John le Carr� - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

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?'

'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 does 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 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.'

Only Ann, though she could not read his workings, refused to accept his findings. She was quite passionate, in fact, as only women can be on matters of business, really driving him to go back, take up where he had left off, never to veer aside in favour of the easy arguments. Not of course that she knew anything, but what woman was ever stopped by a want of information? She felt. And despised him for not acting in accordance with her feelings.

And now, at the very moment when he was near enough beginning to believe his own dogma, a feat made no easier by Ann's infatuation for an out-of-work actor, what happens but that the assembled ghosts of his past - Lacon, Control, Karla, Alleline, Esterhase, Bland, and finally Bill Haydon himself - barge into his cell and cheerfully inform him, as they drag him back to this same garden, that everything which he had been calling vanity is truth?

'Haydon,' he repeated to himself, no longer able to stem the tides of memory. Even the name was like a jolt. 'I'm told that you and Bill shared everything once upon a time,' said Martindale. He stared at his chubby hands, watching them shake. Too old? Impotent? Afraid of the chase? Or afraid of what he might unearth at the end of it? 'There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing,' Ann liked to say - it was a favourite apologia, indeed, for many of her misdemeanours - 'there is only one reason for doing something . And that's because you want to.' Or have to? Ann would furiously deny it: coercion, she would say, is just another word for doing what you want; or for not doing what you are afraid of.

Middle children weep longer than their brothers and sisters. Over her mother's shoulder, stilling her pains and her injured pride, Jackie Lacon watched the party leave. First, two men she had not seen before, one tall, one short and dark. They drove off in a small green van. No one waved to them, she noticed, or even said goodbye. Next, her father left in his own car; lastly a blond good-looking man and a short fat one in an enormous overcoat like a pony blanket made their way to a sports car parked under the beech trees. For a moment she really thought there must be something wrong with the fat one, he followed so slowly and so painfully. Then, seeing the handsome man hold the car door for him, he seemed to wake, and hurried forward with a lumpy skip. Unaccountably, this gesture upset her afresh. A storm of sorrow seized her and her mother could not console her.

Peter Guillam was a chivalrous fellow whose conscious loyalties were determined by his affections. The others had been made over long ago to the Circus. His father, a French businessman, had spied for a Circus r�seau in the war while his mother, an Englishwoman, did mysterious things with codes. Until eight years ago, under the cover of a shipping clerk, Guillam himself had run his own agents in French North Africa, which was considered a murderous assignment. He was blown, his agents were hanged, he entered the long middle age of the grounded pro. He devilled in London, sometimes for Smiley, ran a few home-based operations including a network of girlfriends who were not, as the jargon has it, inter-conscious and when Alleline's crowd took over he was shoved out to grass in Brixton, he supposed because he had the wrong connections, among them Smiley. That, resolutely, was how until last Friday he would have told the story of his life. Of his relationship with Smiley he would have dwelt principally upon the end.

Guillam was living mainly in London docks in those days, where he was putting together low-grade Marine networks from whatever odd Polish, Russian and Chinese seamen he and a bunch of talent-spotters occasionally managed to get their hands on. Between-whiles he sat in a small room on the first floor of the Circus and consoled a pretty secretary called Mary and he was quite happy except that no one in authority would answer his minutes. When he used the phone he got engaged or no answer. He had heard vaguely there was trouble, but there was always trouble. It was common knowledge for instance that Alleline and Control had locked horns but they had been doing little else for years. He also knew, like everyone else, that a big operation had aborted in Czechoslovakia, that the Foreign Office and the Defence Ministry had jointly blown a gasket and that Jim Prideaux, head of the scalphunters, the oldest Czecho hand, and Bill Haydon's lifelong stringer, had been shot up and put in the bag. Hence, he assumed, the loud silence and the glum faces. Hence also Bill Haydon's manic anger, of which the news spread like a nervous thrill through all the building: like God's wrath, said Mary, who loved a full-scale passion. Later he heard the catastrophe called Testify. Testify, Haydon told him much later, was the most incompetent bloody operation ever launched by an old man for his dying glory, and Jim Prideaux was the price of it. Bits made the newspapers, there were parliamentary questions and even rumours, never officially confirmed, that British troops in Germany had been put on full alert.