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When Lady Ann Sercomb married George Smiley towards the end of the war she described him to her astonished Mayfair friends as breathtakingly ordinary.
And so Smiley, without school, parents, regiment or trade, without wealth or poverty, travelled without labels in the guard’s van of the social express, and soon became lost luggage, destined, when the divorce had come and gone, to remain unclaimed on the dusty shelf of yesterday’s news.
He felt safe in the taxi. Safe and warm. The warmth was contraband, smuggled from his bed and hoarded against the wet January night. Safe because unreal: it was his ghost that ranged the London streets and took note of their unhappy pleasure-seekers, scuttling under commissionaires’ umbrellas; and of the tarts, gift-wrapped in polythene.
Merridale Lane is one of those corners of Surrey where the inhabitants wage a relentless battle against the stigma of suburbia.
“It’s like the State and the People. The State is a dream too, a symbol of nothing at all, an emptiness, a mind without a body, a game played with clouds in the sky. But States make war, don’t they, and imprison people? To dream in doctrines—how tidy! My husband and I have both been tidied now, haven’t we?” She was looking at him steadily. Her accent was more noticeable now. “You call yourself the State, Mr. Smiley; you have no place among real people. You dropped a bomb from the sky: don’t come down here and look at the blood, or hear the scream.”
The CID Superintendent at Walliston was a large, genial soul who measured professional competence in years of service and saw no fault in the habit.
As he drove slowly back towards London Smiley ceased to be conscious of Mendel’s presence. There had been a time when the mere business of driving a car was a relief to him; when he had found in the unreality of a long, solitary journey a palliative to his troubled brain, when the fatigue of several hours’ driving had allowed him to forget more sombre cares.
It was still raining as he arrived. Mendel was in his garden wearing the most extraordinary hat Smiley had ever seen. It had begun life as an Anzac hat but its enormous brim hung low all the way round, so that he resembled nothing so much as a very tall mushroom.
Mendel looked at him and wondered whether he was dead.
he done and he never told me, but I guessed it was smuggling. Money to burn he had, came off him like leaves in autumn.
He hated the bed as a drowning man hates the sea. He hated the sheets that imprisoned him so that he could move neither hand nor foot.
He was hot and the sweat ran off him, he was cold and the sweat held him, trickling over his ribs like cold blood.
Then came a blessed day when someone must have drawn the blinds and let in the grey winter light. He heard the sound of traffic outside and knew at last that he would live.
Mendel showed Peter Guillam into the ward, grinning hugely. “Got him,” he said. The conversation was awkward; strained for Guillam at least, by the recollection of Smiley’s abrupt resignation and the incongruity of meeting in a hospital
Mendel drove very well, with a kind of schoolma’amish pedantry that Smiley would have found comic.
Mendel found Smiley sitting in an armchair fully dressed.
“Dieter had a theory that was pure Faust. Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective. He
She opened the door and stood looking at him for a moment in silence.
They arrived at Mitcham at lunch-time. Peter Guillam was waiting for them in his car. “Well, children; what’s the news?”
The Sheridan’s three-act production of Edward II was playing to a full house.
was a man who thought and acted in absolute terms, without patience or compromise.
He hated the Press as he hated advertising and television, he hated mass-media, the relentless persuasion of the twentieth century. Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism. That was why he hated Dieter now, hated what he stood for more strongly than ever before: it was the fabulous impertinence of renouncing the individual in favour of
the mass. When had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom?
He had to put it right. He was one of those world-builders who seem to do nothing but destroy: that’s all.”
was a beautiful night, and through the small window beside him he watched the grey wing, motionless against the starlit sky, a glimpse of eternity between two worlds. The
