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A last word is also needed here about Pym’s politics during this instructive period. Churchill sulked and was too popular. De Gaulle, with his tilted pineapple head, was too much like Uncle Makepeace, while Roosevelt, with his stick and spectacles and wheelchair, was clearly Aunt Nell in disguise. Hitler was so wretchedly unloved that Pym had more than a fair regard for him, but it was Joseph Stalin whom he appointed to be his proxy father. Stalin neither sulked nor preached. He spent his time chuckling, and playing with dogs, and picking roses in news cinemas while his loyal troops won the
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Mary heard herself talking but didn’t understand a lot of what she said because she had one ear in the pillow and the other was listening to the morning sounds of Lesbos through the open window of their little brown terrace house halfway up the hill that Plomari was built on, to the clatter of mopeds and boats and bouzouki music and lorries revving in the alleys. To the scream of sheep having their throats cut at the butcher’s and the slither of donkey hoofs on cobble and the yells of the vendors in the harbour market. If she squeezed her eyes tight enough, she could look over the orange
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their newest home. “We’ve found it. Plush-sur-mer.” And he turns to her with the smile she has not seen until this very holiday—so gallant, so tired-bright in its despair.
At the table he holds her arm fiercely and she can feel his excitement racing through her like a charge, as if having her has made him want her more.
locum.
his best thing was the crazy cricket matches on the edge of town that Magnus took him to in the evenings. Magnus said the Brits had brought the game to the island when they were defending it against Napoleon. Magnus knew those things. Or pretended to.
a man’s boy,
A daddy's boy
“If you want to listen to our conversations, you bloody well come in and listen to them and don’t skulk outside the door like a spy.”
Whitehall realism.
Like Washington reality
the sky remorselessly whitens through the cracks and she is trying not to hear the clanking of the water-pipes beneath her and the rush of water free-falling onto the flagstones as Magnus celebrates his morning shower.
She summons her breath. “Better than Caruso!” she shouts. The exchange is accomplished, Magnus can resume his showering.
Magnus follows politics like a gambler who is too wise to bet.
It is in German: Freedom and Conscience by someone she has never heard of. Beside it, a copy of Madox Ford’s Good Soldier, which Magnus
his overwilling smile, inviting you in but not expecting to be invited.
Bits of novel, she told Brotherhood, all beginnings.
“We are patriots because we are afraid to be cosmopolitan, cosmopolitan because we are afraid to be patriots.”
He who is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.’
Rick and all the mothers and fathers, for stealing my life off my plate while I watched you do it. Poppy,
Betrayal as travel: how can we discover new places if we never leave home? ‘You were my Promised Land, Poppy. You gave my lies a reason.’”
We all did, she thought. But she hadn’t the heart to say it to him or, for that matter, the interest.
Below him the fairy lights of the Amusement Palace glowed like fat berries in the mist.
red setter puppies
They are the axemen of Rick’s tragicomedy, now yielding at the knees and covered in false smiles, now posted like Shakespearean sentries round his stage, white-eyed in the gloom as they wait to disembowel him.
for relaxation attends late-night classes in radical politics
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.
“How do you do,” says Pym. “I’m optimistic, squire, thank you,” Mr. Cunningham replies with a Middle-European literalness. “I think we’re on a road to understanding. Some resistance at first is to be expected. But I believe I see a light begin to shine.”
Prado.
“She’s a damned gem. I’m going to see her right, you mark my words.”
The ghostly formlessness of adolescence was over. Manhood and maturity beckoned, even if he never made the distance. He was in his beloved Switzerland at last, the spiritual home of natural spies.
Then he wrapped her in his favourite tweed jacket and carried her up there and shot her in the back of the head, smashing the spinal cord at the nape, and buried her. After that he sat beside her with a half-bottle of scotch while the Suffolk dew settled itself over him and he decided she had probably had the best death anyone was likely to have in a world not distinguished by good deaths.
silage
“I have trodden the winepress alone,” he bellowed to his surprise. “And of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger and trample them in my fury.” The threat alarmed him and he wondered why he had uttered it and to whom. “And their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment.”
Yikes
There was one thought he could not put in words or even pictures, because it was so bad that even thinking it could turn it into truth.
Not even his father had such a clear idea of how everything should be the same each time yet exquisitely different in tiny ways.
How you had to be completely calm and unfussed yet draw out the day by doing masses of different things until the last moment.
Tattoo
“He said Granddad had gobbled up the natural humanity in him and he didn’t want to gobble it up in me.”
semaphore
Why risk his hotline to you to suppress a bit of paper from the dark ages that did him nothing but credit? Must be something in his own nasty little mind, not ours at all.
“He’s a shell,” Kate said. “All you have to do is find the hermit crab that climbed into him. Don’t look for the truth about him.
The truth is what we gave him of ourselves.”
“Military intelligence has about as much to do with intelligence as military music has to do with music.”
he took care to improve upon the reality, rearranging the facts to fit his prevailing image of himself, an instinctive caution nevertheless counselled him restraint. True, he endowed himself with a noble and eccentric mother, and true, when he came to describe Rick he awarded him many of the qualities Rick unsuccessfully aspired to, such as wealth, military distinction and daily access to the Highest in the Land. But in other respects he was frugal and self-mocking and when he came to the story of E. Weber, which he had not told anyone till now, Axel laughed so much he had to sit on a bench
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Soldaten.
Anti-Dühring,
sleeping, to use Axel’s phrase, like God in France,
he described a retreat through snow with the blind hanging on to the lame and the blood freezing in the wounds. He talked of a hospital, two to a bed and the dead lying on the floor. He asked for water. Pym fetched it and Axel took the glass in both hands, shaking wildly. He lifted the glass till his hands froze, then he lowered his head in jerks until his lips reached the brim. Then he sucked the water like an animal, spilling it while his fevered eyes kept guard. He drew up his legs and wetted himself and sat shaking and grumpy in an armchair while Pym changed his sheets. “Who are you afraid
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“Nobody who stands up is ill. Nobody marches who is ill. Dress.”
Great tattoo
Within a week, they had saved enough cash to take themselves to Davos to visit the shrine of Mann’s diseased souls.
He heard a snap that felt like his own nerve breaking as the ticket reappeared under the door with a hole punched in it.
To Jack, Pym was just another baby Joe, one more addition to his private army in the making, not broken and certainly not trained, but with the halter already slipped nicely round his neck and willing to run a long way for his lump of sugar.
