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His stride was agile, his body forward-sloping in the best tradition of the Anglo-Saxon administrative class.
Like many tyrants Miss Dubber was small. She was also old and powdery and lopsided, with a crooked back that rumpled her dressing-gown and made everything round her seem lopsided too.
“John and Sylvia Illegible of Wimbledon,” said Pym, still at the visitors’ book.
“It’s me,” said a man’s voice. But it wasn’t me. It was Jack Brotherhood.
making everything outside herself perfect because nothing inside herself was perfect in the least.
Passchendaele,
Military Campaign ww1
Finding herself standing before the double doors to the dining room, she pushed them open, switched on the chandeliers, and, whisky in hand, surveyed the long empty table glistening like a lake. Mahogany. Eighteenth-century repro. Counsellor’s grade, nobody’s taste. Seats fourteen with comfort, sixteen if you double up on the curved ends. That bloody burn mark, I’ve tried everything. Remember, she told herself. Force your mind back. Get the whole story straight in your stupid little head before Jack Brotherhood rings that doorbell. Step outside yourself and look in. Now. It is a night like
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Fire
Pausing, Mary lifted her head and listened. A car engine. In this snow they come up on you like bad memories. But, unlike a bad memory, this one passed.
Parsifal
Wagnerian opera; arthurian knight
She wanted him to know that he had earned his peace whenever he chose to take it, instead of giving, giving all the time.
Ella, the daughter of the undertaker, is discovering life. Pym closed the
And Jack—dear Jack—you have your marvellous old attaché case, faithful as the dog you had to shoot.
Your father, however, has only his secrets. They’re his provenance and his curse.
Just my overpromised self set free.
To tell it to no one in particular, and to everyone. To tell it to all of you who own me, to whom I have given myself with such unthinking liberality. To my handlers and paymasters. To Mary and all the other Marys. To anyone who had a piece of me, was promised more and duly disappointed. And to whatever of myself remained after the great Pym share-out.
You’re the male bee. You do it once, and die.
Sometimes, Tom, we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.
cheap migrant labour to man them, first Low Welsh like himself and afterwards and cheaper still and lower, the persecuted Irish.
again, I don’t think there was a corner of the human state where their disapproval did not fall. Because if you don’t understand the gloom of it, you’ll not understand the world that Rick was running away from or the world he was running towards, or the twisting relish that buzzes and tickles like a flea in every humble breast this dark sabbath as the last chimes merge with the drumming of the rain and the first great trial of young Rick’s life begins. “Rick Pym’s for the high jump at last,” says the word. And what more awesome executioner than Makepeace himself, Highest in the Land, Justice
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envy. But because their ease of living was beyond her grasp. Look again at the photograph. The jaw. The stern unsmiling jaw locking out expression. The little mouth clamped shut and downward to keep its secrets safe. That face cannot discard a single bad memory or experience, because it has nobody to share them with. It is condemned to store every one of them away until the day when it will break from overloading.
An unreal, empty woman permanently in flight. If she had had her back to me and not her face, I could not have known her less or loved her more.
“Ideals, my young brethren . . .” I see Makepeace pause here, shoot another glare at Rick and start again: “Ideals, my beloved brethren all, are to be likened unto those splendid stars above us”—I see him lift his sad, starless eyes to the pine roof—“we cannot reach them. Millions of miles separate us from them.” I see him hold out his drooping arms as if to catch a falling sinner. “But oh my brethren, how greatly do we profit from their presence!” Remember them, Tom.
for what is a prophet’s son but himself a prophecy, even if nobody on God’s earth ever discovers what either one of them is prophesying? Makepeace, like all great preachers, must do without a final curtain or applause.
Whatever you had in mind till then, you could forget it: the topic of the day had just walked in.
David Livingstone’s
19th centry british hero
“Lloyd George, Hartley Shawcross, Avory, Marshall Hall, Norman Birkett and other great advocates of his day,”
drawn from the circumference to the centre,
And Rickie, suddenly his gaze has the glint of a flick-knife in the dark. Syd does not go as far as I shall in describing that stare because Syd won’t touch the black side of his lifelong hero. But I will. It looks out of him like a child through the eyeholes of a mask. It denies everything it stood for not a half-second earlier. It is pagan. It is amoral. It regrets your decision and your mortality. But it has no choice because you cannot go back.
Rick’s spirits are back, because the flick-knife never shows for long and because he has already achieved the object that is more important to him than any other in his human dealings, even if he himself does not yet know it. He has inspired Makepeace to hold two totally divergent opinions of him and perhaps more. He has shown him the official and unofficial versions of his identity. He has taught him to respect Rick in his complexity and to reckon as much with Rick’s secret world as with his overt one.
provisional reality
Lumsden had a cliché for every occasion and a reputation for being nimble-minded.
Sick burn
“Listen to this: ‘When the most horrible gloom was over the household; when Edward himself was in agony and behaving as prettily as he knew how.’ Not even a main verb, far as I can make out.” “He didn’t write that.” “It’s in his handwriting, Mary.” “It’s from something he read. When he reads a book he underlines things in pencil. Then when he’s finished it he writes out his favourite bits.”
‘If I am not for myself who is for me; and being for my own self what am I? If not now when?’
Except that he didn’t call her “she” but “Shitlips,” which was his gang’s witty play on Lippschitz.
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 class and, as such people do, just about running the place single-handed and unthanked.
She was a German Four-by-Two, he said, using the affectionate cockney rhyming slang for Jew.
Mönchlein
his eyes were scared and crying without the rest of his face knowing it and his voice was smooth and holy.
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 bumping 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 cortège 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
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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.
The doctor, who must have been a rare imbecile, prescribed a laxative.
amazing two words
true English privilege was obtained by hardship, and that the best hardship was to be found at English boarding-schools.
making him play scales on her flute. “See, Magnus, without informations we are nothing. But with informations we can go anywhere in the world, we are like turtles, our houses always on our backs.
Our world must be inside our heads. That is the only safe way.
The fever of war encouraged brutality, the guilt of our noncombatant staff intensified it, the intricacies of the British hierarchical system provided a natural order for the exercise of sadism.
You kept your hands lightly linked behind your back, shoved your head forward and fixed your eyes upon some vaguely pleasing object on the horizon. You stalked wide and high, smiling slightly, as if listening to other voices, which is how the flower of us wear authority.
for Pym loved luxury as only those can who have had love taken from them.
The lunch bell rang but there was no roll-call for lunch and he was not hungry; he would never be hungry again, he was an immortal knight. He thought of cutting his throat but his mission was too important.
Justice, he was beginning to learn, is only as good as her servants.
Like Rick he was learning to live on several planes at once. The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment.
