The Looking Glass War

by John le Carré

  The air was warmer, the wind had dropped, the street emptied; pleasures were indoors now. The woman behind the bar said, ‘Can’t mix it for you now, dear, not till the rush dies down. You can see for yourself.’

  ‘It’s the only thing I drink.’

  ‘Sorry, dear.’

  He ordered gin and Italian instead and got it warm with no cherry. Walking had made him tired. He sat on the bench which ran along the wall, watching the darts four. They did not speak, but pursued their game with quiet devotion, as if they were deeply conscious of tradition. It was like the film club. One of them had a date, and they called to Leiser, ‘Make a four, then?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ he said, pleased to be addressed, and stood up; but a friend came in, a man called Henry, and Henry was preferred. Leiser was going to argue but there seemed no point.

  Avery too had gone out alone. To Haldane he had said he was taking a walk, to Johnson that he was going to the cinema. Avery had a way of lying which defied rational explanation. He found himself drawn to the old places he had known; his college in the Turl; the bookshops, pubs and libraries. The term was just ending. Oxford had a smell of Christmas about it, and acknowledged it with prudish ill will, dressing the shop windows with last year’s tinsel.

  He took the Banbury Road until he reached the street where he and Sarah had lived for the first year of marriage. The flat was in darkness. Standing before it, he tried to detect in the house, in himself, some trace of the sentiment, or affection, or love, or whatever it was that explained their marriage, but it was not to be found and he supposed it had never been. He sought desperately, wanting to find the motive of youth; but there was none. He was staring into an empty house. He hastened home to the place where Leiser lived.

  ‘Good film?’ Johnson asked.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘I thought you were going for a walk,’ Haldane complained, looking up from his crossword.

  ‘I changed my mind.’

  ‘Incidentally,’ Haldane said, ‘Leiser’s gun. I understand he prefers the three-eight.’

  ‘Yes. They call it the nine-millimetre now.’

  ‘When he returns he should start to carry it with him; take it everywhere, unloaded of course.’ A glance at Johnson. ‘Particularly when he begins transmission exercises on any scale. He must have it on him all the time; we want him to feel lost without it. I have arranged for one to be issued; you’ll find it in your room, Avery, with various holsters. Perhaps you’d explain it to him, would you?’

  ‘Won’t you tell him yourself?’

  ‘You do it. You get on with him so nicely.’

  He went upstairs to telephone Sarah. She had gone to stay with her mother. Conversation was very formal.

  Leiser dialled Betty’s number, but there was no reply.

  Relieved, he went to a cheap jeweller’s, near the station, which was open on Saturday afternoon and bought a gold coach and horses for a charm bracelet. It cost eleven pounds, which was what they had given him for subsistence. He asked them to send it by registered mail to her address in South Park. He put a note in saying ‘Back in two weeks. Be good’, signing it, in a moment of aberration, F. Leiser, so he crossed it out and wrote ‘Fred’.

  He walked for a bit, thought of picking up a girl, and finally booked in at the hotel near the station. He slept badly because of the noise of traffic. In the morning he rang her number again; there was no reply. He replaced the receiver quickly; he might have waited a little longer. He had breakfast, went out and bought the Sunday papers, took them to his room and read the football reports till lunch time. In the afternoon he went for a walk, it had become a habit, right through London, he hardly knew where. He followed the river as far as Charing Cross and found himself in an empty garden filled with drifting rain. The tarmac paths were strewn with yellow leaves. An old man sat on the bandstand, quite alone. He wore a black overcoat and a rucksack of green webbing like the case of a gas mask. He was asleep, or listening to music.

  He waited till evening in order not to disappoint Avery, then caught the last train home to Oxford.

  Avery knew a pub behind Balliol where they let you play bar billiards on Sundays. Johnson liked a game of bar billiards. Johnson was on Guinness, Avery was on whisky. They were laughing a good deal; it had been a tough week. Johnson was winning; he went for the lower numbers, methodically, while Avery tried cushion shots at the hundred pocket.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a bit of what Fred’s having,’ Johnson said with a snigger. He played a shot; a white ball dropped dutifully into its hole. ‘Poles are dead randy. Go up anything, a Pole will. Specially Fred, he’s a real terror. He’s got the walk.’

  ‘Are you that way, Jack?’

  ‘When I’m in the mood. I wouldn’t mind a little bit now, as a matter of fact.’

  They played a couple of shots, each lost in an alcoholic euphoria of erotic fancy.

  ‘Still,’ said Johnson gratefully, ‘I’d rather be in our shoes, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Any day.’

  ‘You know,’ Johnson said, chalking his cue, ‘I shouldn’t be speaking to you like this, should I? You’ve had college and that. You’re different class, John.’

  They drank to each other, both thinking of Leiser.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Avery said. ‘We’re fighting the same war, aren’t we?’

  ‘Quite right.’

  Johnson poured the rest of the Guinness out of the bottle. He took great care, but a little ran over the side on to the table.

  ‘Here’s to Fred,’ Avery said.

  ‘To Fred. On the nest. And bloody good luck to him.’

  ‘Good luck, Fred.’

  ‘I don’t know how he’ll manage the B2,’ Johnson murmured. ‘He’s got a long way to go.’

  ‘Here’s to Fred.’

  ‘Fred. He’s a lovely boy. Here: do you know this bloke Woodford, the one who picked me up?’

  ‘Of course. He’ll be coming down next week.’

  ‘Met his wife at all; Babs? She was a girl, she was; give it to anyone … Christ! Past it now, I suppose. Still, many a good tune, eh?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘To him that hath shalt be given,’ Johnson declared.

  They drank; that joke went astray.

  ‘She used to go with the admin bloke, Jimmy Gorton. What happened to him then?’

  ‘He’s in Hamburg. Doing very well.’

  They got home before Leiser. Haldane was in bed.

  It was after midnight when Leiser hung his wet camel-hair coat in the hall, on a hanger because he was a precise man: tiptoed to the drawing-room and put on the light. His eye ran fondly over the heavy furniture, the tallboy elaborately decorated with fretwork and heavy brass handles; the escritoire and the bible table. Lovingly he revisited the handsome women at croquet, handsome men at war, disdainful boys in boaters, girls at Cheltenham; a whole long history of discomfort and not a breath of passion. The clock on the chimney-piece was like a pavilion in blue marble. The hands were of gold, so ornate, so fashioned, so flowered and spreading that you had to look twice to see where the points of them lay. They had not moved since he went away, perhaps not since he was born, and somehow that was a great achievement for an old clock.

  He picked up his suitcase and went upstairs. Haldane was coughing but no light came from his room. He tapped on Avery’s door.

  ‘You there, John?’

  After a moment he heard him sit up. ‘Nice time, Fred?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘Woman all right?’

  ‘Just the job. See you tomorrow, John.’

  ‘See you in the morning. Night, Fred. Fred …’

  ‘Yes, John?’

  ‘Jack and I had a bit of a session. You should have been there.’

  ‘That’s right, John.’

  Slowly he made his way along the corridor, content in his weariness, entered his room, took off his jacket, lit a cigarette and threw himself gratefully into the armchair. It was tall
and very comfortable, with wings on the side. As he did so he caught sight of something. A chart hung on the wall for turning letters into figures, and beneath it, on the bed, lying in the middle of the eiderdown, was an old suitcase of continental pattern, dark green canvas with leather on the corners. It was open; inside were two boxes of grey steel. He got up, staring at them in mute recognition; reached out and touched them, wary as if they might be hot; turned the dials, stooped and read the legend by the switches. It could have been the set he had in Holland: transmitter and receiver in one box; power unit, key and earphones in the other. Crystals, a dozen of them, in a bag of parachute silk with a green drawstring threaded through the top. He tested the key with his finger; it seemed much smaller than he remembered.

  He returned to the armchair, his eyes still fixed upon the suitcase; sat there, stiff and sleepless, like a man conducting a wake.

  He was late for breakfast. Haldane said, ‘You spend all day with Johnson. Morning and afternoon.’

  ‘No walk?’ Avery was busy with his egg.

  ‘Tomorrow perhaps. From now on we’re concerned with technique. I’m afraid walks take second place.’

  Control quite often stayed in London on Monday nights, which he said was the only time he could get a chair at his club; Smiley suspected he wanted to get away from his wife.

  ‘I hear the flowers are coming out in Blackfriars Road,’ he said. ‘Leclerc’s driving around in a Rolls-Royce.’

  ‘It’s a perfectly ordinary Humber,’ Smiley retorted. ‘From the Ministry pool.’

  ‘Is that where it comes from?’ Control asked, his eyebrows very high. ‘Isn’t it fun? So the black friars have won the pool.’

  14

  ‘You know the set, then?’ Johnson asked.

  ‘The B2.’

  ‘OK. Official title, Type three, Mark two; runs on AC or a six-volt car battery, but you’ll be using the mains, right? They’ve queried the current where you’re going and it’s AC. Your mains consumption with this set is fifty-seven watts on transmit and twenty-five on receive. So if you do end up somewhere and they’ve only got DC, you’re going to have to borrow a battery, right?’

  Leiser did not laugh.

  ‘Your mains lead is provided with adaptors for all continental sockets.’

  ‘I know.’

  Leiser watched Johnson prepare the set for operation. First he linked the transmitter and receiver to the power pack by means of six-pin plugs, adjusting the twin claws to the terminals; having plugged in the set and turned it on, he joined the miniature Morse key to the transmitter and the earphones to the receiver.

  ‘That’s a smaller key than we had in the war,’ Leiser objected. ‘I tried it last night. My fingers kept slipping.’

  Johnson shook his head.

  ‘Sorry, Fred; same size.’ He winked. ‘Perhaps your finger’s grown.’

  ‘All right, come on.’

  Now he extracted from the spares box a coil of multistranded wire, plastic covered, attaching one end to the aerial terminals. ‘Most of your crystals will be around the three megacycle mark, so you may not have to change your coil – get a nice stretch on your aerial and you’ll be a hundred per cent, Fred; specially at night. Now watch the tuning. You’ve connected up your aerial, earth, key, headphones and power pack. Look at your signal plan and see what frequency you’re on; fish out the corresponding crystal, right?’ He held up a small capsule of black bakelite, guided the pins into the double socket – ‘Shoving the male ends into the doodahs, like so. All right so far, Fred? Not hurrying you, am I?’

  ‘I’m watching. Don’t keep asking.’

  ‘Now turn the crystal selector dial to “fundamental all crystals”, and adjust your wave band to match your frequency. If you’re on three and a half megs you want the wave-band knob on three to four, like so. Now insert your plug-in coil either way round, Fred; you’ve got a nice overlap there.’

  Leiser’s head was supported in his hand as he tried desperately to remember the sequence of movements which once had come so naturally to him. Johnson proceeded with the method of a man born to his trade. His voice was soft and easy, very patient, his hands moving instinctively from one dial to another with perfect familiarity. All the time the monologue continued:

  ‘TRS switch on T for tune; put your anode tuning and aerial matching on ten; now you can switch on your power pack, right?’ He pointed to the meter window. ‘You should get the three hundred reading, near enough, Fred. Now I’m ready to have a go: I shove my meter selector on three and twiddle the PA tuning till I get maximum meter reading; now I put her on six—’

  ‘What’s PA?’

  ‘Power Amplifier, Fred: didn’t you know that?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Now I move the anode tuning knob till I get my minimum value – here you are! She’s a hundred with the knob on two, right? Now push your TRS over to S – S for send, Fred – and you’re ready to tune the aerial. Here – press the key. That’s right, see? You get a bigger reading because you’re putting power into the aerial, follow it?’

  Silently he performed the brief ritual of tuning the aerial until the meter obediently dipped to the final reading.

  ‘And Bob’s your uncle!’ he declared triumphantly. ‘Now it’s Fred’s turn. Here, your hand’s sweating. You must have had a weekend, you must. Wait a minute, Fred!’ He left the room, returning with an oversized white pepperpot, from which he carefully sprinkled French chalk over the black lozenge on the key lever.

  ‘Take my advice,’ Johnson said, ‘just leave the girls in peace, see, Fred? Let it grow.’

  Leiser was looking at his open hand. Particles of sweat had gathered in the grooves. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘I’ll bet you couldn’t.’ He slapped the case affectionately. ‘From now on you sleep with her. She’s Mrs Fred, see, and no one else!’ He dismantled the set and waited for Leiser to begin. With childish slowness Leiser painfully reassembled the equipment. It was all so long ago.

  Day after day Leiser and Johnson sat at the small table in the bedroom tapping out their messages. Sometimes Johnson would drive away in the van leaving Leiser alone, and they would work back and forth till early morning. Or Leiser and Avery would go – Leiser was not allowed out alone – and from a borrowed house in Fairford they would pass their signals, encoding, sending and receiving en clair trivialities disguised as amateur transmissions. Leiser discernibly changed. He became nervy and irritable; he complained to Haldane about the complications of transmitting on a series of frequencies, the difficulty of constant retuning, the shortage of time. His relationship to Johnson was always uneasy. Johnson had arrived late, and for some reason Leiser insisted on treating him as an outsider, not admitting him properly to the companionship which he fancied to exist between Avery, Haldane and himself.

  There was a particularly absurd scene one breakfast. Leiser raised the lid of a jam-pot, peered inside and, turning to Avery, asked, ‘Is this bee-honey?’

  Johnson leant across the table, knife in one hand, bread and butter in the other.

  ‘We don’t say that, Fred. We just call it honey.’

  ‘That’s right, honey. Bee-honey.’

  ‘Just honey,’ Johnson repeated. ‘In England we just call it honey.’

  Leiser carefully replaced the lid, pale with anger. ‘Don’t you tell me what to say.’

  Haldane looked up sharply from his paper. ‘Be quiet, Johnson. Bee-honey is perfectly accurate.’

  Leiser’s courtesy had something of the servant, his quarrels with Johnson something of the backstairs.

  Despite such incidents as this, like any two men engaged daily upon a single project, they came gradually to share their hopes, moods and depressions. If a lesson had gone well, the meal that followed it would be a happy affair. The two of them would exchange esoteric remarks about the state of the ionosphere, the skip distance on a given frequency, or an unnatural meter reading which had occurred during tuning. If badly, they would speak little o
r not at all, and everyone but Haldane would hasten through his food for want of anything to say. Occasionally Leiser would ask whether he might not take a walk with Avery, but Haldane shook his head and said there was no time. Avery, a guilty lover, made no move to help.

  As the two weeks neared their end, the Mayfly house was several times visited by specialists of one kind or another from London. A photographic instructor came, a tall, hollow-eyed man, who demonstrated a sub-miniature camera with interchangeable lenses; there was a doctor, benign and wholly incurious, who listened to Leiser’s heart for minutes on end. The Treasury had insisted upon it; there was the question of compensation. Leiser declared he had no dependants, but he was examined all the same to satisfy the Treasury.

  With the increase in these activities Leiser came to derive great comfort from his gun. Avery had given it to him after his weekend’s leave. He favoured a shoulder holster (the drape of his jackets nicely concealed the bulge) and sometimes at the end of a long day he would draw the gun and finger it, looking down the barrel, raising it and lowering it as he had done on the range. ‘There isn’t a gun to beat it,’ he would say. ‘Not for the size. You can have your continental types any time. Women’s guns, they are, like their cars. Take my advice, John, a three-eight’s best.’

  ‘Nine-millimetre they call it now.’

  His resentment of strangers reached its unexpected climax in the visit of Hyde, a man from the Circus. The morning had gone badly. Leiser had been making a timed run, encoding and transmitting forty groups; his bedroom and Johnson’s were now linked on an internal circuit; they played back and forth behind closed doors. Johnson had taught him a number of international code signs: QRJ, your signals are too weak to read; QRW, send faster; QSD, your keying is bad; QSM, repeat the last message; QSZ, send each word twice; QRU, I have nothing for you. As Leiser’s transmission became increasingly uneven, Johnson’s comments, thus cryptically expressed, added to his confusion, until with a shout of irritation he switched off his set and stalked downstairs to Avery. Johnson followed him.