A Perfect Spy

by John le Carré

childhood is the credit balance of the novelist.

Like many tyrants Miss Dubber was small.

He lifted Toby on to his lap and stroked him, a thing he had never done before, and which gave Toby no discernible pleasure.

Mary’s life was a record of fine deaths.

it was just Magnus’s perverse way of liking people to kick at them and pick holes in them and swear he would never talk to them again.

Sometimes, Tom, we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.

That face cannot discard a single bad memory or experience, because it has nobody to share them with. It is condemned to store every one of them away until the day when it will break from overloading.

for what is a prophet’s son but himself a prophecy,

And Rickie, suddenly his gaze has the glint of a flick-knife in the dark. Syd does not go as far as I shall in describing that stare because Syd won’t touch the black side of his lifelong hero. But I will. It looks out of him like a child through the eyeholes of a mask. It denies everything it stood for not a half-second earlier. It is pagan. It is amoral. It regrets your decision and your mortality. But it has no choice because you cannot go back.

Rick’s spirits are back, because the flick-knife never shows for long and because he has already achieved the object that is more important to him than any other in his human dealings, even if he himself does not yet know it. He has inspired Makepeace to hold two totally divergent opinions of him and perhaps more. He has shown him the official and unofficial versions of his identity. He has taught him to respect Rick in his complexity and to reckon as much with Rick’s secret world as with his overt one.

It was only when meddlesome unbelievers such as Makepeace Watermaster had difficulty accepting this state of affairs that Rick found himself with a religious war on his hands, and like others before him was compelled to defend his faith by unpleasant means. All he demanded was the totality of your love. The least you could do in return was give it to him blindly. And wait for him, as God’s Banker, to double it over six months.

Rick just managed to hear, though his face had already acquired the dreamy expression that overcame it at the approach of a direct question.

So there’s yet another Pym for you, Jack, and you had better add him to my file even if he is neither admirable nor, I suspect, comprehensible to you, though Poppy knew him inside out from the first day. He’s the Pym who can’t rest till he’s touched the love in people, then can’t rest till he’s hacked his way out of it, the more drastically the better. The Pym who does nothing cynically, nothing without conviction. Who sets events in motion in order to become their victim, which he calls decision, and ties himself into pointless relationships, which he calls loyalty. Then waits for the next event to get him out of the last one, which he calls destiny.

Once in our lives, it is given us to know a truly happy family. Frau Ollinger was tall and luminous and frugal. On a routine patrol of the house Pym once watched her through a crack in a doorway while she slept, and she was smiling. I am sure she was smiling when she died. Her husband fussed round her like a fat tug, upsetting the economy, dumping every waif and sponger on her that he came upon, adoring her. The daughters were each plainer than the next, played musical instruments atrociously, to the fury of the neighbours, and one by one they married even plainer men and worse musicians whom the Ollingers thought brilliant and delightful—and by thinking made them so.

Pym did not like the description at all. The account of himself that he had given to Herr Ollinger was obsolete. He was dismayed to hear it revived.

“They must be very long poems. He types all night,” said Pym. “Indeed he does. And on my typewriter,” said Herr Ollinger, his pride complete.

It was as if his Maker had put His thumb and forefinger to either temple and yanked the whole face downward as a warning to his frivolity: first the hooped eyebrows, then the eyes, then the moustache which was a shaggy horseshoe. And somehow inside all this was Axel himself, his eyes twinkling out of their own shadows, the grateful survivor of something Pym was not allowed to share.

“Why does Carlsbad no longer exist?” Pym asked Herr Ollinger as soon as he could get him alone. Herr Ollinger knew everything except how to run a factory.

Walking again, Axel had to shove his arm through Pym’s to support himself, and from then on used him unashamedly as his walking-stick. For the rest of our lives we have seldom walked in any other way.

“You wouldn’t mind?” said Sandy quizzically, still smirking. “Why should I?” said Pym. Sandy forced the card cleverly. He sensed that Pym liked taking rash decisions in front of people, and he used this knowledge to press a commitment out of him before he knew what he was committing to.

In a single Christmas, God had dished him up two saints. The one was on the run and couldn’t walk, the other was a handsome English warlord who served sherry on Boxing Day and had never had a doubt in his life. Both admired him, both loved his jokes and his voices, both were clamouring to occupy the empty spaces of his heart. In return he was giving to each man the character he seemed to be in search of. His decision to keep them secret from each other was never taken. Let each be the mistress that keeps the other home intact, Pym thought. If he thought at all.

And what am I thinking? I am thinking that a man who cannot speak clearly cannot think clearly. I am thinking that selfexpression is the companion to logic and that Harry E. Wexler is by this criterion circumcised from the neck up, even if he does hold my precious future in his hands.

Pym held their hands and stared into their puzzled eyes and told them everything he had ever dreamed of hearing.

The lock pops open. I am in the presence of a miracle and the miracle is me. I will return.

This violence is not only of the body. It is the ravishment that must be done to truth, friendship and, if need be, honour in the interest of Mother England.

Armed him with outrageous examples of the Firm’s incompetence worldwide. Until, fighting thus for their mutual survival, Pym and Axel drew still closer together, each laying the irrational burdens of his country at the other’s feet.

In committee, it was true, they reverted soon enough to type, and became the warring princelings of the European countries they had left behind. They could run you up a cabal that would make mediaeval Venice blush. They could be Dutch and stubborn, Scandinavian and gloomy, Balkan and murderous and tribal. But when they mixed with one another they were American and loquacious and disarming, and Pym was hard put to find a centre to betray.

He never did, he never would. Axel was his keeper and his virtue, he was the altar on which Pym had laid his secrets and his life. He had become the part of Pym that was not owned by anybody else.

Do I need to tell you, Tom, how bright and dear the world looks when we know our days are numbered? How all life swells and opens to you, and says “Come in” just when you had thought you were unwanted? What a paradise America became once Pym knew the writing was on the wall.

Can I convince you that Pym and Axel wept sincere tears as they watched the refugees from European persecution set foot on American soil while the commentator spoke of a Nation of Nations and the Land of the Free? We believed it, Tom. And Pym believes it still. Pym never felt more free in his life until the night Rick died. Everything he still contrived to love in himself was here to love in the people round him. A willingness to open themselves to strangers. A guile that was only there to protect their innocence. A fantasy that fired but never owned them. A capacity to be swayed by everything, while still remaining sovereign.

I would shower you with all the money I could afford, praying that it would enable you to add a few more Wentworths to the green cabinet. But even while I fawned on you and exchanged radiant smiles with you and held hands with you and bolstered you in your idiotic schemes, I knew that you had pulled the best con of them all. You were nothing any more. Your mantle had passed to me, leaving you a naked little man, and myself the biggest con I knew.

“You see, Tom, I am the bridge,” he wrote in a hand that was irritatingly sluggish. “I am what you must walk over to get from Rick to life.”