We want to buy your friend, Osnard is saying. And if we can’t, we’ll send him back to prison. Ever been to prison, Pendel?
Yes. And so’s Mickie. And I saw him there. And he’s hardly got the wind to say hullo.
We want to buy your wife, Osnard is saying. And if we can’t, we’ll throw her onto the street and your kids with her. Ever been on the street, Pendel?
It’s where I came from.
And these threats were pistols, not dreams. Held to his head by Osnard. All right, Pendel had lied to him, if lying was the word. He had told Osnard what he wanted to hear and gone to extraordinary lengths to obtain it for him, including making it up. Some people lied because lying gave them a kick, made them feel braver or cleverer than all the lowly conformists who went on their bellies and told the truth. Not Pendel. Pendel lied to conform. To say the right things at all times, even if the right things were in one place and the truth was in another. To ride with the pressure until he could hop off and go home.
But Osnard’s pressure hadn’t let him hop off.
Berating himself, Pendel went through his usual materiel. As a practised self-accuser he tore his hair and called on God to witness his remorse. I’m ruined! It’s a judgment! I’m back in prison! All life is a prison! It doesn’t matter whether I’m inside or out! And I brought it all on myself! But his anger didn’t go away. Eschewing Louisa’s Cooperative Christianity, he resorted to the fearful language of Benny’s half-remembered efforts at atonement, as chanted into his empty tankard at the Wink & Nod: we have harmed, corrupted and ruined… We are guilty, we have betrayed… We have robbed, we have slandered… We have perverted and led astray… We have been false… We cut ourselves off from truth, and reality exists to entertain us. We hide behind distractions and toys. The anger still refused to budge. It went wherever Pendel went, like a cat in a sick pantomime. Even when he embarked on a merciless historical analysis of his despicable behaviour from the beginning of time until the present day, his anger turned the sword away from his own breast and outward at the perverters of his humanity.
In the Beginning was the Hard Word, he told himself. It was applied by Andy when he barged into my shop and there was no resisting it because it was pressure, not only regarding the summer frocks but also one Arthur Braithwaite, known to Louisa and the children as God. And all right, strictly speaking Braithwaite did not exist. Why should he? Not every god has to exist in order to do his job.
And in consequence of the above, there was me undertaking to be a listening post. So I listened. And I heard a few things. And what wasn’t heard as such was heard in my head, which was only natural, given the degree of pressure exerted. I’m a service industry so I served. What’s so wrong about that? And after that there was what I would call a flowering at a certain level, which was hearing a lot more and getting better at it, because a thing you learn about spying is, it’s like trade, it’s like sex, it has to get better or it won’t get anywhere.
So I entered what we might call the area of positive hearing in which certain words are put into people’s mouths that they would have said if they’d thought of them at the time. Which is what everyone does anyway. Plus I photographed a few bits and pieces from Louisa’s briefcase, which I did not like doing but Andy would have it and, bless him, he loves his photographs. But it wasn’t stealing. It was looking. And anyone can look, is what I say. With or without a cigarette lighter in his pocket.
And what happened after that was Andy’s fault completely. I never encouraged him, I never even thought of it till he did. Andy required me to obtain subsources, your subsource being a bird of a very different feather from your unaware informant, and necessitating what I call a quantum leap, plus substantial returning as regards the purveyor’s mental attitude. But I’ll tell you something about subsources. Subsources, once you get into the way of them, are very nice people, a lot nicer than some I could name who had a somewhat larger place in reality, subsources being a secret family that doesn’t answer back or have problems unless you tell them to. Subsources are about turning your friends into what they nearly were already, or would like to be, but strictly speaking never will be. Or what they wouldn’t like to be at all, but rationally might have been, given what they are.