A Legacy of Spies

by John Le Carré

He was middle-European, his name was Collins.

But, unlike Jack, he never asked me about my girls. He must have thought there was safety in numbers.

I can’t help thinking that, consciously or not, he was offering himself as the father figure he later became. But perhaps the feeling was in me, and not in him. The fact remains that, when he finally popped the question, I had a feeling of coming home, even though my home was across the Channel in Brittany.

People who have worked on the outside for us don’t always fit well on the inside. But in your case, we think you might. We don’t pay a lot, and careers tend to be interrupted. But we do feel it’s an important job, as long as one cares about the end, and not too much about the means.’

In Les Deux Eglises, as in all of Brittany, we are Catholic or we are nothing. I am nothing.

passing on your way west chunks of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall which, being unremovable, are fast acquiring the status of a latter-day Stonehenge.

Was reminded of this on our trip to and around the Bordeaux area - particularly at the fuel bunkers under ground - caverns (concrete) as well as the German U boat pens where Salvador Dali works were accompanied by Pink Floyd tunes.

I wasn’t alarmed at first, just quietly amused. Some things about a British secret service never change. One of them is an obsessive anxiety about what sort of stationery to use for its overt correspondence. Not too official or formal looking: that would be bad for cover. The envelope not see-through, so preferably lined. Stark white is too visible: go for a tint, just nothing amorous. A dull blue, a hint of grey, both are acceptable. This one was pale grey.

do we type the address, do we

handwrite it? For answer, consider as always the needs of the man in the field, in this case, me: Peter Guillam, ex-member, out to grass and grateful for it. Long-time resident in rural France. Attends no veterans’ reunions. No listed significant others. Draws full pension and therefore torturable. Conclusion: in a remote Breton hamlet where foreigners are a rarity, a typed, semi-formal-looking grey envelope with a British stamp could raise local eyebrows, so go for handwritten. Now for the hard bit. The Office, or whatever the Circus calls itself these days, can’t resist a security classificati...

case, Per...

The janitor in his box wishes you good morning with a knowing

And anyway you’d rather lose yourself in the labyrinth of corridors and dead ends that is the physical embodiment of the world you’ve chosen to live in,

fag smoke, Nescafé and

deodorant.

returned the shoes to my feet and tied the laces – somehow a far more humiliating procedure than taking them off

The silence gets worse the longer I listen.

I must have relived in quick order every misfire and disaster I’d been involved in over a lifetime of licensed skulduggery.

Signet ring on middle finger of right hand. Her daddy’s? Or a coded signal about sexual preference? I’d been out of England too long.

just in case I didn’t mention it, or you didn’t hear it,’ Bunny is saying, in his blandest voice. ‘It’s our understanding that Operation Windfall involved your friend and colleague Alec Leamas, who you may just remember got himself shot dead at the Berlin

Wall while hastening to the assistance of his girlfriend Elizabeth Gold, who’d been shot dead at the Berlin Wall already. But perhaps you’ve forgotten that too?’

Our new national sport. Today’s blameless generation versus your guilty one. Who will atone for our fathers’ sins, even if they weren’t sins at the time? But you’re not a father, are you? Whereas your file rather suggests you should be overrun by grandchildren.’

I have a sense of fighting to the last man, and the last man is me.

to what extent, not ours to pry. Together they consulted one of those admirably high-minded civil rights lawyers with open-toed sandals who are the bane of this Service.

Birkenstocks no doubt

‘Josef Fiedler and Hans-Dieter Mundt.

The

Tipp-Ex

folie à deux,

Thälmann Battalion

Geheime Mitarbeiter

Majakowskiring elite and sleep with pretty young men.’ Her third identity

One

10

7

No George, blinking his pleasure as he polishes his spectacles on the inside lining of his tie – ‘hullo, Peter, you look as though you need a drink, come on in.’ No Ann in a flurry with only half her make-up on – ‘just about to go out, Peter darling – kiss, kiss – but do come in and sort the world out with poor George.’

At

Spree, been there for centuries, growing bloody cucumbers.

Gare Montparnasse

*

‘She’s a member of her local branch of the Communist Party, for one. Sells the Daily Worker at weekends.

‘Runs?’ ‘Every morning early, she runs. I find it charming. Don’t you? Fitness runs. Wellbeing runs. Round and round the local sports track. Alone. Then off to work in a book store in Fulham. Not a book shop, a store. But books, for all that. Dispatching

name of Gold,’ he concedes, as if I have dragged the name out of him. ‘First name Elizabeth. Liz to her friends.’

Like: what about your humanity, and why did it always have to play second fiddle to some higher, more abstract cause that I can’t quite put my finger on any more, if I ever could? Or put another way: how much of our human feeling can we dispense with in the name of freedom, would you say, before we cease to feel either human or free? Or were we simply suffering from the incurable English disease of needing to play the world’s game when we weren’t world players any more?

And if his features in repose retained their owlish sadness, there was no sadness in his greeting as, with a burst of energy, he bounded to his feet and grasped my hand in both of his.

He listens like nobody I ever knew. His little body goes into a kind of hibernation. The long eyelids half close. Not a frown, not a nod, not so much as a raising of the eyebrows until you have done. And when you have done – and he has made sure you have, by holding you to account on some obscure point you have omitted or fudged – still no surprise, no judgemental moment of approval or the other thing.

‘We were not pitiless, Peter. We were never pitiless. We had the larger pity. Arguably, it was misplaced. Certainly it was futile. We know that now. We did not know it then.’

This was the George I remembered: all-knowing about the frailty of others, while stoically refusing to acknowledge his own.

believe you came to accuse me of something, Peter. Am I right?’ And while it is my turn to hesitate: ‘Was it for the things we did, would you say? Or why we did them at all?’ he enquired in the kindliest of tones. ‘Why did I do them, which is more to the point. You were a loyal foot soldier. It wasn’t your job to ask why the sun rose every morning.’

‘For world peace, whatever that is? Yes, yes, of course. There will be no war, but in the struggle for

peace not a stone will be left standing, as our Russian friends used to say.’ He fell quiet, only to rally more vigorously: ‘Or was it all in the great name of capitalism? God forbid. Christendom? God forbid again.’ A sip

‘So was it all for England, then?’ he resumed. ‘There was a time, of course there was. But whose England? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? I’m a European, Peter. If I had a mission – if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading...