John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels
Page 37
Everyone waited on Smiley’s answer, but none came. The torches went out and the group moved uncertainly towards the car.
“Can we lose him just the same?” the Minister asked on the way back.
“He was a Soviet citizen. Let them have him,” said Lacon.
They agreed it was a pity about the networks. Better see whether Karla would do the deal anyhow.
“He won’t,” said Smiley.
39
Recalling all this in the seclusion of his first-class compartment, Smiley had the curious sensation of watching Haydon through the wrong end of a telescope. He had eaten very little since last night, but the bar had been open for most of the journey.
Leaving King’s Cross, he had had a wistful notion of liking Haydon and respecting him: Bill was a man, after all, who had had something to say and had said it. But his mental system rejected this convenient simplification. The more he puzzled over Haydon’s rambling account of himself, the more conscious he was of the contradictions. He tried at first to see Haydon in the romantic newspaper terms of a thirties intellectual, for whom Moscow was the natural Mecca. “Moscow was Bill’s discipline,” he told himself. “He needed the symmetry of an historical and economic solution.” This struck him as too sparse, so he added more of the man whom he was trying to like: “Bill was a romantic and a snob. He wanted to join an elitist vanguard and lead the masses out of darkness.” Then he remembered the half-finished canvases in the girl’s drawing-room in Kentish Town: cramped, over-worked, and condemned. He remembered also the ghost of Bill’s authoritarian father—Ann had called him simply the Monster—and he imagined Bill’s Marxism making up for his inadequacy as an artist and for his loveless childhood. Later, of course, it hardly mattered if the doctrine wore thin. Bill was set on the road and Karla would know how to keep him there. Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided, seeing Bill again stretched out on the floor in Bywater Street, while Ann played him music on the gramophone.
Bill had loved it, too. Smiley didn’t doubt that for a moment. Standing at the middle of a secret stage, playing world against world, hero and playwright in one: oh, Bill had loved that, all right.
Smiley shrugged it all aside, distrustful as ever of the standard shapes of human motive. He settled instead for a picture of one of those wooden Russian dolls that open up, revealing one person inside the other, and another inside him. Of all men living, only Karla had seen the last little doll inside Bill Haydon. When was Bill recruited, and how? Was his right-wing stand at Oxford a pose, or was it paradoxically the state of sin from which Karla summoned him to grace?
Ask Karla: pity I didn’t.
Ask Jim: I never shall.
Over the flat East Anglian landscape as it slid slowly by, the unyielding face of Karla replaced Bill Haydon’s crooked death mask. “But you had this one price: Ann. The last illusion of the illusionless man. He reckoned that if I were known to be Ann’s lover around the place you wouldn’t see me very straight when it came to other things.”
Illusion? Was that really Karla’s name for love? And Bill’s?
“Here,” said the guard very loudly, and perhaps for the second time. “Come on with it, you’re for Grimsby, aren’t you?”
“No, no—Immingham.” Then he remembered Mendel’s instructions and clambered onto the platform.
There was no cab in sight, so, having enquired at the ticket office, he made his way across the empty forecourt and stood beside a green sign marked “Queue.” He had hoped she might collect him, but perhaps she hadn’t received his wire. Ah well: the post office at Christmas: who could blame them? He wondered how she would take the news about Bill; till, remembering her frightened face on the cliffs in Cornwall, he realised that by then Bill was already dead for her. She had sensed the coldness of his touch, and somehow guessed what lay behind it.
Illusion? He repeated to himself. Illusionless?
It was bitterly cold. He hoped very much that her wretched lover had found her somewhere warm to live.
He wished he had brought her fur boots from the cupboard under the stairs.
He remembered the copy of Grimmelshausen, still uncollected at Martindale’s club.
Then he saw her: her disreputable car shunting towards him down the lane marked “Buses Only” and Ann at the wheel staring the wrong way. Saw her get out, leaving the indicator winking, and walk into the station to enquire: tall and puckish, extraordinarily beautiful, essentially another man’s woman.
For the rest of that term, Jim Prideaux behaved in the eyes of Roach much as his mother had behaved when his father went away. He spent a lot of time on little things, like fixing up the lighting for the school play and mending the soccer nets with string, and in French he took enormous pains over small inaccuracies. But big things, like his walks and solitary golf, he gave up altogether, and in the evenings stayed in and kept clear of the village. Worst of all was his staring empty look when Roach caught him unaware, and the way he forgot things in class, even red marks for merit. Roach had to remind him to hand them in each week.
To support him, Roach took the job of dimmer man on the lighting. Thus at rehearsals Jim had to give him a special signal—to Bill and no one else. He was to raise his arm and drop it to his side when he wanted the footlights to fade.
With time, Jim seemed to respond to treatment, however. His eye grew clearer and he became alert again, as the shadow of his mother’s death withdrew. By the night of the play, he was more light-hearted than Roach had ever known him. “Hey, Jumbo, you silly toad, where’s your mac—can’t you see it’s raining?” he called out as, tired but triumphant, they trailed back to the main building after the performance. “His real name is Bill,” he heard him explain to a visiting parent. “We were new boys together.”
The gun, Bill Roach had finally convinced himself, was, after all, a dream.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword
Introduction
PART I - Winding the Clock
Chapter 1 - How the Circus Left Town
Chapter 2 - The Great Call
Chapter 3 - Mr. George Smiley’s Horse
Chapter 4 - The Castle Wakes
Chapter 5 - A Walk in the Park
Chapter 6 - The Burning of Frost
Chapter 7 - More About Horses
Chapter 8 - The Barons Confer
Chapter 9 - Craw’s Little Ship
Chapter 10 - Tea and Sympathy
Chapter 11 - Shanghai Express
Chapter 12 - The Resurrection of Ricardo
PART II - Shaking the Tree
Chapter 13 - LIESE
Chapter 14 - The Eighth Day
Chapter 15 - Siege Town
Chapter 16 - Friends of Charlie Marshall
Chapter 17 - RICARDO
Chapter 18 - The River Bend
Chapter 19 - Golden Thread
Chapter 20 - Liese’s Lover
Chapter 21 - Nelson
Chapter 22 - Born Again
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY
JOHN LE CARRÉ, the pseudonym for David Cornwell, was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964. His third novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, became a worldwide bestseller. He has written twenty-one novels, which have been published in thirty-six languages. Many of his books have been made into films, including The Constant Gardener; The Russia House; The Little Drummer Girl; and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
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First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf 1977
Published in Penguin Books 2011
Copyright © David Cornwell, 1977
Introduction copyright © David Cornwell, 1989
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc., and to Faber & Faber Ltd. for permission to reprint four lines of “September 1, 1939” from The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden by W. H. Auden. Copyright 1940 by W. H. Auden.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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For Jane, who bore the brunt, put up with my presence and absence alike, and made it all possible
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
—W. H. AUDEN
FOREWORD
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Cornwall, 1977
I offer my warm thanks to the many generous and hospitable people who found time to help me with my research for this novel.
In Singapore, Alwyne (Bob) Taylor, the Daily Mail correspondent ; Max Vanzi, of U.P.I.; Peter Simms, then of Time; and Bruce Wilson, of the Melbourne Herald.
In Hong Kong, Sydney Liu, of Newsweek; Bing Wong, of Time; H. D. S. Greenway, of the Washington Post; Anthony Lawrence, of the B.B.C.; Richard Hughes, then of the Sunday Times; Donald A. Davis and Vic Vanzi, of U.P.I. ; and Derek Davies and his staff at the Far Eastern Economic Review, notably Leo Goodstadt. I must also acknowledge with gratitude the exceptional co-operation of Major General Penfold and his team at the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, who gave me the run of Happy Valley Racecourse and showed me much kindness without once seeking to know my purpose. I wish I could also name the several officials of the Hong Kong government, and members of the Royal Hong Kong Police, who opened doors for me at some risk of embarrassment to themselves.
In Phnom Penh, my genial host Baron Walther von Marschall took marvellous care of me, and I could never have managed without the wisdom of Kurt Furrer and Madame Yvette Pierpaoli, both of Suisindo Shipping & Trading Co., and currently in Bangkok.
But my special thanks must be reserved for those who put up with me the longest: for my friend David Greenway, of the Washington Post, who allowed me to follow in his distinguished shadow through Laos, North East Thailand, and Phnom Penh; and for Peter Simms, who, before settling in Hong Kong, guided my eye through unfamiliar territory and helped me with much of the legwork. To them, to Bing Wong, and to certain Hong Kong Chinese friends who, I believe, will prefer to remain anonymous, I owe a great debt.
Last there is the great Dick Hughes, whose outward character and mannerisms I have shamelessly exaggerated for the part of old Craw. Some people, once met, simply elbow their way into a novel and sit there till the writer finds them a place. Dick is one. I am sorry I could not obey his urgent exhortation to libel him to the hilt. My cruellest efforts could not prevail against the affectionate nature of the original.
And since none of these good people had any more notion than I did, in those days, of how the book would turn out, I must be quick to absolve them from my misdemeanours.
Terry Mayers, a veteran of the British Karate Team, advised me on certain alarming skills. And for Miss Nellie Adams, for her stupendous bouts of typing, no praise is enough.
INTRODUCTION
JOHN LE CARRÉ
July 1989
A clever English writer once remarked that he wrote in order to have something to read in his old age. At fifty-seven I have yet to count myself old, but there is no doubt that in the thirteen years since I began this book, history has aged perceptibly. Thirteen years ago the Soviet Union was still locked in the ice of a slothful and corrupt oligarchy, and the puritanically minded leaders of the new China had turned their backs on their old ally and mentor in contempt. Today it is the Soviet Union which is in the throes of redefining the great Proletarian Revolution, if there ever really was one, while the blood of heroic young Chinese men and women who asked peaceably for similar redefinition of their political identity lies thick on Tiananmen Square, however many times the Army’s water-cannons try to wash it away.
So if you read this book, be warned. You are reading an historical novel, written on the hoof, in a climate so altered that I for one would not know how to recapture any part of it if I were to try to tell you the same story in recollection today.
There is another reason why I might be tempted back to this book in my old age, and that is its fragile recognition of the man I was at the time. The Honourable Schoolboy was the first book I wrote on location, and the first, but not the last, for which I put on the non-uniform of a field reporter in order to obtain my experiences and my information. It commemorates the first time I saw shots exchanged in the heat of battle, or succoured a wounded soldier, or smelt the stench of old blood in the fields. It tells therefore of a certain growing up, but also of a certain growing down, for war is nothing if not a return to childhood.
Thus when Jerry Westerby, my hero, takes his taxi-ride to the battle front a few kilometres outside Phnom Penh, and involuntarily finds himself behind Khmer Rouge lines, I was sitting much where he sat, in the same taxi, with my heart in my mouth, drumming my fingers on the same dashboard and offering the same prayers to my Maker. When Jerry visits an opium den or entrusts himself to the flying skills of an intoxicated Chinese opium pilot in an aeroplane that would not have passed muster in a scrap-auction, he is the beneficiary of my own timid adventurings. Which means only that, in the space of a few months, I shared the perils that any good reporter will take in his stride in a single afternoon.
I remember only one occasion when I chickened, but it does duty for those other occasions I have conveniently forgotten. With H. D. S. Greenway, then of the Washington Post, I was proposing to take a train from Nakhomphenom, in North-East Thailand, back to Bangkok. We had come from Laos and had been roughing it for a week. We had shared some rich but unnerving encounters in the insurgency area, not least with an American-trained Thai colonel of Special Forces whom you will meet in the later chapters of the book and who carried more armament on his person than anybody I have ever seen before or since. As we approached the ticket office, Greenway asked me wearily whether my quest for material required us to travel in the poorest part of the train. I was still hesitating when he came up with the solution: “Tell you what. We’ll travel First and leave Smiley to sweat it out in Third.” And so we did, and consequently arrived in Bangkok in good enough shape to celebrate the publication of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Why else might I pick up this book
ten years from now? The answer is like a sad smile in my memory. For the vanished Cambodia. For the vanished Phnom Penh, the last of Joseph Conrad’s river ports to go to the devil. For the scent of cooking oil and night flowers and the clamour of the bullfrogs as we ate our ridiculously wonderful French-Khmer meals just a few miles from the predatory armies that were about to devastate the city. For the insinuating murmur of the street girls perched up in the backs of their cyclos, as they ticked past us in the hot dark. For the memory, in short, of the dying days of French colonialism, before the vengeance of the terrible Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge swept it all away for good or bad.
As to Hong Kong—is that all history too? Even as I write, Mrs. Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary is in the Colony, bravely explaining why Britain can do nothing for a people she has dined off for a hundred and fifty years. Only betrayal, it seems, is timeless.
PART I
Winding the Clock
1
How the Circus Left Town
Afterwards, in the dusty little corners where London’s secret servants drink together, there was argument about where the Dolphin case history should really begin. One crowd, led by a blimpish fellow in charge of microphone transcription, went so far as to claim that the fitting date was some sixty years ago, when “that arch-cad Bill Haydon” was born into the world under a treacherous star. Haydon’s very name struck a chill into them. It does so even today. For it was this same Haydon who, while still at Oxford, was recruited by Karla the Russian as a “mole” or “sleeper”—or, in English, agent of penetration—to work against them. And who with Karla’s guidance entered their ranks and spied on them for thirty years or more. And whose eventual discovery—thus the line of reasoning—brought the British so low that they were forced into a fatal dependence upon their American sister service, whom they called in their own strange jargon “the Cousins.” The Cousins changed the game entirely, said the blimpish fellow, much as he might have deplored power tennis or bodyline bowling. And ruined it too, said his seconds.