"I expect so. I hear so."

"Is he as important as you were?"

"I suppose."

"I suppose," she repeated. "I expect. I hear. Is he better then? A better performer than you, better at the arithmetic? Tell me. Please tell me. You must."

She was strangely excited. Her eyes, tearful from the wind, shone desperately upon him, she had both hands on his arm, and like a child was dragging on him for an answer.

"You"ve always told me that men aren"t to be compared," he replied awkwardly. "You"ve always said, you didn"t think in that category of comparison."

"Tell me!"

"All right: no, he"s not better."

"As good?"

"No."

"And if I wasn"t there, what would you think of him then? If Bill were not my cousin, not my anything? Tell me. Would you think more of him, or less?"

"Less, I suppose."

"Then think less now. I divorce him from the family, from our lives, from everything. Here and now. I throw him into the sea. There. Do you understand?"

He understood only: go back to the Circus, finish your business. It was one of a dozen ways she had of saying the same thing.

Still disturbed by this intrusion on his memory, Smiley stood up in rather a flurry and went to the window, his habitual lookout when he was distracted. A line of seagulls, half a dozen of them, had settled on the parapet. He must have heard them calling, and remembered that walk to Lamorna.

"I cough when there are things I can"t say," Ann had told him once. What couldn"t she say then? he asked glumly of the chimney pots across the street. Connie could say it, Martindale could say it; so why couldn"t Ann?

"Three of them and Alleline," Smiley muttered aloud. The seagulls had gone, all at once, as if they had spotted a better place. "Tell them they"re buying their way in with counterfeit money." And if the banks accept the money? If the experts p.r.o.nounce it genuine, and Bill Haydon praises it to the skies? And the Cabinet Office files are full of plaudits for the brave new men of Cambridge Circus, who have finally broken the jinx?

He had chosen Esterhase first because Toby owed Smiley his career. Smiley had recruited him in Vienna, a starving student living in the ruins of a museum of which his dead uncle had been curator. He drove down to Acton and bearded him at the Laundry across his walnut desk with its row of ivory telephones. On the wall, kneeling Magi, questionable Italian seventeenth century. Through the window, a closed courtyard crammed with cars and vans and motorbikes, and rest-huts where the teams of lamplighters killed time between shifts. First Smiley asked Toby about his family: there was a son who went to Westminster and a daughter at medical school, first year. Then he put it to Toby that the lamplighters were two months behind on their worksheets and when Toby hedged he asked him outright whether his boys had been doing any special jobs recently, either at home or abroad, which for good reasons of security Toby didn"t feel able to mention in his returns.

"Who would I do that for, George?" Toby had asked, dead-eyed. "You know in my book that"s completely illegal." And idiom, in Toby"s book, had a way of being ludicrous.

"Well, I can see you doing it for Percy Alleline, for one," Smiley suggested, feeding him the excuse: "After all, if Percy ordered you to do something and not to record it, you"d be in a very difficult position."

"What sort of something, though, George, I wonder?"

"Clear a foreign letter box, prime a safe house, watch someone"s back, spike an emba.s.sy. Percy"s Director of Operations, after all. You might think he was acting on instructions from the fifth floor. I can see that happening quite reasonably."

Toby looked carefully at Smiley. He was holding a cigarette, but apart from lighting it he hadn"t smoked it at all. It was a hand-rolled affair, taken from a silver box, but once lit it never went into his mouth. It swung around, along the line or away to the side; sometimes it was poised to take the plunge, but it never did. Meanwhile Toby made his speech: one of Toby"s personal statements, supposedly definitive about where he stood at this point in his life.

Toby liked the service, he said. He would prefer to remain in it. He felt sentimental about it. He had other interests and at any time they could claim him altogether, but he liked the service best. His trouble was, he said, promotion. Not that he wanted it for any greedy reason. He would say his reasons were social.

"You know, George, I have so many years" seniority I feel actually quite embarra.s.sed when these young fellows ask me to take orders from them. You know what I mean? Acton, even: just the name of Acton for them is ridiculous."

"Oh," said Smiley mildly. "Which young fellows are these?"

But Esterhase had lost interest. His statement completed, his face settled again into its familiar blank expression, his doll"s eyes fixed on a point in the middle distance.

"Do you mean Roy Bland?" Smiley asked. "Or Percy? Is Percy young? Who, Toby?"

It was no good, Toby regretted: "George, when you are overdue for promotion and working your fingers to the bones, anyone looks young who"s above you on the ladder."

"Perhaps Control could move you up a few rungs," Smiley suggested, not much caring for himself in this role.

Esterhase"s reply struck a chill. "Well actually, you know, George, I am not too sure he is able these days. Look here, I give Ann something" - opening a drawer - "When I heard you were coming I phone a couple of friends of mine, something beautiful I say, something for a faultless woman, you know I never forget her since we met once at Bill Haydon"s c.o.c.ktail?"

So Smiley carried off the consolation prize - a costly scent smuggled, he a.s.sumed, by one of Toby"s homing lamplighters - and took his beggar bowl to Bland, knowing as he did so that he was coming one step nearer to Haydon.

Returning to the major"s table, Smiley searched through Lacon"s files till he came to a slim volume marked "Operation Witchcraft, direct subsidies", which recorded the earliest expenses incurred through the running of Source Merlin. "For reasons of security it is proposed," wrote Alleline in yet another personal memo to the Minister, this one dated almost two years ago, "to keep the Witchcraft financing absolutely separate from all other Circus imprests. Until some proper cover can be found, I am asking you for direct subventions from Treasury funds rather than mere supplementaries to the Secret Vote which in due course are certain to find their way into the mainstream of Circus accounting. I shall then account to you personally."

"Approved," wrote the Minister a week later, "provided always..."

There were no provisions. A glance at the first row of figures showed Smiley all he needed to know: already by May of that year, when that interview at Acton took place, Toby Esterhase had personally made no fewer than eight trips on the Witchcraft budget, two to Paris, two to the Hague, one to Helsinki and three to Berlin. In each case the purpose of the journey was curtly described as "Collecting product". Between May and November, when Control faded from the scene, he made a further nineteen. One of these took him to Sofia, another to Istanbul. None required him to be absent for more than three full days. Most took place at weekends. On several such journeys, he was accompanied by Bland.

Not to put too fine an edge on it, Toby Esterhase, as Smiley had never seriously doubted, had lied in his teeth. It was nice to find the record confirming his impression.

Smiley"s feelings towards Roy Bland at that time were ambivalent. Recalling them now, he decided they still were. A don had spotted him, Smiley had recruited him; the combination was oddly akin to the one which had brought Smiley himself into the Circus net. But this time there was no German monster to fan the patriotic flame, and Smiley had always been a little embarra.s.sed by protestations of anti-communism. Like Smiley, Bland had had no real childhood. His father was a docker, a pa.s.sionate trade unionist, and a Party member. His mother died when Bland was a boy. His father hated education as he hated authority and when Bland grew clever the father took it into his head that he had lost his son to the ruling cla.s.s and beat the life out of him. Bland fought his way to grammar school and in the holidays worked his ringers, as Toby would say, to the bones, in order to raise the extra fee. When Smiley met him in his tutor"s rooms at Oxford, he had the battered look of someone just arrived from a bad journey.

Smiley took him up, and over several months edged closer to a proposition, which Bland accepted largely, Smiley a.s.sumed, out of animosity towards his father. After that he pa.s.sed out of Smiley"s care. Subsisting on odd grants undescribed, Bland toiled in the Marx Memorial Library and wrote leftish papers for tiny magazines that would have died long ago had the Circus not subsidised them. In the evenings he argued the toss at smoky meetings in pubs and school halls. In the vacations he went to the Nursery, where a fanatic called Thatch ran a charm-school for outward-bound penetration agents, one pupil at a time. Thatch trained Bland in tradecraft and carefully nudged his progressive opinions nearer to his father"s Marxist camp. Three years to the day after his recruitment, partly thanks to his proletarian pedigree, and his father"s influence at King Street, Bland won a year"s appointment as a.s.sistant lector in economics at the University of Poznan. He was launched.

From Poland he applied successfully for a post at the Budapest Academy of Sciences and for the next eight years he lived the nomadic life of a minor left-wing intellectual in search of light, often liked but never trusted. He stayed in Prague, returned to Poland, did a h.e.l.lish two semesters in Sofia and six in Kiev where he had a nervous breakdown, his second in as many months. Once more the Nursery took charge of him, this time to dry him out. He was pa.s.sed as clean, his networks were given to other fieldmen and Roy himself was brought into the Circus to manage, mainly from a desk, the networks he had recruited in the field. Recently, it had seemed to Smiley, Bland had become very much Haydon"s colleague. If Smiley chanced to call on Roy for a chat, like as not Bill was lounging in his armchair surrounded by papers, charts and cigarette smoke; if he dropped in on Bill it was no surprise to find Bland, in a sweat-soaked shirt, padding heavily back and forth across the carpet. Bill had Russia, Bland the satellites; but already in those early days of Witchcraft, the distinction had all but vanished.

They met at a pub in St John"s Wood, May still, half past five on a dull day and the garden empty. Roy brought a child, a boy of five or so, a tiny Bland, fair, burly and pink-faced. He didn"t explain the boy but sometimes as they talked he shut off and watched him where he sat on a bench away from them, eating nuts. Nervous breakdowns or not Bland still bore the imprimatur of the Thatch philosophy for agents in the enemy camp: self-faith, positive partic.i.p.ation, Pied-Piper appeal and all those other uncomfortable phrases which in the high day of the cold war culture had turned the Nursery into something close to a moral rearmament centre.

"So what"s the deal?" Bland asked affably.

"There isn"t one really, Roy. Control feels that the present situation is unhealthy. He doesn"t like to see you getting mixed up in a cabal. Nor do I."

"Great. So what"s the deal?"

"What do you want?"

On the table, soaked from the earlier rainfall, was a cruet set left over from lunchtime with a bunch of paper-wrapped cellulose toothpicks in the centre compartment. Taking one, Bland spat the paper on to the gra.s.s and began working his back teeth with the fat end.

"Well, how about a five-thousand-quid backhander out of the reptile fund?"

"And a house and a car?" said Smiley, making a joke of it.

"And the kid to Eton," Bland added, and winked across the concrete paving to the boy while he went on working with the toothpick. "I"ve paid, see, George. You know that. I don"t know what I"ve bought with it but I"ve paid a h.e.l.l of a lot. I want some back. Ten years solitary for the fifth floor, that"s big money at any age. Even yours. There must have been a reason why I fell for all that spiel but I can"t quite remember what it was. Must be your magnetic personality."

Smiley"s gla.s.s was still going so Bland fetched himself another from the bar, and something for the boy as well.

"You"re an educated sort of swine," he announced easily as he sat down again. "An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function: who dreamed that one up?"

"Scott Fitzgerald," Smiley replied, thinking for a moment that Bland was proposing to say something about Bill Haydon.

"Well, Fitzgerald knew a thing or two," Bland affirmed. As he drank, his slightly bulging eyes slid sideways towards the fence, as if in search of someone. "And I"m definitely functioning, George. As a good socialist I"m going for the money. As a good capitalist, I"m sticking with the revolution, because if you can"t beat it spy on it. Don"t look like that, George. It"s the name of the game these days: you scratch my conscience, I"ll drive your Jag, right?" He was already lifting an arm as he said this. "With you in a minute!" he called across the lawn. "Set one up for me!"

Two girls were hovering the other side of the wire fence.

"Is that Bill"s joke?" Smiley asked, suddenly quite angry.

"Is what?"

"Is that one of Bill"s jokes about materialist England, the pigs-in-clover society?"

"Could be," said Bland and finished his drink. "Don"t you like it?"

"Not too much, no. I never knew Bill before as a radical reformer. What"s come over him all of a sudden?"

"That"s not radical," Bland retorted, resenting any devaluation of his socialism, or of Haydon. "That"s just looking out the b.l.o.o.d.y window. That"s just England now, man. n.o.body wants that, do they?"

"So how do you propose," Smiley demanded, hearing himself at his pompous worst, "to destroy the acquisitive and compet.i.tive instincts in Western society, without also destroying..."

Bland had finished his drink; and the meeting too. "Why should you be bothered? You"ve got Bill"s job. What more do you want? Long as it lasts."

And Bill"s got my wife, Smiley thought, as Bland rose to go; and, d.a.m.n him, he"s told you.

The boy had invented a game. He had laid the table on its side and was rolling an empty bottle on to the gravel. Each time he started the bottle higher up the table top. Smiley left before it smashed.

Unlike Esterhase, Bland had not even bothered to lie. Lacon"s files made no bones of his involvement with the Witchcraft operation: "Source Merlin," wrote Alleline, in a minute dated soon after Control"s departure, "is in every sense a committee operation... I cannot honestly say which of my three a.s.sistants deserves most praise. The energy of Bland has been an inspiration to us all..." He was replying to the Minister"s suggestion that those responsible for Witchcraft should be honoured in the New Year"s list. "While Haydon"s operational ingenuity is at times little short of Merlin"s own," he added. The medals went to all three; Alleline"s appointment as Chief was confirmed, and with it his beloved knighthood.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

Which left me Bill, thought Smiley.

In the course of most London nights, there is one respite from alarm. Ten, twenty minutes, thirty, even an hour, and not a drunk groans or a child cries or a car"s tyres whine into the collision. In Suss.e.x Gardens it happens around three. That night it came early, at one, as Smiley stood once more at his dormer window peering down like a prisoner at Mrs Pope Graham"s sand patch, where a Bedford van had recently parked. Its roof was daubed with slogans: Sydney ninety days, Athens non stop, Mary Lou here we come. A light glowed inside and he presumed some children were sleeping there in unmarried bliss. Kids, he was supposed to call them. Curtains covered the windows.

Which left me Bill, he thought, still staring at the closed curtains of the van and its flamboyant globe-trotting proclamations; which left me Bill, and our friendly little chat in Bywater Street, just the two of us, old friends, old comrades at arms, "sharing everything", as Martindale had it so elegantly, but Ann sent out for the evening so that the men could be alone. Which left me Bill, he repeated, and felt the blood rise, and the colours of his vision heighten, and his sense of moderation begin its dangerous slide.

Who was he? Smiley had no focus on him any more. Each time he thought of him, he drew him too large, and different. Until Ann"s affair with him he thought he knew Bill pretty well: both his brilliance and its limitations. He was of the pre-war set that seemed to have vanished for good, which managed to be disreputable and high-minded at the same time. His father was a high court judge, two of his several beautiful sisters had married into the aristocracy; at Oxford he favoured the unfashionable right rather than the fashionable left, but never to the point of strain. From his late teens he had been a keen explorer and amateur painter of brave, if over-ambitious stamp: several of his paintings now hung in Miles Sercombe"s fatuous palace in Carlton Gardens. He had connections in every emba.s.sy and consulate across the Middle East and he used them ruthlessly. He took up remote languages with ease, and when thirty-nine came, the Circus snapped him up; they had had their eye on him for years. He had a dazzling war. He was ubiquitous and charming; he was unorthodox and occasionally outrageous. He was probably heroic. The comparison with Lawrence was inevitable.

And it was true, Smiley conceded, that Bill in his time had fiddled with substantial pieces of history; had proposed all sorts of grand designs for restoring England to influence and greatness - like Rupert Brooke he seldom spoke of Britain. But Smiley in his rare moments of objectivity could remember few that ever got off the ground.

It was the other side of Haydon"s nature, by contrast, which as a colleague he had found easier to respect: the slow-burning skills of the natural agent runner, his rare sense of balance in the playing back of double agents, and the mounting of deception operations; his art of fostering affection, even love, though it ran against the grain of other loyalties.

As witness, thank you, my wife.

Perhaps Bill really is out of scale, he thought hopelessly, still grappling for a sense of proportion. Picturing him now, and putting him beside Bland, Esterhase, even Alleline, it did truthfully seem to Smiley that all of them were to a great or small extent imperfect imitations of that one original, Haydon. That their affections were like steps towards the same un.o.btainable ideal of the rounded man, even if the idea was itself misconceived, or misplaced; even if Bill was utterly unworthy of it. Bland in his blunt impertinence, Esterhase in his lofty artificial Englishness, Alleline with his shallow gift of leadership: without Bill they were a disarray. Smiley also knew, or thought he knew - the idea came to him now as a mild enlightenment - that Bill in turn was also very little by himself: that while his admirers - Bland, Prideaux, Alleline, Esterhase, and all the rest of the supporters" club - might find in him completeness, Bill"s real trick was to use them, to live through them to complete himself; here a piece, there a piece, from their pa.s.sive ident.i.ties: thus disguising the fact that he was less, far less, than the sum of his apparent qualities... and finally submerging this dependence beneath an artist"s arrogance, calling them the creatures of his mind...

"That"s quite enough," said Smiley aloud.

Withdrawing abruptly from this insight, dismissing it irritably as yet another theory about Bill, he cooled his overheated mind with the recollection of their last meeting.

"I suppose you want to grill me about b.l.o.o.d.y Merlin," Bill began. He looked tired and nervy; it was his time for commuting to Washington. In the old days he would have brought an unsuitable girl and sent her to sit with Ann upstairs while they talked their business; expecting Ann to bolster his genius to her, thought Smiley cruelly. They were all of the same sort: half his age, bedraggled art school, clinging, surly; Ann used to say he had a supplier. And once to shock he brought a ghastly youth called Steggie, an a.s.sistant barman from one of the Chelsea pubs with an open shirt and a gold chain round his midriff.

"Well they do say you write the reports," Smiley explained.

"I thought that was Bland"s job," said Bill with his foxy grin.

"Roy makes the translations," said Smiley. "You draft the covering reports; they"re typed on your machine. The material"s not cleared for typists at all."

Bill listened carefully, brows lifted, as if at any moment he might interrupt with an objection or a more congenial topic, then hoisted himself from the deep armchair and ambled to the bookcase, where he stood a full shelf higher than Smiley. Fishing out a volume with his long fingers he peered into it, grinning.

"Percy Alleline won"t do," he announced, turning a page. "Is that the premise?"

"Pretty well."

"Which means that Merlin won"t do either. Merlin would do if he were my source, wouldn"t he? What would happen if b.l.o.o.d.y Bill here pottered along to Control and said he"d hooked a big fish and wanted to play him alone? "That"s very nifty of you, Bill boy," Control would say. "You do it just the way you want, Bill boy, "course you do. Have some filthy tea." He"d be giving me a medal by now instead of sending you snooping round the corridors. We used to be rather a cla.s.sy bunch. Why are we so vulgar these days?"

"He thinks Percy"s on the make," Smiley said.

"So he is. So am I. I want to be head boy. Did you know that? Time I made something of myself, George. Half a painter, half a spy, time I was all something. Since when was ambition a sin in our beastly outfit?"

"Who runs him, Bill?"

"Percy? Karla does, who else? Lower-cla.s.s bloke with upper-cla.s.s sources, must be a bounder. Percy"s sold out to Karla, it"s the only explanation." He had developed the art, long ago, of deliberately misunderstanding. "Percy"s our house mole," he said.

"I meant who runs Merlin? Who is Merlin? What"s going on?"

Leaving the bookcase Haydon took himself on a tour of Smiley"s drawings. "This is a Callot, isn"t it?" - unhooking a small gilt frame and holding it to the light - "It"s nice." He tilted his spectacles to make them magnify. Smiley was certain he had looked at it a dozen times before. "It"s very nice. Doesn"t anyone think my nose should be out of joint? I am supposed to be in charge of the Russian target, you know. Given it my best years, set up networks, talent-spotters, all mod cons. You chaps on the fifth floor have forgotten what it"s like to run an operation where it takes you three days to post a letter and you don"t even get an answer for your trouble."

Smiley, dutifully: Yes, I have forgotten. Yes, I sympathise. No, Ann is nowhere in my thoughts. We are colleagues after all and men of the world, we are here to talk about Merlin and Control.

"Along comes this upstart Percy, d.a.m.n Caledonian street-merchant, no shadow of cla.s.s, shoving a whole wagonload of Russian goodies. b.l.o.o.d.y annoying, don"t you think?"