Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (11 page)

In a fit of energy Smiley had broken away and was pounding ahead of Lacon down the path that led towards the paddock.

“Then go to the competition,” he called. “Go to the security people. They’re the experts; they’ll do you a job.”

“The Minister won’t have that. You know perfectly well how he and Alleline feel about the competition. Rightly, too, if I may say so. A lot of ex-colonial administrators ploughing through Circus papers: you might as well bring in the army to investigate the navy!”

“That’s no comparison at all,” Smiley objected.

But Lacon as a good civil servant had his second metaphor ready: “Very well, the Minister would rather live with a damp roof than see his castle pulled down by outsiders. Does that satisfy you? He has a perfectly good point, George. We do have agents in the field, and I wouldn’t give much for their chances once the security gentlemen barge in.”

Now it was Smiley’s turn to slow down. “How many?”

“Six hundred, give or take a few.”

“And behind the Curtain?”

“We budget for a hundred and twenty.” With numbers, with facts of all sorts, Lacon never faltered. They were the gold he worked with, wrested from the grey bureaucratic earth. “So far as I can make out from the financial returns, almost all of them are presently active.” He took a long bound. “So I can tell him you’ll do it, can I?” he sang quite casually, as if the question were mere formality, check the appropriate box. “You’ll take the job, clean the stables? Go backwards, go forwards, do whatever is necessary? It’s your generation, after all. Your legacy.”

Smiley had pushed open the paddock gate and slammed it behind him. They were facing each other over its rickety frame. Lacon, slightly pink, wore a dependent smile.

“Why do I say Ellis?” he asked conversationally. “Why do I talk about the Ellis affair when the poor man’s name was Prideaux?”

“Ellis was his workname.”

“Of course. So many scandals in those days, one forgets the details.” Hiatus. Swinging of the right forearm. Lunge. “And he was Haydon’s friend, not yours?” Lacon enquired.

“They were at Oxford together before the war.”

“And stablemates in the Circus during and after. The famous Haydon-Prideaux partnership. My predecessor spoke of it interminably.” He repeated, “But you were never close to him?”

“To Prideaux? No.”

“Not a cousin, I mean?”

“For heaven’s sake,” Smiley breathed.

Lacon grew suddenly awkward again, but a dogged purpose kept his gaze on Smiley. “And there’s no emotional or other reason which you feel might debar you from the assignment? You must speak up, George,” he insisted anxiously, as if speaking up were the last thing he wanted. He waited a fraction, then threw it all away: “Though I see no real case. There’s always a part of us that belongs to the public domain, isn’t there? The social contract cuts both ways; you always knew that, I’m sure. So did Prideaux.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, good Lord, he was shot, George. A bullet in the back is held to be quite a sacrifice, isn’t it, even in your world?”

Alone, Smiley stood at the further end of the paddock, under the dripping trees, trying to make sense of his emotions while he reached for breath. Like an old illness, his anger had taken him by surprise. Ever since his retirement, he had been denying its existence, steering clear of anything that could touch it off: newspapers, former colleagues, gossip of the Martindale sort. After a lifetime of living by his wits and his considerable memory, he had given himself full time to the profession of forgetting. He had forced himself to pursue scholarly interests which had served him well enough as a distraction while he was at the Circus, but which now that he was unemployed were nothing, absolutely nothing. He could have shouted: Nothing!

“Burn the lot,” Ann had suggested helpfully, referring to his books. “Set fire to the house. But don’t rot.”

If by rot, she meant conform, she was right to read that as his aim. He had tried, really tried, as he approached what the insurance advertisements were pleased to call the evening of his life, to be all that a model
rentier
should be; though no one, least of all Ann, thanked him for the effort. Each morning as he got out of bed, each evening as he went back to it, usually alone, he had reminded himself that he never was and never had been indispensable. He had schooled himself to admit that in those last wretched months of Control’s career, when disasters followed one another with heady speed, he had been guilty of seeing things out of proportion. And if the old professional Adam rebelled in him now and then and said: You
know
the place went bad, you
know
Jim Prideaux was betrayed—and what more eloquent testimony is there than a bullet, two bullets, in the back? Well, he had replied, suppose he did? And suppose he was right? “It is sheer vanity to believe that one fat middle-aged spy is the only person capable of holding the world together,” he would tell himself. And other times: “I never heard of anyone yet who left the Circus without some unfinished business.”

Only Ann, though she could not read his workings, refused to accept his findings. She was quite passionate, in fact, as only women can be on matters of business, really driving him to go back, take up where he had left off, never to veer aside in favour of the easy arguments. Not of course that she knew anything, but what woman was ever stopped by a want of information? She felt. And despised him for not acting in accordance with her feelings.

And now, at the very moment when he was near enough beginning to believe his own dogma, a feat made no easier by Ann’s infatuation for an out-of-work actor, what happens but that the assembled ghosts of his past—Lacon, Control, Karla, Alleline, Esterhase, Bland, and finally Bill Haydon himself—barge into his cell and cheerfully inform him, as they drag him back to this same garden, that everything he had been calling vanity is truth?

“Haydon,” he repeated to himself, no longer able to stem the tides of memory. Even the name was like a jolt. “I’m told that you and Bill shared
everything
once upon a time,” said Martindale. He stared at his chubby hands, watching them shake. Too old? Impotent? Afraid of the chase? Or afraid of what he might unearth at the end of it? “There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing,” Ann liked to say—it was a favourite apologia, indeed, for many of her misdemeanours—“There is only one reason for doing
something.
And that’s because you want to.” Or have to? Ann would furiously deny it: coercion, she would say, is just another word for doing what you want; or for not doing what you are afraid of.

Middle children weep longer than their brothers and sisters. Over her mother’s shoulder, stilling her pains and her injured pride, Jackie Lacon watched the party leave. First, two men she had not seen before: one tall, one short and dark. They drove off in a small green van. No one waved to them, she noticed, or even said goodbye. Next, her father left in his own car; lastly a blond, good-looking man and a short fat one in an enormous overcoat like a pony blanket made their way to a sports car parked under the beech trees. For a moment she really thought there must be something wrong with the fat one, he followed so slowly and so painfully. Then, seeing the handsome man hold the car door for him, he seemed to wake, and hurried forward with a lumpy skip. Unaccountably, this gesture upset her afresh. A storm of sorrow seized her and her mother could not console her.

11

P
eter Guillam was a chivalrous fellow whose conscious loyalties were determined by his affections. The others had been made over long ago to the Circus. His father, a French businessman, had spied for a Circus
réseau
in the war while his mother, an Englishwoman, did mysterious things with codes. Until eight years ago, under the cover of a shipping clerk, Guillam himself had run his own agents in French North Africa, which was considered a murderous assignment. He was blown, his agents were hanged, and he entered the long middle age of the grounded pro. He did hackwork in London, sometimes for Smiley, ran a few home-based operations, including a network of girlfriends who were not, as the jargon has it, inter-conscious, and when Alleline’s crowd took over he was shoved out to grass in Brixton—he supposed because he had the wrong connections, among them Smiley. That, resolutely, was how until last Friday he would have told the story of his life. Of his relationship with Smiley he would have dwelt principally upon the end.

Guillam was living mainly in London docks in those days, where he was putting together low-grade Marine networks from whatever odd Polish, Russian, and Chinese seamen he and a bunch of talent-spotters occasionally managed to get their hands on. Betweenwhiles he sat in a small room on the first floor of the Circus and consoled a pretty secretary called Mary, and he was quite happy except that no one in authority would answer his minutes. When he used the phone, he got “engaged” or no answer. He had heard vaguely there was trouble, but there was always trouble. It was common knowledge, for instance, that Alleline and Control had locked horns, but they had been doing little else for years. He also knew, like everyone else, that a big operation had aborted in Czechoslovakia, that the Foreign Office and the Defence Ministry had jointly blown a gasket, and that Jim Prideaux—head of scalp-hunters, the oldest Czecho hand, and Bill Haydon’s lifelong stringer—had been shot up and put in the bag. Hence, he assumed, the loud silence and the glum faces. Hence also Bill Haydon’s manic anger, of which the news spread like a nervous thrill through all the building: like God’s wrath, said Mary, who loved a full-scale passion. Later he heard the catastrophe called Testify. Testify, Haydon told him much later, was the most incompetent bloody operation ever launched by an old man for his dying glory, and Jim Prideaux was the price of it. Bits made the newspapers, there were parliamentary questions, and even rumours, never officially confirmed, that British troops in Germany had been put on full alert.

Eventually, by sauntering in and out of other people’s offices, he began to realise what everyone else had realised some weeks before. The Circus wasn’t just silent, it was frozen. Nothing was coming in, nothing was going out; not at the level on which Guillam moved, anyhow. Inside the building, people in authority had gone to earth, and when pay day came round there were no buff envelopes in the pigeon-holes because, according to Mary, the housekeepers had not received the usual monthly authority to issue them. Now and then somebody would say they had seen Alleline leaving his club and he looked furious. Or Control getting into his car and he looked sunny. Or that Bill Haydon had resigned, on the grounds that he had been overruled or undercut, but Bill was always resigning. This time, said the rumour, the grounds were somewhat different, however: Haydon was furious that the Circus would not pay the Czech price for Jim Prideaux’s repatriation; it was said to be too high in agents, or prestige. And that Bill had broken out in one of his fits of chauvinism and declared that any price was fair to get one loyal Englishman home: give them everything, only get Jim back.

Then, one evening, Smiley peered round Guillam’s door and suggested a drink. Mary didn’t realise who he was and just said “Hullo” in her stylish classless drawl. As they walked out of the Circus side by side, Smiley wished the janitors good night with unusual terseness, and in the pub in Wardour Street he said, “I’ve been sacked,” and that was all.

From the pub they went to a wine bar off Charing Cross, a cellar with music playing and no one there. “Did they give any reason?” Guillam enquired. “Or is it just because you’ve lost your figure?”

It was the word “reason” that Smiley fixed on. He was by then politely but thoroughly drunk, but reason, as they walked unsteadily along the Thames embankment, reason got through to him.

“Reason as logic, or reason as motive?” he demanded, sounding less like himself than Bill Haydon, whose pre-war, Oxford Union style of polemic seemed in those days to be in everybody’s ears. “Or reason as a way of life?” They sat on a bench. “They don’t have to give
me
reasons. I can write my own damn reasons. And that is not the same,” he insisted as Guillam guided him carefully into a cab, gave the driver the money and the address, “that is not the same as the half-baked tolerance that comes from no longer caring.”

“Amen,” said Guillam, fully realising as he watched the cab pull into the distance that by the rules of the Circus their friendship, such as it was, had that minute ended. Next day Guillam learned that more heads had rolled and that Percy Alleline was to stand in as night watchman with the title of acting chief, and that Bill Haydon, to everyone’s astonishment, but most likely out of persisting anger with Control, would serve under him; or, as the wise ones said, over him.

By Christmas, Control was dead. “They’ll get you next,” said Mary, who saw these events as a second storming of the Winter Palace, and she wept when Guillam departed for the siberias of Brixton, ironically to fill Jim Prideaux’s slot.

Climbing the four steps to the Circus that wet Monday afternoon, his mind bright with the prospect of felony, Guillam passed these events in review and decided that today was the beginning of the road back.

He had spent the previous night at his spacious flat in Eaton Place in the company of Camilla, a music student with a long body and a sad, beautiful face. Though she was not more than twenty, her black hair was streaked with grey, as if from a shock she never talked about. As another effect, perhaps, of the same undescribed trauma, she ate no meat, wore no leather, and drank nothing alcoholic; only in love, it seemed to Guillam, was she free of these mysterious restraints.

He had spent the morning alone in his extremely dingy room in Brixton photographing Circus documents, having first drawn a subminiature camera from his own operational stores, a thing he did quite often to keep his hand in. “Daylight or electric?” the storeman asked, and they had a friendly discussion about film grain. He told his secretary he didn’t want to be disturbed, closed his door, and set to work according to Smiley’s precise instructions. The windows were high in the wall. Even sitting, he could see only the sky and the tip of the new school up the road.