“Old Lippsie’s having a touch of her wobblies, son,” Rick explained to Pym, finding him on the stairs as he made to leave. “Slip in there and see if you can make her laugh with one of your stories. Is old Grimble feeding you up there?”
“It’s super,” said Pym.
“Your old man is seeing them right, know that? The healthiest school in Britain, this is. Ask them at the Ministry. Want a half-crown? Well then.”
* * *
To reach Lippsie’s bicycle Pym used a walk he had acquired from Sefton Boyd. You kept your hands lightly linked behind your back, shoved your head forward and fixed your eyes upon some vaguely pleasing object on the horizon. You stalked wide and high, smiling slightly, as if listening to other voices, which is how the flower of us wear authority. He was too small to sit on the tartan saddle but a lady’s bicycle has a hole and not a bar, as Sefton Boyd was always happy to point out, and Pym swayed through the hole pumping his legs from side to side as he swung the handlebars between the rain-filled craters in the tarmac. I am the official bicycle collector. To his right was the kitchen garden where he and Lippsie had Dug for Victory, to his left the coppice where the German bomb had fallen, hurling bits of blackened twig against the window of the bedroom he shared with the Indian and the grocer’s boy. But behind him in his terrified imagination was Sefton Boyd with his lictors in full cry, mimicking Lippsie at him because they knew he loved her: “Vere are you goink, mein little black market? Vot are you doink mit your sweetheart, mein little black market, now she be dead?” Ahead of him was the gate where he had waited for Mr. Cudlove, and to the left of the gate was the Overflow House with its iron railings ripped away for the war effort, and a policeman standing in the gap.
“I’ve been sent to collect my nature-study book,” said Pym to the policeman, looking him straight in the eye as he leaned Lippsie’s bicycle against a brick post. Pym had lied to policemen before and knew you must look honest.
“Your nature book, have you?” said the policeman. “What’s your name, then?”
“Pym, sir. I live here.”
“Pym who?”
“Magnus.”
“Hop along then, Pym Magnus,” said the policeman but Pym still walked slowly, refusing to show any sign of eagerness. Lippsie’s silver-framed family was queued up on the bedside table, but Rick’s heavy head dominated the lot of them, sensitive and political in its pigskin frame, and Rick’s sage eyes followed him wherever he went. He opened Lippsie’s wardrobe and breathed the smell of her, he shoved aside her frilly white dressing-gown, her fur cape and the camel-hair overcoat with the pixie’s hood that Rick had bought her in St. Moritz. From the back of her wardrobe he pulled out her cardboard suitcase. He set it on the floor and opened it with the key she kept hidden in the Toby jug on the tiled mantelpiece next to the soft toy chimp who was Little Audrey who laughed and laughed and laughed. He took out the book like a Bible that was written in little black sword blades, and the music books and reading books he didn’t understand and the passport with her picture in it when she was young, and the wads of letters in German from her sister Rachel, pronounced “Ra-ha-el,” who no longer wrote to her, and from the very bottom of the case Rick’s letters, tied into bundles with bits of harvest twine. Some he knew almost by heart, though he had difficulty unravelling the portent seething beneath their verbiage:
“It is a matter of weeks no days my darling before the present besetting clouds will be dispersed away as a permanency. Loft will have obtained my Discharge and you and I can enjoy our well-deserved Reward…. Look after that boy of mine who regards you as a Mother and make sure he doesn’t turn out airy-fairy. .
“Your doubts regarding Trust completely misplaced. . you should not trouble your Head as it is a further worry to me here waiting for the Bugle’s summons Perhaps never to Return. . what is involved here will bring untold benefits to Many such as Wentworth. . don’t go on at me about W or his wife, that woman is a professional troublemaker of the worst kind out….
“My regards to Ted Grimble whom I consider a great Educationist and Headmaster. Tell him a further Hundredweight of prunes on its way. . he should prepare kitchen for Two gross best fresh oranges also. Loft has got me Out on three weeks compassionate which means I Recommence my basic from scratch if I am recalled. Regarding Another Matter, Muspole says to continue sending items as before. Please oblige quickly owing purely Temporary problem of liquidity this end which is preventing decent people like Wentworth being seen right….
“If you don’t send more fee cheques immediately, you may as well send me back to Prison and all the Boys excepting Perce as usual and that’s a Fact…. Talk about killing yourself is Foolishness with so many Killing each other round the World in this Senseless and Tragic war. . Muspole says if you send post restaurant express Tomorrow he will be at P.O. when they open Saturday and send on to Wentworth immediately. . ”
Lippsie’s letter, which he had left till last, was by contrast a marvel of conciseness:
“My dear darling Magnus,
“You must be good boy always, darling, play your music and be strong like a man to your father, I love you.
Lippsie”
Pym made a bundle of them, Lippsie’s included, stuffed them inside his nature book and the nature book inside his belt. He rode past the policeman slowly, feeling cats’ claws on his back. The school boiler was a brick furnace built into the basement, fed by a chute in the kitchen yard. To approach the chute was a beatable offence, to burn paper was a Quisling act and sailors would drown for it. A fierce rain was blowing from the Downs, the chalk hills were olive against the storm-clouds. Standing before the open chute, shoulders high against his neck, Pym shoved the letters into it and watched them disappear. A dozen people must have seen him, staff and inmates, and some for sure were allies of Sefton Boyd. But the openness with which he had proceeded convinced them he was acting on authority. Certainly it convinced Pym. He shoved in the last letter, which was the one that told him to be strong, and walked away without once turning to see if he was being noticed.
He needed the staff lavatory again. He needed his secret St. Moritz with its panelled seclusion, he needed the secret majesty of its brass taps and mahogany-framed mirror, for Pym loved luxury as only those can who have had love taken from them. He gained the forbidden staircase to the staffroom; he reached the half-landing. The lavatory door was ajar. He pushed it, slipped inside, locked it behind him. He was alone. He stared at his face, making it harder, then softer, then harder. He ran the taps and washed his cheeks till they shone. His sudden isolation, added to the grandeur of his achievement, made him unique in his own eyes. His mind whirled with the vertigo of greatness. He was God. He was Hitler. He was Wentworth. He was the king of the green filing cabinet, TP’s noble descendant. Henceforth, nothing on earth need happen without his intervention. He took out his penknife, opened it and held its big blade uppermost before his face in the mirror, taking an Arthurian vow. By Excalibur I swear. The lunch bell rang but there was no roll-call for lunch and he was not hungry; he would never be hungry again, he was an immortal knight. He thought of cutting his throat but his mission was too important. He thought of names. Who has the best family in the school? I have. The Pyms are crackerjack and Prince Magnus is the fastest horse in the world. He pressed his cheek against the wood panelling, smelling cricket bats and Swiss forests. The knife was still in his hand. His eyes went hot and blurred, his ears sang. The divine voice inside him told him to look, and he saw the initials “KS-B” carved very deeply into the best panel. Stooping, he gathered the splinters at his feet and put them into the lavatory where they floated. He pulled the plug but they still floated. He left them there, went to the arts hut and completed his Dornier bomber.