All afternoon he waited, confident nothing had happened. I didn’t do it. If I went back it wouldn’t be there. It was Maggs in third form. It was Jameson who owns a kukri, I saw him go in. An oik from the village did it, I saw him sneaking round the grounds with a dagger in his belt, his name is Wentworth. At evensong he prayed that a German bomb would destroy the staff lavatory. None did. Next day, he presented Sefton Boyd with his greatest treasure, the koala bear Lippsie had given him after his appendix operation. In break he buried his penknife in the loose earth behind the cricket pavilion. Or as I would say today, cached it. It was not until evening line-up that the full name of the Honourable Kenneth Sefton Boyd was called out in a voice of doom by the duty master, the sadist O’Mally. Mystified, the young nobleman was led to Mr. Grimble’s study. Mystified himself, Pym watched him go. Whatever can they want him for — my friend, my best friend, the owner of my koala bear? The mahogany door closed, eighty pairs of eyes fixed upon its fine workmanship, Pym’s also. Pym heard Mr. Grimble’s voice, then Sefton Boyd’s raised in protest. Then a great silence while God’s justice was administered, blow by blow. Counting, Pym felt cleansed and vindicated. So it wasn’t Maggs, it wasn’t Jameson and it wasn’t me. Sefton Boyd did it himself, otherwise he would not have been beaten. Justice, he was beginning to learn, is only as good as her servants.
“It had a hyphen,” Sefton Boyd told him next day. “Whoever did it gave us a hyphen when we haven’t got one. If I ever find the sod I’ll kill him.”
“So will I,” Pym promised loyally and meant every word. Like Rick he was learning to live on several planes at once. The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment.
* * *
The effects of Lippsie’s death upon the young Pym were many and not by any means all negative. Her demise entrenched him as a self-reliant person, confirming him in his knowledge that women were fickle and liable to sudden disappearances. He learned the great lesson of Rick’s example, namely the importance of a respectable appearance. He learned that the only safety was in seeming legitimacy. He developed his determination to be a secret mover of life’s events. It was Pym, for instance, who let down Mr. Grimble’s tyres and poured three six-pound bags of cooking salt into the swimming-pool. But it was Pym who led the hunt for the culprit too, throwing up many tantalising clues and casting doubt on many solid reputations. With Lippsie gone, his love for Rick became once more unobstructed and, better, he could love him from a distance, for Rick had once more disappeared.
Had he gone back to prison, as he had promised Lippsie that he would? Had the police found the green filing cabinet? Pym did not know then and Syd, I suspect by choice, does not know now. Army records grant Rick an abrupt discharge six months before the period in question, referring the reader to the Criminal Records Office for an explanation. None is available, perhaps because that Perce had a friend who worked there, a lady who thought the world of him. Whatever the reason Pym floated out alone once more, and had a fair amount of fun. For weekend leave Ollie and Mr. Cudlove received him at their basement flat in Fulham and pampered him in every imaginable way. Mr. Cudlove, fit as ever from his exercises, taught him how to wrestle, and when they all went out for a toot on the river together, Ollie wore ladies’ clothes and did a squeaky voice so well that only Pym and Mr. Cudlove in all the world ever knew there was a man inside them. For his longer holidays, Pym was obliged to trek over Cherry’s vast estates with Sefton Boyd, listening to ever more awful stories about the great public school of which he would soon become a member: how new boys were tied into laundry baskets and flung down flights of stone stairs, how they were harnessed to pony traps with fish-hooks through their ears and made to haul the prefect round school yard.
“My father’s gone to prison and escaped,” Pym told him in return. “He’s got a pet jackdaw that looks after him.” He imagined Rick in a cave on Dartmoor, with Syd and Meg taking him pies wrapped in a handkerchief while the hounds sniffed his trail.
“My father’s in the Secret Service,” Pym told him another time. “He’s been tortured to death by the Gestapo but I’m not allowed to say. His real name is Wentworth.”
Having surprised himself by this pronouncement Pym worked on it. A different name and a gallant death suited Rick excellently. They gave him the class Pym was beginning to suspect he lacked and made things right with Lippsie. So when Rick came bouncing back one day, not tortured or altered in any way, but accompanied by two jockeys, a box of nectarines and a brand-new mother with a feather in her hat, Pym thought seriously of working for the Gestapo and wondered how you joined. And would have done so, too, for sure, had not the peace ungraciously robbed him of the chance.
A last word is also needed here about Pym’s politics during this instructive period. Churchill sulked and was too popular. De Gaulle, with his tilted pineapple head, was too much like Uncle Makepeace, while Roosevelt, with his stick and spectacles and wheelchair, was clearly Aunt Nell in disguise. Hitler was so wretchedly unloved that Pym had more than a fair regard for him, but it was Joseph Stalin whom he appointed to be his proxy father. Stalin neither sulked nor preached. He spent his time chuckling, and playing with dogs, and picking roses in news cinemas while his loyal troops won the war for him in the snows of St. Moritz.
* * *
Putting down his pen, Pym stared at what he had written, first in fear, then gradually in relief. Finally he laughed.
“I didn’t break,” he whispered. “I stayed above the fray.”
And poured himself a Poppy-sized vodka for old times’ sake.
CHAPTER 5
Frau Bauer’s bed was as narrow and lumpy as a servant’s bed in a fairy-tale and Mary lay in it exactly as Brotherhood had dumped her there, roly-polyed in the eiderdown, knees drawn up in self-protection, clutching her shoulders with her hands. He had slid off her, she could no longer smell his sweat and breath. But she could feel his bulk at the foot of the bed and sometimes she had a hard time remembering that they had not made love a few moments earlier, for his habit in those days had been to leave her dozing while he sat as he was sitting now, making his phone calls, checking his expenses or doing whatever else served to restore the order of his all-male life. He had found a tape-recorder somewhere and Georgie had a second in case his didn’t work.
For a hangman Nigel was small but extremely dapper. He wore a waisted pinstripe suit and a silk handkerchief in his sleeve.
“Ask Mary to make a voluntary statement, will you, Jack?” Nigel said, as if he did this every week. “Voluntary but formal is the tone. Could be used, I’m afraid. The decision is not Bo’s alone.”
“Who the hell says voluntary?” said Brotherhood. “She signed the Official Secrets Act when she joined, she signed it again when she left. She signed it again when she married Pym. Everything you know is ours, Mary. Whether you heard it on top of a bus or saw the smoking gun in his hand.”
“And your nice Georgie can witness it,” said Nigel.
Mary heard herself talking but didn’t understand a lot of what she said because she had one ear in the pillow and the other was listening to the morning sounds of Lesbos through the open window of their little brown terrace house halfway up the hill that Plomari was built on, to the clatter of mopeds and boats and bouzouki music and lorries revving in the alleys. To the scream of sheep having their throats cut at the butcher’s and the slither of donkey hoofs on cobble and the yells of the vendors in the harbour market. If she squeezed her eyes tight enough, she could look over the orange rooftops across the street, past the chimneys and the clotheslines and the roof gardens full of geraniums, down to the waterfront and out to the long jetty with its red light winking on the point and its evil ginger cats soaking themselves in the sunshine while they watched the tramper putter out of the mist.