Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (17 page)

“Your father wasn’t a Green Jacket, was he, dear?” she enquired, with a yawn, as she read Barraclough in the register. Smiley paid her fifty pounds’ advance for a two-week stay, and she gave him Room 8 because he wanted to work. He asked for a desk and she gave him a rickety card table; Norman, the boy, brought it. “It’s Georgian,” she said with a sigh, supervising its delivery. “So you will love it for me, won’t you, dear? I shouldn’t lend it to you, really; it was the Major’s.”

To the fifty, Mendel privately had added a further twenty on account, from his own wallet—“dirty oncers,” as he called them—which he later recovered from Smiley. “No smell to nothing, is there?” he said.

“You could say so,” Mrs. Pope Graham agreed, demurely stowing the notes among her nether garments.

“I’ll want every scrap,” Mendel warned, seated in her basement apartment over a bottle of the one she liked. “Times of entry and exit, contacts, life-style, and most of all,” he said, lifting an emphatic finger, “most of all—and more important than you can possibly know, this is—I’ll want suspicious persons taking an interest or putting questions to your staff under a pretext.” He gave her his state-of-the-nation look. “Even if they say they’re the Guards Armoured and Sherlock Holmes rolled into one.”

“There’s only me and Norman,” said Mrs. Pope Graham, indicating a shivery boy in a black overcoat to which had been stitched a velvet collar of beige. “And they’ll not get far with Norman—will they, dear; you’re too sensitive.”

“Same with his incoming letters,” said the Inspector. “I’ll want postmarks and times posted where legible, but no tampering or holding back. Same with his objects.” He allowed a hush to fall as he eyed the substantial safe that formed such a feature of the furnishings. “Now and then, he’s going to ask for objects to be lodged. Mainly they’ll be papers, sometimes books. There’s only one person allowed to look at those objects apart from him.” He pulled a sudden piratical grin: “Me. Understand? No one else can even know you’ve got them. And don’t fiddle with them, or he’ll know because he’s sharp. It’s got to be expert fiddling. I’m not saying any more,” Mendel concluded. Though he did remark to Smiley, soon after returning from Somerset, that if twenty quid was all it cost them, Norman and his protectress were the cheapest baby-sitting service in the business.

In which boast he was pardonably mistaken, for he could hardly be expected to know of Jim’s recruitment of the entire car club; or the means by which Jim was able subsequently to trace the path of Mendel’s wary investigations. Nor could Mendel, or anyone else, have guessed the state of electric alertness to which anger, and the strain of waiting, and perhaps a little madness, had seemingly brought Jim.

Room 8 was on the top floor. Its window looked onto the parapet. Beyond the parapet lay a side street with a shady bookshop and a travel agency called Wide World. The hand towel was embroidered “Swan Hotel Marlow.” Lacon stalked in that evening carrying a fat briefcase containing the first consignment of papers from his office. To talk, the two men sat side by side on the bed while Smiley played a transistor wireless to drown the sound of their voices. Lacon took this mawkishly; he seemed somehow too old for the picnic. Next morning on his way to work, Lacon reclaimed the papers and returned the books that Smiley had given him to pad out his briefcase. In this role Lacon was at his worst. His manner was offended and off-hand; he made it clear he detested the irregularity. In the cold weather, he seemed to have developed a permanent blush. But Smiley could not have read the files by day, because they were on call to Lacon’s staff and their absence would have caused an uproar. Nor did he want to. He knew better than anyone that he was desperately short of time. Over the next three days this procedure varied very little. Each evening on his way to take the train from Paddington, Lacon dropped in his papers, and each night Mrs. Pope Graham furtively reported to Mendel that the sour gangly one had called again—the one who looked down his nose at Norman. Each morning, after three hours’ sleep and a disgusting breakfast of undercooked sausage and overcooked tomato—there was no other menu—Smiley waited for Lacon to arrive, then slipped gratefully into the cold winter’s day to take his place among his fellow men.

They were extraordinary nights for Smiley, alone up there on the top floor. Thinking of them afterwards—though his days between were just as fraught, and on the surface more eventful—he recalled them as a single journey, almost a single night. “And you’ll do it,” Lacon had piped shamelessly in the garden. “Go forwards, go backwards?” As Smiley retraced path after path into his own past, there was no longer any difference between the two: forwards or backwards, it was the same journey and its destination lay ahead of him. There was nothing in that room, no object among that whole magpie collection of tattered hotel junk, that separated him from the rooms of his recollection. He was back on the top floor of the Circus, in his own plain office with the Oxford prints, just as he had left it a year ago. Beyond his door lay the low-ceilinged anteroom where Control’s grey-haired ladies, the mothers, softly typed and answered telephones; while here in the hotel an undiscovered genius along the corridor night and day tapped patiently at an old machine. At the anteroom’s far end—in Mrs. Pope Graham’s world there was a bathroom there, and a warning not to use it—stood the blank door that led to Control’s sanctuary: an alley of a place, with old steel cupboards and old red books, a smell of sweet dust and jasmine tea. Behind the desk Control himself, a carcass of a man by then, with his lank grey forelock and his smile as warm as a skull.

This mental transposition was so complete in Smiley that when his phone rang—the extension was an extra, payable in cash—he had to give himself time to remember where he was. Other sounds had an equally confusing effect on him, such as the rustle of pigeons on the parapet, the scraping of the television mast in the wind, and—in rain—the sudden river gurgling in the roof valley. For these sounds also belonged to his past, and in Cambridge Circus were heard by the fifth floor only. His ear selected them, no doubt, for that very reason: they were the background jingle of his past. Once in the early morning, hearing a footfall in the corridor outside his room, Smiley actually went to the bedroom door expecting to let in the Circus night coding clerk. He was immersed in Guillam’s photographs at the time, puzzling out, from far too little information, the likely Circus procedure under lateralism for handling an incoming telegram from Hong Kong. But instead of the clerk he found Norman, barefooted in pyjamas. Confetti was strewn over the carpet and two pairs of shoes stood outside the opposite door, a man’s and a girl’s, though no one at the Islay—least of all Norman—would ever clean them.

“Stop prying and go to bed,” said Smiley. And when Norman only stared: “Oh, do go away, will you? ”—And nearly, but he stopped himself in time, “You grubby little man.”

“Operation Witchcraft,” read the title on the first volume Lacon had brought to him that first night. “Policy regarding distribution of Special Product.” The rest of the cover was obliterated by warning labels and handling instructions, including one that quaintly advised the accidental finder to “return the file UNREAD” to the Chief Registrar at the Cabinet Office. “Operation Witchcraft,” read the second. “Supplementary estimates to the Treasury, special accommodation in London, special financing arrangements, bounty, etc.” “Source Merlin,” read the third, bound to the first with pink ribbon. “Customer Evaluations, cost effectiveness, wider exploitation; see also Secret Annexe.” But the secret annexe was not attached, and when Smiley asked for it there was a coldness.

“The Minister keeps it in his personal safe,” Lacon snapped.

“Do you know the combination?”

“Certainly not,” he retorted, now furious.

“What is the title of it?”

“It can be of no possible concern to you. I entirely fail to see why you should waste your time chasing after this material in the first place. It’s highly secret and we have done everything humanly possible to keep the readership to the minimum.”

“Even a secret annexe has to have a title,” said Smiley mildly.

“This has none.”

“Does it give the identity of Merlin?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. The Minister would not want to know, and Alleline would not want to tell him.”

“What does ‘wider exploitation’ mean?”

“I refuse to be interrogated, George. You’re not family any more, you know. By rights, I should have you specially cleared, as it is.”

“Witchcraft-cleared?”

“Yes.”

“Do we have a list of people who have been cleared in that way?”

It was in the policy file, Lacon retorted, and all but slammed the door on him before coming back, to the slow chant of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” introduced by an Australian disc-jockey. “The Minister—” He stopped, and began again. “He doesn’t like devious explanations. He has a saying: he’ll only believe what can be written on a postcard. He’s very impatient to be given something he can get his hands on.”

Smiley said, “You won’t forget Prideaux, will you? Just anything you have on him at all; even scraps are better than nothing.”

With that, Smiley left Lacon to glare awhile, then make a second exit: “You’re not going fey, are you, George? You realise that Prideaux had most likely never even
heard
of Witchcraft before he was shot? I really do fail to see why you can’t stick with the primary problem instead of rootling around in . . .” But by this time he had talked himself out of the room.

Smiley turned to the last of the batch: “Operation Witchcraft, correspondence with Department.” “Department” being one of Whitehall’s many euphemisms for the Circus. This volume was conducted in the form of official minutes between the Minister on the one side, and on the other—recognisable at once by his laborious schoolboy hand—Percy Alleline, at that time still consigned to the bottom rungs of Control’s ladder of beings.

A very dull monument, Smiley reflected, surveying these much-handled files, to such a long and cruel war.

16

I
t was this long and cruel war that in its main battles Smiley now relived as he embarked upon his reading. The files contained only the thinnest record of it; his memory contained far more. Its protagonists were Alleline and Control, its origins misty. Bill Haydon—a keen, if saddened, follower of those events—maintained that the two men learned to hate each other at Cambridge during Control’s brief spell as a don and Alleline’s as an undergraduate. According to Bill, Alleline was Control’s pupil and a bad one, and Control taunted him, which he certainly might have.

The story was grotesque enough for Control to play it up: “Percy and I are blood brothers, I hear. We romped together in punts, imagine!” He never said whether it was true.

To half-legend of that sort, Smiley could add a few hard facts from his knowledge of the two men’s early lives. While Control was no man’s child, Percy Alleline was a lowland Scot and a son of the Manse; his father was a Presbyterian hammer, and if Percy did not have his faith, he had surely inherited the faculty of bullish persuasion. He missed the war by a year or two and joined the Circus from a City company. At Cambridge he had been a bit of a politician (somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan, said Haydon who was himself, Lord knows, no milk-and-water liberal) and a bit of an athlete. He was recruited by a figure of no account called Maston, who for a short time contrived to build himself a corner in counter-intelligence. Maston saw a great future in Alleline and, having peddled his name furiously, fell from grace. Finding Alleline an embarrassment, Circus personnel packed him off to South America, where he did two full tours under consular cover without returning to England.

Even Control later admitted that Percy did extremely well there, Smiley recalled. The Argentinians, liking his tennis and the way he rode, took him for a gentleman—Control speaking—and assumed he was stupid, which Percy never quite was. By the time he handed over to his successor, he had put together a string of agents along both seaboards and was spreading his wings northward as well. After home leave and a couple of weeks’ briefing, he was moved to India, where his agents seemed to regard him as the reincarnation of the British Raj. He preached loyalty to them, paid them next to nothing, and—when it suited him—sold them down the river. From India he went to Cairo. That posting should have been difficult for Alleline, if not impossible, for the Middle East till then had been Haydon’s favourite stamping-ground. The Cairo networks looked on Bill quite literally in the terms which Martindale had used of him that fateful night in his anonymous dining-club: as a latter-day Lawrence of Arabia. They were all set to make life hell for his successor. Yet somehow Percy bulldozed his way through and, if he had only steered clear of the Americans, might have gone down in memory as a better man than Haydon. Instead there was a scandal and an open row between Percy and Control.

The circumstances were still obscure: the incident occurred long before Smiley’s elevation as Control’s high chamberlain. With no authority from London, it appeared, Alleline had involved himself in a silly American plot to replace a local potentate with one of their own. Alleline had always had a fatal reverence for the Americans. From Argentina he had observed with admiration their rout of left-wing politicians around the hemisphere; in India he had delighted in their skill at dividing the forces of centralisation. Whereas Control, like most of the Circus, despised them and all their works, which he frequently sought to undermine.

The plot aborted, the British oil companies were furious, and Alleline, as the jargon happily puts it, had to leave in his socks. Later, Alleline claimed that Control had urged him on, then pulled the rug out from under; even that he had deliberately blown the plot to Moscow. However it was, Alleline reached London to find a posting order directing him to the Nursery, where he was to take over the training of greenhorn probationers. It was a slot normally reserved for rundown contract men with a couple of years to go before their pension. There were just so few jobs left in London those days for a man of Percy’s seniority and talents, explained Bill Haydon, then head of personnel.