A Legacy of Spies

by John le Carré

  *

  Even today, I’d be hard put to describe the torrent of conflicting emotions that swirled through me on my return to the farmstead, whether I was driving a tractor, spreading muck in the fields or otherwise striving to make my presence felt as the young master. One minute I was basking in the sensations of a night too momentous to define; the next, I was lost in awe at the monstrous irresponsibility of the compulsive, reckless act I had committed, and the words I had, or hadn’t, spoken.

  Invoking the silent darkness in which our embraces were fought out, I tried to persuade myself that our lovemaking had been only in the mind, an illusion brought on by the fear that at any minute Czech security might smash down our bedroom door. But one look at the imprint of her fingers on my body told me I was fooling myself.

  And no imagining on my part could have delivered the moment when, with the coming of first light, and still not a word between us, she wrapped away one part of her body after another, first standing before me naked and sentinel, as she had stood before me on the Bulgarian beach, then covering herself piece by piece in her French finery until there was nothing left to desire but a sensible workaday skirt and black jacket buttoned to the neck: except that I desired her more desperately than ever.

  And how, as she dressed, the light of triumph or desire quieted from her face, and we became by her own choice estranged, first on the bus to Prague airport when she refused my hand, and again on the plane to Paris when, for reasons that eluded me, we were placed in separate rows – until the plane halted and we stood up and started to file out, and our hands found each other again, only to part.

  On the laborious railway journey to Lorient – no high-speed trains in those days – an episode had occurred which with hindsight fills me to this day with a sense of the horror to come. Barely an hour out of Paris, our train came to an abrupt halt, with no explanation offered. Muffled voices from outside were followed by a single unsourced scream, male or female I never knew. Still we waited. Some of us exchanged glances. Others remained determinedly engrossed in their books and newspapers. A uniformed guard appeared in the carriage doorway, a boy of no more than twenty. I remember very well the silence that preceded his prepared speech, which after taking a deep breath he delivered with commendable calm:

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen. I regret to inform you that our progress has been inhibited by human intervention. We shall continue on our way in a few minutes.’

  And it was not I, but the studious old gentleman in stiff white collar seated beside me who raised his head and demanded brusquely:

  ‘Intervention of what nature?’

  To which the boy could only answer in the voice of a penitent:

  ‘A suicide, monsieur.’

  ‘Of whom?’

  ‘A man, sir. It is believed he was a man.’

  Within a few hours of my arrival at Les Deux Eglises, I took myself down to the cove: my cove, my place of solace. First the trudge down the matted slope to the edge of my land, then another trudge along the cliff path, and at its base the little patch of sand, and to either side of it low-lying rocks like dozing crocodiles. This was where I’d done my boyhood thinking. This was where I’d brought my women over the years – the loves, half-loves, quarter-loves. But the only woman I craved was Doris. I taunted myself with the thought that we had never conducted a single conversation that wasn’t cover. But hadn’t I shared every vicarious hour of her life, sleeping and waking, for a whole bloody year? Hadn’t I responded to her every impulse, every lurch of purity, lust, revolt and vengeance? Tell me of another woman I had known so long, and so intimately, before I even slept with her.

  She had empowered me. She had made me the man I had never been till now. More than one woman over the years had told me – kindly, bluntly, or in outright disenchantment – that I had no aptitude for sex; that I could neither take nor give with abandon; was inept, restrained; that I lacked the true instinctual fire.

  But Doris knew all that, before we ever embraced. She had known it as we brush-passed, and she knew it as she took me naked into her arms, welcomed me, absolved me, showed me; then formed herself around me until we were old friends, then careful lovers, and finally triumphant rebels, broken free of everything that presumed to control our two lives.

  Ich liebe Dich. I meant it. I would always mean it. And when I got back to England, I would say it to her again, and I would tell George that I had said it to her and I would tell him I had served my time and more, and if I had to quit the Service to marry Doris and fight the good fight for Gustav, I would do that too. I would stick to my guns and not even George, with all his velvet arguments, was going to talk me round.

  But no sooner had I made this great, irreversible decision than Doris’s well-documented promiscuity came to haunt me. Was that her real secret? That she made love to all her men with equal, indiscriminate generosity? I even half persuaded myself that Alec had been there before me: two whole nights spent together, for Christ’s sake! All right, the first with Gustav in tow. But what about the second night, crammed into the Trabant, one to one, snuggled up for warmth – her head on his shoulder, his own words! – while she bared her soul to him – and whatever else she bared – whereas I, blind courier, could practically count the words that Doris and I had managed to exchange in our entire lives.

  But even as I conjured this spectre of imaginary betrayal, I knew I was deluding myself, which made the ignominy more painful. Alec wasn’t that man. If Alec, instead of me, had spent the night with Doris in the Hotel Balkan, he would have sat smoking placidly in a corner, just as he had done that night in Cottbus, while Doris held Gustav, not Alec, in her arms.

  I was still staring out to sea, reasoning fruitlessly to and fro in these terms, when I realized that I wasn’t alone. In my self-absorption I had even failed to notice that I was being followed. Worse, that I had been followed by the least appetizing member of our community, Honoré the poison dwarf, trader in manure, used car tyres and worse. He cut an elfin figure, and a sinister one: squat, broad-shouldered, evil-faced in Breton cap and smock, standing feet astride at the cliff’s edge, peering down.

  I called up to him. I asked him, with a certain disdain, how I could be of help. What I was really asking him to do was go away and leave me to my thoughts. His answer was to skip down the cliff path, and with not so much as a glance at me, perch himself on a rock near the sea. Dark was gathering. Across the bay, the lights of Lorient were starting to shine. After a while, he raised his head and stared at me, as if in enquiry. Receiving no response, he drew a bottle from the depths of his smock and, having filled two paper beakers from his other pocket, beckoned me to join him, which for civility’s sake I duly did.

  ‘Thinking of death?’ he asked lightly.

  ‘Not consciously.’

  ‘A woman? Another one?’

  I ignored him. I was struck, despite myself, by his mysterious courtliness. Was it new? Or had I not noticed it before? He raised his beaker; I raised mine to him. In Normandy, they would call it Calvados, but to us Bretons it’s Lambig. In Honoré’s version, it was the stuff they put on horses’ hooves to harden them.

  ‘To your sainted father,’ he said, talking out to sea. ‘The great Resistance hero. Killed a lot of Huns.’

  ‘So they say,’ I replied warily.

  ‘Medals too.’

  ‘A couple.’

  ‘They tortured him. Then they killed him. Hero twice over. Bravo,’ he said, and drank again, still looking out to sea. ‘My father was a hero too,’ he went on. ‘Big hero. Mega. Bigger than yours by two metres.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Collaborated with the Huns. They promised him they’d give Brittany her independence when they won the war. Arsehole believed them. War ended, the heroes of the Resistance strung him up in the town square, what was left of it. Big crowd. Lot of applause. You could hear it all over town.’

&
nbsp; Had he heard it too, perhaps? With his hands over his ears, cowering in some kind person’s cellar? I had a feeling he might have done.

  ‘So better you buy your horseshit from someone else,’ he went on. ‘Or maybe they’ll hang you too.’

  He waited for me to say something but nothing came to me, so he replenished our beakers and we went on looking out to sea.

  *

  In those days the peasants still played boules in the village square and sang Breton songs when they were drunk. Determined to count myself a normal human being, I shared their cidre and listened to the Grand Guignol that passed for village gossip: the post office couple who have locked themselves in their upper room and won’t emerge because their son has killed himself; the district tax collector whose wife has left him because his father has dementia and is coming down to breakfast fully dressed at two in the morning; the dairy farmer in the next-door village who has gone to prison for sleeping with his daughters. To all of which I did my best to nod my head in the right places while the questions that wouldn’t let me go multiplied and deepened.

  *

  The sheer, unnatural bloody ease of it, for Christ’s sake!

  Why had everything gone like clockwork when, in any other operation I had ever been involved in, nothing had gone like clockwork even when it had creaked to a successful finish?

  A Stasi woman officer on the run in a neighbouring police state seething with informants? Czech Security notorious for their ruthlessness and efficiency? Yet far from being scrutinized, followed, listened to and even interrogated, we are gently ushered towards the exit gates?

  And since when, tell me, had French Intelligence been so bloody immaculate? Torn apart by internal rivalries was more what I’d heard. Incompetent and penetrated from top to bottom, and why does that ring a bell? Yet suddenly they’re grand masters of the art – or are they?

  And if those were my suspicions, which they were, and becoming more deafening by the minute, what did I propose to do about them? Confess that to Smiley too before I throw in the towel and resign?

  Even now, for all I knew, Doris was cloistered with her debriefers in some rural keep. Was she telling them what ardent love we had made? In matters of the heart, self-restraint was scarcely her strong suit.

  And if her debriefers should begin to suspect, as I had, that her escape through East Germany and Czecho had been made unnaturally easy, what conclusions might they draw?

  That it was all a put-up job? That she was a plant, a double, part of a high-stakes deception game? And that Peter Guillam, fool of fools, had slept with the enemy? – which was what I myself was beginning to believe by the time Oliver Mendel called me at five in the morning and ordered me in George’s name to make my way to the city of Salisbury by the fastest possible route. Not a ‘How are you, Peter?’ Not a ‘Sorry to haul you out of bed at crack of dawn.’ Just a ‘George says get your backside over here to Camp 4 in double-quick time, son.’

  Camp 4: Joint Steering’s safe house in the New Forest.

  *

  Squeezing myself into the last remaining seat of a small plane from Le Touquet, I picture the summary tribunal that awaits me. Doris has confessed to being a double agent. She is using our night of passion as some kind of diversion.

  But then the other half of me takes over. She’s the same Doris, for pity’s sake. You love her. You told her you do, or you think you did, and it’s still true either way. So don’t rush to judgement just because you’re about to be judged yourself!

  By the time I landed at Lydd, there was no logic to any of it. By the time my train pulled in to Salisbury station, still none. But at least I’d found time to puzzle over the choice of Camp 4 as a place to take Doris for her debriefing. It was not, by Circus standards, the most secret of its archipelago of safe houses, or the most secure. On paper, it had everything going for it: small estate in the heart of the New Forest, can’t be seen from the road, low-lying two-storey building, walled garden, a stream, bit of lake, ten acres of land, part wooded, and the whole lot enclosed by a six-foot-high fence of wire mesh, overgrown and concealed by shrubs.

  But for the debriefing of a prized agent, snatched only days ago from the jaws of the Stasi that employed her? A little tarnished surely, a little more visible than George might have wished if Joint hadn’t owned the operation.

  At Salisbury station a Circus driver named Herbert, known to me from my time in Scalphunters’ section, stood holding up a sign reading ‘Passenger for Barraclough’, one of George’s worknames. But when I tried a bit of light conversation, Herbert said he wasn’t authorized to talk to me.

  We entered the long, pitted drive. Trespassers would be prosecuted. Low-hanging branches of lime and maple brushed the roof of the van. From the shadows loomed the unlikely figure of Fawn, first name unknown, a former unarmed-combat instructor at Sarratt and occasional strongarm man for Covert. But what on earth was Fawn doing here, of all people, when Camp 4 boasted its own security guards in the form of that celebrated gay couple beloved of all trainees, Messrs Harper and Lowe? Then I remembered that Smiley had a professional regard for Fawn, and had used him for a number of sticky assignments.

  The driver pulled up, Fawn peered in at me, no smile, then with a tilt of his head beckoned us through. The track rose. A pair of solid wooden gates parted and closed behind us. To our right the main house, a fake-Tudor mansion built for a brewer. To our left, the coach house, a couple of Nissen huts and a majestic thatched tithe barn called the Stoop. Three Ford Zephyrs and one black Ford van were parked in the courtyard; and in front of them, the one human being in sight, Oliver Mendel, retired police inspector and longstanding ally of George, holding a walkie-talkie to his ear.

  Scramble out of van, haul my rucksack after me. Shout ‘Hi, Oliver! I made it!’ But Oliver Mendel doesn’t move a muscle, he just murmurs into his walkie-talkie while he watches me walk towards him. I again start to greet him, think better of it. Oliver murmurs, ‘Will do, George,’ and switches off.

  ‘Our friend is somewhat occupied at the present time, Peter,’ he says gravely. ‘We’ve had a small incident. If you don’t mind, you and me will take a stroll round the precincts.’

  I have the message. Doris has told all, up to and including Ich liebe Dich. Our friend George is occupied, meaning he is disgusted, furious, sickened by the chosen disciple who has failed him. He can’t bring himself to speak to me, so he has deputed his ever-reliable Inspector Oliver Mendel to give young Peter the dressing-down of a lifetime, and probably his marching orders as well. But why Fawn? And why this feeling of a camp deserted in a hurry?

  We have climbed a stretch of lawn and are standing obliquely to each other, which I don’t doubt is Mendel’s intention. Our eyes are fixed on some uncertain object in the middle distance: a pair of silver birch trees, an old dovecote.

  ‘I have a sad message for you, Peter.’

  Here we go.

  ‘I’m very sorry to inform you that sub-source Tulip, the lady you successfully exfiltrated from Czecho, was certified dead this morning.’

  *

  And since nobody ever quite knows what they said at such a moment, and I am no different, I won’t award myself the mandatory cry of pain, horror or disbelief. I know I ceased to see anything clearly, neither the silver birches nor the dovecote. I know it was sunny and warm for the time of year. I know that I wanted to vomit but, true to my inhibited nature, managed not to. I know that I followed Mendel to the derelict summerhouse which lies at the most southern point of the estate, cut off from the main house by a dense coppice of macrocarpa trees. And that when we sat down on the rickety verandah we were looking at an overgrown croquet lawn, because I remember the rusted hoops poking out of the grass.

  ‘Hung by the neck till she was dead, I’m afraid, son,’ Mendel was saying, mouthing the words of the death sentence. ‘A do-it-yourself job. From the low bough of a tree just th
e other side of that slope there. By the footbridge. Point 217 on the map. Life extinct certified at 0800 hours by Dr Ashley Meadows.’

  Ash Meadows, fashionable Harley Street shrink, improbable friend of George. Circus Occasional with a corner in neurotic defectors.

  ‘Ash is here?’

  ‘With her now.’

  I digest this news slowly. Doris is dead. Ash is with her. A doctor stands guard over the dead.

  ‘Did she leave a note or anything? Tell anyone what she was going to do?’

  ‘She just hanged herself, son. With a length of spliced nylon climbing rope she appears to have found on the premises. Nine feet in length. Presumed left over from a training course. Somewhat negligently, in my personal view.’

  ‘Has anyone told Alec?’ I ask, thinking now of her head resting on his shoulder.

  His policeman’s voice again. ‘George will tell your friend Alec Leamas what Alec needs to know when Alec needs to know it, not before, son. And George will pick his own time to do that. Understood?’

  Understood that Alec still believes he delivered Tulip to safety.

  ‘Where is he now? Not Alec. George,’ I ask stupidly.

  ‘Just at this moment in time, George is engaged in conversation with a chance Swiss gentleman, as a matter of fact. Caught himself in a snare in the grounds, poor fellow. Not a snare, more a mantrap, placed there by an unscrupulous poacher after a bit of venison, we can only assume. A rusty one, lying in the long grass, we’re told. Could have been there for I don’t know how long. But the spring wasn’t bothered. And those dragon’s teeth – they could have cut his foot clean off, I’m told. So he was lucky.’ And to my continued silence, in the same conversational tone: ‘The Swiss individual concerned is an ornithologist by hobby, which I respect, being in the way of one myself, and he was birdwatching. He didn’t intend to intrude on the premises, but he did, which he regrets. Which I would too. What shocks me, between you and me, is Harper and Lowe not coming across it on their rounds of the estate. They’re lucky they didn’t walk into it themselves is all I can say.’