The Secret Pilgrim (7 page)

I read Ben's letter. Twenty lines long, unsigned, on white unwatermarked Service stationery, one side. Ben's handwriting but awry, no crossings out. So yes, probably he was drunk.

It called me “Ned my darling.” It laid Ben's hands along my face and drew my lips to his. It kissed my eyelids and my neck and, thank God, on the physical front it stopped there.

It was without adjectives, without art, and the more appalling for its lack of them. It was not a period piece, it was not affected. It was not arch, Greek or nineteen-twenties. It was an unobstructed cry of homosexual longing from a man I had known only as my good companion.

But when I read it, I knew it was the real Ben who had written it. Ben in torment confessing feelings I had never been aware of, but which when I read them I accepted as true. Perhaps that already made me guilty—I mean, to be the object of his desire, even if I had never consciously attracted it, and did not desire him in return. His letter said sorry, then it ended. I didn't think it was unfinished. He had nothing more to say.

“I didn't know,” I said.

I handed Smiley back the letter. He returned it to his pocket. His eyes didn't leave my face.

“Or you didn't know you knew,” he suggested.

“I didn't know,” I repeated hotly. “What are you trying to make me say?”

You must try to understand Smiley's eminence, the respect his name awoke in someone of my generation. He waited for me. I shall remember all my life the compelling power of his patience. A sudden shower of rain fell, with the handclap that London showers make in narrow sweets. If Smiley had told me he commanded the elements, I would not have been surprised.

“In England you can't tell anyway,” I said sulkily, trying to collect myself. God alone knows what point I was trying to make. “Jack Arthur's not married, is he? Nowhere to go in the evenings. Drinks with the lads till the bar closes. Then drinks a bit more. No one says Jack Arthur's queer. But if they arrested him tomorrow in bed with two of the cooks, we'd say we'd known it all along. Or I would. It's imponderable.” I stumbled on, all wrong, groping for
a path and finding none. I knew that to protest at all was to protest too much, but I went on protesting all the same.

“Anyway, where was the letter found?” I demanded, trying to recover the initiative.

“In a drawer of his desk. I thought I told you.”

“An empty drawer?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, it does! If it was jammed in among old papers, that's one thing. If it was put there to be found by you people, that's another. Maybe he was forced to write it.”

“Oh, I'm sure he was forced,” said Smiley. “It's just a question of what by. Did you know he was so lonely? If there was no one in his life but you, I'd have thought it would have been rather obvious.”

“Then why wasn't it obvious to Personnel?” I said, bridling again. “My God, they grilled us for long enough before they appointed us. Sniffed round our friends and relations and teachers and dons. They know far more about Ben than I do.”

“Why don't we just assume that Personnel fell down on the job? He's human, this is England, we're the clan. Let's begin again with the Ben who's disappeared. The Ben who wrote to you. There was no one close to him but you. Not anyone that you knew of, anyway. There could have been lots of people you
didn't
know of, but that's not your fault. As far as you knew, there was no one. We have that settled. Don't we?”

“Yes!”

“Very well then, let's talk about what you
did
know. How's that?”

Somehow he brought me down to earth and we talked into the small grey hours. Long after the rain had stopped and the starlings had begun, we were talking. Or I was—and Smiley was listening as only Smiley can, eyes half closed, chins sunk into his neck. I thought I was telling him everything I knew. Perhaps he thought I was too, though I doubt it, for he understood far better than I the levels of self-deception that are the means of our survival.
The phone rang. He listened, muttered “Thank you” and rang off. “Ben's still missing and there are no new pointers,” he said. “You're still the only clue.” He took no notes that I remember and I don't know to this day whether he had a recorder running. I doubt it. He hated machines, and besides, his memory was more reliable than theirs.

I talked about Ben but I talked as much about myself, which was what Smiley wanted me to do: myself as the explanation for Ben's actions. I described again the parallel nature of our lives. How I had envied him his heroic father—I, who had no father to remember. I made no secret of our shared excitement, Ben's and mine, when we began to discover how much we had in common. No, no, I said again, I knew of no one woman—except his mother, who was dead. And I believed myself. I am sure I did.

In childhood, I told Smiley, I used to wonder whether somewhere in the world there was not another version of myself, some secret twin who had the same toys and clothes and thoughts that I did, even the same parents. Perhaps I'd read a book based on this story. I was an only child. So was Ben. I told Smiley all this because I was determined to talk directly to him from my thoughts and memories as they came to me, even if they incriminated me in his eyes. I only know that, consciously, I held nothing back from him, even if I reckoned it potentially ruinous to myself. Somehow Smiley had convinced me that was the least I owed to Ben. Unconsciously—well, that's another matter altogether. Who knows what a man hides, even from himself, when he is telling the truth for his survival?

I told him of our first meeting—mine and Ben's—in the Circus training house in Lambeth where the newly selected entrants were convened. Until then, none of us had met any of his fellow novices. We had hardly met the Circus either, for that matter, beyond the recruiting officer, the selectors and the vetting team. Some of us had only the haziest notion of what we'd joined. Finally we were to be enlightened—about each other, and about our calling—and we
gathered in the waiting room like so many characters in a Foreign Legion novel, each with his secret expectations and his secret reasons for being there, each with his overnight bag containing the same quantity of shirts and underpants, marked in Indian ink with his personal number, in obedience to the printed instructions on the unheaded notepaper. My number was nine and Ben's was ten. There were two people ahead of me when I walked into the waiting room, Ben and a stocky little Scot called Jimmy. I nodded at Jimmy, but Ben and I recognised each other at once—I don't mean from school or university but as people who bear a physical and temperamental similarity to one another.

“Enter the third murderer,” he said, shaking my hand. It seemed a wonderfully inappropriate moment to be quoting Shakespeare. “I'm Ben, this is Jimmy. Apparently we've got no surnames any more. Jimmy left his in Aberdeen.”

So I shook Jimmy's hand as well, and waited on the bench beside Ben to see who came through the door next.

“Five to one he's got a moustache, ten to one a beard, thirty to one green socks,” said Ben.

“And evens on a cloak,” I said.

I told Smiley about the training exercises in unfamiliar towns when we had to invent a cover story, meet a contact and withstand arrest and interrogation. I let him sense how such exploits deepened our companionship, just as sharing our first parachute jumps deepened it, or compass-trekking at night across the Scottish Highlands, or looking out dead-letter boxes in godforsaken inner cities, or making a beach landing by submarine.

I described to him how the directing staff would sometimes drop a veiled reference to Ben's father, just to emphasise their pride in having the son to teach. I told him about our leave weekends, how we would go once to my mother's house in Gloucestershire and once to his father's in Shropshire. And how, each parent being widowed, we had amused ourselves with the notion that we might broker a marriage between them. But the chances in reality were
small, for my mother was stubbornly Anglo-Dutch, with jolly sisters and nephews and nieces who all looked like Breughel models, whereas Ben's father had become a scholarly recluse whose only known surviving passion was for Bach.

“And Ben reveres him,” said Smiley, prodding again at the same spot.

“Yes. He adored his mother but she's dead. His father has become some sort of icon for him.”

And I remember noticing to my shame that I had deliberately avoided using the word “love,” because Ben had used it to describe his feelings for me.

I told him about Ben's drinking, though again I think he knew. How Ben normally drank little and often nothing at all, until an evening would come along—say, a Thursday and the weekend already looming—when he would drink insatiably, Scotch, vodka, anything, a shot for Ben, a shot for Arno. Then reel off to bed, speechless but inoffensive. And how on the morning after, he looked as if he had undergone a fortnight's cure at a health farm.

“And there was really nobody but you?” Smiley mused. “Poor you, what a burden, coping with all that charm alone.”

I reminisced, I wandered, I told him everything as it came to me, but I knew he was still waiting for me to tell him something I was keeping back, if we could find out what it was. Was I conscious of withholding? I can only reply to you as I afterwards replied to myself: I did not know I knew. It took me a full twenty-four hours more of self-interrogation to winkle my secret out of its dark corner. At four a.m., he told me to go home and get some sleep. I was not to stray from my telephone without telling Personnel what I was up to.

“They'll be watching your flat, naturally,” he warned me as we waited for my cab. “You won't take it personally, will you? If you imagine being on the loose yourself, there are really very few ports you'd feel safe to head for in a storm. Your flat could rank high on Ben's list. Assuming there isn't anybody else except his father. But
he wouldn't go to him, would he? He'd be ashamed. He'd want you. So they watch your flat. It's natural.”

“I understand,” I said as a fresh wave of disgust swept over me.

“After all, there's no one of his age whom he seems to like better than you.”

“It's all right. I understand,” I repeated.

“On the other hand of course, he's not a fool, so he'll know how we're reasoning. And he could hardly imagine you would hide him in your priest-hole without telling us. Well, you wouldn't, would you?”

“No I couldn't.”

“Which if he's halfway rational he would also know, and that would rule you out for him. Still, he might drop by for advice or assistance, I suppose. Or a drink. It's unlikely, but it's not an assumption we can ignore. You must be far, far and away his best friend. Nobody to compare with you. Is there?”

I was wishing very much he would stop talking like this. Until now, he had shown the greatest delicacy in avoiding the topic of Ben's declared love for me. Suddenly he seemed determined to reopen the wound.

“Of course he
may
have written to other people apart from you,” he remarked speculatively. “Men or women, both. It's not so unlikely. There are times when one's so desperate that one declares one's love to all sorts of people. If one knows one's dying or contemplating some desperate act. The difference in their case would be, he posted the letters. Still, we can't go round Ben's chums asking them whether he's written them a steamy letter recently—it wouldn't be secure. Besides, where would one start? That's the question. You have to put yourself in Ben's position.”

Did he deliberately plant the germ of self-knowledge in me? Later, I was certain he did. I remember his troubled, perspicacious gaze upon me as he saw me to the cab. I remember looking back as we turned the corner, and seeing his stocky figure standing in the centre of the street as he peered after me, ramming his
last words into my departing head. “You have to put yourself in Ben's position.”

I was in vortex. My day had begun in the small hours in South Audley Street and continued with barely pause for sleep through the Panda's monkey and Ben's letter until now. Smiley's coffee and my sense of being the prisoner of outrageous circumstance had done the rest. But the name of Stefanie, I swear it, was still nowhere in my head—not at the front, not at the back. Stefanie still did not exist. I have never, I am sure, forgotten anyone so thoroughly.

Back in my flat, my periodical spurts of revulsion at Ben's passion gave way to concern for his safety. In the living room I stared theatrically at the sofa where he had so often stretched out after a long day's street training in Lambeth: “Think I'll bunk down here if you don't mind, old boy. Jollier than home tonight. Arno can sleep at home. Ben sleeps here.” In the kitchen I laid the palm of my hand on the old iron oven where I had fried him his midnight eggs: “Christ Almighty, Ned, is that a stove? Looks more like what we lost the Crimean War with!”

I remembered his voice, long after I had switched out my bedside light, rattling one crazy idea after another at me through the thin partition—the shared words we had, our insider language.

“You know what we ought to do with Brother Nasser?”

“No, Ben.”

“Give him Israel. Know what we ought to do with the Jews?”

“No, Ben.”

“Give them Egypt.”

“Why, Ben?”

“People are only satisfied with what doesn't belong to them. Know the story of the scorpion and the frog crossing the Nile?”

“Yes, I do. Now shut up and go to sleep.”

Then he'd tell me the story, nevertheless, as a Sarratt case history. The scorpion as penetration agent, needing to contact his
stay-behind team on the opposite bank. The frog as double agent, pretending to buy the scorpion's cover story, then blowing it to his paymasters.

And in the morning he was gone, leaving behind him a one-line note saying, “See you at Borstal,” which was his name for Sarratt. “Love, Ben.”