* * *
A weekday evening, Tom. The traffic in Chester Street burps and crackles in the rain, but inside the Reichskanzlei it is a Green Hill Sunday. Still pious from his monastery Pym presses the bell but hears no answering chime. He drives the great brass door knocker against its stud. A lace curtain parts and closes. The door opens, but not far.
“Cunningham’s the name, squire,” says a heavy man in a thick expatriate cockney, as he shuts the door fast after him as if scared of letting in germs. “Half cunning, half ham. You’ll be the son and heir. Greetings, squire, Salaams.”
“How do you do,” says Pym.
“I’m optimistic, squire, thank you,” Mr. Cunningham replies with a Middle-European literalness. “I think we’re on a road to understanding. Some resistance at first is to be expected. But I believe I see a light begin to shine.”
It is more than Pym does for the passage down which Mr. Cunningham leads him with such assurance is pitch black and the only light comes from the pale patches on the wall left by the departed law books.
“You’re a German scholar, I understand, squire,” says Mr. Cunningham more thickly, as if the exertion has affected his adenoids. “A fine language. The people, I’m not sure. But a lovely tongue in the right hands, you can quote me.”
“Why are we going upstairs?” says Pym, who has by now recognised several familiar omens of impending pogrom.
“Trouble with the lift, squire,” Mr. Cunningham replies. “I understand an engineer has been sent for and is at this moment hastening on his way.”
“But Rick’s office is on the ground floor.”
“But upstairs has the privacy, squire,” Mr. Cunningham explains, pushing open a double door. They enter a gutted State Apartment lit by the glow of street lamps. “Your son, sir, fresh from his worship,” Mr. Cunningham announces, and bows Pym ahead of him.
At first Pym sees only Rick’s brow glinting in the candlelight. Then the great head forms round it, followed by the broad bulk of the body as it advances swiftly to envelop him in a damp and fervent bear-hug.
“How are you, old son?” he asks urgently. “How was the train?”
“Fine,” says Pym, who has hitchhiked owing to a temporary problem of liquidity.
“Did they give you a bit to eat then? What did they give you?”
“Just a sandwich and a glass of beer,” says Pym who has had to make do on a piece of rocklike bread from Murgo’s refectory.
“My own boy, as you see me!” Mr. Cunningham exclaims with zest. “Never satisfied unless he’s eating.”
“Son, you want to watch that drinking of yours,” says Rick in an almost unconscious reflex, as he clutches Pym under the armpit and marches him over bare floorboards towards an imperial-sized bed. “There’s five thousand pounds for you in cash if you don’t smoke or take liquor until you’re twenty-one. All right, my dear, what do you think of this boy of mine?”
A darkly dressed figure has risen like a shade from the bed.
It’s Dorothy, thinks Pym. It’s Lippsie. It’s Jemima’s mother lodging a complaint. But as the darkness lifts, the aspiring monk observes that the figure before him is wearing neither Lippsie’s headscarf nor Dorothy’s cloche hat, nor has she the daunting authority of Lady Sefton Boyd. Like Lippsie she sports the antiquarian uniform of pre-war Europe but there the comparison ends. Her flared skirt has a nipped waist. She wears a blouse with a lace ruff and a feathery bit of hat that makes the whole outfit jaunty. Her breasts are in the best tradition of Amor and Rococo Woman, and the dim light flatters their roundness.
“Son, I want you to meet a noble and heroic lady who has known great advantages and misfortunes and fought great battles and suffered cruelly at the hands of fate. And who has paid me the greatest compliment a woman can pay a man by coming to see me in her hour of need.”
“Rot-schilt, darling,” the lady says softly, lifting her limp hand to a level where Pym may kiss or shake it.
“Heard that name anywhere, have you, son, with your fine education? Baron Rothschild? Lord Rothschild? Count Rothschild? Rothschild’s Bank? Or are you going to tell me you’re not conversant with the name of a certain great Jewish family with all the wealth of Solomon at its fingertips?”
“Well yes, of course I’ve heard of it.”
“Well then. Just you sit yourself here and listen to what she has to say because this is the baroness. Sit down, my dear. Come here between us. What do you think of him, Elena?”
“Beautiful, darling,” says the baroness.
He’s selling me to her, thinks Pym, not at all unwilling. I’m his last desperate deal.
So there we all are, Tom. Everyone on the go and madness here to stay. Your father and grandfather seated buttock to buttock with a Jewish baroness in the half-furnished director’s knocking-shop of a West End palace without electricity, and Mr. Cunningham, as I gradually realise, keeping guard at the door. An air of daft conspiracy comparable only with later daft conspiracies mounted by the Firm, as her soft voice embarks on one of those patient refugee monologues that your Uncle Jack and I have listened to more times than either of us can remember, except that tonight Pym is a virgin in these matters, and the baroness’s thigh is pressed cosily against that of the aspiring monk.
“I am a humble widow of simple but pious family, married happily but oh so briefly to the late Baron Luigi Svoboda-Rothschild, the last of the great Czech line. I was seventeen, he twenty-one, imagine our pleasure. My greatest regret is I bore him no child. Our country seat was the Palais of Nymphs at Brno, which first the Germans then the Russians rape worse than a woman literally. My Cousin Anna she marry to the head man from De Beers diamonds Cape Town, got houses like you not imagine, too much luxury I don’t approve.” Pym does not approve either, as he tries to tell her with a monkish smirk of sympathy. “With my Uncle Wolfram I never speak and thanks God I say. He collaborate with the Nazis. The Jews hang him upside down.” Pym sets his jaw in grim approval. “My Granduncle David give all his tapestries to the Prado. Now he is poor like a kulak, why don’t the museum give him something so he can eat?” Pym rolls his head in despair at the baseness of the Spanish soul. “My Auntie Waldorf—” She breaks down beautifully while Pym wonders whether the agitation of his body is visible to her in the darkness.
“It’s a damn shame!” cries Rick, while the baroness composes herself. “My God, son, those Bolsheviks could swoop down on Ascot tomorrow without a by-your-leave and help themselves to a fortune. Go on, my dear. Son, tell her to go on. Call her Elena, she likes it. She’s not a snob. She’s one of us.”
“Weiter, bitte,” says Pym.
“Weiter,” the baroness echoes approvingly and pats her eyes with Rick’s handkerchief. “Jawohl, darling. Sehr gut!”
“Oh but you should hear his accent,” Mr. Cunningham calls from the door. “Not a wrinkle, you can quote me, same as my own boy.”
“What does she say, son?”
“She can manage,” says Pym. “She can handle it.”
“She’s a damned gem. I’m going to see her right, you mark my words.”
So is Pym. He is going to marry her at least. But meanwhile, to his irritation, he must hear more praise for my dear late husband the baron. My Luigi was not only the proprietor of a great palace, he was a financial genius and until the outbreak of war the Chairman of the House of Rothschild in Prague.
“They were the richest of the lot,” says Rick. “Weren’t they, son? You’ve read your history. What’s your verdict?”