“But what were you having to endure?” Jemima asked.
For Jemima an extra kind of specialness was needed. Pym’s reply took him by surprise. Afterwards, he decided that it had been lying in wait inside him and leapt out before he could prevent it. “It was for England,” he said. “I’m lucky to be alive. If I tell anyone about it they’ll kill me.”
“Why ever will they do that?”
“It’s secret. I swore never to tell.”
“Then why are you telling me?”
“I love you. I had to do awful things to people. You can’t imagine what it’s like, carrying secrets like that alone.”
As Pym heard himself saying this he remembered something that Axel had told him shortly before the end: There is no such thing as a life that does not return.
The next time he met Jemima, he described a brave girl he had worked with when he was doing his terribly secret work. He had in mind one of those muddy war photographs of beautiful women who win George Medals for being parachuted weekly into France.
“Her name was Wendy. We did secret missions into Russia together. We became partners.”
“Did you do it with her?”
“It wasn’t that kind of relationship. It was professional.”
Jemima was fascinated. “You mean she was a tart?”
“Of course she wasn’t. She was a secret agent like me.”
“Have you ever done it with a tart?”
“No.”
“Kenneth has. He’s done it with two. One each end.”
Each end of what? thought Pym, in rampant indignation. Me a secret hero, and she talks to me about sex! In his despair he wrote Belinda a twelve-pager about his platonic love for her, but by the time her reply came he had forgotten the context of his feelings. Sometimes Jemima came uninvited, wearing no make-up and her hair shoved behind her ears. She lay on the bed and read Jane Austen on her tummy, while she kicked a bare leg in the air or yawned.
“You can put your hand up my skirt if you like,” she said.
“I’m fine, thanks,” said Pym.
Too polite to disturb her further he sat in the chair and read A Handbook of Old High German Literature till she made a grimace and left. For a while after that, she didn’t visit him. He kept glimpsing her in cinemas of which there were seven so he got round them nicely in a week. Always she was with another man and once, like her brother, she had two. Once during this same period Belinda came to stay with her, but told Pym she should keep away from him because it wasn’t fair on Jem. Pym’s need to impress Jemima now took on wild dimensions. He ate his meals alone and looked haunted, but she still didn’t come to him. One evening, passing a brick wall, he deliberately dashed his knuckles against it until they bled, then hurried to her expensive lodgings in Merton Street, where he found her drying her long hair before the electric fire.
“Who’ve you been fighting?” she asked as she dabbed on iodine.
“I can’t talk about it. Some things never go away.”
Laying the fire on its back she cooked him toast while she went on brushing her hair and watching him through the strands.
“If I were a man,” she said, “I wouldn’t waste my energy hitting anybody. I wouldn’t play rugger, I wouldn’t box, I wouldn’t spy for people. I wouldn’t even ride. I’d save everything I had for fucking, again and again and again.”
Pym departed, once more smouldering at the frivolity of those who failed to perceive his higher calling.
“Dearest Bel,
“Is there nothing you can do for Jemima? I simply cannot bear to see her go to the devil like this.”
Did Pym know that he had tempted God? Certainly I know it now, this blowy night beside the sea as I try to write it so many years later. Whom else but his Maker was he provoking as he spun his stupid stories? Pym was calling down his fate on himself as surely as if he had begged for it by name in his prayers, and God dealt him the favour as God often did. Pym’s fantasy version of himself waited out there like a decoy that no celestial eye could overlook, and the divine response was lying in his cubbyhole in the porter’s lodge not twenty-four hours later when he came down to see who loved him this Saturday morning before breakfast. Ah! A letter! Blue in colour! Can it be perhaps from Jemima? Or is it from the virtuous Belinda, Jemima’s friend? Is it from Lalage, perhaps — or Polly, or Prudence, or Anne? The answer, Jack, was none of them. It came, like so many bad things, from you. You were writing to Pym from Oman, care of the Trucial-Oman Scouts, though the stamp was true-blue British and the postmark Whitehall, because it had come to England by bag.
“My dear Magnus,
“As you will see from the letter heading, I have abandoned the fleshpots of Bern for harsher fare and am presently attached to the Military Mission here, where life is certainly a little more exciting! I still do the odd spot of church work, and I must say some of these Arabs sing pretty nicely. The purpose of my letter is twofold.
“1. To wish you all the best with your studies and to repeat my interest in your progress.
“2. To tell you that I have passed your name to our sister church back in the old country, since I gather they are a bit short of tenors in your region. So if you should chance to hear from a chap called Rob Gaunt, who tells you he is a friend of mine, I trust you will allow him to buy you a meal on my behalf, and make sure he does you proud! Incidentally, he is a Lieutenant Colonel, nominally a Gunner.”
Pym had not long to wait, though every minute seemed a year. On the following Tuesday, returning from a testing tutorial on the theory of Ablaut, he found a second envelope waiting for him. This one was brown and of exceptional thickness, of a type I never saw in later years. Faint lines ran across it, giving it the appearance of corrugated cardboard though the texture was oily and smooth. There was no crest on the back, no address of sender. Even the manufacturer was secret. Yet Pym’s name and address were immaculately typed, the stamp perfectly centred, and when he probed at the flap in the safety of his room, he discovered that it was stuck down with a rubberised bonding, which smelt of acid drops and parted in sticky threads like chewing gum. Inside lay a single sheet of thick white paper that was not so much folded as ironed. Prising it open the great spy observed at once the absence of a watermark. The type was large, as if for the partially sighted, the alignment faultless:
Box 777
The War Office
Whitehall S.W.I
My dear Pym,
Our mutual friend Jack tells me excellent things about you and I would greatly like the opportunity to get to know you, as there are important matters of mutual interest that you might help us out with. Unfortunately I have a full programme at the moment, and shall be abroad by the time you receive this letter. I wonder therefore whether as an interim measure you would care to have a conversation with a colleague of mine who will be down your way on Monday of next week. If you are willing, why not take the bus to Burford and be in the saloon bar of the Monmouth Arms a little before midday? For ease of recognition he will be carrying a copy of Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, and I suggest you provide yourself with a Financial Times, which has a distinctive pink. His name is Michael and, like Jack, he had a valuable war. I have no doubt the two of you will hit it off famously.
With all good wishes,
Yours sincerely,
R. Gaunt
(Lt. Col., R.A., ret.)
For the next five days Pym abandoned work. He paced the back streets of the city, turning in his tracks to see who was following him. He bought a sheath knife and practised throwing it at trees until the blade broke. He wrote a Will and sent it to Belinda. When he entered his rooms he did so with circumspection, never descending or climbing his staircase without first listening for unfamiliar sounds. Where should he hide the secret letters? They were far too precious to throw away. Remembering something he had read, he gouged out the centre of his brand-new copy of Kluge’s Etymological Dictionary to make a nest for them. From then on, his eviscerated Kluge became the first thing his eye fell upon when he returned from his sorties. To buy his copy of the Financial Times without attracting notice, he walked all the way to Littlemore but the village post office had never heard of it. By the time he returned to Oxford everything was shut. After a sleepless night he made a dawn raid on the Junior Common Room before anyone was up, and stole a back number from the racks.