Absolute Friends

by John le Carré

  The car has drawn up. He hears a door open. And stay open. He hears footsteps climbing towards him. The square is on a slope, and he is at the upper end of it, which is why there has to be a short climb, then a leveling out as the footsteps cross the cobbled platform and come to a halt a yard away. But Mundy is too fed up, too confused and put upon, to lift his head.

  Fancy German shoes. Mushroom-colored leather with brogue toe caps. Brown trousers with cuffs. A hand descends on his shoulder and gently shakes it. A voice that he refuses to recognize speaks perfumed German English to him.

  “Ted? Is it you? Ted?”

  After a very long pause, Mundy agrees to look up and sees a parked black saloon at the curbside with Lothar at the wheel and Sasha in his beret peering at him from the rear seat. He looks higher and sees the elegant features of the silken-haired Professor as he gazes down on him with fatherly concern.

  “Ted. My dear fellow. You remember me. Wolfgang. Thank God we found you. You look all in. I understand you had a jolly interesting conversation with Sasha this afternoon. This is not the behavior we expect from a disciple of the late, great Dr. Mandelbaum. Why don’t we go somewhere quiet and talk about God and the world?”

  Mundy stares at him for a while in mystification. Gradually he lets the penny drop. “And why don’t you move your fucking shadow,” he suggests, and remains seated, his face buried in his hands, until the Professor, with Sasha’s assistance, carefully raises him to his feet and guides him to the car.

  Traitors are opera stars, Edward. They have nervous breakdowns, crises of conscience and outrageous needs. The Wolfgangs of this world know that. If you don’t make it hard for them they’ll never believe you were worth buying.

  A classic Cold War double-agent operation is taking its first cautious steps towards consummation. If the seduction is agonizingly slow, that is because Ted Mundy in his many parts turns out to be a master of prevarication.

  At an international convention of Egyptologists in Bucharest he flourishes a tantalizing sample of the sort of material he thinks he might be able to provide: a top secret plan to disrupt a forthcoming World Federation of Trade Unions in Warsaw—but can he bear to deceive his colleagues? His tempters hasten to reassure him. In the service of the true democracy, they tell him, such scruples are misplaced.

  At a book fair in Budapest he provides an enticing, if retrospective, overview of how anti-Communist disinformation is fed to the Third World press. But the risk he took still scares him. He’ll have to think about it. His tempters wonder aloud whether fifty thousand capitalist dollars will assist his thought processes.

  At the Leningrad Festival of Peace and Song, exactly at the point where the Professor and his people dare to believe they have landed their fish, Mundy throws a convincing five-star tantrum about the proposed terms of his remuneration. What proof can they give him, when he shows up at the Bank Julius Bär in Geneva five years from now and utters the magic password, that the cashier will hand over the cash and not ring for the police? It takes a five-day seminar of international oncologists in Sofia to iron out the final details. A discreet but lavish dinner in the upper room of a grand hotel overlooking Lake Iskur marks the breakthrough.

  Faking illness to Kate and his notional employers at the British Council, Mundy allows himself to be spirited from Sofia to East Berlin. In the Professor’s villa in Potsdam where Sasha was first told that his father the Herr Pastor was a Stasi spy, glasses are raised to the brilliant new agent at the heart of Britain’s subversive propaganda machine, and his recruiter, Sasha. Seated shoulder to shoulder at the center of the candlelit table, the two friends proudly listen as the Professor reads aloud a telegram of congratulation from his masters in Moscow.

  Triumph on one side is matched by triumph on the other. In London a safe house in Bedford Square is acquired and a team assembled to perform the double duty of processing Sasha’s alpha double plus material and confecting disinformation ingenious and plausible—and alarming enough—to satisfy the paranoid appetites of Mundy’s masters for the next hundred years at least, since everybody on both sides knows that’s how long the Cold War’s going to last.

  Insiders including Mundy learn to refer to the house as the Wool Factory, wool being the commodity that it proposes to pull over the Stasi’s eyes.

  The effect of the twin victory upon Mundy himself is mixed. At the age of thirty-two, the pseudo-artist, pseudo-radical, pseudo-failure and pseudo everything else he accuses himself of being has finally discovered his natural art form. On the other hand, there are snags. The strains of running two successful careers within a single marriage are well known; the strains of running three, less so—particularly when one of them is a top secret mission vital to the security of your nation, rated alpha double plus and not discussable with your partner.

  9

  KATE IS GETTING ALONG splendidly.

  So is young Jake, now aged eight.

  Jake is a boisterous, rough-cut fellow who, according to family lore, bears no resemblance to either of his parents but is the dead spit of his granddad Des: stocky, outspoken, large-hearted but quick to anger, and no friend of fine distinctions. Unlike Mundy or Sasha, Jake entered the world without mishap. After a squally infancy, he passed his first year at primary with flying colors, to the relief of his parents who were beginning to fear he might need specialized attention. The present anxiety is how he will handle the move to Kate’s hometown of Doncaster where, if she is to stand any chance of reversing the pro-Tory swing in her marginal constituency, she must reclaim her roots.

  In the years between, Kate’s political ambitions have made impressive strides. She is billed as one of the Labor Party’s rising modernizers. Her blistering denunciation of the wreckers of St. Pancras—FEARLESS SCHOOLMARM BLASTS ‘ENEMIES WITHIN,’ Hampstead & Highgate Express—did not escape the eye of Labor Party headquarters. Her fighting nomination speech as parliamentary candidate for her native constituency of Doncaster Trent, praised for its unsparing realism, earned her loud applause from the new centrists. And while she is heartbroken to be saying goodbye to her pupils and colleagues in Hampstead—not to mention uprooting Jake just when he’s settling down at last—well, the best-rated secondary in South Yorkshire is bidding for her services, there’s a house that comes with the job, and a primary for Jake right round the corner and a kids’ sports center where he can let off steam.

  But it’s Ted, as the whole family agrees, who’s come through this looking like the trooper Des always said he was. Without Ted’s support, Kate would never have made it out of the trap, says Des, who loves a greyhound. He goes one further, inspiring a family joke that never quite goes to rest, much as Mundy might wish it to:

  “I’ll tell you this, and in a minute I’m going to drink to it,” he warns, while Mundy carves the Sunday beef and Jake tries to get everyone to join him in “One Man Went to Mow.” “When our Kate takes up residence at Number Ten, which she will, I’m not joking—Jake, shut up a minute, will you?—when she does, Ted here is going to do a bloody sight better job than what Denis Thatcher is doing today, or should I say not doing? Ted here will not be playing golf all day, and he will not be more than somewhat refreshed by four o’clock in the afternoon or somewhat sooner—In a minute, all right, Jake darling?—Ted here, unlike Denis the Menace, will be where he belongs, at my darling daughter’s side, giving her moral support from every angle in exactly the way—Belt up, Jake!—in the same way that Prince Albert did for Queen Victoria—don’t laugh, Kate, please, I am totally serious. He’ll be your consort is what he’ll be. And he’ll be the best bloody consort there ever was, bar none. So here’s to you, Ted old son, and God bless you. All right, Jake, let’s have a sing then.”

  The move to Doncaster raises complications for the whole family, but Kate and Ted, as two rational people, are not about to be thrown by them. With Jake they hope asleep upstairs, Kate sets out the invariables of the situation. Ted has passed the big four-O, so it would be daylight madness for him
to give up his pension rights and promotion prospects unless something equally good and preferably better comes along. And that’s putting the best face on it, says Kate. Because frankly, Ted, at your age, in your position . . . She tactfully leaves the sentence unfinished, just as she has left unfinished an earlier speech on the subject of Our Marriage and Its Shortcomings, principal among which are Mundy’s frequent absences, and his peculiar otherworldliness before and after them, which might well lead any other wife to conclude he had another interest, but since he swears he hasn’t, she’ll let that go.

  Returning to Ted’s career prospects, or lack of them, Kate takes it to be common ground that he has hit a plateau at the Council. This special job they gave him as Traveling Representative Eastern Europe all those years ago has not turned out to be quite the path to glory Ted was led to expect. Put bluntly, it’s become a backwater, not to say dead end, she goes on. And why they now insist on calling him an auxiliary traveling representative strikes her as most extraordinary. She can only imagine Ted blotted his copybook in some way that he won’t tell her about. Or perhaps, after all, they have found out about his not having a degree. She just wishes she could confront those wretched people in his personnel department, who according to Ted look straight through him these days.

  “And you, my darling, as we all know, are the very last person to speak up for yourself. It’s your public-school hang-up about not being pushy. Well, these days we all have to be pushy because that’s what Thatcherism’s brought us to.”

  Kate next applies her analytical head to the feasibility of Mundy living in Doncaster and commuting to London. Unfortunately, that too is a nonstarter. Quite apart from the astronomic cost of a Doncaster-King’s Cross season ticket, neither of them can see Ted sitting on a train for four hours a day, plus the Underground—particularly if Thatcher does what she’s threatening to do with the railways. Also, Kate’s going to need some paid help with looking after Jake while she’s getting round her constituency. Her political agent, a mother herself, says there’s a good supply of Sri Lankans if you tap into the right lot, but they cost.

  “Anyway, completely rationally, if you count up weekends, bank holidays and your leave entitlement”—which, as it happens, Kate has already done—“they amount to very nearly half the year. So let’s think of it that way, shall we? Bearing in mind that, ever since you took up your present job, you’ve been averaging nine weeks abroad per year, thanks to the academic conferences and student exchange programs which for some extraordinary reason they’ve thrown at you in addition to your cultural festivals.”

  Not for the first time in recent years, Mundy wonders who Kate is. The woman before him seems to have no relation to the woman he longs for when he is away from her. She has not evolved, she has simply been replaced. If she were Kate’s double, he wouldn’t be surprised. On the other hand, it occurs to him that Kate may well be having similar thoughts about himself.

  “Next question, obviously: Can we afford to maintain two households and, following on from that, what do we do with Estelle Road, particularly given that the housing market, after being deliberately inflated by the City banks for their own purposes, is in a state of collapse? Might we, for instance, keep the house, but let off the two spare bedrooms—say to medical students or nurses from the Royal Free Hospital? You could keep the master bedroom, drawing room and kitchen, and they could have the rest.”

  Mundy is not attracted by the prospect of adding boardinghouse keeper to his many roles in life, but doesn’t say so. They agree to discuss the possibilities with Des. Maybe a loft conversion is the answer. But Mundy also feels obliged to obtain a second opinion from Amory, who together with the Professor owns the controlling interest in Mundy Incorporated.

  Amory finds much to commend the idea of two households. If there is a financial shortfall, he adds cautiously, London might make it up to him. And London can afford to, he might have added. As a prized Stasi agent, Mundy receives a fat retainer, bonuses and incentive payments. The conventions of the trade, however, require him to turn these sums over to his true masters, whose remunerations are more modest, since London, unlike the Stasi, takes his loyalty for granted. Obscure lockaway trusts and life policies lodged in City banks have little meaning for him. A monthly brown envelope containing what Amory calls “play money” is all he is otherwise allowed, since an unnatural improvement in his lifestyle would not only attract the curiosity of British Security, from which Amory’s Service likes to keep a healthy distance, but of the family accountant, Kate.

  “Perfect way to keep your flavors apart, Edward. Once Jake knows the form, he’ll settle down in no time. How’s his cricket coming on?”

  “Fine. Super.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Kate likes to do her door-to-door stuff at weekends when voters are at home.”

  “Tell her to do it on weekday evenings when you’re not there,” Amory advises, and perhaps he really has a wife to whom he can talk like that.

  Suddenly the schism is real. Mundy hires a van, Des and a friend of his called Wilf help load it up with the bits of furniture that Kate has marked in advance with lengths of pink tape. Jake, who is no supporter of the move, barricades himself in his room and lobs its contents out of the window, including his duvet, blankets, toy fire station and, for the finale, the cradle Des and Mundy made for him before he was born.

  With Jake firing off abuse from the back of the van they arrive at a very new housing estate on the outskirts of Doncaster. Its dominant feature is a redbrick church with a freestanding bell tower which to Mundy resembles a hanged man swinging from a gibbet. The semi-bungalow which is henceforth the candidate’s family home is an orange-roofed box with picture windows and a rectangle of mown lawn front and back like two fresh graves. After two days of boisterous unpacking, punctuated by bursts of kids’ cricket on the community playground, and Mundy’s entire repertoire of funny voices, not to mention the glad-handing of next-door neighbors and other members of the electorate, he drives the empty van back to London and begins his new life as a weekly boarder.

  In his early mornings he pounds the Heath and tries not to remember the mornings when he walked Kate to work, and the evenings when he stood around with the mothers waiting for her to come out of class, and the sandpit where he and Jake fought the Battle of Waterloo, and the corner of the playing field where they threw Frisbees, and played England versus Pakistan test cricket until Jake made it clear that he preferred his disobliging peers to anything Mundy had to offer.

  Jake’s rages are accusing. He seems to be having them for all the family: for Kate, who in anger merely purses her lips, and for Mundy whose first line of defense is to make silly jokes and bark with laughter till the cloud has passed. But Jake has inherited neither of these tactics. When Jake is shushed, he roars. When he feels frustrated or perplexed or disregarded, he roars. To Mundy in despondent mood, Jake’s message is clear: You’re a fraud, Dad. I’ve observed your clowning, I have listened carefully to your funny voices and your crappy bird noises. I am familiar with the full range of your insincere facial expressions, and I’ve rumbled you. You’re a revolutionary tourist turned capitalist spy and there’s not a true bone in your ugly, overlong body. But because my tender years preclude me from articulating these sentiments, I roar. Signed Jake.

  But look on the bright side, Mundy urges himself, with one of those compulsive reaches for the sky which his right arm undertakes by itself these days. All right, I’m not quite the father I hoped I’d be. But I’m not a cashiered ex-Indian Army drunk either, and Jake’s got a real, live, upwardly mobile mother instead of a dead aristocrat turned bog-Irish housemaid. It’s not my fault that I’m six different people.

  At first, Mundy’s daily routine proceeds much as before. All morning he sits or paces in his room at the British Council, engaging in what Amory is pleased to call his cover job, making the odd phone call, signing off the odd policy document and being affable in the canteen, where he is reg
arded as some sort of remittance man. It is required of him by Amory that he present, where challenged, a soured, antiestablishment sort of image and despite his affability he contrives this without too much difficulty. The old rebellious fires may not be exactly raging, but thanks to Mrs. Thatcher there are plenty of embers around.

  Lunch, always a relief, is a variable affair. If he’s lucky, his cover work will require him to be entertained by a fellow cultural diplomat from an Iron Curtain embassy, someone who may be reckoned to wear more than one hat. On such occasions Mundy will adopt an even more seditious attitude on the reasonable assumption that his words will get back to the Professor. Sometimes his host will venture an intelligence pass, which Mundy will politely decline. He can hardly explain that he is already fully engaged on both sides of the ideological abyss.

  Afternoons are again a mixed feast. Under the terms of whatever murky deal Amory’s Service has thrashed out with Personnel, they are ostensibly given over to outside meetings with artists and their representatives. In reality, they are Amory’s to dispose of, but nothing in Mundy’s life is neat, and he frequently finds himself with a couple of empty hours on his hands. To fill them he has until now patronized the National Gallery, the Tate, the British Museum and other worthy institutions of self-instruction. In the spirit of his greater liberty, he now transfers his custom to the little strip clubs that pop up and disappear like brightly colored mushrooms in the fertile pastures of Soho.

  His motives are not prurient. It is the churchlike atmosphere of sanctuary that draws him, the mute devotion of his fellow worshippers, and the disinterested good nature of the performing priestesses. Seated in the smoky half-darkness he is as sovereign and untouchable as the creatures he observes. Of shame, contrition, guilt or whatever is supposed to afflict him, he feels nothing. I deserve this. Mundy Two would be proud of me. And Doncaster isn’t cleared for access.