“Please stop,” said Pym. “I know what you want.”
“Where’s the justice? If he’s got it there I’ll have it from him, thank you. I’ve no letters above a couple of procrastinators from Perce Loft, and what do they say? It’s like trying to nail a raindrop to the wall, I tell you.”
“Try to be calm now,” Pym said. “Please.”
“I took myself to that stupid Lakin, the Tory. Half a day it took of waiting but I got to him. ‘Rick Pym’s a shark,’ I tell him. What’s the good of telling that to a Tory when they’re all sharks anyway? I told the Labour but they kept saying ‘What’s he done?’ They said they’ll enquire and thank you, but what will they find, the poor innocents?”
* * *
Mattie Searle is sweeping the courtyard. Pym is indifferent to his scrutiny. Pym carries himself with authority, using the same walk that got him to Lippsie’s bicycle and past the policeman to the Overflow House. I am authority. I am British. Will you kindly get out of my way.
“I left something in the cellar,” he says carelessly.
“Oh yes,” says Mattie.
Peggy Wentworth’s bandsaw voice is cutting into his soul. What dreadful echoes has it woken in him? In what empty house of his childhood is it nagging and whining at him? Why is he so abject before its dredging insistence? She is the risen Lippsie, speaking out from the grave at last. She is the world inside my head made strident. She is the sin I can never expiate. Put your head in the basin, Pym. Hold these taps and listen to me while I explain why no punishment will ever be enough for you. Put him on bread and water, his father’s child. Why do you wet your bed, old son? Don’t you know there’s a thousand quid in cash waiting for you at the end of your first dry year? He switches on the committee-room lights, throws open the door to the cellar steps and stomps heavily down them. Cardboard boxes. Commodities. A glut to fill the shortages. The Michaels’ dividers to the fore again, better than a Swiss penknife. He trips the lock of the green cabinet and pulls out the first drawer as the glow begins to spread over him.
Lippschitz first name Anna, two volumes only. Why Lippsie, it’s you at last, he thinks calmly. Well it was a short life, wasn’t it? No time now, but rest where you are and I’ll come back and claim you later. Watermaster Dorothy, Marital, one volume only. Well it was a short marriage too, but wait for me, Dot, for I’ve other ghosts I must attend to first. He closes the first drawer and pulls open the second. Rick, you bastard, where are you? Bankruptcy, the whole drawer full of it. He opens the third. The imminence of his discovery is setting his body on fire: the eyelids, the surfaces of his back and waist. But his fingers are light and quick and agile. This is what I was born for, if I was born at all. I am God’s detective, seeing everybody right. Wentworth, a dozen of them, tagged in Rick’s handwriting. Foremost in his mind Pym has the dates of Muspole’s letter regretting Rick’s absence for his national necessity. He remembers the Fall and Rick’s long healthy holiday while he and Dorothy were sweating out their imprisonment in The Glades. Rick you bastard where were you? “Come on, old son, we’re pals, aren’t we?” In a minute I shall hear Herr Bastl barking.
He opens the last drawer and sees Rex versus Pym 1938, three fat files, and beside it Rex versus Pym 1944, one only. He pulls out the first of the 1938 batch, replaces it and selects the last instead. He turns to the final page first and reads the judge’s summing-up, verdict, sentence, the immediate disposal of the prisoner. In calm ecstasy he turns back to the beginning and starts again. No camera in those days. No copier, no tape-recorders. Only what you can see and hear and memorise and steal. He reads for an hour. A clock strikes eight but it means nothing to him. I am following my vocation. Divine service is in progress. You women want nothing but to drag us down.
Mattie is still sweeping the courtyard but his outlines are blurred.
“Find it then?” says Mattie.
“Eventually, thanks, yes.”
“That’s the way then,” says Mattie.
He gains his bedroom, turns the key in the lock, pulls a chair to the washstand, starts writing at once, from the memory straight on to the paper, not a thought for style. A clock strikes again and once he hears a knock, first timid then louder. Then a soft and pessimistic “Magnus?” before the feet slowly descend the stairs. But Pym is at the heart of things, women are temporarily abhorrent to him, even Judy is irrelevant to his destiny. He hears her feet clip across the forecourt and the sound of her van driving away, slow at first, then suddenly much faster. Good riddance.
“Dear Peggy”—he is writing—“I hope that the enclosed will be of use to you.”
“Dear Belinda”—he is writing—“I really must own to being fascinated by this glimpse of the democratic process at work. What seems at first to be such a rough instrument turns out to be equipped with all sorts of refined checks and balances. Do let’s meet as soon as I return to London.”
“Dearest Father”—he is writing—“Today is Sunday and in four days we shall know our fate and yours. But I do want you to know how much I have learned to admire the courage and conviction with which you have fought your arduous campaign.”
* * *
On the dais, Rick had not moved. His flick-knife stare was still fixed on Pym. Yet he appeared quite calm. Nothing had happened behind him in the hall that could not be dealt with, apparently. His preoccupation was with his son, whom he was regarding with dangerous intensity. He was wearing his statesman’s silver tie that night and a handmade shirt of cream silk with double cuffs and the great big RTP links from Asprey’s. He had had his hair cut earlier in the day, and Pym could smell the barber’s lotion as father and son continued to face each other. Once, Rick’s gaze switched to Muspole and it was Pym’s later impression Muspole nodded to him in some signal. The silence in the hall was absolute. No coughs or creaks that Pym could hear, not even from the Old Nellies whom Rick, as always, had appointed to the front row where they could remind him of his dear mother and his beloved father who had died so many heroes’ deaths.
At last Rick turned, and advanced towards the audience with the dutiful Goodman Pym walk that so often preceded an act of particular hypocrisy. He reached the table but did not stop. He reached the microphone and switched it off: let no machine come between us at this moment. He went on walking till he had reached the edge of the dais, at the point where it meets the fine curving staircase. He set his jaw, he looked out over the faces, he allowed his features to betray a moment’s soul-searching before he set himself to speak. Somewhere on his way between Pym and the audience he had unbuttoned his jacket. Strike me here, he was saying. Here is my heart. At last, he spoke. His voice higher than usual. Hear the emotion clenching it.
“Would you mind repeating that question, please, Peggy? Very loudly, my dear, so that everyone can hear?”
Peggy Wentworth did as she was bidden. But as Rick’s guest now as well as his accuser.
“Thank you, Peggy.” Then he asked for a chair for her so that she could sit down like everybody else. It was brought by Major Blenkinsop himself. Peggy sat on it in the aisle, obediently, a child in disgrace, waiting to hear some home truths. So it seemed to Pym, and still does, for I have long believed that everything Rick did this night was prepared in advance. If they had popped a dunce’s cap on her head Pym would not have been surprised. I believe they had seen Peggy haunting them and Rick had laid out his mental defences in advance of her, as he had often done before. Muspole’s people could have snatched her for the evening. Major Blenkinsop could have been advised she was not welcome inside the hall. There were a dozen ways in the court’s book to keep a crazed and penniless little blackmailer like Peggy at bay for a crucial night. Rick used none of them. He wanted the trial, as ever. He wanted to be judged and found spotless.