Honourable Schoolboy (31 page)

They are talking simplistic nonsense.

In the first place, time was of no account. The Russian goldseam, and the operation it financed, whatever that was, had been running for years, and undisturbed would presumably run for many more. The only people who were demanding action were the Whitehall barons, the Circus itself, and indirectly Jerry Westerby, who had to eat his head off with boredom for a couple more weeks while Smiley meticulously prepared his next move. Also, Christmas was approaching, which makes everyone impatient. Ko, and whatever operation he was controlling, showed no sign of development. ‘Ko and his Russian money stood like a mountain before us,’ Smiley wrote later, in his departing paper on Dolphin. ‘We could visit the case whenever we wished, but we could not move it. The problem was going to be, not how to stir ourselves, but how to stir Ko to the point where we could read him.’

The lesson is clear: long before anyone else, except perhaps Connie Sachs, Smiley already saw the girl as a potential lever and, as such, the most important single character in the cast - far more important, for instance, than Jerry Westerby, who was at any time replaceable. This was just one of many good reasons why Smiley made it his business to get as close to her as security considerations allowed. Another was that the whole nature of the link between Sam Collins and the girl still floated in uncertainty. It’s so easy now to turn round and say ‘obvious’ but at that time the issue was anything but cut and dried. The Cale file gave an indication. Smiley’s intuitive feeling for Sam’s footwork helped fill in some blanks; hasty backbearings by Registry produced clues and the usual batch of analogous cases; the anthology of Sam’s field reports was illuminating. The fact remains that the longer Smiley held Sam off, the closer he came to an independent understanding of the relationships between the girl and Ko, and between the girl and Sam: and the stronger his bargaining power when he and Sam next sat down together.

And who on earth could honestly say how Sam would have reacted under pressure? The inquisitors have had their successes, true, but also failures. Sam was a very hard nut.

One more consideration also weighed with Smiley, though in his paper he is too gentlemanly to mention it. A lot of ghosts walked in those post-fall days, and one of them was a fear that, buried somewhere in the Circus, lay Bill Haydon’s chosen successor: that Bill had brought him on, recruited and educated him against the very day when he himself, one way or another, would fade from the scene. Sam was originally a Haydon nominee. His later victimisation by Haydon could easily have been a put-up job. Who was to say, in that very jumpy atmosphere, that Sam Collins, manoeuvring for readmission, was not the heir elect to Haydon’s treachery?

For all these reasons George Smiley put on his raincoat and got himself out on the street. Willingly, no doubt for at heart, he was still a case man. Even his detractors gave him that.

In the district of old Barnsbury, in the London borough of Islington, on the day that Smiley finally made his discreet appearance there, the rain was taking a mid-morning pause. On the slate rooftops of Victorian cottages, the dripping chimney pots huddled like bedraggled birds among the television aerials. Behind them, held up by scaffolding, rose the outline of a public housing estate abandoned for want of funds.

‘Mr-?’

‘Standfast,’ Smiley replied politely, from beneath his umbrella.

Honourable men recognise each other instinctively. Mr Peter Worthington had only to open his front door and run his eye over the plump, rainsoaked figure on the step - the black official briefcase, with EIIR embossed on the bulging plastic flap, the diffident and slightly shabby air for an expression of friendly welcome to brighten his kindly face.

‘That’s it. Jolly decent of you to come. Foreign Office is in Downing Street these days, isn’t it? What did you do? Tube from Charing Cross, I suppose? Come on in, have a cuppa.’

He was a public-school man who had gone into state education because it was more rewarding. His voice was moderate and consoling and loyal. Even his clothes, Smiley noticed, following him down the slim corridor, had a sort of faithfulness. Peter Worthington might be only thirty-four years old, but his heavy tweed suit would stay in fashion - or out of it - for as long as its owner needed. There was no garden. The study backed straight on to a concrete playground. A stout grille protected the window, and the playground was divided in two by a high wire fence. Beyond it stood the school itself, a scrolled Edwardian building not unlike the Circus, except that it was possible to see in. On the ground floor, Smiley noticed children’s paintings hanging on the walls. Higher up, test-tubes in wooden racks. It was playtime and, in their own half, girls in gym slips were racing after a handball. But on the other side of the wire the boys stood in silent groups, like pickets at a factory gate, blacks and whites separate. The study was knee deep in exercise books. A pictorial guide to the kings and queens of England hung on the chimney breast. Dark clouds filled the sky and made the school look rusty.

‘Hope you don’t mind the noise,’ Peter Worthington called from the kitchen. ‘I don’t hear it any more, I’m afraid. Sugar?’

‘No, no. No sugar, thank you,’ said Smiley with a confessive grin.

‘Watching the calories?’

‘Well, a little, a little.’ Smiley was acting himself, but more so, as they say at Sarratt. A mite homelier, a mite more careworn: the gentle, decent civil servant who had reached his ceiling by the age of forty, and stayed there ever since.

‘There’s lemon if you want it!’ Peter Worthington called from the kitchen, clattering dishes inexpertly.

‘Oh, no thank you! Just the milk.’

On the threadbare study floor lay evidence of yet another, smaller child: bricks, and a scribbling book with Ds and As scrawled endlessly. From the lamp hung a Christmas star in cardboard. On the drab walls, Magi and sleds and cotton wool. Peter Worthington returned carrying a tea tray. He was big and rugged, with wiry brown hair going early to grey. After all the clattering, the cups were still not very clean.

‘Clever of you to choose my free period,’ he said, with a nod at the exercise books. ‘If you can call it free, with that lot to correct.’

‘I do think you people are very underrated,’ Smiley said, mildly shaking his head. ‘I have friends in the profession myself. They sit up half the night, just correcting the work, so they assure me and I’ve no reason to doubt them.’

‘They’re the conscientious ones.’

‘I trust I may include you in that category.’

Peter Worthington grinned, suddenly very pleased. ‘Afraid so. If a thing’s worth doing it’s worth doing well,’ he said, helping Smiley out of his raincoat.

‘I could wish that view were a little more widely held, to be frank.’

‘You should have been a teacher yourself,’ said Peter Worthington and they both laughed.

‘What do you do with your little boy?’ said Smiley, sitting down.

‘Ian? Oh he goes to his Gran’s. My side, not hers,’ he added, as he poured. He handed Smiley a cup, ‘You married?’ he asked.

‘Yes, yes I am, and very happily so too, if I may say so.’

‘Kids?’

Smiley shook his head, allowing himself a small frown of disappointment. ‘Alas,’ he said.

‘That’s where it hurts,’ said Peter Worthington, entirely reasonably.

‘I’m sure it does,’ said Smiley. ‘Still, we’d have liked the experience. You feel it more, at our age.’

‘You said on the phone there was some news of Elizabeth,’ said Peter Worthington. ‘I’d be awfully grateful to hear it, I must say.’

‘Well nothing to be excited about,’ said Smiley cautiously.

‘But hopeful. One must have hope.’

Smiley stooped to the official black plastic briefcase and unlocked the cheap clasp.

‘Well now, I wonder whether you’l1 oblige me,’ he said. ‘It’s not that I’m holding back on you, but we do like to be sure. I’m a belt and braces man myself and I don’t mind admitting it. We do exactly the same with our foreign deceases. We never commit ourselves until we’re absolutely sure. Forenames, surname, full address, date of birth if we can get it, we go to no end of trouble. Just to be safe. Not cause, of course, we don’t do cause, that’s up to the local authorities.’

‘Shoot ahead,’ said Peter Worthington heartily. Noticing the exaggeration in his tone, Smiley glanced up, but Peter Worthington’s honest face was turned away and he seemed to be studying a pile of old music stands heaped in a corner.

Licking his thumb, Smiley laboriously opened a file on his lap and turned some pages. It was the Foreign Office file, marked ‘Missing Person’, and obtained by Lacon on a pretext to Enderby. ‘Would it be asking too much if I went through the details with you from the beginning? Only the salient ones naturally, and only what you wish to tell me, I don’t have to say that, do I? My headache is, you see, I’m actually not the normal person for this work. My colleague Wendover, whom you met, is sick, I’m afraid - and, well, we don’t always like to put everything on paper do we? He’s an admirable fellow but when it comes to report writing I do find him a little terse. Not sloppy, far from it, but sometimes a little wanting on the human picture side.’

‘I’ve always been absolutely frank. Always,’ said Peter Worthington rather impatiently to the music stands. ‘I believe in that.’

‘And for our part, I can assure you, we at the Office do respect a confidence.’

A sudden lull descended. It had not occurred to Smiley, till this moment, that the scream of children could be soothing; yet as it stopped, and the playground emptied, he had a sense of dislocation which took him a moment to get over.

‘Break’s over,’ said Peter Worthington with a smile.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Break. Milk and buns. What you pay your taxes for.’

‘Now first of all there is no question here, according to my colleague Wendover’s notes - nothing against him, I hasten to say - that Mrs Worthington left under any kind of constraint… Just a minute. Let me explain what I mean by that. Please. She left voluntarily. She left alone. She was not unduly prevailed upon, lured, or in any wise the victim of unnatural pressure. Pressure for instance which, let us say, might in due course be the subject of a legal court action by yourself or others against a third party not so far named?’

Longwindedness, as Smiley knew, creates in those who must put up with it an almost unbearable urge to speak. If they do not interrupt directly, they at least counter with pent-up energy: and as a schoolmaster, Peter Worthington was not by any means a natural listener.

‘She left alone, absolutely alone, and my entire position is, was, and always has been, that she was free to do so. If she had not left alone, if there had been others involved, men, God knows we’re all human, it would have made no difference. Does that satisfy your question? Children have a right to both parents,’ he ended, stating a maxim.

Smiley was writing diligently but very slowly. Peter Worthington drummed his fingers on his knee, then cracked them, one after another, in quick impatient salvo.

‘Now in the interim, Mr Worthington, can you please tell me whether a custody order has been applied for in respect of -’

‘We always knew she’d wander. That was understood. I was her anchor. She called me my anchor , Either that or schoolmaster . I didn’t mind. It wasn’t badly meant. It was just, she couldn’t bear to say Peter. She loved me as a concept. Not as a figure perhaps, a body, a mind, a person, not even as a partner. As a concept, a necessary adjunct to her personal, human completeness. She had an urge to please, I understand that. It was part of her insecurity, she longed to be admired. If she paid a compliment, it was because she wished for one in return.’

‘I see,’ said Smiley, and wrote again, as if physically subscribing to this view.

‘I mean nobody could have a girl like Elizabeth as a wife and expect to have her all to himself. It wasn’t natural. I’ve come to terms with that now. Even little Ian had to call her Elizabeth. Again I understand. She couldn’t bear the chains of Mummy . Child running after her calling Mummy . Too much for her. That’s all right, I understand that too. I can imagine it might be hard for you, as a childless man, to understand how a woman of any stamp, a mother, well cared for and loved and looked after, not even having to earn, can literally walk out on her own son and not even send him a postcard from that day to this. Probably that worries, even disgusts you. Well, I take a different view, I’m afraid. At the time, I grant you: yes, it was hard.’ He glanced toward the wired playground. He spoke quietly with no hint at all of self-pity. He might have been talking to a pupil. ‘We try to teach people freedom here. Freedom within citizenship. Let them develop their individuality. How could I tell her who she was? I wanted to be there, that’s all. To be Elizabeth’s friend. Her longstop: that was another of her words for me. My longstop . The point is, she didn’t need to go. She could have done it all here. At my side. Women need a prop, you know. Without one -’

‘And you still have not received any direct word of her?’ Smiley enquired meekly. ‘Not a letter, not even that postcard to Ian, nothing?’

‘Not a sausage.’

Smiley wrote. ‘Mr Worthington, to your knowledge, has your wife ever used another name?’ For some reason the question threatened to annoy Peter Worthington quite considerably. He flared, as if he were responding to impertinence in class, and his finger shot up to command silence. But Smiley hurried on. ‘Her maiden name, for instance? Perhaps an abbreviation of her married one, which in a non-English speaking country could create difficulties with the natives -’

‘Never. Never, never. You have to understand basic human behavioural psychology. She was a text-book case. She couldn’t wait to get rid of her father’s name. One very good reason why she married me was to have a new father and a new name. Once she’d got it, why should she give it up? It was the same with her romancing, her wild, wild story telling. She was trying to escape from her environment. Having done so, having succeeded, having found me, and the stability which I represent, she naturally no longer needed to be someone else. She was someone else. She was fulfilled. So why go?’