Brotherhood did not stoop but held his arms out. Georgie pa.s.sed the box up to him and Brotherhood took it to the table where Tom did his Spirograph and his Lego and his endless drawings of German aeroplanes being shot down against a Plush sunset, with family in the background, everybody waving, everybody absolutely fine. Brotherhood picked out the biggest bundle first and they looked on while he started to unwrap it and changed his mind.

"Here," he said, handing it to Georgie. "Woman's fingers." She's one of his mistresses, Mary suddenly realised. She wondered why on earth it hadn't dawned on her before.

Georgie rose elegantly to her full height, one leg, other leg, and having fixed her straight hair behind her ears, applied her woman's fingers to unwinding the strips of bedsheet that Magnus had said he wanted for the car, revealing at last a small, clever-looking camera with a clever steel harness round it. And after the camera a thing like a telescope with a bracket on it which, when you pulled it to its full length, made a stand that you could screw the camera to, face downwards and at a fixed distance, for photographing doc.u.ments on your father-in-law's campaign table. After the telescope came a succession of films and lenses and filters and rings and other bits of equipment she could not identify offhand. And underneath these a pad of flimsy cloth-paper with columns of numbers on the top sheet and thickly rubberised edges so that you could only see the top page. Mary knew the type of paper. She had worked on it in Berlin. It shrivelled into fern the moment you put a match near it. The pad was half used. Underneath the pad again, an aged cardboard-backed military jotting pad marked "W.D. Property," standing for War Department and consisting of unwritten-on lined paper of blotchy wartime quality. And inside it, when Brotherhood continued searching, two pressed red flowers of great age, poppies, but just possibly roses, she was not entirely certain, and anyway by then she was shouting. "It's for the Firm! It's for his work for you!" "Of course it is. I'll tell Nigel. No problem." "Just because he didn't tell me about it, it doesn't mean it's wrong! It's for in case he gets landed with doc.u.ments in the house! At weekends!" And then, realising what she had said: "It's for his Joes--if they bring him doc.u.ments, you fool! If Grant does, and he's got to turn them round at short notice! What's so f.u.c.king sinister about that?"

Fergus was fingering the half-used pad, turning it over and over, tilting it in the beam of Tom's Anglepoise lamp.

"Looks more like your Czech, sir, frankly," said Fergus, tilting the pad to the light. "It could be Russian but I think Czech's more likely, frankly. Yes," he said pleasantly as his eye caught some unexplained feature of the rubber edge. "That's it. Czech. Mind you, that's only where they're made. Who's dishing them out is another matter. Specially these days."

Brotherhood was more interested in the pressed flowers. He had laid them on his palm and was staring at them as if they told his future.

"I think you're a bad girl, Mary," he said deliberately. "I think you know a lot more than you told me. I don't think he's in Ireland or the b.l.o.o.d.y Bahamas. I think that was a lot of smoke. I think he's a bad man and I'm wondering whether you're bad together."

All constraint left her. She screamed "You s.h.i.t!" and hit at him with her open hand but he blocked her. He put an arm round her and swung her off the ground as if she had no legs left. He carted her across the corridor to Frau Bauer's bedroom which was the only room that hadn't so far been ripped apart. He dumped her on the bed and whisked her shoes off exactly as he used to in the squalid safe flat where he did his s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g. He rolled her into the eiderdown, making a straitjacket of it. Then he lay on her, grappling her into submission while Georgie and Fergus looked on. But somehow, amazingly, throughout all these antics and dramatics, Jack Brotherhood had still contrived to keep hold of the two pressed poppies in his left fist, and kept hold of them even when the doorbell went again, one long peal for authority.

4.

"To be above the fray," Pym wrote to himself on a separate sheet of paper. "A writer is King. He should look down with love upon his subject, even when the subject is himself."

Life began with Lippsie, Tom, and Lippsie happened long before you came along or anyone else did, and long before Pym was what the Firm calls of marriageable age.

Before Lippsie all Pym remembered was an aimless trek through different-coloured houses and a lot of shouting. After her everything seemed to flow in the one unstoppable direction and all he had to do was sit in his boat and let the current carry him. From Lippsie to Poppy, from Rick to Jack, it was all one jolly stream, however much it wriggled and divided itself along the way. And not only life but death began with her as well, for it was actually Lippsie's dead body that got Pym going, though he never saw it. Others saw it, and Pym could have made the journey because it was in the bell yard and no one covered it for ages. But the little fellow was going through a squeamish and self-centred period at the time and had a notion that if he didn't see it she might not be dead after all, but pretending. Or that her death was a judgment upon himself for taking part in the recent killing of a squirrel in the empty swimming-pool. The hunt had been led by a wall-eyed maths master called Corbo the Crow. When the squirrel was safely trapped, Corbo sent three boys down the pool ladder with hockey sticks, and Pym was one. "On you go, Pymmie. Give it to him!" Corbo urged. Pym had watched the crippled creature limp towards him. Scared by its pain he had caught it a great swipe, harder than he meant. He had seen it catapult to the next player and lie still. "Good man, Pymmie! Good shot."

His other thought was that the Sefton Boyd gang had made the whole thing up to tease him, always possible. So as a stopgap Pym gave himself the desk job of gathering descriptions and forming, in that first rush before the school went silent, a mind's picture of her that was probably as clear as anybody's. She lay in a running position, sideways on the flagstones, her forward hand punched towards the finishing line and her rear foot pointing the wrong way. Sefton Boyd, who made the original sighting and alerted the Headmaster during school breakfast, actually thought she was running, he said, until he saw the wonky foot. He thought she was doing a special exercise on her side, a sort of kicking, bicycling exercise. And he thought the blood round her was a cape or a towel that she was lying on until he noticed how the old chestnut leaves stuck to it and wouldn't blow away. He didn't go close because bell yard was out of bounds, even to sixth-formers, on account of the dangerous roof above it. And he didn't throw up, he boasted, because us Sefton Boyds own simply ma.s.ses of land and I've done a lot of shooting with my father and I'm accustomed to seeing blood and innards all the time. But he did run up sixth-form staircase to the tower window, which the police said later was where she had fallen from; she must have been leaning out to do something. And it must have been something urgent and important she was leaning out for because she had been wearing her nightdress, having bicycled up the mile-long drive from the Overflow House in the middle of the night. Her bicycle with its tartan cover on the saddle was still leaning against the dustbin shed behind the kitchens.

Sefton Boyd's theory, excitedly culled from his father's life-style, was that she was drunk. Except that he didn't call her "she" but "s.h.i.tlips," which was his gang's witty play on Lippschitz. But then again, as he had been suggesting for some time, s.h.i.tlips may have been a German spy who had slipped up the tower to send messages after blackout, sir. Because from tower window you can see right the way across the valley to the Brace of Partridges, so it would be a wizard place for signalling to German bombers, sir. The trouble was she had no light with her except her bike lamp, which was still securely on the handlebars. So perhaps she had hidden it in her v.a.g.i.n.a, which Sefton Boyd claimed to have seen clearly because the fall had ripped her nightdress off.

Thus the stories went round that morning while Pym stood on the fine wood seat of the staff lavatory which he had made his safe house after the first furore, and held his breath and blushed and turned white in front of the mirror in a series of puzzled efforts to make his face appropriate to his grief. Using the Swiss Army penknife from his pocket, he had sawn off a bit of his forelock as a sort of useless tribute, then loitered, fiddling with the taps and hoping someone was looking for him. Where's Pym? Pym's run away! Pym's dead, too! But Pym hadn't run away, nor was he dead, and in the chaos of having Lippsie's body lying in bell yard and ambulance and police arriving, n.o.body was looking for anybody, least of all in the staff lavatory which was the most out-of-bounds place in the school, so forbidden that Sefton Boyd himself was in awe of it. Cla.s.ses were cancelled and what you were supposed to do after all the shouting and the clamour was go quietly to your form room and revise--unless, like Pym, you were in the second form which overlooked bell yard, in which case you were to go to the arts hall. This was the converted Nissen hut built by Canadian soldiers where Lippsie taught music and painting and drama and held remedial exercises for boys with flat feet. It was also where she did her typing and paperwork in her capacity as school dogsbody: collecting school fees, paying school bills for the Bursar, ordering taxis for boys in confirmation cla.s.s and, as such people do, just about running the place single-handed and unthanked. But Pym wouldn't go to the arts hall either, though he had a half-finished balsa model of a Dornier to work on with his penknife, as well as a half-made plan to copy out some obscure poems from an old book there and claim they were his own. What he had to do, when he found his courage and the moment, was get back to the Overflow House where he had lived till now with Lippsie and the eleven other Overflow Boys. Until he had done that and done something about the letters, he daren't go anywhere because Rick would go back to prison.

How he had got himself into this pa.s.s, how he had acquired the training that was to stand him in such fine stead in this, his first clandestine operation, was pretty much the story of his life this far, which was ten years and three terms of boarding-school old.

Even today, trying to trace Lippsie through Pym's life is like pursuing an errant light through an impenetrable thicket. For Perce Loft, now dead himself, she was simply deniable-- "t.i.tch's figment" he called her, meaning my invention, my fabrication, my nothing. But Perce the great lawyer could have made a figment out of the Eiffel Tower after he had banged his nose on it, if he needed to. That was his job. And this despite the testimony of Syd and others that it was Perce himself who first had the use of her, Perce who had introduced her to the court back in the dark ages before Pym's birth. Mr. Muspole, that marvel with the books--also now pa.s.sed on--understandably backed Perce up. He would. He was up to his neck in the business himself. Even Syd, the one surviving source, is not much more helpful. She was a German Four-by-Two, he said, using the affectionate c.o.c.kney rhyming slang for Jew. He thought she came from Munich, could have been Vienna. She was lonely, t.i.tch. Adored the kids. Adored you. He didn't say she adored Rick but in the court that was taken for granted. She was a Lovely and in court ethic that was what Lovelies were there for: to be seen right by Rick and to bathe in his glory. And Rick in his goodness had her learn secretarial and qualify, says Syd. And your Dorothy, she thought the world of Lippsie and taught her English, which was meant, says Syd--after which he clams up, remarking only that it was a shame and we should all learn from it, and maybe your dad worked her a bit too hard because she never had your advantages. Yes, he admits, she was a looker. And she had a drop of cla.s.s to her which some of the others, let's face it, didn't always have, t.i.tch. And she loved a joke till she started to think of her poor family and what had been done to them by those Jerries.

My furtive record checks have not been more enlightening. Finding myself with the run of Registry during a stint as night duty officer not too many years back, I chased Lippschitz, first name Annie, right through the general index but drew a blank on all spellings. Old d.i.n.kel in Vienna, who heads up the personnel side of the Austrian service, recently ran a similar search for me when I spun him a story; so, on another occasion, did his German counterpart in Cologne. Both reported no trace.

In my memory, however, she is anything but no trace. She is a tall, soft-haired, vital girl with large scared eyes and an air of flounce about her stride, nothing happening slowly. And I remember--it must have been a summer holiday in some house where we were temporarily sheltering--I remember how Pym longed more than anything to see her naked, and devoted his waking hours to contriving it. Which Lippsie must have guessed somehow for one afternoon she suggested he share her bath with her to save hot water. She even measured the water with her hand: patriots were allowed five inches and Lippsie was never less than a patriot. She stooped, naked, and let me watch her while she put her hand's span in the tub, I'm sure she did, and brought it out again: "See, Magnus!"--showing me the wet spread hand--"how we may be sure we do not help the Germans."

Or so I fervently believe, though try as I may I cannot to this day remember what she looked like. And I know that in the same house or one like it her room was opposite to Pym's own across a corridor, and that it contained her cardboard suitcase and photographs of her bearded brother and solemn sisters in black hats and silver frames which stood like tiny polished gravestones on her dressing-table. And there was the room where she screamed at Rick and warned him she would rather die than be a thief, and where Rick laughed his brown rich laugh, the one that went on longer than it needed and made everything all right again until next time. And though I do not remember a single lesson, she must have taught Pym German because years later when he came to learn the language formally he discovered that he possessed a repository of information about her--Aaron war mein Bruder, Mein Voter war Architekt--all in the same past tense to which she herself by then belonged. He also realised still later in life that when she had called him her Monchlein she had meant her "little monk" and was referring to the hard path of Martin Luther--"little monk, go your own way"--whereas at the time he had thought she had cast him as the organ-grinder's tethered monkey and Rick as his organ-grinder. The discovery raised his self-respect no end, until he realised she had been telling him that he must get along without her.

And I know she was in Paradise with us because without Lippsie there was no Paradise. Paradise was a golden land between Gerrard's Cross and the sea, where Dorothy wore an angora pullover for her ironing and a blue ulster for her shopping. Paradise was where Rick and Dorothy fled after their runaway marriage, a Metroland of new beginnings and exciting futures, but I don't remember a day of it without Lippsie flouncing somewhere at the edge, or telling me what was right and wrong in a voice I didn't mind. One hour eastward by Bentley motorcar lay Town and in Town lay the West End and that was where Rick had his office; the office had a big tinted photograph of Granddad TP wearing his mayor's necklace, and the office was what kept Rick late at night, which was the infant Pym's best thing because he was allowed to climb into Dorothy's bed and keep her warm, she was so small and shivery even to a child. Sometimes Lippsie stayed behind with us, sometimes she went to London with Rick because she had to qualify and, as I now understand, justify her own survival when so many of her kind were dead.

Paradise was a string of shiny racehorses that Syd called "neverwozzers" and a succession of even shinier Bentleys which, like the houses, wore out as fast as the credit they were bought on and had to be changed with thrilling rapidity for yet newer and more expensive models. Sometimes the Bentleys were so precious they had actually to be driven round the side of the house and hidden in the back garden for fear they might become tarnished by the gaze of the Unfaithful. At other times Pym drove them at a thousand miles an hour sitting on Rick's lap, down sandy unmade roads lined with cement mixers, hammering the big deep horn at the builders while Rick shouted "How are you, boys?" and invited them all back to the house for a gla.s.s of bubbly. And Lippsie was there beside us in the pa.s.senger seat, straight as a coachman and as distant, until Rick chose to speak to her or make a joke. Then her smile was like holiday sunshine and she loved us both.

Paradise was also St. Moritz where Swiss Army penknives come from, though somehow the Bentleys and those two pre-war winters in Switzerland become fused in my memory as one place. Even today I have only to sniff the leather interior of a grand car and I am wafted willingly away to the great hotel drawing-rooms of St. Moritz in the wake of Rick's riotous love of festival. The Kulm, the Suvretta House, the Grand--Pym knew them as a single gigantic palace with different sets of servants but always the same court: Rick's private household of jesters, tumblers, counsellors, and jockeys; he barely went anywhere without them. In the daytime, Italian doormen with long brooms flipped the snow off your boots every time you went through the swing doors. In the evenings, while Rick and the court banqueted with local Lovelies and Dorothy was too tired, Pym would venture on Lippsie's hand through snowy alleys clutching his penknife in his pocket while he pretended to himself he was some kind of Russian prince protecting her from everyone who laughed at her for being serious. And in the morning after an early levee, he would tiptoe unescorted to the landing and gaze down through the banisters on his army of serfs toiling in the great hall below him, while he sniffed the stale cigar smoke and women's perfume and the wax polish that glistened like dew on the parquet as they buffed it with long sweeps of their mops. And that was how Rick's Bentleys smelt ever after: of the Lovelies, of beeswax, of the smoke of his millionaires' cigars. And very faintly, from sledge rides through the freezing forest at Lippsie's side, of the cold and the horse dung, while she chatted away in German to the coachman.

Back home again, and Paradise was pyramids of polished tangerines in silver paper, and pink chandeliers in the dining-room and roaring visits to distant racetracks to flash our Owners' badges and watch the neverwozzers lose, and a tiny black-and-white television set in a huge mahogany case that showed the boat race behind a sky of white spots, and when we watched the Grand National the horses were so far off that Pym wondered how they ever found their way home, but I'm afraid now that Rick's very often didn't which was why Syd called them neverwozzers. And cricket in the garden with Syd, sixpence if he didn't get t.i.tch out in six b.a.l.l.s. And boxing in the drawing-room with Morrie Washington, the court expert on the Fight Game, for Morrie was our Minister for the Arts: he had spoken to Bud Flanagan and shaken hands with Joe Louis, he had played conjuror's stooge for the Man with X-Ray Eyes. And having half-crowns pulled out of your ears by Mr. Muspole the great accountant, though Mr. Muspole was never my favourite; there was too much of making me do arithmetic in my head. And watching sugar-k.n.o.bs vanish from under Perce Loft's legal Homburg: they were being turned to figments before my very eyes. And piggybacks round the garden on the waistcoated shoulders of the jockeys, who had names like Billie and Jimmy and Gordon and Charlie and were the best magic-makers in the world, the best elves, and read all my comics and left me theirs when they'd finished them.

But always somewhere in this pageant I can still find Lippsie, now mother, now typist, musician, cricketer and always Pym's own private moral tutor, flouncing through the outfield in pursuit of a high catch while everyone yelled "Achtung!" at her, and "Whoopsie, mind the flower-beds!" It was in Paradise too that Rick kicked a brand-new full-size football slap into Pym's young face, which was like being hit by the inside of all the Bentleys at once, the same leather travelling at the same breakneck speed. When he came round, Dorothy was bending over him with a handkerchief crammed between her teeth, whimpering "Oh, don't, please, dear G.o.d, don't," because the blood was everywhere. The football had only cut his forehead but Dorothy insisted it had shoved the whole eyeball deep into his head never to be got out again. The poor heart, she was too scared to dab away the blood so Lippsie had to do it for her, because Lippsie could touch me as she touched wounded animals and birds. I never met a woman since with so much touching in her hands. And I believe now that was what I meant to her: a thing to touch and cherish and protect, after everything else had been removed from her. I was her bit of hope and love in the gilded prison where Rick kept her.

In Paradise when Rick was in residence there was no night and n.o.body went to bed but Dorothy, the court's self-appointed Sleeping Beauty. Pym could join the festival any time he chose and there they all were, Rick and Syd and Morrie Washington and Perce Loft and Mr. Muspole and Lippsie and the jockeys, lying on the floor amid piles of money, watching the roulette ball hopping over the tin walls while TP in his regalia looked down on them, so there must have been a picture of him in the houses too. And I see us all dancing to the gramophone and telling stories about a chimpanzee called Little Audrey who laughed and laughed at jokes that were beyond Pym's intellectual reach. But he laughed louder than anyone because he was learning to be a pleaser, with funny voices, acts and anecdotes to make himself attractive. In Paradise everybody loved everybody because once Pym found Lippsie sitting on Rick's lap and another time he was dancing cheek to cheek with her, a cigar between his teeth, while he sang "Underneath the Arches" with his eyes shut. And it seemed a pity that Dorothy was once again too tired to put on the frilly dressing-gown Rick had bought her--pink for Dorothy, white for Lippsie--and come on down and have some fun. But the louder Rick yelled to her up the stairs the deeper Dorothy slept, as Pym discovered for himself when he was dispatched on Rick's instruction to talk her round. He knocked and had no answer. He tiptoed to the enormous bed and brushed what looked at first like cobwebs from her cheek. He whispered to her, then he tried shouting at her, but with no useful result. Dorothy was crying in her sleep, he reported when he returned downstairs. But next morning everything was all right again because there they were the three of them in bed together with Rick in the middle, and Pym was allowed to wriggle in beside Lippsie while Dorothy went down and made the toast and Lippsie held him gravely to her, and gave him her troubled, moral frown, which I suppose now was her way of telling me she was ashamed of her weakness and infatuation, and wished to cleanse it with her concern for me.

In Paradise, it was true, Rick roared but never at Pym. He never once raised his voice at me; his will was strong enough without it and his love was stronger still. He roared at Dorothy, he cajoled and warned her about things Pym could not understand. More than once he carted her bodily to the telephone and made her talk to people--to Uncle Makepeace, to shops, and to others who were threatening us somehow, and only Dorothy could appease them, because Lippsie refused to do that, and anyway her accent wasn't right. I believe now that this was the first time Pym heard the name Wentworth, for I remember Dorothy holding my hand for courage while she told Mrs. Wentworth it would be all right about the money if only everyone would stop pressing. So the name Wentworth was ugly to Pym from early. It became synonymous with fear and an end to things.

"Who's Wentworth?" Pym asked Lippsie, and it was the only time she told him to be quiet.

And I remember how Dorothy knew all the operators' names at the exchange, and what their husbands and fiances did, and where their children were at school, because when she was alone with Pym and shaky in her angora pullover, she'd pick up the white phone and have a good chat with them, she seemed to find comfort in a world of disembodied voices. Rick roared at Lippsie too when she stood up to him, and I think now that she stood up to him more as I grew up. And sometimes he roared at Dorothy and Lippsie together, making them both weep at the same time until they all patched it up in the great bed where he had his toast for breakfast and dripped the b.u.t.ter on the pink sheets. But no one hurt Pym or made him cry. I think, even in those days, Pym understood that Rick measured his relationships with women against his relationship with Pym, and found them wanting by comparison. Sometimes Rick took Dorothy and Lippsie skating. Rick wore a black tail suit and a white tie, but Dorothy and Lippsie dressed like pantomime boys, each holding an arm of him and avoiding one another's eye.

The Fall occurred in darkness. We had been moving house a great deal recently, in what must have been a giddy ascent through the local real-estate market, and our palace of the day was a mansion on a hill and the day was a black winter afternoon near Christmas. Pym had been making paper decorations with Lippsie, and I have a notion that if I could ever find the place, if it is not a council estate or a bypa.s.s by now, they would still be hanging there exactly as we left them, stars of David and stars of Bethlehem--she taught me the difference precisely--twinkling in enormous empty rooms. First the lights went out in Pym's vast nursery, then the electric fire faded, then his brand-new ten-track, Hornby O electric train set wouldn't work, then Lippsie gave a kind of shriek and vanished. Pym went downstairs and pulled open the walnut lid of Rick's brand-new de-luxe c.o.c.ktail cabinet. The mirrored interior refused to light up and it wouldn't play "Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah."

Suddenly, in the whole house, the bra.s.s b.a.l.l.s of the barometric perpetual clock were the only thing that had retained their energy. Pym ran to the kitchen. No Cookie and no Mr. Roley the gardener, whose children stole his toys but couldn't be blamed because they hadn't his advantages. He ran upstairs again and feeling very cold made an urgent reconnaissance of the long corridors, calling "Lippsie, Lippsie," but no one answered. From the arched landing window of stained gla.s.s, he glared into the garden and made out black cars in the drive. Not Bentleys but two police Wolseleys. And police drivers with peaked caps sitting at the wheel. And men in brown mackintoshes standing round them talking to Mr. Roley while Cookie twisted her handkerchief and wrung her hands like the dame in the Crazy Gang pantomime that Rick had taken the court to see only a week before. People under siege go upwards, I now know, which may explain why Pym's reaction was to race up the narrow staircase to the attic. There he found Rick in a great flurry, with files and papers on the floor all round him, and he was loading them by the armful into an old chipped green filing cabinet that Pym in all his explorations had never seen before.

"The electricity's broken and Lippsie's scared and the police have come and they're in the garden arresting Mr. Roley," Pym told Rick in one breath.

He said this several times, louder each time, because of the great moment of his message. But Rick wouldn't hear him. He was rushing between the papers and the cabinet, loading up the drawers. So Pym went to him and punched him hard on the upper arm, as hard as he could on the soft bit just above the steel spring he wore to keep his silk shirt sleeve straight, and Rick flung round on him and his hand went back to strike him, and his face looked like Mr. Roley's when he was about to make a huge last heave at a log to split it: red and strained and damp. Then he dropped into a crouch and seized Pym by each shoulder with his thick cupped hands. And his face worried Pym much more than the axe-heave, because his eyes were scared and crying without the rest of his face knowing it and his voice was smooth and holy.

"Don't ever hit me again, son. When I'm judged, as judged we shall all be, G.o.d will judge me on how I treated you, make no bones about it."

"Why are the police here?" said Pym.

"Your old man's got a temporary problem of liquidity. Now clear a way to that cupboard and open the door for us like a good chap. Quick."

The cupboard was in a corner behind a pile of old clothes and attic junk. Somehow Pym fought his way to the door and hauled it open. With a series of crashes Rick was slamming shut the drawers of the filing cabinet. He turned the lock, grabbed Pym by the arm and poked the key deep into his trouser pocket, which was small and woolly and only big enough for a key and a small bag of sweets.

"You give that to Mr. Muspole, you hear, son? n.o.body but Muspole. Then you show him where this cabinet is. You bring him here and you show him. No one else. Do you love your old man?"

"Yes."

"Well then."

Proud as a sentry, Pym held back the door while Rick swivelled and rolled the cabinet past him on its castors into the cupboard, then into the dark wainscotting beyond. Then he threw in a lot of junk after it, which hid it completely.

"See where it went, son?"

"Yes."

"Close the door."

Pym did so, then stomped downstairs with his chest out because he wanted to take another look at the police cars.

Dorothy was in the kitchen dressed in her new far coat and her new fluffy bedroom slippers, stirring a tin of tomato soup. She had one of those bubbles over her mouth that people get when they are too choked to speak. Pym loathed tomato soup, so did Rick.

"Rick's mending the water-pipes," he announced grandly, in order to keep his secret intact. This was the only meaning he could place on Rick's reference to liquidity. Yelling even louder for Lippsie he charged into the corridor, straight into the path of two policemen labouring under the weight of a great desk that was Rick's office when he was at home.

"That's my dad's," he said aggressively, putting a hand over the pocket where he had the key.

The first policeman is the only one I remember. He was kindly and had a white moustache like TP's, and he was taller than G.o.d.

"Yes, well, I'm afraid it's ours now, lad. Hold open that door for us, will you, and mind your toes."

Pym the official door-holder obliged.

"Your dad got any more desks, has he?" the tall policeman asked.

"No."

"Cupboards? Anywhere he keeps his papers?"

"They're all in there," said Pym, pointing firmly at the desk while he kept his other hand over the pocket.

"Do you want a wee then?"

"No."

"Where's some rope?"

"I don't know."

"Yes you do."

"It's in the stable. On a big saddle hook next to the new mower. It's a halter."

"What's your name?"

"Magnus. Where's Lippsie?"

"Who's Lippsie?"

"She's a lady."

"She work for your dad?"

"No."

"Slip and fetch the rope for us, will you, Magnus, there's a lad. Me and my friends here we're going to take your dad on a working holiday for a bit and we need his papers or n.o.body can work."

Pym raced off to the shed which was across the other side of the grounds between the pony paddock and Mr. Roley's cottage. On the shelf stood a green tea-tin where Mr. Roley kept his nails. Pym put the key into it, thinking: green tin, green filing cabinet. By the time he returned with the halter Rick was standing between two men in brown raincoats. And I picture it exactly: Rick so pale that not all the holidays in the world would see him right, commanding loyalty of me with his eyes. And the tall policeman letting Pym try his flat cap on and push the b.u.t.ton that made the silver bell ring under the hood of the black Wolseley. And Dorothy looking as though she needed a holiday even more than Rick did, not choking any more, but standing still as an effigy with her white hands folded across her fur coat.

Memory is a great temptress, Tom. Paint the tragic tableau. The little group, the winter's day, Christmas in the air. The convoy of Wolseleys b.u.mping away down the lane that Pym has spent so long patrolling with his new Harrods six-shooter. Rick's desk lashed to the last car with the aid of the halter from the stable. Motionless they stare after the cortege as it vanishes into the tunnel of the trees, taking our one Provider to Lord knows where. Mrs. Roley weeping. Cookie howling in Irish. Pym's little head pressed against his mother's bosom. A thousand violins playing "Will Ye No Come Back Again?"--there is no limit to the pathos I could squeeze out of that lemon if I worked on it. Yet the truth, when I make the effort to recall it, is different. With the departure of Rick a great calm descended over Pym. He felt refreshed and freed of an intolerable burden. He watched the cars leave, Rick's desk last. And he continued to stare anxiously after them, but only for fear that Rick would talk them into turning back. As he watched, Lippsie stepped out of the woods wearing her headscarf and struggled towards him weighed down by the cardboard suitcase that contained her life's possessions. The sight of her made Pym even more furious than he'd been when he'd found Dorothy making soup. You hid, he accused her in the secret dialogue he constantly conducted with her. You were so scared you hid in the woods and missed the fun. I realise now, of course, but could not at the time, that Lippsie had seen people taken away before: her brother Aaron and the architect her father, to mention only two. But Pym in common with the rest of the world cared little about pogroms in those days and all he could feel was a deep resentment that his life's love had foiled to rise to a historic moment.

Muspole came that evening. He arrived at the side door with a cooked chicken for us and a rhubarb pie and thick custard and a thermos of hot tea, and he said he was making arrangements for us and everything would be fine tomorrow. To get him on his own, Pym said "Come and see my Hornby" and at once Dorothy cried because by then there was no Hornby: the distraining bailiffs had fought a pitched battle with the repossessing shopkeepers and the Hornby had been one of the first things to go. But Mr. Muspole went with Pym anyway and Pym took him to the shed and gave him the key, then led him to the attic and showed him the secret. And everybody watched again while Mr. Roley and Mr. Muspole heaved and puffed and loaded the cabinet on to Mr. Muspole's car. And waved again when Mr. Muspole drove into the twilight in his hat.

After the Fall came, very properly, Purgatory, and Purgatory possessed no Lippsies--I guess she was trying to make one of her breaks from me, using Rick's absence to cut herself off. Purgatory was where Dorothy and I served out our sentence, Tom, and Purgatory is just over the hill from here, a few of Rick's fare-stages along the coast, though the new time-share apartments have removed much of its sting. Purgatory was the same wooded hollow of clefts and chines and dripping laurels where Pym had been conceived, with red windswept beaches always out of season, and creaking swings and sodden sandpits that were closed to enjoyment on the sabbath and for Pym on any other day as well. Purgatory was Makepeace Watermaster's great sad house, The Glades, where Pym was forbidden to leave the walled orchard if it was dry or enter the main rooms if it was raining. Purgatory was the Tabernacle with the Night School Boys written clean out of the history books; and Makepeace Watermaster's frightful sermons; and Mr. Philpott's sermons; and sermons from every aunt, cousin and neighbourhood philosopher who felt moved to words by Rick's misfortune and saw the young criminal as the proper person to address.

Purgatory possessed no c.o.c.ktail cabinets, television sets, jockeys, Bentleys or neverwozzers, and served bread and margarine instead of b.u.t.tered toast. When we sang, we droned, "There Is a Green Hill Far Away," and never "Underneath the Arches" or one of Lippsie's Lieder. Contemporary photographs show a grinning toothy child, well grown and well looking enough, but stooped as if from living under low ceilings. All are out of focus; all have a furtive, stolen look about them, and I try to love them only because I believe Dorothy must have taken them, though it was Lippsie whom Pym was missing. In a couple the child is tugging at the arm of whatever mother happens to attend him, probably trying to persuade her to come away with him. In one he is wearing sloppy white gloves like puppets' hands, so I suppose he suffered from some skin disease, unless Makepeace was worried about fingerprints. Or perhaps he was intending to become a waiter.

The mothers, all large, all dressed in the same strict uniform, have such an air of the wardress about them that I seriously wonder whether Makepeace obtained them from an agency specialising in the care of delinquents. One wears a medal like an Iron Cross. I do not mean they are without kindness. Their smiles are alight with pious optimism. But there is something in their glance that a.s.sures me they are alert at all times to the latent criminality of their charge. Lippsie is not featured, and my poor Dorothy, Pym's one cellmate in the dark rear wing to which the two of them were confined, was even more useless than before. If Pym was thrashed, Dorothy would dress his wounds but never question the need for them. If he was put into shameful nappies as a punishment for wetting his bed, Dorothy would urge him not to drink in the second part of the day. And if he was denied tea altogether, Dorothy would save him her biscuits and pa.s.s them to him in the privacy of their upper room, poking them one by one between the invisible bars. In Paradise on good days Pym and Dorothy had managed to share the occasional joke together. Now the guilty silence of her house reclaimed her. Each day drove her further into herself and though he told her his best jokes and did his best acts for her, and painted the best pictures for her that he knew, nothing he could do was able to wake her smile for long. At night she moaned and ground her teeth and when she switched the light on, Pym lay awake beside her, thinking of Lippsie and watching Dorothy's unblinking eyes staring up at the parchment star of Bethlehem that was their lampshade.

If Dorothy had been dying Pym could have gone on nursing her for ever, no question. But she wasn't so he resented her instead. In fact soon he began to weary of her altogether and wonder whether the wrong parent had gone on holiday, and whether Lippsie was his real mother and he had made an awful mistake, the one that accounted for everything. When war broke out Dorothy was incapable of rejoicing at the marvellous news. Makepeace turned on the wireless and Pym heard a solemn man saying he had done everything he could to prevent it. Makepeace turned off the wireless and Mr. Philpott, who had come for tea, asked mournfully where, oh where, would the battlefield be? Makepeace, never at a loss, replied that G.o.d would decide. But Pym, spilling over with excitement, for once presumed to question him.

"But Uncle Makepeace! If G.o.d can decide where the battlefield is, why doesn't He stop the battle altogether? He doesn't want to. He could if He wanted to, easy. He doesn't!" Even to this day, I do not know which was the greater sin: to question Makepeace or to question G.o.d. In either case the remedy was the same: put him on bread and water like his father.

But the worst monster in The Glades was not rubbery Uncle Makepeace with his little rose ears, but mad Aunt Nell in her liver-coloured spectacles, who chased after Pym with no reason, waving her stick at him and calling him "my little canary" because of the yellow pullover Dorothy had managed to knit him while she wept. Aunt Nell had a white stick for seeing with and a brown stick for walking with. She could see perfectly well, except when she carried her white stick.

"Aunt Nell gets her wobblies out of a bottle," Pym told Dorothy one day, thinking it might make her smile. "I've seen. She's got a bottle hidden in the greenhouse."

Dorothy did not smile but became very frightened, and made him swear never to say such a thing again. Aunt Nell was ill, she said. Her illness was a secret and she took secret medicine for it, and n.o.body must ever know or Aunt Nell would die and G.o.d would be very angry. For weeks afterwards Pym carried this wonderful knowledge round with him much as, briefly, he had carried Rick's, but this was better and more disgraceful. It was like the first money he had ever owned, his first piece of power. Who to spend it on? he wondered. Who to share it with? Shall I let Aunt Nell live or shall I kill her for calling me her little canary? He decided on Mrs. Bannister, the cook. "Aunt Nell gets her wobblies out of a bottle," he told Mrs. Bannister, careful to use exactly the form of words that had so appalled Dorothy. But Aunt Nell did not die, and Mrs. Bannister knew about the bottle already and cuffed him for his forwardness. Worse still, she must have taken his story to Uncle Makepeace who that night made a rare visit to the prison wing, swaying and roaring and sweating and pointing at Pym while he talked about the Devil who was Rick. When he had gone Pym made his bed across the door in case Makepeace decided to come back and do some more roaring, but he never did. Nevertheless the burgeoning spy had acquired an early lesson in the dangerous business of intelligence: everybody talks.

His next lesson was no less instructive and concerned the perils of communication in occupied territory. By now Pym was writing to Lippsie daily and posting his letters in a box that stood at the rear gate of the house. They contained to his later shame priceless information, almost none of it in code. How to break into The Glades at night. His hours of exercise. Maps. The character of his persecutors. The money he had saved. The precise location of the German guards. The route to be followed through the back garden and where the kitchen key was kept. "I have been kidnapped to a dangerous house, please get me quick," he wrote, and enclosed a drawing of Aunt Nell with canaries coming out of her mouth as a further warning of the hazards that surrounded him. But there was a snag. Having no address for Lippsie, Pym could only hope that somebody at the post office would know where she was to be found. His confidence was misplaced. One day the postman delivered the whole top-secret bundle to Makepeace personally, who summoned the prevailing mother, who summoned Pym, and led him like the convict he was to Makepeace for chastis.e.m.e.nt, though he simpered and begged and blandished him for all he was worth, for Pym somewhat unsportingly hated the lash and was seldom gallant about receiving it. After that he contented himself with looking for Lippsie on buses and, where he could do so deniably, asking people who happened to be pa.s.sing the rear gate whether they had seen her. Particularly he asked policemen, whom he now smiled at richly wherever he found them.

"My father's got an old green box with secrets in," he told a constable one day, strolling in the memorial gardens with a mother.

"Has he then, son? Well, thanks for telling us," said the constable and pretended to write in his notebook.

Meanwhile word of Rick, though not of Lippsie, reached Pym like the unfinished whispers of a distant radio transmitter. Your father is well. His holiday is doing him good. He has lost weight, lots of good food, we're not to worry, he's getting exercise, reading his law books, he's gone back to school. The source of these priceless snippets was the Other House, which lay in a poorer part of Purgatory down by the c.o.king station and must never be mentioned in front of Uncle Makepeace, since it was the house that had sp.a.w.ned Rick and brought disgrace on the great family of Watermaster, not to mention the memory of TP. Hand in hand, Dorothy and Pym rode there in fireside darkness, sticky mesh against bomb blast on the windows of the trolley-bus, and the lights inside burning blue to baffle German pilots. At the Other House, a steadfast little Irish lady with a rock jaw gave Pym half-a-crown out of a ginger jar and squeezed his arm muscles approvingly and called him "son" like Rick, and on the wall hung a copy of the same tinted photograph of TP, framed not in gold but in coffin wood. Jolly-faced aunts made sweets for Pym out of their sugar ration, and hugged and wept and treated Dorothy like the royalty she once had been, and hooted when Pym did his funny voices and clapped when he sang "Underneath the Arches." "Go on, Magnus, give us Sir Makepeace then!" Rut Pym dared not for fear of G.o.d's anger, which he knew from the Aunt Nell affair to be swift and awful.

The aunt he loved most was Ress. "Tell us, Magnus," whispered Aunt Ress to him, alone in the scullery, drawing his head close to her own. "Is it true your dad ever owned a racehorse called Prince Magnus, after you?"

"It's not true," said Pym without a second's thought, remembering the excitement as he sat beside Lippsie on her bed, listening to the commentary of Prince Magnus coming nowhere. "It is a lie made up by Uncle Makepeace to hurt my father."

Aunt Bess kissed him and laughed and wept in relief, and held him even tighter. "Never say I asked you. Promise."

"I promise," said Pym. "G.o.d's honour."

The same Aunt Bess, one glorious night, smuggled Pym out of The Glades and into the Theatre Pier, where they saw Max Miller and a row of girls with long bare legs like Lippsie's. On the trolley-bus back, br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with grat.i.tude, Pym told her everything he knew in the world, and made up whatever he didn't. He said he had written a book by Shakespeare and it was in a green box in a secret house. One day he would find and print it and make a lot of money. He said he would be a policeman and an actor and a jockey, and drive a Bentley like Rick, and marry Lippsie and have six children all called TP like his granddad. This pleased Bess enormously, except for the bit about the jockey, and sent her home saying Magnus was a card, which was what he wanted most. His gratification was short-lived. This time Pym had made G.o.d very angry indeed, and as usual He was not slow to do something about it. On the very next day before breakfast the police came and took away his Dorothy for ever, though the reigning mother said they were only ambulance.

And once again--though Pym dutifully wept for Dorothy-- and refused food for her, and flailed with his fists at the long-suffering mothers--he could not but see their rightness in removing her. They were taking her to a place where she would be happy, the mothers said. Pym envied her luck. Not to the same place as Rick, no, but somewhere nicer and quieter, with kind people to look after her. Pym planned to join her. Escape, till now a fantasy, became his serious aim. A celebrated epileptic at Sunday school acquainted him with his symptoms. Pym waited a day, ran into the kitchen with his eyes rolling, and collapsed dramatically before Mrs. Bannister, shoving his hands into his mouth and writhing for good measure. The doctor, who must have been a rare imbecile, prescribed a laxative. Next day in a further attempt to draw attention to himself, Pym hacked off his forelock with paper scissors. No one noticed. Improvising now, he released Mrs. Bannister's c.o.c.katoo from its cage, sprinkled soap flakes into the Aga cooker and blocked the lavatory with a feather boa belonging to Aunt Nell.

Nothing happened. He was beating the air. What he needed was a great dramatic crime. All night he waited, then early in the morning when his courage was highest, Pym walked the length of the house to Makepeace Watermaster's study in his dressing-gown and slippers and relieved himself prolifically over the centre of the white carpet. Terrified, he threw himself on to the patch he had created, hoping to dry it out with the heat of his body. A maid entered and screamed. A mother was summoned and from his anguished position on the carpet Pym was treated to a formative example of how history rewrites itself in a crisis. The mother touched his shoulder. He groaned. She asked him where it hurt. He indicated his groin, the literal cause of his distress. Makepeace Watermaster was fetched. What were you doing in my study in the first place? The pain, sir, the pain, I wanted to tell you about the pain. With a screech of tyres the doctor returned and now everything was remembered while he bent over Pym and probed his stomach with his stupid fingertips. The collapse before Mrs. Bannister. The nightly moans, the daily pallor. Dorothy's madness, discussed in hushed terms. Even Pym's bed-wetting was taken down and used in evidence on his behalf.

"Poor boy, it's got him here as well," said the mother as the patient was lifted cautiously to the sofa and the maid was hurried off to fetch Jeyes disinfectant and a floor-cloth. Pym's temperature was read and grimly observed to be normal. "Doesn't mean a thing," said the doctor, now battling to make good his earlier negligence, and ordered the mother to pack the poor boy's things. She did so and in the course of it must inevitably have discovered a number of small objects that Pym had taken from other people's lives in order to improve his own: Nell's jet earrings, Cook's letters from her son in Canada and Makepeace Watermaster's Travels with a Donkey which Pym had selected for its t.i.tle, the only part he had read. In the crisis even this black evidence of his criminality was ignored.

The outcome was more effective than Pym could have hoped. Not a week later, in a hospital newly fitted to receive victims of the approaching blitz, Magnus Pym, aged eight and a half years, yielded up his appendix in the interests of operational cover. When he came round, the first thing he saw was a blue and black koala bear larger than himself seated on the end of his bed. The second was a basket of fruit bigger than the bear, which looked like a piece of St. Moritz that had landed by mistake in wartime England. The third was Rick, slim and smart as a sailor, standing to attention with his right hand lifted in salute. Beside Rick again, like a scared ghost dragged unwillingly from the shades of Pym's chloroformed realm, came Lippsie, hunched at the shoulders by a new fur cape, and supported by Syd Lemon looking like his own younger brother.

Lippsie knelt to me. The two men looked on while we embraced.

"That's the way then," Rick kept saying approvingly. "Give him a good old English hug. That's the way."

Softly, like a b.i.t.c.h recovering her pup, Lippsie picked me over, lifting the remains of my forelock and staring gravely into my eyes as if fearing that bad things had got into them.

How they celebrated their release! Shorn of all possessions except the clothes they stood up in and the credit they could muster as they went along, Rick's reconst.i.tuted court took to the open road and became crusaders through wartime Britain. Petrol was rationed, Bentleys had vanished for the duration, all over the country posters asked "Is Your Journey Really Necessary?" and every time they pa.s.sed one they slowed down to yell back, "Yes, it is!" in chorus through the open windows of their cab. Drivers either became accomplices or left in a hurry. A Mr. Humphries threw them all into the street in Aberdeen after a week, calling them crooks, and drove away without his money, never to be seen again. But a Mr. Cudlove whom Rick had met on holiday--and who got the court a week's tick at the Imperial at Torquay on the strength of an aunt who worked in the accounts department-- he stayed for ever, sharing their food and fortunes and teaching Pym tricks with string. Sometimes they had one taxi, sometimes Mr. Cudlove's special friend Ollie brought his Humber and they had day-long races for Pym's sole benefit, with Syd leaning out of the back window giving the car the whip. Of mothers they had a dazzling and varying supply and often acquired them at such short notice they had to cram them into the back two deep, with Pym squeezed into an exciting, unfamiliar lap. There was a lady called Topsie who smelt of roses and made Pym dance with his head against her breast; there was Millie who let him sleep with her in her siren-suit because he was frightened of the black cupboard in his hotel bedroom, and who bestowed frank caresses on him while she bathed him. And Eileens and Mabels and Joans, and a Violet who got carsick on cider, some into her gas-mask case and the rest over Pym. And when they were all got out of the way, Lippsie materialised, standing motionless in the steam of a railway station, her cardboard suitcase hanging from her slim hand. Pym loved her more than ever, but her deepening melancholy was too much for him and in the whirl of the great crusade he resented being the object of it.

"Old Lippsie's got a touch of what's-its," Syd would say kindly, noting Pym's disappointment, and they'd heave a bit of a sigh of relief together when she left.

"Old Lippsie's on about her Jews again," said Syd sadly another time. "They keep telling her another lot's been done."