A Perfect Spy

Highlights

Page 344

‘Maybe as much as two weeks. I’ve taken some leave of absence so that I can work in peace.’ Miss Dubber pretended to be appalled. ‘But whatever will happen to the country? How shall Toby and I stay safe, with no Mr Canterbury at the helm to steer us?’

Note: Haha

Page 492

‘Grant is a Cassius looking for a Caesar,’ Magnus had said. ‘If he doesn’t find a back to stab soon, the Agency will give his dagger to someone else.’

Page 654

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.

Page 868

At Grimble’s, boys were flogged for tardiness and flogged for untidiness, flogged for apathy and flogged for cheek, and flogged for not improving from the flogging. The fever of war encouraged brutality, the guilt of our non-combatant staff intensified it, the intricacies of the British hierarchical system provided a natural order for the exercise of sadism. Their God was the protector of English country gentlemen and their justice was the punishment of the illborn and disadvantaged, and it was meted out with the collaboration of the strong, of whom Sefton Boyd was the strongest and most handsome. It is the saddest of all the ironies of Lippsie’s death, as I see it now, that she died in the service of a Fascist state.

Page 544

At one of them Mr Muspole was called a bloody profiteer by a small waiter he was insulting and Pym contrived to leap in with a funny word in time to stop the fight. What the word was I don’t remember, but Mr Muspole had once shown me a brass knuckle-duster he liked to take to the races and I know he had it with him that night. And I know the waiter’s name was Billy Craft and that he took me home to meet his underfed wife and children in their Bob Cratchit flat on the edge of Slough, and that Pym spent a jolly night with them and slept on a bony sofa under everybody’s woollies. Because fifteen years later at a resources conference at Head Office who should loom out of the crowd but this same Billy Craft, supremo of Domestic Surveillance section. ‘I thought I’d rather follow them than feed them, sir,’ he said with a shy laugh as he shook my hand about fifty times. ‘No disrespect to your father, mind, he was a great man, naturally.’ Pym, it turned out, had not been the only one to redress Mr Muspole’s ill-behaviour. Rick had sent him a case of bubbly and a dozen pairs of nylons for Mrs Craft.

Note: Many sections like this I just don’t understand.

Page 851

So there’s yet another Pym for you, Jack, and you had better add him to my file even if he is neither admirable nor, I suspect, comprehensible to you, though Poppy knew him inside out from the first day. He’s the Pym who can’t rest till he’s touched the love in people, then can’t rest till he’s hacked his way out of it, the more drastically the better. The Pym who does nothing cynically, nothing without conviction. Who sets events in motion in order to become their victim, which he calls decision, and ties himself into pointless relationships, which he calls loyalty. Then waits for the next event to get him out of the last one, which he calls destiny.

Page 067

Poppy, he thought, stay exactly where you are.

Note: Who the fuck is Poppy. I’m getting annoyed because I still don’t know why he’s doing this.

Page 470

‘ “I love you, Kate,” ’ she said. ‘ “Get me clear of this and I’ll marry you and we’ll live happily ever after.” ’ Brotherhood took her cigarette and drew on it. ‘ “I’ll dump Mary. We’ll go and live abroad. France. Morocco. Who cares?” Phone calls from the other end of the earth. “I rang to say I love you.” Flowers, saying “I love you.” Cards. Little notes folded into things, shoved under the door, personal for my eyes only in top secret envelopes. “I’ve lived too long with the what-ifs. I want action, Kate. You’re my escape line. Help me. I love you. M.” ’ Once again, Brotherhood waited. ‘ “I love you,” ’ she repeated. ‘He kept saying it. Like a ritual he was trying to believe in. “I love you.” I suppose he thought if he said it to enough people enough times, one day it might be true. It wasn’t. He never loved a woman in his life. We were enemy, all of us. Touch me, Jack!’

Note: Seems like Pym is a chip off the old block. Psycho.

Page 020

Not bad men by any means. Not dishonest men. Not stupid. But men who see the threat to their class as synonymous with the threat to England and never wandered far enough to know the difference.

Page 648

A society that admires its shock troops had better be bloody careful about where it’s going Magnus liked to say.

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