“Roses.” He had recovered his confidence. “Roses all the way. I’ve got a girl who’s an air hostess with South African. A pal of mine flew me cargo to the Cape; at the Cape my girl took care of me, then hitched me a free ride to Dublin with one of the pilots. As far as anyone back East knows, I never left the peninsula.”
“I’m doing what I can to check,” said Guillam to the ceiling.
“Well, you be damn careful, baby,” Tarr snapped down the line to Guillam. “Because I don’t want the wrong people on my back.”
“Why did you come to Mr. Guillam?” Smiley enquired, still deep in Poole’s passport. It had a used, well-thumbed look, neither too full nor too empty. “Apart from the fact that you were frightened, of course.”
“Mr. Guillam’s my boss,” said Tarr virtuously.
“Did it cross your mind he might just turn you straight over to Alleline? After all, you’re something of a wanted man as far as the Circus top brass is concerned, aren’t you?”
“Sure. But I don’t figure Mr. Guillam’s any fonder of the new arrangement than you are, Mr. Smiley.”
“He also loves England,” Guillam explained with mordant sarcasm.
“Sure. I got homesick.”
“Did you ever consider going to anyone else but Mr. Guillam? Why not one of the overseas residencies, for instance, where you were in less danger? Is Mackelvore still headman in Paris?” Guillam nodded. “There you are, then: you could have gone to Mr. Mackelvore. He recruited you, you can trust him: he’s old Circus. You could have sat safely in Paris instead of risking your neck over here. Oh, dear God. Lacon, quick!”
Smiley had risen to his feet, the back of one hand pressed to his mouth as he stared out the window. In the paddock Jackie Lacon was lying on her stomach screaming while a riderless pony careered between the trees. They were still watching as Lacon’s wife, a pretty woman with long hair and thick winter stockings, bounded over the fence and gathered the child up.
“They’re often taking tumbles,” Lacon remarked, quite cross. “They don’t hurt themselves at that age.” And scarcely more graciously: “You’re not responsible for everyone, you know, George.”
Slowly they settled again.
“And if you had been making for Paris,” Smiley resumed, “which route would you have taken?”
“The same till Ireland, then Dublin-Orly, I guess. What do you expect me to do—walk on the damn water?”
At this Lacon coloured and Guillam with an angry exclamation rose to his feet. But Smiley seemed quite unbothered. Taking up the passport again, he turned slowly back to the beginning.
“And how did you get in touch with Mr. Guillam?”
Guillam answered for him, speaking fast: “He knew where I garage my car. He left a note on it saying he wanted to buy it and signed it with his workname Trench. He suggested a place to meet and put in a veiled plea for privacy before I took my trade elsewhere. I brought Fawn along to baby-sit—”
Smiley interrupted: “That was Fawn at the door just now?”
“He watched my back while we talked,” Guillam said. “I’ve kept him with us ever since. As soon as I’d heard Tarr’s story, I rang Lacon from a call-box and asked for an interview . . . George, why don’t we talk this over among ourselves?”
“Rang Lacon down here or in London?”
“Down here,” said Lacon.
There was a pause till Guillam explained. “I happened to remember the name of a girl in Lacon’s office. I mentioned her name and said she had asked me to speak to him urgently on an intimate matter. It wasn’t perfect but it was the best I could think of on the spur of the moment.” He added, filling the silence, “Well, damn it, there was no reason to suppose the phone was tapped.”
“There was every reason.”
Smiley had closed the passport and was examining the binding by the light of a tattered reading lamp at his side. “This is rather good, isn’t it?” he remarked lightly. “Really very good indeed. I’d say that was a professional product. I can’t find a blemish.”
“Don’t worry, Mr. Smiley,” Tarr retorted, taking it back; “it’s not made in Russia.” By the time he reached the door, his smile had returned. “You know something?” he said, addressing all three of them down the aisle of the long room. “If Irina is right, you boys are going to need a whole new Circus. So if we all stick together I guess we could be in on the ground floor.” He gave the door a playful tap. “Come on, darling, it’s me. Ricki.”
“Thank you! It’s all right now! Open up, please,” Lacon shouted, and a moment later the key was turned, the dark figure of Fawn the baby-sitter flitted into view, and then the footsteps faded into the big hollows of the house, to the distant accompaniment of Jackie Lacon’s crying.
10
On another side of the house, away from the pony paddock, a grass tennis court was hidden among the trees. It was not a good tennis court; it was mown seldom. In spring the grass was sodden from the winter and no sun got in to dry it, in summer the balls disappeared into the foliage, and this morning it was ankle deep in frosted leaves that had collected from all over the garden. But round the outside, roughly following the wire rectangle, a footpath wandered between some beech trees and here Smiley and Lacon wandered also. Smiley had fetched his travelling coat but Lacon wore only his threadbare suit. For this reason, perhaps, he chose a brisk, if unco-ordinated, pace which with each stride took him well ahead of Smiley, so that he had constantly to hover, shoulders and elbows lifted, waiting till the shorter man caught up. Then he promptly bounded off again, gaining ground. They completed two laps in this way before Lacon broke the silence.
“When you came to me a year ago with a similar suggestion, I’m afraid I threw you out. I suppose I should apologise. I was remiss.” There was a suitable silence while he pondered his dereliction. “I instructed you to abandon your enquiries.”
“You told me they were unconstitutional,” Smiley said mournfully, as if he were recalling the same sad error.
“Was that the word I used? Good Lord, how very pompous of me!”
From the direction of the house came the sound of Jackie’s continued crying.
“You never had any, did you?” Lacon piped at once, his head lifted to the sound.
“I’m sorry?”
“Children. You and Ann.”
“ No.”
“Nephews, nieces?”
“One nephew.”
“On your side?”
“Hers.”
Perhaps I never left the place, Smiley thought, peering around him at the tangled roses, the broken swings and sodden sandpits, the raw red house so shrill in the morning light. Perhaps we’re still here from last time.
Lacon was apologising again: “Dare I say I didn’t absolutely trust your motives? It rather crossed my mind that Control had put you up to it, you see. As a way of hanging on to power and keeping Alleline out”—swirling away again, long strides, wrists outward.
“Oh, no, I assure you Control knew nothing about it at all.”
“I realise that now. I didn’t at the time. It’s a little difficult to know when to trust you people and when not. You do live by rather different standards, don’t you? I mean you have to. I accept that. I’m not being judgemental. Our aims are the same, after all, even if our methods are different”—bounding over a cattle ditch. “I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn’t. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one’s aims are, that’s the trouble, specially if you’re British. We can’t expect you people to determine our policy for us, can we? We can only ask you to further it. Correct? Tricky one, that.”
Rather than chase after him, Smiley sat on a rusted swing seat and huddled himself more tightly in his coat, till finally Lacon stalked back and perched beside him. For a while they rocked together to the rhythm of the groaning springs.
“Why the devil did she choose Tarr?” Lacon muttered at last, fidd
ling his long fingers. “Of all the people in the world to choose for a confessor, I can imagine none more miserably unsuitable.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to ask a woman that question, not us,” said Smiley, wondering again where Immingham was.
“Oh, indeed,” Lacon agreed lavishly. “All that’s a complete mystery. I’m seeing the Minister at eleven,” he confided, in a lower tone. “I have to put him in the picture. Your parliamentary cousin,” he added, forcing an intimate joke.
“Ann’s cousin, actually,” Smiley corrected him, in the same absent tone. “Far removed I may add, but cousin for all that.”
“And Bill Haydon is also Ann’s cousin? Our distinguished Head of London Station.” They had played this game before as well.
“By a different route, yes, Bill is also her cousin.” He added quite uselessly: “She comes from an old family with a strong political tradition. With time it’s rather spread.”
“The tradition?”—Lacon loved to nail an ambiguity.
“The family.”
Beyond the trees, Smiley thought, cars are passing. Beyond the trees lies a whole world, but Lacon has this red castle and a sense of Christian ethic that promises him no reward except a knighthood, the respect of his peers, a fat pension, and a couple of charitable directorships in the City.
“Anyway I’m seeing him at eleven.” Lacon had jerked to his feet and they were walking again. Smiley caught the name “Ellis” floating backward to him on the leafy morning air. For a moment, as in the car with Guillam, an odd nervousness overcame him.
“After all,” Lacon was saying, “we both held perfectly honourable positions. You felt that Ellis had been betrayed and you wanted a witch-hunt. My Minister and I felt there had been gross incompetence on the part of Control—a view which to put it mildly the Foreign Office shared—and we wanted a new broom.”
“Oh, I quite understood your dilemma,” said Smiley, more to himself than to Lacon.
“I’m glad. And don’t forget, George: you were Control’s man. Control preferred you to Haydon, and when he lost his grip towards the end—and launched that whole extraordinary adventure—it was you who fronted for him. No one but you, George. It’s not every day that the head of one’s secret service embarks on a private war against the Czechs.” It was clear that the memory still smarted. “In other circumstances, I suppose, Haydon might have gone to the wall, but you were in the hot seat and—”
“And Percy Alleline was the Minister’s man,” said Smiley, mildly enough for Lacon to slow himself and listen.
“It wasn’t as if you had a suspect, you know! You didn’t point the finger at anyone! A directionless enquiry can be extraordinarily destructive!”
“Whereas a new broom sweeps cleaner.”
“Percy Alleline has produced intelligence instead of scandals, he has stuck to the letter of his charter and won the trust of the customers. And he has not, to my knowledge, invaded Czechoslovak territory. All in all he has done extremely well.”
“With Bill Haydon to field for him, who wouldn’t?”
“Control, for one,” said Lacon, with punch.
They had drawn up at an empty swimming pool and now stood staring into the deep end. From its grimy depths Smiley fancied he heard again the insinuating tones of Roddy Martindale: “Little reading rooms at the Admiralty, little committees popping up with funny names . . .”
“Is that special source of Percy’s still running?” Smiley enquired. “The Witchcraft material, or whatever it’s called these days?”
“I didn’t know you were on the list,” Lacon said, not at all pleased. “Since you ask, yes. Source Merlin’s our mainstay and Witchcraft is still the name of his product. The Circus hasn’t turned in such good material for years. Since I can remember, in fact.”
“And still subject to all that special handling?”
“Certainly, and now that this has happened I’ve no doubt that we shall take even more rigorous precautions.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Gerald might smell a rat.”
“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Lacon observed quickly. His strength was improbable, Smiley reflected. One minute he was like a thin, drooping boxer whose gloves were too big for his wrists; the next he had reached out and rocked you against the ropes, and was surveying you with Christian compassion. “We can’t move. We can’t investigate because all the instruments of enquiry are in the Circus’s hands, perhaps in the mole Gerald’s. We can’t watch, or listen, or open mail. To do any one of those things would require the resources of Esterhase’s lamplighters, and Esterhase like anyone else must be suspect. We can’t interrogate; we can’t take steps to limit a particular person’s access to delicate secrets. To do any of these things would be to run the risk of alarming the mole. It’s the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies? Who can smell out the fox without running with him?” He made an awful stab at humour: “Mole, rather,” he said, in a confiding aside.
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 doe
s 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.”
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