Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (21 page)

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, his brilliance and its limitations. He was of that 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 embassy and consulate across the Middle East and he used them ruthlessly. He took up remote languages with ease, and when 1939 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, that 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, Smiley 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 affectations were like steps towards the same unobtainable ideal of the rounded man, even if the ideal 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 passive identities, 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 bloody 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 assistant 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 Bloody 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 classy 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-class bloke with upper-class 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, damn Caledonian street-merchant, no shadow of class, shoving a whole wagonload of Russian goodies. Bloody annoying, don’t you think?”

“Very.”

“Trouble is, my networks aren’t very good. Much easier to spy on Percy than—” He broke off, tired of his own thesis. His attention had settled on a tiny van Mieris head in chalk. “And I fancy this
very
much,” he said.

“Ann gave it me.”

“Amends?”

“Probably.”

“Must have been quite a sin. How long have you had it?”

Even now, Smiley remembered noticing how silent it was in the street. Tuesday? Wednesday? And he remembered thinking: No, Bill. For you I have so far received no consolation prize at all. As of this evening, you don’t even rate a pair of bedroom slippers . . . Thinking but not saying.

“Is Control dead yet?” Haydon asked.

“Just busy.”

“What does he do all day? He’s like a hermit with the clap, scratching around all on his own in that cave up there. All those bloody files he reads—what’s he about, for God’s sake? Sentimental tour of his unlovely past, I’ll bet. He looks sick as a cat. I suppose that’s Merlin’s fault, too, is it?”

Again Smiley said nothing.

“Why doesn’t he eat with the cooks? Why doesn’t he join us instead of grubbing around for truffles up there? What’s he after?”

“I didn’t know he was after anything,” said Smiley.

“Ah, stop flirting around. Of course he is. I’ve got a source up there—one of the mothers, didn’t you know? Tells me indiscretions for chocolate. Control’s been toiling through personal dossiers of old Circus folk heroes, sniffing out the dirt, who was pink, who was a queen. Half of them are under the earth already. Making a study of all our failures. Can you imagine? And for why? Because we’ve got a success on our hands. He’s mad, George. He’s got the big itch: senile paranoia, take my word for it. Ann ever tell you about wicked Uncle Fry? Thought the servants were bugging the roses to find out where he’d hidden his money. Get away from him, George. Death’s a bore. Cut the cord, move down a few floors. Join the proles.”

Ann had still not returned, so they sauntered side by side down the King’s Road looking for a cab while Bill enunciated his latest vision of politics, and Smiley said “Yes, Bill,” “No, Bill,” and wondered how he was going to break it to Control. He forgot now which particular vision it was. The year before, Bill had been a great hawk. He had wanted to run down conventional forces in Europe and replace them outright with nuclear weapons. He was about the only person left in Whitehall who believed in Britain’s independent deterrent. This year, if Smiley remembered rightly, Bill was an aggressive English pacifist and wanted the Sweden solution but without the Swedes.

No cab came; it was a beautiful night, and like old friends they went on walking, side by side.

“By the by, if you ever want to sell that Mieris, let me know, will you? I’ll give you a bloody decent price for it.”

Thinking Bill was making another bad joke, Smiley rounded on him, at last prepared to be angry. Haydon was not even conscious of his interest. He was gazing down the street, his long arm raised at an approaching cab.

“Oh, Christ, look at them,” he shouted irritably. “Full of bloody Jews going to Quag’s.”

“Bill’s backside must look like a damn gridiron,” Control muttered next day, barely looking up from his reading. “The years he’s spent sitting on the fence.”

For a moment he stared at Smiley in an unfocused way, as if looking through him to some different, less fleshy prospect; then ducked his eyes and seemed to resume his reading. “I’m glad he’s not
my
cousin,” he said.

The following Monday, the mothers had surprising news for Smiley. Control had flown to Belfast for discussions with the army. Later, checking the travel imprests, Smiley nailed the lie. No one in the Circus had flown to Belfast that month, but there was a charge for a first-class return to Vienna and the issuing authority was given as G. Smiley.

Haydon, also looking for Control, was cross: “So now what’s the pitch? Dragging Ireland into the net, creating an organisational diversion, I suppose. Jesus, your man’s a bore!”

The light in the van went out, but Smiley continued to gaze at its garish roof. How do they live? he wondered. What do they do for water, money? He tried to fathom the logistics of a troglodyte life in Sussex Gardens: water, drains, light. Ann would work them out all right; so would Bill.

Facts. What were the facts?

Facts were that one balmy pre-Witchcraft summer evening, I returned unexpectedly from Berlin to find Bill Haydon stretched on the drawing-room floor and Ann playing Liszt on the gramophone. Ann was sitting across the room from him in her dressing gown, wearing no make-up. There was no scene; everyone behaved with painful naturalness. According to Bill, he had dropped by on his way from the airport, having just flown in from Washington; Ann had been in bed but insisted on getting up to receive him. We agreed it was a pity we hadn’t shared a car from Heathrow. Bill left; I asked “What did he want?” And Ann said: “A shoulder to cry on.” Bill was having girl trouble, wanted to pour out his heart, she said.

“There’s Felicity in Washington, who wants a baby, and Jan in London, who’s having one.”

“Bill’s?”

“God knows. I’m sure Bill doesn’t.”

Next morning, without even wishing to, Smiley established that Bill had been back in London two days, not one. Following the episode, Bill showed an uncharacteristic deference towards Smiley, and Smiley reciprocated with acts of courtesy which normally belong to a newer friendship. In due course Smiley noticed that the secret was out, and he was still mystified by the speed with which that had happened. He supposed Bill had boasted to someone, perhaps Bland. If the word was correct, Ann had broken three of her own rules. Bill was Circus and he was Set—her word for family and ramifications. On either count he would be out of bounds. Thirdly, she had received him at Bywater Street, an agreed violation of territorial decencies.

Withdrawing once more into his own lonely life, Smiley waited for Ann to say something. He moved into the spare room and arranged for himself plenty of evening engagements in order that he would not be too aware of her comings and goings. Gradually it dawned on him that she was deeply unhappy. She lost weight, she lost her sense of play, and if he didn’t know her better he would have sworn she was having a bad bout of the guilts, even of self-disgust. When he was gentle with her, she fended him off; she showed no interest in Christmas shopping and developed a wasting cough, which he knew was her signal of distress. If it had not been for Operation Testify, they would have left for Cornwall earlier. As it was, they had to postpone the trip till January, by which time Control was dead, Smiley was unemployed, the scale had tipped; and Ann, to his mortification, was covering the Haydon card with as many others as she could pull from the pack.

So what happened? Did she break off the affair? Did Haydon? Why did she never speak of it? Did it matter, anyway—one among so many? He gave up. Like the Cheshire cat, the face of Bill Haydon seemed to recede as soon as he advanced upon it, leaving only the smile behind. But he knew that somehow Bill had hurt her deeply, which was the sin of sins.

19

R
eturning with a grunt of distaste to the unlovable table, Smiley resumed his reading of Merlin’s progress since his own enforced retirement from the Circus. The new régime of Percy Alleline, he at once noticed, had immediately produced several favourable changes in Merlin’s life-style. It was like a maturing, a settling down. The night dashes to European capitals ceased; the flow of intelligence became more regular and less nervy. There were headaches, certainly. Merlin’s demands for money—requirements, never threats—continued, and with the steady decline in the value of the pound these large payments in foreign currency caused the Treasury much agony. There was even a suggestion at one point, never pursued, that “since we are the country of Merlin’s choice, he should be ready to shoulder his portion of our financial vicissitudes.” Haydon and Bland exploded, apparently: “I have not the face,” wrote Alleline with rare frankness to the Minister, “to mention this subject to my staff again.”