The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  I did not remember ever quite inviting Toby to join us, but certainly the staff had been expecting him and the mess waiters had scurried out to greet him as he arrived. In his wide, watered-silk lapels and waistcoat with its Balkan frogging, he looked every inch the Rittmeister.

  Burr had hastened directly from Heathrow, changing into his dinner jacket in the back of his chauffeur-driven Rover in deference to George. He had entered almost unremarked, with that soundless dancer’s walk of his that big men seem to manage naturally. Then Monty Arbuck spotted him and at once gave up his seat. Burr had recently become the first man to make Coordinator before the age of thirty-five.

  And at Smiley’s feet lounged my last intake of students, the girls like cut flowers in their evening dresses, the boys keen and freshfaced after their end-of-course exertions in Argyll.

  “It’s over,” Smiley repeated.

  Was it his sudden stillness that alerted us. His altered voice? Or some almost priestly gesture that he made, a stiffening of his tubby body in piety or resolution. I couldn’t have told you then, I can’t tell you now. But I know I caught no one’s eye, yet with his words I felt at once a kind of tensing among us, as if Smiley were calling us to arms—yet what he was talking about had as much to do with laying them down as taking them up.

  “It’s over, and so am I. Absolutely over. Time you rang down the curtain on yesterday’s cold warrior. And please don’t ask me back, ever again. The new time needs new people The worst thing you can do is imitate us.”

  I think he had intended to end there, but with George you do better not to guess. For all I know, he had committed his entire closing speech to memory before he came, worked on it, rehearsed it word for word. In either case our silence now commanded him, as did our need of ceremony. Indeed, so thorough was our dependence on him at that moment that if he had turned and walked from the room without offering us another word, our disappointment would have turned our love to gall.

  “I only ever cared about the man,” Smiley announced. And it was typical of his artfulness that he should have opened with a riddle, then waited a moment before setting out to explain it. “I never gave a fig for the ideologies, unless they were mad or evil, I never saw institutions as being worthy of their parts, or policies as much other than excuses for not feeling. Man, not the mass, is what our calling is about. It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn’t notice. It wasn’t weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we’ve had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they’ve had their day. Because they have no heart of their own. They’re the whores and angels of our striving selves. One day, history may tell us who really won. If a democratic Russia emerges—why then, Russia will have been the winner. And if the West chokes on its own materialism, then the West may still turn out to have been the loser. History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose. You asked me how we should think of Russia today.”

  Was that really what we had asked him? What else explained his change of direction? We had talked loosely of the crumbling Soviet Empire, it was true; we had pondered the rise and rise of Japan and the historical shifts of economic power. And in the to-and-fro after dinner, yes, there had been a few passing references to my time in the Russia House, and a few questions touching on the Middle East and Smiley’s work with the Fishing Rights Committee, which, thanks to Toby, had become common knowledge. But I don’t think that was the question George was choosing to answer now.

  “You ask,” he went on, “can we ever trust the Bear? You seem to be amused, yet a bit unseated, by the notion that we can talk to the Russians like human beings and find common cause with them in many fields. I will give you several answers at once.

  “The first is no, we can never trust the Bear. For one reason, the Bear doesn’t trust himself. The Bear is threatened and the Bear is frightened and the Bear is falling apart. The Bear is disgusted with his past, sick of his present and scared stiff of his future. He often was. The bear is broke, lazy, volatile, incompetent, slippery, dangerously proud, dangerously armed, sometimes brilliant, often ignorant. Without his claws, he’d be just another chaotic member of the Third World. But he isn’t without his claws, not by any means. And he can’t pull his soldiers back from foreign parts overnight, for the good reason that he can’t house them or feed them or employ them, and he doesn’t trust them either. And since this Service is the hired keeper of our national mistrust, we’d be neglecting our duty if we relaxed for one second our watch on the Bear, or on any of his unruly cubs. That’s the first answer.

  “The second answer is yes, we can trust the Bear completely. The Bear has never been so trustworthy. The Bear is begging to be part of us, to submerge his problems in us, have his own bank account with us, to shop in our High Street and be accepted as a dignified member of our forest as well as his—all the more so because his society and economy are in tatters, his natural resources are pillaged and his managers incompetent beyond belief. The Bear needs us so desperately that we may safely trust him to need us. The Bear longs to wind back his dreadful history and emerge from the dark of the last seventy or seven hundred years. We are his daylight.

  “The problem is, we Westerners do not find it in us naturally to trust the Bear, whether he’s a White Bear or a Red Bear, or both kinds of bear at once, which is what he is at the moment. The Bear may be in perdition without us, but there are lots of us who believe that’s exactly where he belongs. Just as there were people in 1945 who argued that a defeated Germany should remain a rubble desert for the rest of human history.”

  Smiley paused and seemed to wonder whether he had said enough. He glanced towards me but I refused to catch his eye. The waiting silence must have convinced him to go on.

  “The Bear of the future will be whatever we make of him, and the reasons for making something of him are several. The first is common decency. When you’ve helped a man to escape from wrongful imprisonment, the least you can do is provide him with a bowl of soup and the means to take his place in a free world. The second is so obvious it makes me a little intemperate to have to mention it at all. Russia—even Russia alone, shorn of all her conquests and possessions—is a vast country with a vast population in a crucial part of the globe. Do we leave the Bear to rot?—encourage him to become resentful, backward, an over-armed nation outside our camp? Or make a partner of him in a world that’s changing its shape every day?”

  He picked up his balloon glass and peered thoughtfully into it while he swirled the last of his brandy. And I sensed that he was finding it harder to take his leave than he had expected.

  “Yes. Well,” he muttered, as if somehow defending himself against his own assertions. “It’s not only our minds we’re going to have to reconstruct, either. It’s the over-mighty modern State we’ve built for ourselves as a bastion against something that isn’t there any more. We’ve given up far too many freedoms in order to be free. Now we’ve got to take them back.”

  He gave a shy grin, and I knew that he was trying to break his own spell upon us.

  “So while you’re out there striving loyally for the State, perhaps you’ll do me a small favour and lean on its pillars from time to time. It’s got a lot too big for its boots of late. It would be nice if you would cut it down to size. Ned, I’m a bore. Time you sent me home.”

  He stood up abruptly, as if shaking himself free of something that threatened to hold him too tight. Then, very deliberately, he treated himself to a last slow look round the room—not at the students any more, but at the old photographs and trophies of his time, apparentl
y committing them to memory. He was taking leave of his house after he had bequeathed it to his heirs. Then, with a great flurry, he launched a search for his spectacles, before he discovered he was wearing them. Then he drew back his shoulders and marched purposefully to the door as two students hastened to open it for him.

  “Yes. Well. Goodnight. And thanks. Oh, and tell them to spy on the ozone layer, will you, Ned? It’s dreadfully hot in St. Agnes for the time of year.”

  He left without looking back.

  13

  The rituals of retirement from the Service are probably no more harrowing than any other professional leave-taking, but they have their own poignancy. There are the ceremonies of remembering—lunches with old contacts, office parties, brave handshakes with tearful senior secretaries, courtesy visits to friendly services. And there are the ceremonies of forgetting, where snip by snip you sever yourself from the special knowledge not given to other mortals. For someone who has spent a lifetime in the Service, including three years in Burr’s inmost Secretariat, these can be lengthy and repetitive affairs, even if the secrets themselves have retired long before you. Closeted in Palfrey’s musty lawyer’s office, mercifully quite often in the glow of a good lunch, I signed away one piece after another of my past, obediently mumbling after him the same shy little English oath, and listening each time to his insincere warnings of retribution should I be tempted by vanity or money to transgress.

  And I would be deceiving us both if I pretended that the cumulative burden of these ceremonies did not slowly weigh me down, and make me wish that my day of execution could be brought forward—or, better still, regarded as accomplished. For day by day I began to feel like the man who is reconciled to death but has to spend the last of his energies consoling those who will survive him.

  It was a considerable relief to me, therefore, when seated once more in Palfrey’s wretched lair with three days still to go before my final freedom or imprisonment, I received a peremptory summons to Burr’s presence.

  “I’ve got a job for you. You’ll hate it,” he assured me, and slammed down the phone.

  He was still fuming when I reached his gaudy modern office. “You’re to read his file, then drive into the country and reason with him. You’re not to offend him, but if you should happen to break his neck by accident you’ll not find me over-critical.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Some leftover relic of Percy Alleline’s. One of those beer-bellied tycoons from the City that Percy liked to play his golf with.”

  I glanced at the cover of the top volume. “BRADSHAW,” I read, “Sir Anthony Joyston.” And in small letters underneath: “asset index,” meaning that the fileholder was perceived as an ally of the Service.

  “You’re to crawl to him, that’s an order. Appeal to his better nature,” said Burr in the same acid tone. “Strike the elder statesman’s note. Bring him back into the fold.”

  “Who says I am?”

  “The sainted Foreign Office. Who do you think?”

  “Why don’t they do their own crawling?” I said, peering curiously at the career synopsis on page I. “I thought that was what they were paid for.”

  “They tried. They sent a Junior Minister, cap in hand. Sir Anthony is crawlproof. He also knows too much. He can name names and point fingers. Sir Anthony Bradshaw”—Burr announced, raising his voice in a North Country salvo of indignation—“Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw,” he corrected himself, “is one of England’s natural shits, who in the course of affecting to be of service to his country has picked up more knowledge of the disreputable activities of Her Majesty’s Government than HMG ever picked up from Sir Anthony in regard to her adversaries. He accordingly has HMG by the balls. Your brief is to invite him, very courteously, to relax his grip. Your weapons for this task are your grey locks and your palpable good nature, which I have observed that you are not above putting to perfidious use. He’s expecting you at five this evening and he likes punctuality. Kitty’s cleared a desk for you in the anteroom.”

  It was not long before Burr’s outrage was explained to me. There are few things more riling in our trade than having to cope with the unappetising leftovers of one’s predecessors, and Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, self-styled merchant venturer and City magnate, was a gruesome example of the type. Alleline had befriended him—at his club, where else? Alleline had recruited him. Alleline had sponsored him through a string of shady transactions of dubious value to anybody but Sir Anthony, and there were uncomfortable suggestions that Alleline might have taken a cut. Where scandal had threatened, Alleline had sheltered Sir Anthony under the Circus’s compendious umbrella. Worse still, many of the doors that Alleline had opened for Bradshaw appeared to have stayed open, for the reason that nobody had thought to close them. And it was through one of these that Bradshaw had now walked, to the shrill outrage of the Foreign Office and half of Whitehall.

  I drew an Ordnance Survey map from Library and a Ford Granada from the car pool. At half past two, with the file pretty much in my head, I set off. Sometimes you forget how beautiful England is. I passed through Newbury and climbed a winding hill lined with beech trees whose long shadows were cut like trenches into the golden stubble. A smell of cricket fields filled the car. I mounted a crest, castles of white cloud waited to receive me. I must have been thinking of my childhood, I suppose, for I had a sudden urge to drive straight to them, a thing I had often dreamed of as a boy. The car dipped again and fell free, and suddenly a whole valley opened below me, strewn with hamlets, churches, folding fields and forests.

  I passed a pub, and soon a great pair of closed and gilded gates appeared between stone gateposts capped by carved lions. Beside them stood a neat white gatehouse newly thatched. A fit young man lowered his face to my open window and studied me with sniper’s eyes.

  “To see Sir Anthony,” I said.

  “Name, sir?”

  “Carlisle,” I replied, using an alias for the last time.

  The boy disappeared into the lodge; the gates opened, then closed as soon as I was through them. The park was bordered by a high brick wall—there must have been a couple of miles of it. Fallow deer lay in the shade of chestnut trees. The drive lifted and the house appeared before me. It was golden and immaculate and very large. The centre section was William and Mary. The wings looked later, but not much. A lake lay before it, vegetable gardens and greenhouses behind. The old stables had been converted to offices, with clever outside staircases and glazed external corridors. A gardener was watering the orangerie.

  The drive skirted the lake and brought me to the front sweep. Two Arab mares and a llama eyed me over the fence of a lunging ring. A young butler came down the steps, dressed in black trousers and a linen jacket.

  “Shall I park your car round the back, Mr. Carlisle, once you’ve been introduced?” he asked. “Sir Anthony does like a clear façade, when he can get one, sir.”

  I gave him the keys and followed him up the wide steps. There were nine, though I can’t imagine why I counted, except that it was something we had taught on the Sarratt awareness course, and in recent weeks my life seemed to have become less a continuation than a mosaic of past ages and experiences. If Ben had come striding up to me and grasped my hand, I don’t think I would have been particularly surprised. If Monica or Sally had appeared to accuse me, I would have had my answers ready.

  I entered a huge hall. A splendid double staircase rose to an open landing. Portraits of noble ancestors, all men, stared down at me, but somehow I didn’t believe they were of one family, or could have lived here long without their women. I passed through a billiards room and noticed that the table and cues were new. I suppose I saw everything so clearly because I was treating each experience as my last. I followed the butler through a stately drawing room and traversed a second room that was got up as a hall of mirrors, and a third that was supposed to be informal, with a television set the size of one of those old ice-cream tricycles that used to call at my preparatory school on sunn
y evenings just like this. I arrived at a pair of majestic doors and waited while the butler knocked. Then waited again for a response. If Bradshaw were an Arab, he would keep me standing here for hours, I thought, remembering Beirut.

  Finally I heard a male voice drawl “Come,” and the butler took a pace into the room and announced, “A Mr. Carlisle, Sir Anthony, from London.”

  I had not told him I had come from London.

  The butler stepped aside and gave me a first view of my host, though it took a little longer before my host had his first view of Mr. Carlisle.

  He was sitting at a twelve-foot desk with brass inlay and cabriole legs. Modern oil paintings of spoilt children hung behind him. His correspondence was stacked in trays of thick stitched hide. He was a big, well-nourished man, and clearly a big worker also, for he had stripped to his shirt, which was blue with a midwife’s white collar, and he was working in his braces, which were red. Also he was too busy to acknowledge me. First he read, using a gold pen to guide his eye. Then he signed, using the gold pen to write. Then he meditated, still in a downward direction, using the tip of the gold pen as a focus for his great thoughts. His gold cufflinks were as big as old pennies. Then at last he laid the pen down and, with a wounded—even accusatory—air, he raised his head, first to discover me, then to measure me by standards I had yet to ascertain.

  At the same moment, by a happy chance of nature, a shaft of low sunlight from the French windows landed on his face, and I was able to measure him in return: the self-sadness of his pouchy eyes, as if he should be pitied for his wealth, the straight small mouth set tense and crooked in the puckered chins, the air of resolution formed of weakness, of boyhood suspicions in a grown-up world. At forty-five, this fattened child was unappeased, blaming some absent parent for his comforts.

  Suddenly, Bradshaw was walking towards me. Stalking? Wading? There is an English walk these days peculiar to men of power, and it is a confection of several things at once. Self-confidence is one, lazy sportiveness another. But there is also menace in it, and impatience, and a leisured arrogance, which comes with the crablike splaying of elbows that give way to nobody, and the boxer’s slouch of the shoulders, and the playful springiness in the knees. You knew long before you shook his hand that he had no truck with a whole category of life that ranged from art to public transport. You were silently forewarned to keep your distance if you were that kind of fool.