"And wasn"t there in fact a small hitch that night?" Smiley asked, remembering Sam Collins, and the matter of whether Ellis had been shot. Haydon agreed that there had been. If everything had gone according to plan, the first Czech bulletins should have broken at ten thirty. Haydon would have had a chance to read his club tickertape after Sam Collins had rung Ann, and before he arrived at the Circus to take over. But because Jim had been shot, there was fumble at the Czech end and the bulletin was released after his club had closed.

"Lucky no one followed it up," he said, helping himself to another of Smiley"s cigarettes. "Which one was I by the way?" he asked conversationally. "I forget."

"Tailor. I was Beggarman."

By then Smiley had had enough, so he slipped out, not bothering to say goodbye. He got into his car and drove for an hour anywhere, till he found himself on a side road to Oxford doing eighty, so he stopped for lunch and headed for London. He still couldn"t face Bywater Street so he went to a cinema, dined somewhere and got home at midnight slightly drunk to find both Lacon and Miles Sercombe on the doorstep, and Sercombe"s fatuous Rolls, the black bedpan, all fifty foot of it, shoved up on the kerb in everyone"s way.

They drove to Sarratt at a mad speed, and there, in the open night under a clear sky, lit by several hand torches and stared at by several white-faced inmates of the Nursery, sat Bill Haydon on a garden bench facing the moonlit cricket field. He was wearing striped pyjamas under his overcoat; they looked more like prison clothes. His eyes were open and his head was propped unnaturally to one side, like the head of a bird when its neck has been expertly broken.

There was no particular dispute about what had happened. At ten thirty Haydon had complained to his guards of sleeplessness and nausea: he proposed to take some fresh air. His case being regarded as closed, no one thought to accompany him and he walked out into the darkness alone. One of the guards remembered him making a joke about "examining the state of the wicket". The other was too busy watching the television to remember anything. After half an hour they became apprehensive so the senior guard went off to take a look while his a.s.sistant stayed behind in case Haydon should return. Haydon was found where he was now sitting; the guard thought at first that he had fallen asleep. Stooping over him, he caught the smell of alcohol - he guessed gin or vodka - and decided that Haydon was drunk, which surprised him since the Nursery was officially dry. It wasn"t till he tried to lift him that his head flopped over, and the rest of him followed as dead weight. Having vomited (the traces were over there by the tree), the guard propped him up again and sounded the alarm.

Had Haydon received any messages during the day? Smiley asked.

No. But his suit had come back from the cleaners and it was possible a message had been concealed in it - for instance inviting him to a rendezvous.

"So the Russians did it," the Minister announced with satisfaction to Haydon"s unresponsive form. "To stop him peaching, I suppose. b.l.o.o.d.y thugs."

"No," said Smiley. "They take pride in getting their people back."

"Then who the h.e.l.l did?"

Everyone waited on Smiley"s answer, but none came. The torches went out and the group moved uncertainly towards the car.

"Can we lose him just the same?" the Minister asked on the way back.

"He was a Soviet citizen. Let them have him," said Lacon, still watching Smiley in the darkness.

They agreed it was a pity about the networks. Better see whether Karla would do the deal anyhow. "He won"t," said Smiley.

Recalling all this in the seclusion of his first-cla.s.s compartment, Smiley had the curious sensation of watching Haydon through the wrong end of a telescope. He had eaten very little since last night, but the bar had been open for most of the journey.

Leaving King"s Cross he had had a wistful notion of liking Haydon, and respecting him: Bill was a man, after all, who had had something to say and had said it. But his mental system rejected this convenient simplification. The more he puzzled over Haydon"s rambling account of himself, the more conscious he was of the contradictions. He tried at first to see Haydon in the romantic newspaper terms of a Thirties intellectual, for whom Moscow was the natural Mecca. "Moscow was Bill"s discipline," he told himself. "He needed the symmetry of an historical and economic solution." This struck him as too spa.r.s.e, so he added more of the man whom he was trying to like: "Bill was a romantic and a sn.o.b. He wanted to join an elitist vanguard and lead the ma.s.ses out of the darkness." Then he remembered the half-finished canvases in the girl"s drawing room in Kentish Town: cramped, overworked and condemned. He remembered also the ghost of Bill"s authoritarian father - Ann had called him simply the Monster - and he imagined Bill"s Marxism making up for his inadequacy as an artist, and for his loveless childhood. Later of course it hardly mattered if the doctrine wore thin. Bill was set on the road and Karla would know how to keep him there. Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided, seeing Bill again stretched out on the floor in Bywater Street, while Ann played him music on the gramophone.

Bill had loved it, too. Smiley didn"t doubt that for a moment. Standing at the middle of a secret stage, playing world against world, hero and playwright in one: oh, Bill had loved that all right.

Smiley shrugged it all aside, distrustful as ever of the standard shapes of human motive, and settled instead for a picture of one of those wooden Russian dolls that open up, revealing one person inside the other, and another inside him. Of all men living, only Karla had seen the last little doll inside Bill Haydon. When was Bill recruited, and how? Was his right-wing stand at Oxford a pose, or was it paradoxically the state of sin from which Karla summoned him to grace?

Ask Karla: pity I didn"t.

Ask Jim: I never shall.

Over the flat East Anglian landscape as it slid slowly by, the unyielding face of Karla replaced Bill Haydon"s crooked deathmask. "But you had this one price: Ann. The last illusion of the illusionless man. He reckoned that if I were known to be Ann"s lover around the place you wouldn"t see me very straight when it came to other things."

Illusion? Was that really Karla"s name for love? And Bill"s?

"Here," said the guard very loudly, and perhaps for the second time. "Come on with it, you"re for Grimsby then, aren"t you?"

"No, no: Immingham." Then he remembered Mendel"s instructions and clambered on to the platform.

There was no cab in sight, so having enquired at the ticket office, he made his way across the empty forecourt and stood beside a green sign marked "Queue". He had hoped she might collect him, but perhaps she hadn"t received his wire. Ah well; the post office at Christmas: who could blame them? He wondered how she would take the news about Bill; till, remembering her frightened face on the cliffs in Cornwall, he realised that by then Bill was already dead for her. She had sensed the coldness of his touch, and somehow guessed what lay behind it.

Illusion? he repeated to himself. Illusionless?

It was bitterly cold; he hoped very much that her wretched lover had found her somewhere warm to live.

He wished he"d brought her fur boots from the cupboard under the stairs.

He remembered the copy of Grimmelshausen, still uncollected at Martindale"s club.

Then he saw her: her disreputable car shunting towards him down the lane marked "Buses only" and Ann at the wheel staring the wrong way. Saw her get out, leaving the indicator winking, and walk into the station to enquire: tall and puckish, extraordinarily beautiful, essentially another man"s woman.

For the rest of that term, Jim Prideaux behaved in the eyes of Roach much as his mother had behaved when his father went away. He spent a lot of time on little things, like fixing up the lighting for the school play and mending the soccer nets with string, and in French he took enormous pains over small inaccuracies. But big things, like his walks and solitary golf, these he gave up altogether, and in the evenings stayed in and kept clear of the village. Worst of all was his staring, empty look when Roach caught him unawares, and the way he forgot things in cla.s.s, even red marks for merit: Roach had to remind him to hand them in each week.

To support him, Roach took the job of dimmer man on the lighting. Thus at rehearsals Jim had to give him a special signal, to Bill and no one else. He was to raise his arm and drop it to his side, when he wanted the footlights to fade.

With time, Jim seemed to respond to treatment, however. His eye grew clearer and he became alert again, as the shadow of his mother"s death withdrew. By the night of the play he was more light-hearted than Roach had ever known him. "Hey Jumbo you silly toad, where"s your mac, can"t you see it"s raining?" he called out, as tired but triumphant they trailed back to the main building after the performance. "His real name is Bill," he heard him explain to a visiting parent. "We were new boys together."

The gun, Bill Roach had finally convinced himself, was after all a dream.

END.