“Nigel’s at the Foreign Office. Check with Bo. While you’re about it, ask Defence to give you the name of the Commandant of Number Six Interrogation, Graz, Austria, on July 18, 1951. I’m in a hurry. Greensleeves, have you got it? Maybe you’re not musical.”
He rang off and pulled Pym’s battered letter to Tom savagely towards him.
“He’s a shell,” Kate said. “All you have to do is find the hermit crab that climbed into him. Don’t look for the truth about him. The truth is what we gave him of ourselves.”
“Sure,” said Brotherhood. He set a sheet of paper ready to jot on while he silently read: “If I don’t write to you for a while, remember I’m thinking of you all the time.” Maudlin slush. “If you need help and don’t want to turn to Uncle Jack, this is what you do.” He continued reading, writing out Pym’s instructions to his son, one by one. “Don’t worry your head so much about religious things, just try to trust in God’s goodness.” “Damn the man!” he expostulated aloud for Kate’s sake and, slamming down his pencil, pressed both fists against his temple as the phone rang again. He let it ring a moment, recovered and picked it up, glancing at his watch, which was his habit always.
“Anyway the file you want went missing years ago,” said Nicholson with pleasure.
“Who to?”
“Us. They say it’s marked out to us and we never returned it.”
“Who of us in particular?”
“Czech section. It was requisitioned by one of our own London desk officers in 1953.”
“Which one?”
“M.R.P. That would be Pym. Do you want me to ring Vienna and ask him what he did with it?”
“I’ll ask him myself in the morning,” he said. “What about the C.O.?”
“A Major Harrison Membury of the Education Corps.”
“The what?”
“He was on secondment to Army Intelligence for the period 1950 to ’54.”
“Christ Almighty. Any address?”
He wrote it down, remembering a quip of Pym’s, paraphrased from Clemenceau: “Military intelligence has about as much to do with intelligence as military music has to do with music.”
He rang off.
“They haven’t even indoctrinated the poor bloody duty officer!” Brotherhood expostulated, again for Kate.
He went back to his homework better pleased. Somewhere beyond Green Park a London clock was striking three.
“I’m going,” Kate said. She was standing at the door, dressed.
Brotherhood was on his feet in a moment.
“Oh no you’re not. You’re staying here until I hear you laugh.”
He went to her and undressed her again. He put her back to bed.
“Why do you think I’m going to kill myself?” she said. “Has somebody done that to you once?”
“Let’s just say once would be too often,” he replied.
“What’s in the burnbox?” she asked, for the second time that night. But for the second time, too, Brotherhood appeared too busy to reply.
CHAPTER 8
My memory gets selective here, Jack. More than usual. He’s in my sights as I expect he begins to be in yours. But you are in them too. Whatever doesn’t point to you both slips by me like landscape through a railway window. I could paint for you Pym’s distressing conversations with the luckless Herr Bertl in which, on Rick’s instruction, he assured him repeatedly it was in the post, it was taken care of, everybody would be seen right, and his father was on the point of making an offer for the hotel. Or we could have some fun with Pym, languishing for days and nights in his hotel bedroom as a hostage to the mountain of unpaid bills downstairs, dreaming of Elena Weber’s milky body reflected in its many delightful poses in the mirrored changing rooms of Bern, kicking himself for his timidity, living off hoarded continental breakfasts, running up more bills and waiting for the telephone. Or the moment when Rick went off the air. He did not ring and when Pym tried his number the only response was a howl, like the cry of a wolf stuck on one note.
When he tried Syd he got Meg, and Meg’s advice was strikingly similar to E. Weber’s. “You’re better off where you are, dear,” she said in the pointed voice of someone who is telling you she is overheard. “There’s a heat wave here and a lot of people are getting burned.” “Where’s Syd?” “Cooling himself, darling.” Or the Sunday afternoon when everything in the hotel fell mercifully silent and Pym, having packed together his few possessions, stole heart in mouth down the staff staircase and out through a side door into what was suddenly a hostile foreign city — his first clandestine exit, and his easiest.
I could offer you Pym the infant refugee, though I never starved, had a valid British passport and in retrospect seldom wanted for a kindly word. But he did dip tallows for a religious candlemaker, sweep the aisle of the Minster, roll beer barrels for a brewer and unstitch sacks of carpets for an old Armenian who kept urging him to marry his daughter, and come to think of it he might have done worse; she was a beautiful girl and kept sighing and draping herself over the sofa but Pym was too polite to approach her. All those things he did and more. All of them at night, a night animal on the run through that lovely candlelit city with its clocks and wells and cobble and arcades. He swept snow, carted cheeses, led a blind dray-horse and taught English to aspiring travel agents. All under cover while he waited for Herr Bertl’s hounds to sniff him out and bring him to justice, though I know now the poor man bore me no grudge whatever, and even at the height of his rage avoided mentioning Pym’s part in the affair.
“Dear Father,
“I am really happy out here and you must not worry about me at all as the Swiss are kindly and hospitable and have all sorts of remarkable bursaries for young foreigners keen on reading law.”
I could sing of another great hotel, not a stone’s throw from the first, where Pym went to earth as a night waiter and became a schoolboy again, sleeping under avenues of lagged piping in a basement dormitory as big as a factory where the lights never went out; how he took gratefully once more to his little iron bed and how he jollied his fellow waiters as he had jollied his fellow new boys, for they turned out to be peasants from Ticino who wanted only to go home. How he rose willingly with every bell and donned a white dicky that, though thick with last night’s grease, was not half as constricting as Mr. Willow’s collars. And how he took trays of bubbly and foie gras to ambiguous couples who sometimes wanted him to stay, Amor and Rococo beckoning from their glances. But once again he was too polite and too unknowing to oblige. His manners in those days were a barbed-wire cage. He only lusted when he was alone. Yet even as I allow my memory to brush past these tantalising episodes, my heart is hurtling ahead to the night I met the saintly Herr Ollinger in the third-class buffet of Bern railway station and, through his charity, stumbled into the encounter that altered all my life till here — and I fear your life as well, Jack, though you have yet to learn by how much.
Of the university, how Pym enrolled there and why, my recollections are equally impatient. It was for cover. All for cover as usual, leave it there. He had been working in a circus at its winter home, which was a patch of land just beneath the same railway station where his footsteps so often finished after his all-day walks. Somehow the elephants had drawn him. Any fool can wash an elephant, but he was surprised to learn how hard it was to dip the head of a twenty-foot brush into a bucket when the only light comes in shafts from the spotlights in the apex of the marquee. Each dawn when his work was done he made his way home to the Salvation Army hostel that was his temporary Ascot. Each dawn he saw the green dome of the university rising above him through the autumn mist like an ugly little Rome challenging him to convert. And somehow he had to get inside the place, for he had a second terror, greater than Herr Bertl’s hounds: namely that Rick despite his problems of liquidity would appear in a cloud of Bentley and whisk him home.