Mother England. We are the chaps who do the dirty work so that purer souls can sleep in bed at night. Pym of course has heard these arguments before from the Michaels, but now he must hear them again, from his new employers, who make pilgrimages from London in order to warn the uncut young of the wily foreigners they will one day have to tangle with. Do you remember your own visit, Jack? A gala night it was, close to Christmas: the great Brotherhood is coming! We had streamers hanging from the rafters. You sat at the directing staff's table in the excellent canteen, while we young 'uns craned our necks to catch a glimpse of one of the great players of the Game. After dinner we gathered round you in a half circle, clutching our subsidised port, and you told us tales of derring-do until we crept off to bed and dreamed of being like you--though alas we could never really have your lovely war, even if that was what we were rehearsing for. Do you remember how in the morning, before you left, you called on Pym while he was shaving, and congratulated him on a d.a.m.n good showing so far?

"Nice girl you're marrying, too," you said.

"Oh, do you know her, sir?" said Pym.

"Just good reports," you said complacently.

Then off you went, confident you had scattered a pinch more Stardust in Pym's eyes. Which you had, Jack. You had.

Except that what goes up with Pym has a way of coming down, and it annoyed him to discover that his impending marriage had received the Firm's approval while it still awaited his.

"So what exactly are you doing for a living, old boy? Don't quite understand," Belinda's father asked, not for the first time, during a discussion about whom to invite.

"It's a government-sponsored language lab, sir," said Pym, in accordance with the Firm's sketchy guidelines on cover. "We work out exchanges of academics from various countries and arrange courses for them."

"Sounds more like the Secret Service to me," said Belinda's father, with that queer cracked laugh of his that always seemed to know too much.

To his future spouse, on the other hand, Pym told everything he knew about his work, and more. He showed her how he could break her windpipe with a single blow, and put her eyes out with two fingers easily. And how she could smash the small bones in someone's foot if they were annoying her under the table. He told her everything that made him a secret hero of England, seeing the world right single-handed.

"So how many people have you killed?" Belinda asked him grimly, discounting those that he had merely maimed.