A Perfect Spy

by John le Carré

They toasted each other gravely, the way Axel had taught him. They refilled their glasses and drank again, a drink for each man. And it is my recollection that by the time they separated they had finished the bottle, for I remember Axel chucking it out into the lake to the outrage of about a thousand moorhens. But if Pym had drunk a case of the stuff it would not have affected him, such was the intensity of his feeling. Even while they began to talk, Pym kept secretly blinking into corners to make sure everything was how it was when he had last looked, so eerily similar at times was the barn to the Bern attic, right down to the soft wind that used to whirr in the skylights. And when he heard the fox again in the distance, he had the certain feeling it was Bastl barking on the wooden staircase after everyone had gone. Except that, as I say, those sentimental days were over. Magnus had killed them dead; the manhood of their friendship was beginning.