John le Carré - The Russia House

Thus to the three mysteries that by now were sticking in Ned's throat – the embrace, the drive from the hospital with Barley at the wheel, the two hours they spent together in the flat. For Barley's answers, we must see him as Paddy saw him, bowed over the low light on the table in the truck, his face glistening from the heat. There is the whiff from the bafflers in the background. Both men are wearing earphones, a closed-circuit microphone lies between them. Barley whispers his story, half to the microphone, half to his station chief Not all Paddy's.nights of adventure on the North-West Frontier could have yielded a more dramatic atmosphere.

Cy sits in the shadows in a third pair of earphones. It is Cy's truck but he has orders to let Paddy host the feast.

'Then she goes and gets the wobblies,' says Barley, with enough of the man-to-man in his voice to make Paddy smile. 'She'd been winding herself up all week for his call and suddenly it was over and she went pop. Probably didn't help her, me being there. Without me around, I reckon she'd have held it back till she got home.'

'Probably would at that,' Paddy agrees understandingly.

'It was too much for her. Hearing his voice, hearing he'll be in town in a couple of days, her worries about her kids - and about him, and about herself as well - it was just too much for her.'

Paddy understood perfectly. He had known emotional women in his day, and was experienced in the sorts of thing they cried over.

From there everything else flowed naturally. The deception became a symphony. Barley had done what he could to comfort her, he said, but she was in bad shape so he put his arm round her and lugged her to the car and drove her home.

In the car she did some more crying but she was on the mend by the time they got to fier flat. Barley made her a cup of tea and patted her hand, until he was confident she was able to cope.

'Well done,' said Paddy. And if, as he says this, he sounds like a nineteenth-century Indian Army officer congratulating his men after a futile cavalry charge, that is only because he is impressed and his mouth is too near the microphone.

There is lastly Barley's question, which is where Cy came in. With hindsight, no doubt, it sounds like a straight declaration of larcenous intent. But Cy didn't hear it that way and neither did Paddy. Neither, in fact, did anyone in London except Ned, whose impotence -was by now unnerving. Ned was becoming the pariah of the situation room.

'Oh yes – that's it – what about the shopping list?' says Barley as he prepares to leave. The question emerges as one of several small administrative worries, not a solo. 'When do you get to press the shopping list into my hot little hand?' he asks repetitiously.

'Why?' says Cy from the shadows.

'Well I don't know. Shouldn't I bone up on it a bit or something?'

'There's nothing to bone up,' says Cy. 'It's written questions, yes-or-no answers, and it is positively important that you do not know any part of it, thank you.'

'So when do I get it?'

'The shopping list we do as late as possible,' says Cy.

Of Cy's own opinion of Barley's state of mind, one nugget is recorded. 'With the Brits,' he is reported to have said, 'you never know what the hell they're thinking anyway.'

That night at least, Cy had a certain justice on his side.

'There was no bad news,' Ned insisted while Brock played the truck tapes for the third or thirtieth time.

We were back in our own Russia House. We had taken refuge there. It was like the early days all over again. It was dawn, but we were too wakeful to remember sleep.

'There was no bad news,' Ned repeated. 'it was all good news. "I'm well. I'm safe. I gave a great lecture. I'm catching the plane. See you on Friday. I love you." So she weeps.'

'Oh, I don't know,' I said, talking against my own mood. 'Haven't you ever cried when you were happy?'

'She weeps so much he has to cart her down the hospital corridor. She weeps so much she can't drive. When they get to her apartment she runs ahead of him to the door as if Barley doesn't exist, because she's so happy that the Bluebird's flying in on time. And he comforts her. For all the good news she's had.' Barley's recorded voice had come on again. 'And he's calm. Totally calm. Not a worry in the world. "We're bang on target, Paddy. Everything's fine. That's why she's weeping." Of course it is.'

He sat back and closed his eyes while Barley's trustworthy voice continued to talk to him from the recorder.

'He doesn't belong to us any more,'said Ned. 'He's gone away.'

As also, in a different sense, had Ned. He had launched a great operation. Now all he could do by his own reckoning was watch it hurtle out of control. In my whole life I never saw a man so isolated, with the possible exception of myself.

Spying is waiting.

Spying is worrying.

Spying is being yourself but more so.

The nostrums of the extinct Walter and the living Ned rang in Barley's ears. The apprentice had become heir to the spells of his masters but his magic was more potent than theirs had ever been.

He was on a plateau none of them had ascended. He had the goal, he had the means to reach it and he had what Clive would have called the motivation, which in better mouths was purpose. Everything they had taught him was paying off as he rode calmly into battle to deceive them. But he was not their trickster.

Their flags were nothing to him. They could wave in any wind. But he was not their traitor. He was not his own cause. He knew the battle he had to win and whom he had to win it for. He knew the sacrifice he was prepared to make. He was not their traitor. He was complete.

He did not need their scared labels and their weakling systems. He was one man alone but he was greater than the sum of those who had presumed to take control of him. He knew them as the worst of all bad weapons, because their existence justified their targets.

In a gentle way that was not even all that gentle, he had discovered anger. He could smell its first kindling and hear the crackle of its brushwood.

There was only now. Gocthe was right. There was no tomorrow because tomorrow was the excuse. There was now or there was nowhere and Goethe, even nowhere, was still right. We must cut down the grey men inside ourselves, we must burn our grey suits and set our good hearts free, which is the dream of every decent soul, and even – believe it or not – of certain grey men too. But how, with what?

Goethe was right, and it was not his fault or Barley's that each by accident had set the other in motion. With the radiance of spirit that was rising in him, Barley's sense of kinship with his unlikely friend was overwhelming. He brimmed with allegiance to Goethe's frantic dream of un- leashing the forces of sanity and opening the doors on dirty rooms.

But Barley did not dwell long on Goethe's agony. Goethe was in hell and very likely Barley would soon be following him. I'll mourn him when I have the time, he thought. Until then his business was with the living whom Goethe had put so shamefully at risk, and in a brave last gesture had attempted to preserve.

For his immediate business Barley must use the grey men's wiles. He must be himself but more so than he has ever been before. He must wait. He must worry. He must be a man reversed, inwardly reconciled, outwardly unfulfilled. He must live secretly on tiptoe, arch as a cat inside his head while he acts the Barley Blair they wish to see, their creature all the way.

Meanwhile the chess-player in him reckons his moves. The slumbering negotiator is becoming unobservably awake. The publisher is achieving what he has never achieved before, he is becoming the cool-headed broker between the necessity and the far vision.