P. O. Box 777
The Foreign Office
London, S.W. I
Dear Pym,
Mutual friends in Austria have passed 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 Shell, Magnus,” said Belinda’s mother, who had taken Pym’s future much to heart. “Belinda’s got an uncle in Shell, 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 bumped 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 class-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 librarianship at the British Museum and a sort of third assistant clerkship 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 interlocuter 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 God 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, passionate 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 membership 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.”