The first evening together Stott remarks, “Now, the brothels, old man. You’ve got good contacts there, I suppose?” Tripp has never been in a brothel in his life. He has to own that he has overlooked brothels. “Most important, old man. Every visiting businessman goes to the brothels. Got to have them covered.”
He has a night round the town with Stott and gets into trouble with his wife for returning at two in the morning. Stott moves on to Berlin, but he has sown seeds in Tripp’s mind. His notional agents in future follow a Stott line. London is asked to approve in rapid succession the madame of a high class “house,” a cafe singer, and, his most imaginative effort to date, a well-known Latesthian cinema actress who is described as Agent B720’s (i.e. Tripp’s) mistress. Of course he has never spoken to her in his life, and he has no idea that she is in fact a German agent.
3
A SECOND CRISIS-NEEDING MORE DELICATE HANDLING THAN Stott’s-blows up. The threat of European war is deepening and London considers that Tripp’s position in Latesthia is a key one. He must have a proper staff: Singer Sewing Machines are persuaded in the interests of the nation to build up their agency in Latesthia and they inform Tripp that they are sending out to him a secretary-typist and a clerk. Tripp is innocently delighted that his work for Singer has borne such fruit and that sewing machines are booming. He is less pleased, however, when the clerk and typist arrive and prove to be members of the Secret Service sent to assist him in handling his now complicated network of agents.
The clerk is a young man with a penetrating cockney accent and an enormous capacity for hero worship and heroine worship. His devotion is equally aroused by what he considers the experience and daring of Tripp and by the legs and breasts of Tripp’s wife. His name is Cobb, and he has an annoying habit of asking questions. He says himself, “You don’t have to bother to explain things, Chief. Just let me dig in and ask questions, and I’ll get the hang of things for myself.”
The typist-Miss Jixon-is a withered spinster of forty-four who regards everyone and everything with suspicion. She believes that even the most innocent labourer is in the pay of the secret police, and she is shocked by the inadequacy of the security arrangements in the office. She insists on all blotting paper being locked in the safe and all typewriter ribbons being removed at night. This is highly inconvenient as no one is very good at fixing typewriter ribbons. Once she finds a used ribbon thrown in the wastepaper basket instead of being burned in the incinerator and she begins to demonstrate the danger of the practice by deciphering the impress on the ribbon. All she can make out is “Red lips were ne’er so red nor eyes so pure,” which turns out to be a line of a sonnet written by Cobb-obviously with Mrs. Tripp in mind.
“He’s really rather sweet,” Mrs. Tripp says. The chief problem that Tripp has to solve is how to disguise the fact that he has no sources for his reports. He finds this unexpectedly easy. He goes shopping and returns with envelopes that have been handed to him, he says, from under the counter; he makes a great show of testing perfectly innocent letters about sewing machines for secret inks; he takes Cobb for a round of the town and now and then in the restaurants points out his agents.
“A very discreet man. You’ll see he won’t show the least flicker of recognition.”
The monthly payments to agents present a difficulty: Miss Jixon objects strongly to the payments being made by himself.
“It’s irregular, insecure: HQ would never countenance it.”
By this time, for the sake of his assistants, he has drawn up an impressive chart of his sources, with the immediate head agents who control each gang. Miss Jixon insists that from now on he shall cut off his personal contacts with all but his head agents (of whom the cinema actress is one) and that he should meet them on every occasion in a different disguise.
Disguises become the bane of Tripp’s life. What makes it worse, of course, is that his wife knows nothing. Miss Jixon shows a horrible ingenuity: Tripp’s makeup box for the operatic productions of the Anglo-Latesthian Society is requisitioned. He finds himself being forced to slip out of back doors in red wigs and return by front doors in black wigs. She makes him carry at least two soft hats of varying colors in his overcoat pockets, so that he can change hats. Spectacles, horn-rimmed and steel-rimmed, bulge his breast pockets.
The strain tells. He becomes irritable and Mrs. Tripp is reduced to tears. Cobb is torn between hero worship and heroine worship.
4
NEXT CRISIS: THE ENEMY BEGINS TO TAKE TRIPP SERIOUSLY. He becomes aware that he is followed everywhere-even to the Anglo-Latesthian musical soiree-“an evening with Edward German and Vaughan Williams.” Miss Jixon’s security arrangements have been a little too good and the Germans are no longer able to keep an eye on the reports he sends.
She has objected to the use of the Chief of Police as transmitter and has evolved an elaborate method of sending secret ink messages on postage stamps. (There is a moment when Miss Jixon skirts shyly round the possibility of bird shit as secret ink.) Unfortunately the ink never develops properly-single words will appear and disappear with disconcerting rapidity.
Tripp, in order to be able to fake his expenses sheet and show the expenditure of huge sums for entertainment, is forced to dine out at least three times a week. He hates restaurant meals-and in any case it would be fatal if one of his assistants saw him dining alone. He therefore rents a room in the suburbs and retires there for a quiet read (his favorite authors are Charles Lamb and Newbolt) or the writing of a bogus report, taking a little food out of the larder with him. (In his account book this appears as “Dinner for three (political sources) with wines, cigars, etc., Ł5. l0s.0d.”) This constant dining out had never been necessary in the old days before his assistants came, and Mrs. Tripp resents it.
The domestic crisis reaches its culmination when on payday Tripp has to pretend to visit the home of the cinema actress with pay for her subsources. Cobb keeps guard in the street outside and Tripp, wearing a false mustache, proceeds up to the actress’s flat, rings the bell and inquires for an imaginary person. He turns away from the closing door just as Mrs. Tripp comes down from visiting a friend in the flat above. His excuse that he was trying to sell a sewing machine seems weak to Mrs. Tripp in view of his false mustache.
Domestic harmony is further shattered when Cobb, anxious to make peace between his hero and his heroine, tells Mrs. Tripp everything-or what he thinks is everything. “It’s for his country, Mrs. Tripp,” he says.
Mrs. Tripp decides that she too will go in for patriotism. She begins to dine out too, and Tripp, not unduly disturbed, takes the opportunity of appointing her as agent with a notional lover in the Foreign Ministry.
“That fellow Tripp,” they say in London, “deserves a decoration. The Service comes even before his wife. Good show.”
His notional mistress and his wife’s notional lover are among his most interesting sources. Unfortunately, of course, his wife does not believe that his mistress is notional, and her dinner companion, unlike the notional member of the Foreign Ministry, is a very real young man attached to Agriculture and Fisheries.
Mrs. Tripp gets news of Tripp’s hideout and decides to track him down. She is certain she will find him in the company of the actress and that he will not be engaged in work of national importance.