Lippsie knelt to me. The two men looked on while we embraced.
“That’s the way then,” Rick kept saying approvingly. “Give him a good old English hug. That’s the way.”
Softly, like a bitch recovering her pup, Lippsie picked me over, lifting the remains of my forelock and staring gravely into my eyes as if fearing that bad things had got into them.
* * *
How they celebrated their release! Shorn of all possessions except the clothes they stood up in and the credit they could muster as they went along, Rick’s reconstituted court took to the open road and became crusaders through wartime Britain. Petrol was rationed, Bentleys had vanished for the duration, all over the country posters asked “Is Your Journey Really Necessary?” and every time they passed one they slowed down to yell back, “Yes, it is!” in chorus through the open windows of their cab. Drivers either became accomplices or left in a hurry. A Mr. Humphries threw them all into the street in Aberdeen after a week, calling them crooks, and drove away without his money, never to be seen again. But a Mr. Cudlove whom Rick had met on holiday — and who got the court a week’s tick at the Imperial at Torquay on the strength of an aunt who worked in the accounts department — he stayed for ever, sharing their food and fortunes and teaching Pym tricks with string. Sometimes they had one taxi, sometimes Mr. Cudlove’s special friend Ollie brought his Humber and they had day-long races for Pym’s sole benefit, with Syd leaning out of the back window giving the car the whip. Of mothers they had a dazzling and varying supply and often acquired them at such short notice they had to cram them into the back two deep, with Pym squeezed into an exciting, unfamiliar lap. There was a lady called Topsie who smelt of roses and made Pym dance with his head against her breast; there was Millie who let him sleep with her in her siren-suit because he was frightened of the black cupboard in his hotel bedroom, and who bestowed frank caresses on him while she bathed him. And Eileens and Mabels and Joans, and a Violet who got carsick on cider, some into her gas-mask case and the rest over Pym. And when they were all got out of the way, Lippsie materialised, standing motionless in the steam of a railway station, her cardboard suitcase hanging from her slim hand. Pym loved her more than ever, but her deepening melancholy was too much for him and in the whirl of the great crusade he resented being the object of it.
“Old Lippsie’s got a touch of the what’s-its,” Syd would say kindly, noting Pym’s disappointment, and they’d heave a bit of a sigh of relief together when she left.
“Old Lippsie’s on about her Jews again,” said Syd sadly another time. “They keep telling her another lot’s been done.”
And once: “Old Lippsie’s got the guilts she isn’t dead like them.”
Pym’s intermittent enquiries after Dorothy led him nowhere. Your mum’s poorly, Syd would say; she’ll be back soon, and the best thing our Magnus here can do for her meantime is not fret over her, because it will only get to her and make her worse.
Rick took a wounded line. “You’ll just have to put up with your old man for a while. I thought we were having fun then. Aren’t we having fun?”
“All the fun in the world,” said Pym.
On the subject of his recent absence Rick was as sparing as the rest of the court, so that soon Pym began to wonder whether they had ever been on holiday at all. Only the occasional hint convinced him that they had shared a cementing experience. Winchester had been worse than Reading because of those bloody gypsies off of Salisbury Plain, Pym once overheard Morrie Washington tell Perce Loft. Syd backed him up. “Those Winchester gyppos was rough you wouldn’t believe,” said Syd with feeling. “The screws was no better, either.” And Pym noticed that their holiday had made hearty eaters of them. “Eat your peas now, Magnus,” Syd urged him amid much laughter. “There’s worse hotels than this one, we can tell you.”
It wasn’t till a year or more later, when Pym’s vocabulary had grown equal to his intelligence gathering, that he realised they had been talking about prison.
But their leader did not share these jokes and they ceased abruptly, for Rick’s gravitas was something no man tampered with lightly, least of all those appointed to uphold it. Rick’s superiority was manifest in everything he did. In the way he dressed even when we were very broke, his clean laundry and clean shoes. In the food he required and the style to eat it in. The rooms he had in the hotel. In the way he needed brandy for his snooker, and scared everyone into silence with his brooding. In his preoccupation with good works, which involved visiting hospitals where people had taken bad knocks and seeing the old people right while their children were away at the war.
“Will you see Lippsie right too, when the war’s over?” Pym asked one day.
“Old Lippsie’s crackerjack,” said Rick.
Meanwhile we traded. What in, Pym never rightly knew and nor do I now. Sometimes in rare commodities, such as hams and whisky, sometimes in promises, which the court called Faith. Other times in nothing more solid than the sunny horizons that sparkled ahead of us down the empty wartime roads. When Christmas approached somebody produced sheets of coloured crêpe paper, thousands of them. For days and nights on end, augmented by extra mothers recruited for this vital war-work, Pym and the court crouched in an empty railway carriage at Didcot, twisting the paper into crackers that contained no toys and would not crack, while they told each other wild stories and cooked toast by laying it on top of the paraffin stove. Some of the crackers, it was true, had little wooden soldiers inside them, but these were called “samples” and kept separate. The rest, Syd explained, was for decoration, Titch, like flowers when there isn’t any. Pym believed it all. He was the most willing child labourer in the world, so long as there was approval waiting for him round the corner.
Another time they towed a trailer filled with crates of oranges which Pym refused to eat because he overheard Syd saying they were hot. They sold them to a pub on the road to Birmingham. Once they had a load of dead chickens that Syd said they could only move at night when it was cold enough, so perhaps that was what had gone wrong with the oranges. And there is a clip of film running for ever in my memory. It shows a scraggy moonlit hilltop on the moors, and our two cabs with their lights out winding nervously to the crest. And the dark figures standing waiting for us on the back of their lorry. And the masked lamp that counted out the money for Mr. Muspole the great accountant while Syd unloaded the trailer. And though Pym watched from a distance because he hated feathers, no night frontier crossing later in his life was ever more exciting.
“Can we send the money to Lippsie now?” Pym asked. “She hasn’t got any left.”
“Now how do you know a thing like that, old son?”
From her letters to you, Pym thought. You left one in your pocket and I read it. But Rick’s eyes had their flick-knife glint so he said “I made it up,” and smiled.
Rick did not come on our adventures. He was saving himself. What for was a question nobody asked within Pym’s hearing and certainly he never asked it for himself. Rick was devoting himself to his good works, his old people and his hospital visiting. “Is that suit of yours pressed, son?” Rick would say when as a special privilege father and son embarked together on one of these high errands. “God in heaven, Muspole, look at the boy’s suit, it’s a damned shame! Look at his hair!” Hastily a mother would be ordered to press the suit, another to polish his shoes and get his fingernails proper, a third to comb his hair till it was orderly and sensitive. With flimsy patience Mr. Cudlove tapped his keys on the car roof while Pym was given a final check-over for signs of unintentional irreverence. Then away at last they sped to the house or bedside of some elderly and worthy person, and Pym sat fascinated to see how swiftly Rick trimmed his manner to suit theirs, how naturally he slipped into the cadences and vernacular that put them most at ease, and how the love of God came into his good face when he talked about Liberalism and Masonry and his dear dead father, God rest him, and a first-class rate of return, ten percent guaranteed plus profits for as long as you’re spared. Sometimes he brought a ham with him as a gift and was an angel in a hamless world. Sometimes a pair of silk stockings or a box of nectarines, for Rick was always the giver even when he was taking. When he was able Pym threw his own charm into the scales by reciting a prayer he had composed, or singing “Underneath the Arches,” or telling a witty story with a range of regional accents that he had picked up in the course of the crusade. “The Germans are killing all the Jews,” he said once, to great effect. “I’ve got a friend called Lippsie and all her other friends are dead.” If his performance was wanting, Rick let him know this without brutality. “When somebody like Mrs. Ardmore asks you whether you remember her, son, don’t scratch your old head and pull a face. Look her in the eye and smile and say, ‘Yes.’ That’s the way to treat old people, and to be a credit to your father. Do you love your old man?”