Syd misses his shot and swears. Pym closes the door. They are settled. No danger there for at least an hour. He continues his patrol. Another flight upwards the atmosphere tightens, as it will in any secret building. Here is the quiet room where invited guests may kick off their shoes and take part in a relaxing hand of poker with Our Candidate and his circle. Pym enters without knocking. At a table strewn with cash and brandy gla.s.ses, Rick and Perce Loft are locked in a sharp piece of betting with Mattie Searle. The pot is a stack of petrol coupons, which in the court are preferred as hard currency. Mattie raises Rick and Rick sees him. Rick looks on with forbearance while Mattie scoops the pool.

"They tell me you and Colonel Barker had a crack at Little Kimble this morning, old son."

I forget exactly why Rick called Judy Colonel. I have an idea it was a reference to a celebrated lesbian who had been involved in a court case. Whatever the reason, Pym did not care for it.

"The boy had them kissing the ground, Rickie," Perce Loft confirms.

"Not the only thing he's been kissing, if you ask me," says Rick and everybody laughs because it is Rick's joke.

Pym leans in for the good-night bear-hug and hears Rick sniff his cheek, which has Judy's smell on it.

"Just you keep that old mind of yours on the election, son," he says, patting the same cheek in warning.

Down the corridor lies Morrie Washington's publicity department which doubles as disinformation section. Cases of whisky and nylons are stacked against the wall waiting to pave the way to the last electoral favours. It was from Morrie's desk that the baseless rumours went out regarding the Tory Candidate's support of Sir Oswald Mosley, and the Labour Candidate's overaddiction to his pupils. Springing the locks with his dividers, Pym flicks quickly through the drawers. One bank statement, one set of indecent playing cards. The statement is in the name of Mr. Morris Wurzheimer and is overdrawn by a hundred and twenty pounds. The playing cards would be impressive if Judy's reality did not eclipse them. Relocking everything neatly after him Pym climbs halfway up the last flight, then hovers listening to Mr. Muspole murmuring on the telephone. The top floor is the sanctum. It is safe room, cypher room and operations centre combined. At the end of the corridor lie Our Candidate's State Apartments which not even Pym has penetrated so far, for Sylvia now spends erratic hours in bed having headaches or trying to grill herself brown with a mysterious hand lamp she has bought from Mr. Muspole. He can therefore never be sure of a safe run. Next door resides the so-called Action Committee, where big money and support are mustered and promises traded. What promises is still half a mystery to me, though Syd once spoke of a plan to fill the ancient harbour with cement and make a carpark of it, to the pleasure of many influential contractors.

Abruptly Mr. Muspole rings off. Without a sound, Pym swivels on his heel and prepares to beat an orderly retreat down the stairs. He is saved by the whirr of Mr. Muspole dialling again. He is talking to a lady, asking tender questions and purring at the answers. Muspole can carry on like this for hours. It is his little pleasure.

Having waited till his voice has settled to a rea.s.suring flow Pym returns to the ground floor. The darkness of the committee rooms smells of tea and deodorant. The door to the courtyard is locked from the inside. Pym softly turns the key and pockets it. The cellar staircase stinks of cat. Boxes are stored on the steps. Groping his way down, unwilling to put on the light lest it be visible from the courtyard, Pym has an unmistakable mental reprise of a day in Bern when he carried his damp washing down the stone steps to another cellar and was scared of tripping over Herr Bastl. And as he reaches the bottom step he does indeed miss his footing. Lurching forward he falls heavily on to the cellar door and pushes it open with both hands as he tries to steady himself. The door screeches in the grime. The impetus of his body is enough to carry him into the cellar which to his surprise is lit by a pale light. By its glow Pym makes out the green filing cabinet and standing before it a woman holding what appears to be a chisel, examining its locks by the ailing beam of a bicycle lamp. Her eyes, which are turned to him, are dark and pugnacious. There is not a flicker of guilt about her. And it is a thing I wonder at still that it never seriously occurred to him to doubt that she was the same woman, with the same gaze, and the same intense and disapproving quietness, whose veiled face had fixed on him after his triumph on the hustings of Little Chedworth, and stalked him through a dozen meetings since. Even asking her name Pym realises that he knows it already though he is blessed with no faculty of premonition. She wears a long skirt that could have been her mother's. She has a hard, pebble face and young hair turned to grey. Her eyes are disconcertingly straight and bright, even in the gloom.

"My name is Peggy Wentworth," she replies defiantly in a tough Irish brogue. "Shall I spell it for you, Magnus? Peggy short for Margaret, have you heard that? Your father, Mr. Richard Thomas Pym, killed my husband John, and as good as killed me too. And if it takes me the rest of my living death till they put me in the grave beside him, I'll find the proof of it, and bring the brute to justice."

Seeing a flicker of moving light Pym glances sharply behind him. Mattie Searle is standing in the doorway with a blanket over his shoulders. His head is hung sideways to favour his good ear while he squints first at Pym then at Peggy over the top of his spectacles. How much has he heard? Pym has no idea. But his mind is made fertile by alarm.

"This is Emma from Oxford, Mattie," he says boldly. "Emma, this is Mr. Searle who owns the hotel."

"Pleased to meet you," says Peggy calmly.

"Emma and I are in a college play next month, Mattie. She came up to Gulworth so that we could rehea.r.s.e together. We thought we'd be out of your way down here."

"Oh yes," says Mattie. His eyes slip from Peggy to Pym and back again, with a knowledge that makes nonsense of Pym's lies. They hear his lazy shuffle going up the stairs.

I can't tell you very accurately any more, Tom, which bits she told Pym where. His first thought on escaping the hotel was to keep going, so they hopped a bus and went as far as it took them, which turned out to be the oldest, most broken-down bit of waste dockland you could imagine: gutted warehouses with windows you could see the moon through, idle cranes that rose like gallows straight out of the sea. A bunch of roving knife-bladers had pitched camp there, they must have worked at night and slept by day, because I remember their Romany faces rocking over their wheels as they trod their treadles, and the sparks gushing over the watching children. I remember girls with men's muscles flinging fish baskets while they yelled ribaldries at each other, and fishermen strutting among them in their oilskins, too grand to be bothered with anyone but themselves. I remember with a leap of grat.i.tude every flash of face or voice outside the windows of the prison she had locked me in with her relentless monologue.

At a tea-stall on the waterfront while they stood shivering with a crowd of down-and-outs, Peggy told Pym the story of how Rick had stolen her farm. She had begun it the moment they got on the bus, for the benefit of anyone who'd care to hear it, and had continued it without a comma or a full stop since, and Pym knew that it was all true, all terrible, even if quite often the sheer venom in her drove him secretly to Rick's protection. They walked to get warm but she didn't stop talking for one second. When he bought her beans and egg at a Seamen's Mission hut called the Rover, still she went on talking as she spread her elbows and sawed the toast and used her teaspoon to get up the sauce. It was at the Rover that she told Pym about Rick's great trust fund that took possession of the nine thousand pounds of insurance money paid to her husband John after he fell into the thresher and lost both legs below the knee and all the fingers of one hand. As she told this part she drew the lines of amputation on her own scant limbs without looking at them, and Pym sensed her obsession again and was scared of it. The one voice I never did for you, Tom, is Peggy's Irish brogue dropping into Rick's chapel cadences as she repeated his silver-tongued promises: twelve and a half percent plus profits, my dear, year in and year out, enough to see dear old John right for as long as he's spared, and enough for yourself when he's gone, and enough left over after that, my dear, to put some by for that first-rate boy of yours for when he goes to college and reads his law just the way my own son will--they're birds of a feather. It was a Thomas Hardy story that she told, full of casual disasters that seemed to have been timed by an angry G.o.d to obtain the maximum of misfortune. And she was Hardy's woman to go with it: lured forward by her obsession, and only her own destiny left to deal with.

John Wentworth, as well as being a victim, was an a.s.s, she explained, and was ready to be swayed by the first charmer who walked into the room. He went to his grave convinced that Rick was a saviour and a pal. His farm was a Cornish manor called Tamar Rose where every grain of wheat had to be wrestled from the sea wind. He had inherited it from a wiser father, and Alastair their son was his only heir. When John died there was not a penny for anybody. Everything signed away, every b.l.o.o.d.y thing mortgaged to the neck, Magnus--on which word Peggy pa.s.sed her bean-stained knife across her throat. She told about Rick visiting John in hospital soon after his accident and the flowers and the chocolates and the bubbly--and Pym in his mind's eye saw the basket of black-market fruit beside his own hospital bed when he woke up after his operation. He remembered Rick's n.o.ble caring for the aged and decrepit that he had helped him with during the war years of the great crusade. He remembered Lippsie's sobbing voice calling Rick a teef, and Rick's letters to her promising to see her right.

"And a free train ticket for myself," Peggy is saying, "to come up to Truro Hospital to visit him. And your father driving me home after, Magnus, nothing too much trouble for him until he has our man's money." The doc.u.ments he made John sign, Magnus, always witnessed by the prettiest nurses. How your father always had the patience for John, always explaining to him whatever he couldn't understand, over and again if necessary, but John won't listen, the deluded man is too trusting and lazy in his mind.

A fit of fury seizes her: "Me up at four in the morning for the milking and falling asleep over my accounts at midnight!" she shouts as sleepy heads turn to her from other tables. "And that stupid husband of mine lying warm in his bed in Truro signing it all away behind my back while your father sits by his bedside playing the saint to him, Magnus. And my Alastair needing a pair of shoes to walk to school in, while you're living on the hog there with your fine schools and your fine clothes, Magnus, G.o.d save you!" For it turns out, of course, on John's death, that for reasons outside everyone's control the great trust fund has suffered a purely temporary problem of liquidity and can't pay the twelve and a half percent plus profits after all. It can't refund the capital either. And that to tide everyone over this sticky patch, John Wentworth took the wise precaution, just before his death, of mortgaging the farm and land and livestock, and b.l.o.o.d.y nearly his wife and child as well, so that n.o.body will ever want for anything again. And had given the proceeds to his dear old pal Rick. And that Rick has brought down a distinguished lawyer, name of Loft, all the way from London with him, just to explain the implications of this smart move to John on his deathbed. And John, to please everyone as usual, has written out a special long letter all in his own hand, a.s.suring whom it may concern that his decision has been taken while he was of sound mind and in full possession of his mental faculties and was not in any manner subjected to undue influence by a saint and his lawyer while he was lying gasping out his last. All this in case Peggy, or for that matter Alastair, should later have the bad manners to dispute the doc.u.ment in court or try to get John's nine thousand pounds back, or should otherwise show a lack of faith in Rick's selfless stewardship of John's ruin.

"When did all this happen?" says Pym.

She tells him the dates, she tells him the day of the week and the hour of the day. she pulls a wad of letters from her handbag signed by Perce and regretting that "our Chairman, Mr. R. T. Pym, is unavailable, being absent indefinitely on a mission of national necessity," and a.s.suring her that "the doc.u.ments relating to the Freehold of Tamar Rose are at present being processed with a view to acquiring a large Figure in your interest." And she watches him with her mad cold eyes as he reads them by the light of a street lamp while they sit huddled on a broken bench. She takes back the letters and returns them to their envelopes lovingly, careful of the edges and the folds. As she continues talking, Pym wants to close his ears or slap a hand over her mouth. He wants to get up and run to the sea-wall and throw himself over. He wants to scream "Shut up!" But all he does is ask her, please, I beg you, if you would be so kind, don't continue with your story.

"Why not, pray?"

"I don't want to hear it. It's not my business, this part. He robbed you. The rest doesn't make any difference," says Pym.

Peggy doesn't agree. She is flailing her Irish back with her Irish guilt and using Pym's presence as the excuse to do it. She is talking in a gush. It is what she has been waiting to tell him best.

"And why not--seeing as the b.l.o.o.d.y man possesses you anyway? If he's already got his filthy arms around you sure as if he had you in his fancy bed with the frills and the fancy mirrors"--it is Rick's bedroom in Chester Street she is describing--"seeing as he's already got the power of life and death over you and you're a foolish lonely woman in the world with a sickly boy to care for and a bankrupt farm to mind, and not a soul but the stupid bailiff to say nice day to for a week at a time?"

"It's enough to know he's done you wrong," Pym insists. "Please, Peggy. The rest is private."

"Seeing as he can beckon you up to London first-cla.s.s, send the tickets, just with a flick of his fingers the moment he gets back from his national necessity, because he thinks you're going to put the lawyers on him? Well you go, don't you? If you haven't had a man for two years and more and only your own body to look at withering in the mirror every day, you go!"

"I'm sure you do. I'm sure there was every reason," Pym says. "Please don't tell me any more."

She is doing Rick's voice again: "'Let's sort this matter out once and for all, Peggy my dear. I'm not having a sour bit of business come between us when all I ever wanted was to see you right.' Well, you go, don't you?" Her voice is echoing in the empty square and out over the water. "My G.o.d, you go. You pack your bag, you take your boy and lock the door because you're off to get your money and some justice. You scurry up there bursting to have the fight of your life just the moment you set eyes on him. You leave the washing and the dishes and the milking and the penny-pinching life he's put you to. And you tell the stupid bailiff to mind the shop for you, me and Alastair we're going up to London. And when you arrive, instead of a business conference with Mr. Percy Loft and Mr. b.l.o.o.d.y Muspole and the gang of them, the man buys you fine clothes in Bond Street and treats you like a princess, with the limousines and the restaurants and the fancy petticoats and silks--well you can always have your row with him later, can't you?"

"No," says Pym. "You can't. You've got to have it then or never."

"If he's trodden you into the mud these years the least you can do is get a bit back from him, in exchange for all the misery, take him for every penny he's robbed you of." Yet again she does Rick's voice: "'I always fancied you, Peggy, you know that. You're a good scout, the best. Always had my eye on that pretty Irish smile of yours and not only the smile either.' So all right, he's got a treat prepared for the boy as well. Takes him to the a.r.s.enal and we sit up there like G.o.ds in the special box with the lords and grandees, and dinner at Quaglino's after, him the People's Man, with a two-foot cake with the boy's name written on it, you should see Alastair's face. And next day a Harley Street specialist laid on to listen to his cough and a gold watch for the boy after, for being the brave one, with his initials on it, 'From RTF to a fine young man.' Come to think of it, it's not at all unlike the one you're wearing now--is that a gold one too? So when a man's done all that for you and been a b.a.s.t.a.r.d--well you have to admit to yourself after a couple of days of it, there's many worse b.a.s.t.a.r.ds than him in the world. Most of them wouldn't split their b.l.o.o.d.y Bath bun with you, let alone a two-foot cake at Quaglino's and somebody to take the boy home to bed after, so that the grown-ups can go to a nightclub and have a bit of fun--why not if he always fancied me? There's not many women wouldn't put off a fight for a day or two for some of that, I suppose--so why not?"

She is speaking as if Pym is no longer there and she is right. She has deafened him but he can still hear her. As I hear her still, an endless, needling babble of destruction. She is speaking to the derelict cattle market with its broken pens and stopped clock, but Pym is numb and dead and anywhere but here. He is in the Overflow House at his prep school and Rick's raised voice and Lippsie's weeping keep waking him in his sleep. He is on Dorothy's bed at The Glades and bored to b.l.o.o.d.y death, with his head against her shoulder staring at the white sky through the window all day long. He is in an attic somewhere in Switzerland, wondering to G.o.d why he has killed his friend to please an enemy.

She is describing Rick's madness with her own. Her voice is a nagging querulous torrent and he hates it to distraction. The way the man boasted. He'd not a foot on the earth when he started with his lying. How he had been Lady Mountbatten's lover and she'd a.s.sured him he was better than Noel Coward. How they'd wanted him for Amba.s.sador in Paris but he'd turned it down; he'd no patience with the airy-fairies. And about the stupid green filing cabinet with his rotten secrets in it, imagine the madness of a fellow who spends his hours weaving the rope they ought to hang him with! How he'd led her barefoot to it in her nightdress, look at this my child. The record, he called it. All the rights and the wrongs he'd done. All the evidence of his innocence--his b.l.o.o.d.y righteousness. How, when he was judged, as judged he would surely be, everything in this stupid cabinet would be put into the balance, rights and wrongs together, and we would see him for what he was, up alongside of the angels while us poor sinners down here bleed and starve for the glory of him. It's what he's put together to con the Almighty with and that's the short of it--imagine the impertinence, and him a b.l.o.o.d.y Baptist too!

Pym asks her how she has known where to find it. I saw the stupid thing being delivered, she says. I was keeping a watch on Searle's hotel the first day of the campaign. The pansy Cudlove drove it up specially in his limousine, the cost alone. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d Loft helped him carry it to the cellar, first time he's got his hands dirty. Rick didn't dare leave it in London while they were all up here. "I have to put the proof on him, Magnus," she keeps repeating as he leads her through the dawn to her miserable lodging-house, her voice whining and insisting in his ear like a machine that n.o.body can stop. "If he's got the proof there like he says, I'll have it off of him and turn it back on him, I swear I will. All right, I've taken a drop of money off him, it's true. But what's the money when he's cheated me in love? What's the money when he can walk down the street a grandee and there's my John rotting in his grave? And the people in the street all clapping for him, for Rickie boy? And con his way to Heaven into the bargain? What's the use of a poor deluded victim like me who let him have his will with her and will burn in h.e.l.l for it, if she won't do her duty by the world and point him up for the devil that he is? Where's the proof? I'm asking."

"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 handsaw 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d, 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 G.o.d'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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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-reeorders. 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 RTF 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 unb.u.t.toned 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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.

"Ladies and gentlemen. This lady's name is Mrs. Peggy Wentworth. She is a widow whom I have known and tried to help for many years, who has been desperately wronged in life, and who blames me for her misfortune. I hope that after this meeting you will all hear whatever Peggy has to tell you, give her every indulgence at your command, show her every patience. And in your wisdom judge for yourselves where the truth may lie. I hope you will show charity to Peggy, and to me, and remember how hard it is for all of us to accept misfortune without pointing the finger of blame."

He placed his hands behind his back. His feet were close together.

"Ladies and gentlemen, my old friend Peggy Wentworth is quite right." Not even Pym, who thought he knew all the instruments in Rick's orchestra, had heard him so straight and simple in his delivery, so bereft of rhetoric. "Many years ago, ladies and gentlemen, when I was a very young man, striving to get on in life--as we all were once, overeager, ready to cut a few corners--I found myself in the position of the office boy who had borrowed a few stamps from the till and been caught before he had a chance to put them back. I was a first offender, it is true. My mother, like Peggy Wentworth here, was a widow. I had a great father to live up to and only sisters in the family. The responsibilities that weighed upon me, I will admit, blew me across the borders of what Justice, in her blind wisdom, deemed right. Justice exacted her penalty. I paid it in full measure. As I shall pay for it all my life."

Then the jaw went up and the thick hands untied themselves, and one arm struck out towards the Old Nellies in the front while his eyes and voice reached into the darkness at the back.

"My friends--Peggy, my dear, I still count you as one too--my loyal friends of Gulworth North, I see among you here tonight men and women still young enough to be impulsive. I see others with the experience of life upon them, whose children and grandchildren have gone out into the world to follow their impulses, to strive and make mistakes and overcome them. I want to ask you older people this. If one of these young people--children, grandchildren, or if this son of mine who sits behind me here, poised to collect some of the highest prizes the law of this country can offer--if one of them should ever make a mistake, and pay the price that society exacts, and come home and say, 'Mum, it's me. Dad, it's me'--which one of you sitting here among us tonight is going to slam the door in his face?"

They were standing. They were calling his name. "Rickie-- good old Rickie--you get our vote, Rickie boy." On the dais behind him we were standing too, and Pym saw through his own tears that Syd and Morrie were embracing each other. For once Rick did not acknowledge the applause. He was casting round theatrically for Pym and calling "Magnus, where are you, son?" though he knew perfectly well where he was. Affecting to find him he seized his arm, raised it and drew him forward, almost lifting him off the ground even as he offered him as champion to the jubilant crowd, shouting "Here's one, here's one!" I suppose he meant a penitent who has paid the price and come home, though I'll never be certain because of the roar, and perhaps he said, "Here's my son." As to Pym, he could no longer contain himself. He had never adored Rick more. He was choking and clapping, he was shaking Rick's hand for them with both of his, bear-hugging him and patting his great shoulder for them and telling him he was crackerjack. As he did so, he thought he saw Judy's pale face and big pale eyes behind their serious spectacles, watching him from the centre of the crowd. My father needed me, he wanted to explain to her. I forgot where the bus stop was. I lost your phone number. I did it for my country. The Bentley was waiting at the front steps, Cudlove at the door. Riding away at Rick's side, Pym imagined he heard Judy calling out his name: "Pym. You b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Where are you?"

It was dawn. Unshaven, Pym sat at his desk, not wanting the daylight. Chin in hand he stared at the last page he had written. Change nothing. Don't look back, don't look forward. You do it once, then die. A miserable vision a.s.sailed him of the women in his life vainly waiting at every bus stop along his chaotic path. Rising quickly he mixed himself a Nescafe and drank it while it was still too hot for him. Then took up his stapler and marker pen and set himself busily to work--I am a clerk, that is all I am--stapling his cuttings and cross-indexing the helpful references.

Extracts from Gulworth Mercury and Evening Star reporting Liberal Candidate's fighting stand on Eve of Poll night in the Town Hall. For libel reasons writers omit direct reference to Peggy Wentworth's accusations, referring only to Candidate's spirited self-defence against personal attack. Enter at 21a. b.l.o.o.d.y stapler doesn't work. This sea air rusts everything.

Cutting from London Times giving results of Gulworth North by-election:McKechnie (Labour) 17,970 Lakin (Cons.) 15,711 Pym (Lib.) 6,404 Semi-literate leader ascribes victory to "miscalculated intervention" of Liberals. Enter at 22a.Extract from Oxford University Gazette notifying waiting world that Magnus Richard Pym has been awarded a B.A. Rons, degree in Modern Languages, Cla.s.s I. No reference to night hours spent studying previous examination papers, or informal exploration of tutor's desk drawers with the aid of the Michaels' ever-handy steel dividers. Entered at 23a.

But actually, not entered at all, for in the act of marking this cutting, Pym set it down before him and stared at it, head in hands, with an expression of revulsion.

Rick knew. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d knew. His head still between his hands, Pym returns himself to Gulworth later the same night. Father and son are riding in the Bentley, their favourite place. The Town Hall lies behind them, Mrs. Searle's Temperance Rest is approaching. The tumult of the crowd still rings in their ears. It will be another twenty-four hours before the world will learn the name of the winning candidate, but Rick knows it already. He has been judged and applauded for all his life till now.

"Let me tell you something, old son," he says in his mellowest and kindest voice. The pa.s.sing streetlights are switching his wise features on and off, making his triumph appear intermittent. "Never lie, son. I told them the truth. G.o.d heard me. He always does."

"It was fantastic," says Pym. "Could you possibly let go of my arm, please?"

"No Pym was ever a liar, son."

"I know," says Pym, taking back his arm anyway.

"Why couldn't you have come to me, son? 'Father,' you could have said--'Rickie' if you like; you're old enough--'I'm not reading law any more. I'm building up my languages because I want the gift of tongues. I want to go out into the world like my best pal, and be heard wherever men gather regardless of colour, race or creed.' Because do you know what I'd have answered if you'd come to me and said that to your old man?"

Pym is too mad, too dead to care.

"You'd have been super," he says.

"I'd have said: 'Son, you're grown up now. You take your own decisions. All your old man can do is play wicket-keeper while Magnus here bats and G.o.d does the bowling.'" He grasps Pym's hand, nearly breaking the fingers. "Don't shrink away from me like that, old son. I'm not angry with you. We're pals, remember? We don't have to tiptoe round each other looking in one another's pockets, poking in drawers, talking to misguided women in hotel cellars. We come out with it straight. On the table. Now dry those old peepers of yours and give your old pal a hug."

With his monographed silk handkerchief the great statesman magnanimously wipes away the tears of Pym's rage and impotence.

"Want a good English steak tonight, son?"

"Not much."

"Old Mattie's cooking us one with onions. You can invite Judy if you like. We'll all have a game of chemmy afterwards. She'd like that."

Raising his head, Pym recovered his marker pen and went back to work.

Extract of Branch minutes of Oxford University Communist Party regretting departure of Comrade M. Pym, tireless worker on behalf of cause. Fraternal thanks for his tremendous efforts. Entered at 24a.

Pained letter from Bursar of Pym's college enclosing his cheque for his last term's battles, marked "Refer to Drawer." Similar letters and cheques from Messrs. Blackwell, Parker (Booksellers), and Hall Brothers (Tailors), entered at 24c.

Pained letter from Pym's bank manager regretting that following return of cheque drawn in Pym's favour by the Magnus Dynamic Astral Company (Bahamas) Ltd., in the sum of two hundred and fifty pounds, he has had no alternative but to refer to drawer the cheques as at 24c.

Extract from London Gazette dated March 29, 1951, appointing official receiver in yet another pet.i.tion for bankruptcy of R.T.P. and eighty-three a.s.sociated companies.

Letter from Director of Public Prosecutions inviting Pym to present himself for interview on named date in order to explain his relationship with above companies. Entered at 36a.

Military call-up papers offering Pym sanctuary. Grabbed with both hands.

"If I could just sit with you for a bit, Miss D," said Pym, softly pushing open her kitchen door.

But her chair was empty and the fire out. It was not evening as he had thought, but dawn.

12.

It was the same dawn. It was time minus ten minutes. It was the moment Brotherhood had lain wakeful and alone for in his rotten flat that was becoming a solitary cell for him, staring at the images of his past in the restless London sky. It was an outdoor game being played by indoor people who didn't know they were awake. How many times had he sat like this, in rubber boats, on arctic hillsides, pressing the headphones into his ears with kapok mittens to catch the whisper that meant life was not extinct? Here in the communications room on the top floor of the Head Office there were no headphones, no subzero winds to rip through sodden clothing and freeze the operator's fingers off, no bicycle generator that some poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d had to pump at till his legs failed. No aerial that collapsed on you when you most needed it. No two-ton suitcase to be cached in iron-hard soil while the Huns were breathing down your neck. Up here we have dimpled grey-green boxes freshly dusted, with pretty pin-lights and shiny switches. And tuners and amplifiers. And dials to cut out atmospherics. And comfortable chairs for the barons here a.s.sembled to rest their candy a.r.s.es on. And a mysterious compression of the air that clenches your scalp while you watch the green numerals sliding through their prison window as quickly as the later years of life: now I am forty, now I am forty-five, now I am seventy, now I am ten minutes to being dead.

On the raised platform two boys in headphones were patrolling the dials. They'll never know what it was like, thought Brotherhood. They'll go to their graves thinking life came out of a packet. Bo Brammel and Nigel sat below them like producers at a preview. Behind them a dozen shadows that Brotherhood had barely bothered with. He noticed Lorimer, Head of Operations. He saw Kate and thought thank heaven she's alive. At the edge of the stage, Frankel was lugubriously reporting a string of failures. His mid-European accent has thickened.

"Nine-twenty yesterday morning local time, Prague Station has its chief cut-out dial the Watchman household from a callbox, Bo," he said. "Number engaged. He makes five calls in two hours from round town. Still engaged. He tries Conger. Number out of order. Everybody vanished, everybody out of touch. Midday the Station sends a little girl they own to the canteen where Conger's daughter goes for lunch. Conger's daughter is conscious so maybe she knows where her father is. Our little girl is a sixteen-year-old kid, very small, very hardy. She hangs around two hours, checks both sittings, checks the queue. No daughter. She checks the attendance sheets at the factory gate, tells the guards she is the daughter's room-mate. She's so innocent they let her. Conger's daughter is not reported present, is not reported sicklisted. Vanished."

In the tension n.o.body spoke to anybody. Everyone spoke to himself. The room was still filling up. How many people does it take to give a network a decent burial? thought Brotherhood. Eight minutes to go.

Frankel continued his dirge. "Seven o'clock yesterday morning local time, Gdansk Station puts two of their local boys to mend a telegraph pole at the end of the street where Merryman lives. His house is in a cul-de-sac. He's got no other way out. Every day normally he goes to work by car, leaves his house seven-twenty. But yesterday his car is not outside his house. Every other day it is parked outside his house. Not yesterday. From where the boys work they can see his front door. The front door stays closed. No Merryman, n.o.body at all leaves or enters that house by that door. Downstairs is curtained, no lights, no fresh tracks in the drive. Merryman's good friend is an architect. Merryman likes to take a coffee with him sometimes on his way to work. This architect is not a Joe, he is not whitelisted."

"Wenzel," said Brotherhood.

"Wenzel is the architect's name, Jack. One of the boys calls up Mr. Wenzel and tells him Merryman's mother is ill. 'Where can I get hold of him to give him this bad news?' he says. Mr. Wenzel says try the laboratory, how ill? The boy says she's maybe dying, Merryman ought to get to her fast. 'Give him this message,' the boy says. 'Tell him please that Maximilian says he better get to his mother's bedside fast.' Maximilian, that's the codeword for it's all over. Maximilian means abort, means run, means get the h.e.l.l out by any known means, don't bother with customary procedures, run. The boy is resourceful. When he has ceased to speak to Mr. Wenzel, he calls the laboratory where Merryman works. 'This is Mr. Maximilian. Where's Merryman? It's urgent. Tell him Maximilian got to speak to him about his mother.' Merryman don't come in today, they tell him. Merryman got a conference in Warsaw."

Brotherhood was already objecting. "They wouldn't say that," he growled. "The labs don't give out details of staff movements. They're a top-secret installation, for Christ's sake. Somebody's playing games with us."

"Sure, Jack. My own reaction entirely. You want I go on?"

A couple of heads turned to locate Brotherhood at the back of the room.