John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  While David was recovering, a visitor came to stay at Tunmers. This was ‘Mr Flynn’, a dreadfully thin, wild-eyed, unshaven man of indeterminate middle age, who dressed as if just released from prison. At a family briefing, attended by a couple of his courtiers and by Flynn himself, Ronnie explained that Flynn was a hero. Years later David would paint the scene:

  We were to tell nobody what we were about to hear. During the war Flynn had served in the most secret of secret services: an unsung tiny band of intrepid men and women who were under Winston Churchill’s personal command. None of us sitting in this room – except Flynn, of course – would ever know what contributions Flynn had made to the Allied victory. Yet without him we might not be sitting here at all, and wasn’t that right, Flynn? And Flynn, who had a rich Irish accent, was very pleased, and said yes, it was quite right.

  Ronnie went on to explain that the Prime Minister wished to reward Flynn for his services, but for obvious reasons couldn’t do so publicly, and a medal was out of the question. So in two weeks’ time, at a private ceremony in Buckingham Palace, to which Ronnie and a few other trusted friends were privileged to be invited, His Majesty the King in person was going to appoint Flynn to the very important and lucrative post of Consul-General in Lisbon, after which Flynn would put Ronnie in the way of all sorts of lucrative business.

  For the following fortnight Flynn was billeted at Tunmers – in David’s bedroom, in the spare bed next to his. Flynn would wander around the room in borrowed pyjamas like a prisoner pacing out his cell, whispering to himself in a rich, unintelligible Irish brogue. Some mornings Ronnie would take him up to London; there were debts to be paid off, because the poor chap had been down on his luck until dear old Winston had remembered him. There was a morning suit to be bought, not hired, because it would be needed in Lisbon; and a trousseau of suits, shirts and underclothes because, as Ronnie explained, Flynn was too proud to ask for an advance against his salary.

  After a week of this David took his courage in his hands and told Ronnie that he thought Flynn was barking mad, only to be rebuked for his cynicism.

  When the due day arrived, Messrs Cornwell and Flynn drove up to London in their morning coats, top hats on the back seat. Arriving at Ronnie’s office in Mount Street, Flynn explained that he had some business to attend to before going to the Palace, and disappeared in a taxi, saying ‘meet you there’.

  A couple of hours later, Ronnie left his office, hailed a taxi and instructed the driver to take him to the Palace. On the way he confided in the cabbie, having first of course sworn him to secrecy. But as they entered the Mall, the driver pointed out that there was no flag flying from the Palace roof. Even then Ronnie did not lose faith. Since the investiture was private, the King was rightly keeping his presence quiet until the ceremony was over, he decided. The policeman at the Palace gates disillusioned him. His Majesty was at Sandringham and was expected to remain there for some time.26

  The missing Flynn was arrested a few weeks later on a string of charges, including the theft of David’s Burberry raincoat.

  As David recovered from his skiing accident, Ronnie renewed the pressure on him. ‘The ball of my “future career” has started to roll,’ he wrote to Ann while she was still out in Chamonix:

  So much so that I am at present supposed to be

  1. In the Army

  2. At Oxford

  3. At Cambridge

  4. At Gibson & Weldon’s, Law Tutors …

  One thing is beyond doubt – that by the time you come back I shall be studying somewhere with a view to doing something afterwards. I think that I should rather like to open a small pub in the East-end.

  I am pretty mobile now and will soon have to totter back to the army to get myself officially released. After that it’s the oak table and the inky nose for yours truly …

  It’s probably the bar for me. One way or the other.27*

  A few days later he told her that he would ‘probably’ go up to Oxford in October – though the deadline for entries was past, so the only way he could obtain a place would be by special pleading. When Ann protested that he didn’t seem to have any ideas of his own about his future, he insisted that he did, ‘and believe me, those are the ones that are going to count!’ He was relaxing with his father and stepmother ‘among the monkey-puzzle trees and rhododendrons of Bournemouth – the place is full of dying aunts and Baptist clergymen … Actually it’s quite fun here and I do very little but play Daddy billiards for drinks …’28 Possibly Ronnie was using his visit to extract money from his mother, because around this time she put £6,000 into one of his companies.

  David often addressed his girlfriend as ‘Mousey’ or ‘Ann Mouse’ (he kept his St Andrew’s nickname of ‘Maggot’), and his letters were sometimes illustrated with cartoons depicting her as such. ‘I spend all day drawing now,’ he told her. He had established a studio in the attic at Tunmers. ‘I draw from morning till night and am terribly happy.’29

  Meanwhile Ronnie had sought the help of Sir James Barnes, who had prevailed upon Sir Folliott Sandford, an Air Ministry colleague who knew the Rector of Lincoln College,* to write to him on David’s behalf. ‘Barnes is very much interested in finding a possible vacancy at Oxford in October for the son of an old friend, who is anxious to read modern languages with a view to entering the Foreign Service.’ The Rector, Keith Murray, had a word with the college chaplain and history tutor, the Reverend Vivian Green, who had taught at Sherborne before coming to Oxford; Green remembered David as ‘very intelligent’ and recommended that the college should find a place for him if possible. Murray warned Sandford that the prospects were not good at this late date, as the college already had its full quota of freshmen for the academic year beginning in October, by then only six months away; but there remained a faint possibility that someone might drop out, and he offered to consider young Cornwell for any vacancy which might arise if he were willing to take a college entrance examination. David duly submitted an application form. Under ‘other interests’ he listed ‘writing’ as well as ‘painting and caricaturing’.

  Ronnie believed that, like Tony, David planned to read law, and David, like Magnus Pym in A Perfect Spy, did not disabuse him. So David recalled several decades later: according to him, Ronnie discovered the truth that he was reading modern languages only after he had been up at Oxford for a while.30 He has written of Ronnie’s distress at the discovery and a subsequent confrontation with Vivian Green, by then the college senior tutor. Such an encounter between two contrasting father figures is psychologically beguiling. But the story is difficult to reconcile with the letter from Sir James Barnes’s colleague Sir Folliott Sandford, which mentions David’s wish to read modern languages. If Sandford knew that he was not planning to read law, then so, presumably, did Barnes, and it would be strange if he had concealed this from his chum Ronnie. David told Ann of his plan to read modern languages, without asking her to keep this secret. Vivian Green’s unpublished memoir, written many years later, provides a vivid description of a visit from Ronnie ‘with his well-brushed brilliantined hair, smart blue suit and polished black shoes’ to discuss his son’s future; but, far from coming to confront him, Ronnie is portrayed as ‘the acme of charm’. Moreover this account is apparently at odds with a letter from David to Green written in the autumn of 1954, which refers to his upcoming wedding as ‘a chance for you to meet Papa’, implying that they had not met before. (A further complication is that Ronnie was not invited to the wedding, though perhaps this had not been decided at the time.) Weighing the evidence, it seems possible that the confrontation is an example of false memory on David’s part, perhaps a result of the imaginative effort required to recast his life in fictional form. Just possibly this imaginative reconstruction was so powerful that Green too absorbed it.

  Having little else to do, and being now well enough to travel, David joined Ronnie and the family for a ten-day holiday in Monte Carlo. They stayed at the five-star Hôtel de Paris, only yards from the Cas
ino. ‘One seems either to be acquiring or sleeping off a hangover,’ David wrote to Ann, though he did find time to paint and play tennis. ‘Daddy plays in the Casino a good deal, but doesn’t have much luck.’31 One evening David watched Ronnie playing at the big table, a complimentary brandy and ginger in front of him. Also there was King Farouk’s equerry, a polished, grey-haired man, with a white telephone at his elbow. This linked him directly to the Egyptian King, then in the last months of his reign, who had become notorious for gluttony, extravagance and gambling. From time to time the white telephone would ring, the equerry would raise the receiver and listen impassively to his master’s instructions, and then transfer some of the chips from the diminishing pile in front of him on to the appropriate square. David imagined the King at the other end, surrounded by astrologers. To his alarm, he noticed Ronnie raising his bids. As his father splashed out the last of his chips and beckoned imperiously for more, David realised that he was not playing a hunch, or playing the house, or playing the numbers: he was playing the King. He watched with horror as more and more chips disappeared into the croupier’s maw. At last, in the small hours of the morning, Ronnie was done. In the pre-dawn twilight father and son sauntered down the esplanade to the twenty-four-hour jewellers to pawn Ronnie’s platinum cigarette case and gold wristwatch. As they parted in the foyer of the Hôtel de Paris, Ronnie boasted that he had shown ‘that chap Farouk’ a thing or two. The King’s losses, he reckoned, had been two or three times his own. ‘Win it all back tomorrow with interest, right, old son?’32

  While in Monaco David witnessed a pigeon shoot, devised to allow disappointed punters to let off steam. On a lawn facing out to sea, half-cut guests reclined on day-beds, shotguns at the ready. Among them were Hector Caird, owner of the society magazine the Queen; and a crony of Ronnie’s, Sir Bracewell Smith, a former Conservative MP and lord mayor of London. Pigeons emerged in front of them from underground tunnels, stumbling their way into the sunlight, only to be shot at by the recumbent guests. David was horrified by the pile of dead birds, some still fluttering in their death-agony. Those few that escaped homed naturally to the place where they had been bred, the Casino roof, and so were captured and put back into the tunnel, only to run the gauntlet again. This grotesque image left a lasting impression.* David identified with the pigeons, unable to escape and lacking the wit to fly away. In a letter to Ann he wrote that ‘the sooner I get out of this utterly crazy place, the happier I shall be’.33

  Ann and David were reunited after he returned to England towards the end of March 1952. By now she was longing to marry him. In her diary she confessed to being ‘infernally jealous’ when he told her that he had met a debutante in Wengen who wanted to do ‘the season’ with him. ‘Are you in love with me?’ she had demanded, ‘or are you just pretending?’ David replied that he didn’t know, and asked her the same question. Ann paused, and replied, ‘I know I can’t imagine being without you.’ In her diary she confided her fears that he had grown away from her, and agonised about whether or not to spend a night with him, as she had done in Chamonix – ‘probably better not’, she eventually decided, ‘or I’d have been virgin no longer’.

  Ann cherished an ambition to be a writer. She encouraged David to pursue his artistic talent, imagining the two of them as a creative couple. When he telephoned to say that he was going up to Oxford for an interview, she felt disappointed in him. ‘Oh he’s weak really, I suppose – yet his paintings are really good,’ she recorded in her diary. ‘He needs to be poor, properly poor, and have to live by it.’ No doubt one reason why she did not want him to go to university was that it meant continuing to be dependent on his father for the next three years.

  David breezed through the interview with the Rector. According to Vivian Green, who was also present, he arrived in a smart pepper-and-salt suit and ‘displayed the charismatic qualities which at later dates have enchanted his interviewers’. The next step was for him to take the entrance exam. Ann secretly hoped that he would fail. In fact he passed, achieving marks of α-?-* in German and of β+ in his general paper.

  Meanwhile the college had sought an opinion from David’s former housemaster. In due course a ‘private and confidential’ response arrived from Thompson. ‘He is an extremely sensitive boy, artistic and a poet, and he has a good brain’ wrote Thompson. ‘Perhaps by now he has steadied down, at any rate I hope so, for he has it in him to do very well at anything to which he gives his mind with conviction. He strikes me as the sort who might become either Archbishop of Canterbury or a first-rate criminal!’ Thompson was in favour of awarding a place to David, but not in 1952.

  I really do not think he ought to step in at the last minute where others have tried and failed, who have passed the necessary tests. The Cornwells tend to assume that what they want they get, at least that is the impression I have of his father. Mr Cornwell is an enigma – very charming and persuasive, but wholly without principle, I should say.34

  The college chose not to take Thompson’s advice. In mid-May, after another candidate had dropped out, the Rector wrote to David offering him a place starting in October, which he gratefully accepted.

  At a celebratory dinner David explained to Ann that he would need a few weeks’ extra tuition in Oxford during the summer to bring him up to the required standard for a first-year undergraduate – especially to prepare for a Latin exam.35 He promised her that he had not forgotten his ambition to become an artist, and spoke of going to art school in the university vacations, using drawing ‘as a sideline’ to begin with, and possibly graduating to it full time later on. Over the weeks that followed he tried to obtain private commissions to earn extra money. One evening he plucked up courage to go up to town alone, and succeeded in selling three caricatures at five guineas each to members of the Albany Club.36

  Ann came to stay a weekend at Tunmers, which gave her an opportunity to observe her boyfriend’s father at close hand. Ronnie was very much in control, she noticed, remaining slumped in his armchair in the sitting room with a large brandy and ginger by his side, while David (who was permitted only sherry) was called upon to run hither and thither. She was surprised by his docility, in contrast to the rebellious tone of his letters. Ronnie attempted to charm her, without success. Ann was suspicious of him from the outset. His entire way of life offended against her moral code. He was, she would say later, ‘the only really evil person I ever met’.

  She was now working for Odhams Publishers. Her job was mostly secretarial, but with some proof-reading and paste-up work. She had begun writing poetry again. ‘If only it was any good!’ she lamented in her diary. Some short stories she had submitted to the weekly literary magazine John O’London’s were returned with a rejection slip.

  Once again at a loose end and short of cash, David accepted an offer of temporary work from his father, who had acquired the Cricketer, a fortnightly publication founded in 1921 by the former England Test match player Sir Pelham ‘Plum’ Warner and still edited by him. After some weeks in Ronnie’s Mount Street offices fruitlessly trying to promote the moribund journal, David agreed to undertake a tour of the north of England with Robin Cooke, selling copies to retailers. They would travel in Ronnie’s Triumph two-seater, with Cooke taking the wheel, as David had not yet learned to drive; Ronnie undertook to pay them each £6 per week. He warned them not to fill up the car at the nearest garage, but they forgot; as they motored on to the forecourt, Cooke spotted the attendant rushing to the telephone, so he accelerated away without stopping. Although David wrote to Ann from Newport to say that they were ‘doing quite well’, the reality was rather different: they dumped hundreds of copies in a ditch by the side of the road rather than admit that no one would take them. After five weeks they reported back to Ronnie, expecting to collect £30 each. ‘What shall I say?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Fifteen pounds?’ Cooke was particularly annoyed, as he had arranged to buy a dinner jacket on the strength of his promised earnings. After protests from the young men, Ronnie reluctantly
stumped up the amount agreed, before taking the boys to an expensive lunch at Claridge’s.

  David went up Oxford to begin his extra tuition in August, and found lodgings in St John Street. A few days later he wrote that he was working very hard – ‘harder than you would credit me with’. He had cancelled a holiday in Switzerland because of pressure of work.37

  When Ann came to visit, he took her punting with Colin Simpson, a neighbour from Chalfont St Peter who was also coming up to Oxford in October. ‘I have decided that in future I will let D touch my breasts, but nothing more,’ she wrote in her diary afterwards. Meanwhile Tony, who had returned from America to resume his legal studies, came up to Oxford for the day, with a friend from Bowdoin College in tow. David complained to Ann that he could not understand them: ‘We had Dollars at Balliol, Fraternities at Lincoln and Cookies at Univ.’ He felt alienated from his brother, he told her. ‘When I am away from him I admire him, when I am with him I find him incomprehensible.’38

  Once his summer cramming was over David took a short working holiday in France, narrated in a series of postcards to Ann. ‘A crazy, penniless, amusing week doing everything from serving as a barman to taking mass at Notre Dame,’ he wrote to her in mid-September. Three days later he sent another postcard, boasting that he had ‘walked repeat walked Paris–Orleans. Thence Orleans–Blois also on foot. Quel héro!’39*