Smiley's People

by John le Carré

  “Ah, now, you’re writing up our glorious past, I hear,” the night registrar sang indulgently. She was a tall girl and county, with Hilary’s walk: she seemed to topple even when she sat. She plonked an old tin deed-box on the table. “Fifth floor sent you this lot with their love,” she said. “Squeal if you need ferrying around, won’t you?”

  The label on the handle read “Memorabilia.” Lifting the lid, Smiley saw a heap of old buff files bound together with green string. Gently, he untied and lifted the cover of the first volume, to reveal Karla’s misted photograph staring up at him like a corpse from the darkness of its coffin. He read all night, he hardly stirred. He read as far into his own past as into Karla’s, and sometimes it seemed to him that the one life was merely the complement to the other; that they were causes of the same incurable malady. He wondered, as so often before, how he would have turned out if he had had Karla’s childhood, had been fired in the same kilns of revolutionary upheaval. He tried but, as so often before, failed to resist his own fascination at the sheer scale of the Russian suffering, its careless savagery, its flights of heroism. He felt small in the face of it, and soft by comparison, even though he did not consider his own life wanting in its pains. When the night-shift ended, he was still there, staring into the yellow pages “the way a horse sleeps standing up,” said the same night registrar, who rode in gymkhanas. Even when she took the files from him to return them to the fifth floor, he went on staring till she gently touched his elbow.

  He came the next night and the next; he disappeared, and returned a week later without explanation. When he had done with Karla, he drew the files on Kirov, on Mikhel, on Villem, and on the Group at large, if only to give, in retrospect, a solid documentary heart to all he had heard and remembered of the Leipzig-Kirov story. For there was yet another part of Smiley, call it pedant, call it scholar, for which the file was the only truth, and all the rest a mere extravagance until it was matched and fitted to the record. He drew the files on Otto Leipzig and the General, too, and, as a service to their memory, if nothing else, added to each a memorandum that calmly set out the true circumstances of his death. The last file he drew was Bill Haydon’s. There was hesitation at first about releasing it, and the fifth-floor duty officer, whoever he was that night, called Enderby out of a private ministerial dinner party in order to clear it with him. Enderby, to his credit, was furious: “God Almighty, man, he wrote the damn thing in the first place, didn’t he? If George can’t read his own reports, who the hell can?” Smiley didn’t really read it, even then, the registrar reported, who had a secret watching brief on everything he drew. It was more browsing, she said—and described a slow and speculative turning of the pages, “like someone looking for a picture they’d seen and couldn’t find again.” He only kept the file for an hour or so, then gave it back with a polite “Thank you very much.” He did not come again after that, but there is a story the janitors tell that some time after eleven on the same night, when he had tidied away his papers and cleared his desk space and consigned his few scribbled notes to the bin for secret waste, he was observed to stand for a long time in the rear courtyard—a dismal place, all white tiles and black drain-pipes and a stink of cat—staring at the building he was about to take his leave of, and at the light that was burning weakly in his former room, much as old men will look at the houses where they were born, the schools where they were educated, and the churches where they were married. And from Cambridge Circus—it was by then eleven-thirty—he startled everybody, took a cab to Paddington and caught the night sleeper to Penzance, which leaves just after midnight. He had not bought a ticket in advance, or ordered one by telephone; nor did he have any night things with him, not even a razor, though in the morning he did manage to borrow one from the attendant. Sam Collins had put together a ragtag team of watchers by then, an amateurish lot admittedly, and all they could say afterwards was that he made a call from a phone-box, but there was no time for them to do anything about it.

  “Bloody queer moment to take a holiday, isn’t it?” Enderby remarked petulantly when this intelligence was brought to him, together with a string of moans from the staff-side about overtime, travelling time, and allowances for unsocial hours. Then he remembered, and said, “Oh, my Christ, he’s visiting his bitch goddess. Hasn’t he got enough problems, taking on Karla single-handed?” The whole episode annoyed Enderby strangely. He fumed all day and insulted Sam Collins in front of everyone. As a former diplomat, he had great contempt for abstracts, even if he took refuge in them constantly.

  The house stood on a hill, in a coppice of bare elms still waiting for the blight. It was granite and very big, and crumbling, with a crowd of gables that clustered like torn black tents above the tree-tops. Acres of smashed greenhouses led to it; collapsed stables and an untended kitchen garden lay below it in the valley. The hills were olive and shaven, and had once been hill-forts. “Harry’s Cornish heap,” she called it. Between the hills ran the line of the sea, which that morning was hard as slate under the lowering cloud banks. A taxi took him up the bumpy drive, an old Humber like a wartime staff car. This is where she spent her childhood, thought Smiley; and where she adopted mine. The drive was very pitted; stubs of felled trees lay like yellow tombstones either side. She’ll be in the main house, he thought. The cottage where they had passed their holidays together lay over the brow, but on her own she stayed in the house, in the room she had had as a girl. He told the driver not to wait, and started towards the front porch, picking his way between the puddles with his London shoes, giving the puddles all his attention. It’s not my world any more, he thought. It’s hers, it’s theirs. His watcher’s eyes scanned the many windows of the front façade, trying to catch a glimpse of her shadow. She’d have picked me up at the station, only she muddled the time, he thought, giving her the benefit of the doubt. But her car was parked in the stables with the morning frost still on it; he had spotted it while he was still paying off the taxi. He rang the bell and heard her footsteps on the flagstones, but it was Mrs. Tremedda who opened the door and showed him to one of the drawing-rooms—smoking-room, morning-room, drawing-room, he had never worked them out. A log fire was burning.

  “I’ll get her,” Mrs. Tremedda said.

  At least I haven’t got to talk about Communists to mad Harry, Smiley thought while he waited. At least I haven’t got to hear how all the Chinese waiters in Penzance are standing by for the order from Peking to poison their customers. Or how the bloody strikers should be put up against a wall and shot—where’s their sense of service, for Christ’s sake? Or how Hitler may have been a blackguard but he had the right idea about the Jews. Or some similar monstrous, but seriously held, conviction.

  She’s told the family to keep clear, he thought.

  He could smell honey through the wood-smoke and wondered, as he always did, where it came from. The furniture wax? Or was there, somewhere in the catacombs, a honey room, just as there was a gunroom and a fishing-room and a box-room and, for all he knew, a love room? He looked for the Tiepolo drawing that used to hang over the fireplace, a scene of Venice life. They’ve sold it, he thought. Each time he came, the collection had dwindled by one more pretty thing. What Harry spent the money on was anybody’s guess—certainly not the upkeep of the house.

  She crossed the room to him and he was glad it was she who was doing the walking, not himself, because he would have stumbled into something. His mouth was dry and he had a lump of cactus in his stomach; he didn’t want her near him, her reality was suddenly too much for him. She was looking beautiful and Celtic, as she always did down here, and as she came towards him her brown eyes scanned him, looking for his mood. She kissed him on the mouth, putting her fingers along the back of his neck to guide him, and Haydon’s shadow fell between them like a sword.

  “You didn’t think to pick up a morning paper at the station, did you?” she enquired. “Harry’s stopped them again.”

  She asked whether he had breakfasted and he lied and said
he had. Perhaps they could go for a walk instead, she suggested, as if he were someone wanting to see round the estate. She took him to the gunroom where they rummaged for boots that would do. There were boots that shone like conkers and boots that looked permanently damp. The coast footpath led in both directions out of the bay. Periodically, Harry threw barbed-wire barricades across it, or put up notices saying “DANGER LAND-MINES.” He was fighting a running battle with the Council for permission to make a camping site, and its refusal sometimes drove him to a fury. They chose the north shoulder and the wind, and she had taken his arm to listen. The north was windier, but on the south you had to go single file through the gorse.

  “I’m going away for a bit, Ann,” he said, trying to use her name naturally. “I didn’t want to tell you over the telephone.” It was his wartime voice and he felt an idiot when he heard himself using it. “I’m going off to blackmail a lover,” he should have said.

  “Away to somewhere particular, or just away from me?”

  “There’s a job I have to do abroad,” he said, still trying to escape his Gallant Pilot rôle, and failing. “I don’t think you should go to Bywater Street while I’m away.”

  She had locked her fingers through his own, but then she did those things: she handled people naturally, all people. Below them in the rocks’ cleft, the sea broke and formed itself furiously in patterns of writhing foam.

  “And you’ve come all this way just to tell me the house is out of bounds?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Let me try it differently,” she proposed when they had walked a distance. “If Bywater Street had been in bounds, would you have suggested that I did go there? Or are you telling me it’s out of bounds for good?”

  She stopped and gazed at him, and held him away from her, trying to read his answer. She whispered, “For goodness’ sake,” and he could see the doubt, the pride, and the hope in her face all at once, and wondered what she saw in his, because he himself had no knowledge of what he felt, except that he belonged nowhere near her, nowhere near this place; she was like a girl on a floating island that was swiftly moving away from him with the shadows of all her lovers gathered round her. He loved her, he was indifferent to her, he observed her with the curse of detachment, but she was leaving him. If I do not know myself, he thought, how can I tell who you are? He saw the lines of age and pain and striving that their life together had put there. She was all he wanted, she was nothing, she reminded him of someone he had once known a long time ago; she was remote to him, he knew her entirely. He saw the gravity in her face and one minute wondered that he could ever have taken it for profundity; the next, he despised her dependence on him, and wanted only to be free of her. He wanted to call out “Come back” but he didn’t do it; he didn’t even put out a hand to stop her from slipping away.

  “You used to tell me never to stop looking,” he said. The statement began like the preface to a question, but no question followed.

  She waited, then offered a statement of her own. “I’m a comedian, George,” she said. “I need a straight man. I need you.”

  But he saw her from a long way off.

  “It’s the job,” he said.

  “I can’t live with them. I can’t live without them.” He supposed she was talking about her lovers again. “There’s one thing worse than change and that’s the status quo. I hate the choice. I love you. Do you understand?” There was a gap while he must have said something. She was not relying on him, but she was leaning on him while she wept, because the weeping had taken away her strength. “You never knew how free you were, George,” he heard her say. “I had to be free for both of us.”

  She seemed to realise her own absurdity and laughed.

  She let go his arm and they walked again while she tried to right the ship by asking plain questions. He said weeks, perhaps longer. He said “In a hotel,” but didn’t say which city or country. She faced him again, and the tears were suddenly running anywhere, worse than before, but they still didn’t move him as he wished they would.

  “George, this is all there is, I promise you,” she said, halting to make her entreaty. “The whistle’s gone, in your world and in mine. We’re landed with each other. There isn’t any more. According to the averages we’re the most contented people on earth.”

  He nodded, seeming to take the point that she had been somewhere he had not, but not regarding it as conclusive. They walked a little more, and he noticed that when she didn’t speak he was able to relate to her, but only in the sense that she was another living creature moving along the same path as himself.

  “It’s to do with the people who ruined Bill Haydon,” he said to her, either as a consolation, or an excuse for his retreat. But he thought: “who ruined you.”

  He had missed his train and there were two hours to kill. The tide was out so he walked along the shore near Marazion, scared by his own indifference. The day was grey, the seabirds were very white against the slate sea. A couple of brave children were splashing in the surf. I am a thief of the spirit, he thought despondently. Faithless, I am pursuing another man’s convictions; I am trying to warm myself against other people’s fires. He watched the children, and recalled some scrap of poetry from the days when he read it:To turn as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

  Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.

  Yes, he thought glumly. That’s me.

  “Now, George,” Lacon demanded. “Do you think we set our women up too high, is that where we English middle-class chaps go wrong? Do you think—I’ll put it this way—that we English, with our traditions and our schools, expect our womenfolk to stand for far too much, then blame them for not standing up at all—if you follow me? We see them as concepts, rather than flesh and blood. Is that our hangup?”

  Smiley said it might be.

  “Well, if it isn’t, why does Val always fall for shits?” Lacon snapped aggressively, to the surprise of the couple sitting at the next-door table.

  Smiley did not know the answer to that either.

  They had dined, appallingly, in the steak-house Lacon had suggested. They had drunk Spanish burgundy out of a carafe, and Lacon had raged wildly over the British political dilemma. Now they were drinking coffee and a suspect brandy. The anti-Communist phobia was overdone; Lacon had declared himself sure of it. Communists were only people, after all. They weren’t red-toothed monsters, not any more. Communists wanted what everyone wanted: prosperity and a bit of peace and quiet. A chance to take a breather from all this damned hostility. And if they didn’t—well, what could we do about it anyway? he had asked. Some problems—take Ireland—were insoluble, but you would never get the Americans to admit anything was insoluble. Britain was ungovernable; so would everywhere else be in a couple of years. Our future was with the collective, but our survival was with the individual, and the paradox was killing us every day.

  “Now, George, how do you see it? You’re out of harness after all. You have the objective view, the overall perspective.”

  Smiley heard himself muttering something inane about a spectrum.

  And now the topic that Smiley had dreaded all evening was finally upon them: their seminar on marriage had begun.

  “We were always taught that women had to be cherished,” Lacon declared resentfully. “If one didn’t make ’em feel loved every minute of the day, they’d go off the rails. But this chap Val’s with—well, if she annoys him, or speaks out of turn, he’ll like as not give her a black eye. You and I never do that, do we?”

  “I’m sure we don’t,” said Smiley.

  “Look here. Do you reckon if I went and saw her—bearded her in his house—took a really tough line—threatened legal action and so forth—it might tip the scales? I mean I’m bigger than he is, God knows. I’m not without clout, whichever way you read me!”

  They stood on the pavement under the stars, waiting for Smiley’s cab.

  “Well, have a good holiday anyway. You’ve deserved it,”
Lacon said. “Going somewhere warm?”

  “Well, I thought I might just take off and wander.”

  “Lucky you. My God, I envy you your freedom! Well, you’ve been jolly useful, anyway. I shall follow your advice to the letter.”

  “But, Oliver, I didn’t give you any advice,” Smiley protested, slightly alarmed.

  Lacon ignored him. “And that other thing is all squared away, I hear,” he said serenely. “No loose ends, no messiness. Good of you, that, George. Loyal. I’m going to see if we can get you a bit of recognition for it. What have you got already, I forget? Some chap the other day in the Athenaeum was saying you deserve a K.”

  The cab came, and to Smiley’s embarrassment Lacon insisted on shaking hands. “George. Bless you. You’ve been a brick. We’re birds of a feather, George. Both patriots, givers, not takers. Trained to our services. Our country. We must pay the price. If Ann had been your agent instead of your wife, you’d probably have run her pretty well.”

  The next afternoon, following a telephone call from Toby to say that “the deal was just about ready for completion,” George Smiley quietly left for Switzerland, using the workname Barraclough. From Zurich Airport he took the Swissair bus to Berne and made straight for the Bellevue Palace Hotel, an enormous, sumptuous place of mellowed Edwardian quiet, which on clear days looks across the foothills to the glistening Alps, but that evening was shrouded in a cloying winter fog. He had considered smaller places; he had considered using one of Toby’s safe flats. But Toby had persuaded him that the Bellevue was best. It had several exits, it was central, and it was the first place in Berne where anyone would think to find him, and therefore the last where Karla, if he was looking out for him, would expect him to be. Entering the enormous hall, Smiley had the feeling of stepping onto an empty liner far out at sea.