“Lapadi he need one hundred pound, darling”—a day or two later—“the Vertrauensmann know a man whose sister know the head from customs. Better he pay him now for friendship.”
Remembering Rick’s instructions Pym offers token resistance but the baroness already has her hand out and is rubbing her finger and thumb together with delightful insinuation. “You want to paint the house, darling, first you got to buy the brush,” she explains and to Pym’s amazement lifts her skirts to the waist and pops the banknotes into the top of her stocking. “Tomorrow we buy you nice suit.”
“Gave her the money, son?” Rick roars that night across the Channel. “God in Heaven, what do you think we are? Fetch me Elena.”
“Don’t shout me, darling,” the baroness says calmly into the telephone. “You got lovely boy here, Rickie. He very strict with me. I think one day he be great actor.”
“The baroness says you’re first rate, son. Are you talking our language with her out there?”
“All the time,” says Pym.
“Have you had an honest-to-God English mixed grill yet?”
“No, we’re sort of saving it.”
“Well have one on me. Tonight.”
“We will, Father. Thanks.”
“God bless you, son.”
“And you too, Father,” says Pym politely and, butler-like, keeps his knees and feet together while he puts the phone down.
More important to me by far are my memories of Pym’s first platonic honeymoon with a wise lady. With Elena beside him, Pym wandered Bern’s old city, drank the light small wines of the Valais, watched thés dansants in the great hotels and consigned his past to history. In scented, frilly boutiques that she seemed to find by instinct, they exchanged her battered wardrobe for fur capes and Anna Karenina riding boots that slithered on the frosty cobble, and Pym’s dismal school habit for a leather jacket and trousers without buttons for his braces. Even in her disarray, the baroness would insist on Pym’s judgment, beckoning him into the little mirrored box to help her choose, and permitting him, as if unknowingly, delicious glimpses of her Rococo charms: now a nipple, now the cup of a buttock carelessly uncurtained, now an amazing shadow at the centre of her rounded thighs as she whisked from one skirt to another. She is Lippsie, he thought excitedly; she is how Lippsie would have been if she hadn’t thought so much of death.
“Gefall’ ich dir, darling?”
“Du gefällst mir sehr.”
“One day you have pretty girl, you talk to her just like this, she go crazy. You don’t think too tarty?”
“I think perfect.”
“Okay, we buy two. One for my sister Zsa-Zsa, she my size.”
A tilt of the white shoulders, a careless pull at a straying hem of lingerie, the bill was brought, Pym signed it and addressed it to the provident Herr Bertl, turning his back on her and crouching forward in order to conceal the evidence of his perturbation. From a jeweller in the Herrengasse they bought a pearl necklace for another sister in Budapest and as an afterthought a topaz ring for her mother in Paris which the baroness would take to her on her way home. And I see that ring now, winking on her freshly manicured finger as she traces a trout back and forth across the fish tank in the grill-room of our grand hotel while the headwaiter stands above her with his net poised to strike.
“Nein, nein, darling, nicht this one, that one! Ja, ja, prima.”
It was at one such dinner, in the event their last, that Pym was so moved by love and confusion that he felt obliged to confide to the baroness his intention of leading a monastic life. She put down her knife and fork with a clatter.
“Don’t tell me no more from monks!” she commanded him angrily. “I see too many of monks. I see monks of Croatia, monks of Serbia, Russia. God He ruin the damn world with monks.”
“Well, it’s not completely certain,” said Pym.
It took a lot of funny voices from him, and a lot of intimate fabrications, before the light came cautiously back to her brown eyes.
“And her name was Lippsie?”
“Well that’s what we called her. I mustn’t tell you her real name.”
“And she slept with such a young boy like you? You made love with her so young? She was a whore, I think.”
“Probably just lonely,” said Pym wisely.
But her thoughtfulness remained and when Pym as usual saw her to her bedroom door she studied him closely before taking his head between her hands and kissing him on the mouth. Suddenly her mouth opened, Pym’s also. The kiss became intense, he felt an unfamiliar mound plying irresistibly against his thigh. He felt its warmth, he felt soft hair slipping against silk as she pressed more rhythmically. She whispered “Schatz,” he heard a squeak and wondered whether he had hurt her somehow. Her head twisted, her neck pressed against his lips. With confiding fingers she handed him the key to her bedroom door and looked away while he opened it. He found the keyhole, turned the key and held the door for her. He put the key into her palm and saw the light in her eyes fade.
“So, my dear,” she said. She kissed him, one cheek other cheek, she stared at him as if searching for something she had lost. It was not till next morning that he discovered she had been kissing him goodbye.
“Darling”—she wrote—“You are good man, got body from Michelangelo but your Papi got bad problems. Better you stay in Bern. Never mind. E. Weber love you always.”
In the envelope were the gold cufflinks we had bought for her cousin in Oxford, and two hundred of the five hundred pounds that Pym had given her for the invisible Mr. Lapadi. I wear the cufflinks as I write. Gold with tiny diamonds in a crown. The baroness always loved a touch of royalty.
* * *
It was morning at Miss Dubber’s also. Through the closed curtains, Pym heard the milk van clinking on its rounds. Pen in hand he drew a pink file towards him marked simply “R.T.P.,” licked his forefinger and thumb and began methodically turning through the entries until he had extracted some half dozen.
Copy letter Richard T. Pym to Father Guardian, Lyme Regis, dated 1 October 1948, threatening legal proceedings for the abduction of his son Magnus. (Ex R.T.P.’s files.)
Memorandum of 15 September 1948, Fraud Squad to Passport Control Department, recommending impounding of R.T.P.’s passport pending criminal investigations in the matter of one J. R. Wentworth. (Obtained informally through Head Office police liaison section.)
Letter from school bursar to R.T.P. declining to accept either dried fruit, tinned peaches or any other commodity in part or full payment of fees and regretting that the governing board cannot see its way to educating Pym for nothing. “I note also with regret that you refuse to describe yourself as an impecunious parent whose son is destined for the clergy.” (Ex R.T.P.’s files.)
Furious letter from lawyers representing Herr Eberhardt Bertl, sometime under-manager of the Grand Palace Hotel in Bern, addressed to Colonel Sir Richard T. Pym, D.S.O., one of a succession, demanding payment in the order of eleven thousand and eighteen Swiss francs forty centimes, plus interest at four percent per month. (Ex R.T.P.’s files.)
Extract from London Chronicle dated November 8, 1949, declaring personal bankruptcy R.T.P., and compulsory liquidation of the eighty-three companies of the Pym empire including, no doubt, The Muspole Friendly & Academic Ltd.
Extract from Daily Telegraph dated October 9, 1948, recording the death in Truro Hospital, Cornwall, of one John Reginald Wentworth, after a long illness resulting from his injuries, beloved husband to Peggy.