“So they got you too, did they, son?” he said — not, I thought, without a certain satisfaction. “I always thought you were up to something. You should have read your law like I told you.” Slowly the truth began to dawn on him. The turnkey unlocked his door, the good Kommandant said, “Please, Herr Pym,” and stood aside for Pym to enter. Pym went to Rick, and put his arms round him, but delicately, in case they had been beating him and he was sore. Gradually the puff began to fill Rick up again.
“God in heaven, old son, what the devil are they doing to me? Can’t an honest fellow do a bit of business in this country? Have you seen the food they give you here, these German sausages? What do we pay our taxes for? What did we fight the war for? What’s the good of a son who’s head of the Foreign Office if he can’t keep these German thugs away from his old man?”
But by then Pym was bear-hugging Rick, slapping his shoulders and saying it was good to see him in whatever circumstances. So Rick took to weeping also, and the Kommandant delicately removed himself to another room while, reunited, each pal celebrated the other as his saviour.
I don’t mean to disappoint you, Tom, but I do honestly forget, perhaps deliberately, the details of Rick’s Berlin transactions. Pym was expecting his own judgment at the time, not Rick’s. I remember two sisters and that they were of noble Prussian stock and lived in an old house in Charlottenburg, because Pym called on them to pay them off for the usual missing paintings Rick was selling for them, and the diamond brooch he was getting cleaned for them, and the fur coats that were being remodelled by a first-rate tailor friend of his in London who would do it free because he thought the world of Rick. And I remember the sisters had a bent nephew who was involved in a shady arms racket, and that somewhere in the story Rick had an aeroplane for sale, the finest, best-preserved fighter-bomber you could wish for, in mint condition inside and out. And for all I know it was being painted by those lifelong Liberals, Balham’s of Brinkley, and guaranteed to fly everyone to Heaven.
It was in Berlin also that Pym courted your mother, Tom, and took her away from his boss and hers, Jack Brotherhood. I am not sure that you or anybody else has a natural right to know what accident conceived you, but I’ll try to help you as best I can. There was mischief in Pym’s motive, I won’t deny it. The love, what there was of it, came later.
“Jack Brotherhood and I seem to be sharing the same woman,” Pym remarked impishly to Axel one day, during a callbox-to-callbox conversation.
Axel required to know immediately who she was.
“An aristo,” said Pym, still teasing him. “One of ours. Church and spy Establishment, if that means anything to you. Her family’s connections with the Firm go back to William the Conqueror.”
“Is she married?”
“You know I don’t sleep with married women unless they absolutely insist.”
“Is she amusing?”
“Axel, we are talking of a lady.”
“I mean is she social?” Axel demanded impatiently. “Is she what you call diplomatic geisha? Is she bourgeois? Would Americans like her?”
“She’s a top Martha, Axel. I keep telling you. She’s beautiful and rich and frightfully British.”
“Then maybe she is the ticket that will get us to Washington,” said Axel, who had recently been expressing anxieties about the number of random women drifting through Pym’s life.
Soon afterwards, Pym received similar advice from your Uncle Jack.
“Mary has told me what’s going on between you, Magnus,” he said, taking him aside in his most avuncular manner. “And if you ask me you could travel further and fare a damned sight worse. She’s one of the best girls we’ve got, and it’s time you looked a little less disreputable.”
So Pym, with both his mentors pushing in the same direction, followed their advice and took Mary, your mother, to be his truly wedded partner at the High Table of the Anglo-American alliance. And really, after all that he had given away already, it seemed a very reasonable sacrifice.
“Hold his hand, Jack”—Pym wrote—“He’s the dearest thing I had.”
“Mabs, forgive”—Pym wrote—”Dear, dear Mabs, forgive. If love is whatever we can still betray, remember that I betrayed you on a lot of days.”
He began a note to Kate and tore it up. He scribbled “Dearest Belinda” and stopped, scared by the silence around him. He looked sharply at his watch. Five o’clock. Why hasn’t the clock chimed? I’ve gone deaf. I’m dead. I’m in a padded cell. From across the square the first chime sounded. One. Two. I can stop it any time I want, he thought. I can stop it at one, at two, at three. I can take any part of any hour and stop it dead. What I cannot do is make it chime midnight at one o’clock. That’s God’s trick, not mine.
* * *
A shocked stillness had descended over Pym and it was the literal stillness of death. He was standing at the window once more, watching the leaves drift across the empty square. An ominous inactivity marked everything he saw. Not a head in a window, not an open doorway. Not a dog or cat or squirrel or a single squawking child. They have taken to the hills. They are waiting for the raiders from the sea. But in his head he is standing in the cellar flat of a run-down office block in Cheapside, watching the two faded Lovelies on their knees as they tear open the last of Rick’s files and lick their crabbed fingertips to speed them in their paperchase. Paper lies in growing mounds around them, it flutters through the air like swirling petals as they rummage and discard what they have vainly plundered: bank statements written in blood, invoices, furious solicitors’ letters, warrants, summonses, love letters dripping with reproach. The dust of them is filling Pym’s nostrils as he watches, the clang of the steel drawers is like the clang of his prison grilles, but the Lovelies heed nothing; they are avid widows ransacking Rick’s record. At the centre of the débris, drawers and cupboard askew, stands Rick’s last Reichskanzlei desk, its serpents twining themselves round its bombé legs like gilded garters. On the wall hangs the last photograph of the great TP in mayoral regalia and on the chimney piece, above a grate stuffed with false coals and the last of Rick’s cigar butts, stands the bronze bust of your Founder and Managing Director himself, beaming out the last of his integrity. On the open door at Pym’s back hangs the memorial tablet to Rick’s last dozen companies, but a sign beside the bell reads “Press here for attention,” because when Rick has not been saving his nation’s faltering economy, he has been working as night porter for the block.
“What time did he die?” says Pym, before remembering that he knows.
“Evening, dearie. The pubs was just opening,” says one of the Lovelies through her cigarette as she heaves another batch of paper on to the rubbish heap.
“He was having a nice drop next door,” says the other, who like the first has not for one moment relaxed her labours.
“What’s next door?” says Pym.
“Bedroom,” says the first Lovely, tossing aside another spent file.
“So who was with him?” Pym asks. “Were you with him? Who was with him, please?”
“We both were, dearie,” says the second. “We was having a little cuddle, if you want to know. Your dad loved a drink and it always made him amorous. We’d had a nice tea early because of his commitments, steak with onion, and he’d had a bit of a barney on the blower with the telephone exchange about a cheque that was in the post to them. He was depressed, wasn’t he, Vi?”