John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels

by John le Carré

  When they reached his bus-stop she hung around, and when the bus came she climbed aboard after him and let him buy her a ticket, and when she got out at the village she climbed the hill with him, Jerry with his book-sack, the girl with her shoulder-bag, and that’s how it was. Three nights and most of the days she slept, and on the fourth night she came to him. He was so unprepared for her that he had actually left his bedroom door locked; he had a bit of a thing about doors and windows, specially at night. So that she had to hammer on the door and shout, “I want to come into your bloody cot, for Christ’s sake!” before he opened up.

  “Just never lie to me,” she warned, scrambling into his bed as if they were sharing a dormitory feast. “No words, no lies. Got it?”

  As a lover, she was like a butterfly, he remembered—could have been Chinese. Weightless, never still, so unprotected he despaired of her. When the fireflies came out, the two of them knelt on the window-seat and watched them, and Jerry thought about the East. The cicadas shrieked and the frogs burped, and the lights of the fireflies ducked and parried round a central pool of blackness, and they would kneel there naked for an hour or more, watching and listening, while the hot moon drooped into the hill-crests. They never spoke on those occasions, or reached any conclusions that he was aware of. But he gave up locking his door.

  The music and the hammering had stopped, but a din of church bells had started—he supposed for evensong. The valley was never quiet, but the bells sounded heavier because of the dew. He sauntered over to the swing-ball, teasing the rope away from the metal pillar, then with his old buckskin boot kicked at the grass around the base, remembering her lithe little body flying from shot to shot and the monk’s habit billowing.

  “Guardian is the big one,” they had said to him. “Guardian means the road back.” For a moment longer Jerry hesitated, gazing downward again into the blue plain where the very road, not figurative at all, led shimmering and straight as a canal toward the city and the airport.

  Jerry was not what he would have called a thinking man. A childhood spent listening to his father’s bellowing had taught him early the value of big ideas, and big words as well. Perhaps that was what had joined him to the girl in the first place, he thought. That’s what she was on about: “Don’t give me anything I can’t carry.”

  Maybe. Maybe not. She’ll find someone else. They always do.

  It’s time, he thought. Money gone, novel stillborn, girl too young. Come on. It’s time.

  Time for what?

  Time! Time she found herself a young bull instead of wearing out an old one. Time to let the wanderlust stir. Strike camp. Wake the camels. On your way. Lord knows, he had done it before once or twice. Pitch the old tent, stay a little, move on; sorry, sport.

  It’s an order, he told himself. Ours not to reason. Whistle goes, the lads rally. End of argument. Guardian.

  Rum how he’d had a feeling it was coming, all the same, he thought, still staring into the blurred plain. No great presentiment, any of that tripe; simply, yes, a sense of time. It was due. A sense of season. But in place of a gay upsurge of activity, a deep sluggishness seized hold of his body. He suddenly felt too tired, too fat, too sleepy ever to move again. He could have lain down just here, where he stood. He could have slept on the harsh grass till she woke him or the darkness came.

  Tripe, he told himself. Sheer tripe. Taking the telegram from his pocket, he strode vigorously into the house, calling her name.

  “Hey, sport! Old thing! Where are you hiding? Spot of bad news.” He handed it to her. “Doomsville,” he said, and went to the window rather than watch her read it.

  He waited till he heard the flutter of the paper landing on the table. Then he turned round because there was nothing else for it. She hadn’t said anything, but she had wedged her hands under her armpits and sometimes her body-talk was deafening. He saw how the fingers waved blindly about, trying to lock on to something.

  “Why not shove off to Beth’s place for a bit?” he suggested. “She’ll have you like a shot, old Beth. Thinks the world of you. Have you long as you like, Beth would.”

  She kept her arms folded till he went down the hill to send his telegram. By the time he came back she had got his suit out, the blue one they had always laughed about—his prison gear, she called it—but she was trembling and her face had turned white and ill, the way it went when he dealt with the hornets. When he tried to kiss her, she was cold as marble, so he let her be. At night they slept together and it was worse than being alone.

  Mama Stefano announced the news at lunch-time, breathlessly. The honourable schoolboy had left, she said. He wore his suit. He carried a grip, his typewriter, and the book-sack. Franco had taken him to the airport in the van. The orphan had gone with them, but only as far as the slip-road to the autostrada. When she got out, she didn’t even say goodbye—just sat beside the road like the trash she was. For a while, after they dumped her, the schoolboy had remained very quiet and private. He scarcely noticed Franco’s ingenious and pointed questions, and he pulled at his tawny forelock a lot—the Sanders had called it pepper and salt. At the airport, with an hour to kill before the plane left, they had a flask together, also a game of dominoes, but when Franco tried to rob him for the fare, the schoolboy showed an unusual harshness, haggling at last like the true rich.

  Franco had told her, she said; her bosom friend. Franco, maligned as a pederast. Had she not always defended him, Franco the elegant? Franco, the father of her idiot son? They had had their differences—who had not?—but let them only name for her, if they could, in the whole valley, a more upright, diligent, graceful, better-dressed man than Franco, her friend and lover!

  The schoolboy had gone back for his inheritance, she said.

  3

  Mr. George Smiley’s Horse

  Only George Smiley, said Roddy Martindale, a fleshy Foreign Office wit, could have got himself appointed captain of a wrecked ship. Only Smiley, he added, could have compounded the pains of that appointment by choosing the same moment to abandon his beautiful, if occasionally errant wife.

  At first or even second glance, George Smiley was ill-suited to either part, as Martindale was quick to note. He was tubby, and in small ways hopelessly unassertive. A natural shyness made him from time to time pompous, and to men of Martindale’s flamboyance his unobtrusiveness acted as a standing reproach. He was also myopic, and to see him in those first days after the holocaust—in his round spectacles and his civil-servant weeds, attended by his slender, tight-mouthed cupbearer Peter Guillam, discreetly padding the marshier bypaths of the Whitehall jungle; or stooped over a heap of papers at any hour of day or night in his scruffy throne-room on the fifth floor of the Edwardian mausoleum in Cambridge Circus, which he now commanded—you would think it was he, and not the dead Haydon, the Russian spy, who deserved the trade name “mole.” After such long hours of work in that cavernous and half-deserted building, the bags beneath his eyes turned to bruises, he smiled seldom, though he was by no means humourless, and there were times when the mere exertion of rising from his chair seemed to leave him winded. Reaching the upright position, he would pause, mouth slightly open, and give a little, fricative “uh” before moving off. Another mannerism had him polishing his spectacles distractedly on the fat end of his tie, which left his face so disconcertingly naked that one very senior secretary—in the jargon, these ladies were known as “mothers”—was on more than one occasion assailed by a barely containable urge, of which psychiatrists would have made all sorts of heavy weather, to start forward and shelter him from the impossible task he seemed determined to perform.

  “George Smiley isn’t just cleaning the stable,” the same Roddy Martindale remarked, from his luncheon table at the Garrick. “He’s carrying his horse up the hill as well. Haw haw.”

  Other rumours, favoured mainly by departments which had entered bids for the charter of the foundered service, were less respectful of his travail.

  “George is living on his re
putation,” they said, after a few months of this. “Catching Bill Haydon was a fluke.”

  Anyway, they said, it had been an American tip-off, not George’s coup at all; the Cousins should have had the credit, but they had waived it diplomatically. No, no, said others, it was the Dutch. The Dutch had broken Moscow Centre’s code and passed the take through liaison; ask Roddy Martindale—Martindale, of course, being a professional trafficker in Circus misinformation. And so, back and forth, while Smiley, seemingly oblivious, kept his counsel and dismissed his wife.

  They could hardly believe it.

  They were stunned.

  Martindale, who had never loved a woman in his life, was particularly affronted. He made a positive thing of it at the Garrick.

  “The gall! Him a complete nobody and her half a Sawley! Pavlovian, that’s what I call it. Sheer Pavlovian cruelty. After years of putting up with her perfectly healthy peccadilloes—driving her to them, you mark my words—what does the little man do? Turns round and with quite Napoleonic brutality kicks her in the teeth! It’s a scandal. I shall tell everyone it’s a scandal. I’m a tolerant man in my way—not unworldly, I think—but Smiley has gone too far. Oh, yes.”

  For once, as occasionally occurred, Martindale had the picture straight. The evidence was there for all to read. With Haydon dead and the past buried, the Smileys had made up their differences, and together, with some small ceremony, the reunited couple had moved back into their little Chelsea house in Bywater Street. They had even made a stab at being in society. They had gone out, they had entertained in the style befitting George’s new appointment; the Cousins, the odd parliamentary Minister, a variety of Whitehall barons all dined and went home full. They had even for a few weeks made a modestly exotic couple around the higher bureaucratic circuit. Till overnight, to his wife’s unmistakeable discomfort, George Smiley had removed himself from her sight and set up camp in the meagre attics behind his throne-room in the Circus. Soon the gloom of the place seemed to work itself into the fabric of his face, like dust into the complexion of a prisoner. While, in Chelsea, Ann Smiley pined, taking very hardly to her unaccustomed rôle of wife abandoned.

  Dedication, said the knowing. Monkish abstinence. George is a saint. And at his age.

  Balls, the Martindale faction retorted. Dedication to what? What was there left, in that dreary red-brick monster, that could possibly command such an act of self-immolation? What was there anywhere in beastly Whitehall—or, Lord help us, in beastly England—that could command it any more?

  Work, said the knowing.

  But what work? came the falsetto protests of these self-appointed Circus-watchers, handing round, like Gorgons, their little scraps of sight and hearing. What did he do up there, shorn of three-quarters of his staff, all but a few old biddies to brew his tea, his networks blown to smithereens? His foreign residencies, his reptile fund frozen solid by the Treasury (they meant his operational accounts), and not a friend in Whitehall or Washington to call his own? Unless you counted that loping prig Lacon at the Cabinet Office to be his friend, always so determined to go down the line for him at every conceivable opportunity. And naturally Lacon would put up a fight for him; what else had he? The Circus was Lacon’s power base. Without it, he was—well, what he was already, a capon. Naturally, Lacon would sound the battle cry.

  “It’s a scandal,” Martindale announced huffily as he cropped his smoked eel and steak-and-kidney and the club’s own claret, up another twenty pence a crack. “I shall tell everybody.”

  Between the villagers of Whitehall and the villagers of Tuscany, there was sometimes surprisingly little to choose.

  Time did not kill the rumours. To the contrary, they multiplied, taking colour from his isolation, and calling it obsession.

  It was remembered that Bill Haydon had not merely been George Smiley’s colleague, but Ann’s cousin and something more besides. Smiley’s fury against him, they said, had not stopped at Haydon’s death; he was positively dancing on Bill’s grave. For example, George had personally supervised the clearing of Haydon’s fabled pepper-pot room overlooking the Charing Cross Road, and the destruction of every last sign of him, from the indifferent oil-paintings by his own hand to the left-over oddments in the drawers of his desk; even the desk itself, which he had ordered sawn up and burned. And when that was done, they maintained, he had called in Circus workmen to tear down the partition walls. Oh, yes.

  Or, for another example, and frankly a most unnerving one, take the photograph which hung on the wall of Smiley’s dingy throne-room—a passport photograph by the look of it, but blown up far beyond its natural size, so that it had a grainy and, some said, spectral look. One of the Treasury boys spotted it during an ad hoc conference about scrapping the operational bank accounts.

  “Is that Control’s portrait, by the by?” he had asked of Peter Guillam, purely as a bit of social chit-chat. No sinister intent behind the question. Well, surely one was allowed to ask? Control, other names still unknown, was the legend of the place. He had been Smiley’s guide and mentor for all of thirty years. Smiley had actually buried him, they said; for the very secret, like the very rich, have a tendency to die unmourned.

  “No, it bloody well isn’t Control,” Guillam, the cupbearer, had retorted, in that offhand, supercilious way of his. “It’s Karla.”

  And who was Karla when he was at home?

  Karla, my dear, was the work name of the Soviet case officer who had recruited Bill Haydon in the first place, and had the running of him thereafter. “A different sort of legend entirely, to say the least,” said Martindale, all a-quiver. “It seems we’ve a real vendetta on our hands. How puerile can you get, I wonder?”

  Even Lacon was a mite bothered by that picture: “Now, seriously, why do you hang him there, George?” he demanded, in his bold, head prefect’s voice, dropping in on Smiley one evening on his way home from the Cabinet Office. “What does he mean to you, I wonder? Have you thought about that one? It isn’t a little macabre, you don’t think? The victorious enemy? I’d have thought he would get you down, gloating over you all up there?”

  “Well, Bill’s dead,” said Smiley, who had a habit sometimes of giving a clue to an argument, rather than the argument itself.

  “And Karla’s alive, you mean?” Lacon prompted. “And you’d rather have a live enemy than a dead one? Is that what you mean?”

  But questions of George Smiley at a certain point had a habit of passing him by—even, said his colleagues, of appearing to be in bad taste.

  An incident which provided more substantial fare around the Whitehall bazaars concerned the “ferrets,” or electronic sweepers. A worse case of favouritism could not be remembered anywhere. My God, those hoods had a nerve sometimes! Martindale, who had been waiting a year to have his room done, sent a complaint to his Under-Secretary. By hand. To be opened personally by. So did his Brother-in-Christ at Defence and so, nearly, did Hammer of Treasury, but Hammer either forgot to post his or thought better of it at the last moment. It wasn’t just a question of priorities—not at all. Not even of principle. Money was involved. Public money. Treasury had already had half the Circus rewired on George’s insistence. His paranoia about eavesdropping knew no limits, apparently. Add to that, the ferrets were short-staffed, there had been industrial disputes about unsocial hours—oh, any number of angles! Dynamite, the whole subject.

  Yet what had happened in the event? Martindale had the details at his manicured fingertips. George went to Lacon on a Thursday—the day of the freak heat wave, you remember, when everyone practically expired, even at the Garrick—and by the Saturday—a Saturday, imagine the overtime!—the brutes were swarming over the Circus, enraging the neighbours with their din, and tearing the place apart. A more gross case of blind preference had not been met with since—well, since they allowed Smiley to have back that mangy old Russian researcher of his—Sachs, Connie Sachs—the don woman from Oxford, against all reason, calling her a mother when she wasn’t.

 
Discreetly, or as discreetly as he could manage, Martindale went to quite some lengths to find out whether the ferrets had actually discovered anything, but met a blank wall. In the secret world, information is money, and by that standard at least, though he might not know it, Roddy Martindale was a pauper, for the inside to this inside story was known only to the smallest few. It was true that Smiley called on Lacon in his panelled room overlooking St. James’s Park on the Thursday, and that the day was uncommonly hot for autumn. Rich shafts of sunlight poured on to the representational carpet, and the dust specks played in them like tiny tropical fish. Lacon had even removed his jacket, though of course not his tie.

  “Connie Sachs has been doing some arithmetic on Karla’s handwriting in analogous cases,” Smiley announced.

  “Handwriting?” Lacon echoed, as if handwriting were a vice.

  “Tradecraft. Karla’s habits of technique. It seems that where it was operable, he ran moles and sound-thieves in tandem.”

  “Once more now, in English, George—do you mind?”

  Where circumstance allowed, said Smiley, Karla had backed up his agent operations with microphones. Though Smiley was satisfied that nothing had been said within the building which could compromise any “present plans,” as he called them, the implications were unsettling.

  Lacon was getting to know Smiley’s handwriting too: “Any collateral for that rather academic theory?” he enquired, examining Smiley’s expressionless features over the top of his pencil, which he held between his two index fingers, like a rule.

  “We’ve been making an inventory of our own audio stores,” Smiley confessed with a puckering of his brow. “There’s a quantity of house equipment missing. A lot seems to have disappeared during the alterations of ’sixty-six.” Lacon waited, dragging it out of him. “Haydon was on the building committee responsible for having the work carried out,” Smiley ended, as a final sop. “He was the driving force, in fact. It’s just—well, if the Cousins ever got to hear of it, I fear it would be the last straw.”