Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

by John Le Carré

Coming from a broken home Roach was also a natural watcher.

Small, podgy and at best middle-aged, he was by appearance one of London’s meek who do not inherit the earth.

‘Living off the wits of his subordinates; well, maybe that’s leadership these days.’

‘Sheer lack of willpower,’ he told himself, as he courteously declined the suggestions of a lady in the doorway.

When the war came the couple evacuated to Singapore for the sake of their young son. A few months later Singapore fell and Ricki Tarr began his education in Changi jail under Japanese supervision. In Changi the father preached God’s charity to everyone in sight, and if the Japs hadn’t persecuted him his fellow prisoners would have done the job for them.

In Spain a year later, acting on a tip-off supplied by Bill Haydon, Tarr blackmailed – or burned, as the scalphunters would say – a Polish diplomat who had lost his heart to a dancer. The first yield was good, Tarr won a commendation and a bonus. But when he went back for a second helping the Pole wrote a confession to his ambassador and threw himself, with or without encouragement, out of a high window.

He’d had one tangle with a Eurasian girl along the way and Thesinger’s watchers got after her and bought the story. She said he was lonely and sat on the bed moaning about his wife for not appreciating his genius.

‘Reason as logic, or reason as motive?’ he demanded, sounding less like himself than Bill Haydon, whose pre-war, Oxford Union style of polemic seemed in those days to be in everybody’s ears. ‘Or reason as a way of life?’ They sat on a bench. ‘They don’t have to give me reasons. I can write my own damn reasons. And that is not the same,’ he insisted as Guillam guided him carefully into a cab, gave the driver the money and the address, ‘that is not the same as the half-baked tolerance that comes from no longer caring.’

There are old men who go back to Oxford and find their youth beckoning to them from the stones. Smiley was not one of them. Ten years ago he might have felt a pull. Not now.

‘George, when you are overdue for promotion and working your fingers to the bones, anyone looks young who’s above you on the ladder.’

That was another thing about him that Guillam didn’t like just then: he spoke as if you followed his reasoning, as if you were inside his mind all the time.

‘For some reason, it hurt an awful lot.’ His eyes were still open but his gaze had fixed upon an inner world. The skin of his brow and cheeks was drawn smooth as if by the exertion of his memory; but nothing could conceal from Guillam the loneliness evoked by this one admission. ‘I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,’ Smiley went on, more lightly. ‘Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things. What do you think of it?’

‘Can you? Sitting is an eloquent business, any actor will tell you that. We sit according to our natures. We sprawl and straddle, we rest like boxers between rounds, we fidget, perch, cross and uncross our legs, lose patience, lose endurance. Gerstmann did none of those things. His posture was finite and irreducible, his little jagged body was like a promontory of rock; he could have sat that way all day, without stirring a muscle. Whereas I—’ Breaking out in an awkward, embarrassed laugh, Smiley tasted the wine again, but it was no better than before. ‘Whereas I longed to have something before me, papers, a book, a report. I think I am a restless person; fussy, variable. I thought so then, anyway. I felt I lacked philosophic repose. Lacked philosophy, if you like. My work had been oppressing me much more than I realised; till now. But in that foul cell I really felt aggrieved. I felt that the entire responsibility for fighting the Cold War had landed on my shoulders. Which was tripe, of course, I was just exhausted and a little bit ill.’ He drank again.

‘As it was, the next thing I knew I was talking about Ann.’ He left no time for Guillam’s muffled exclamation. ‘Oh not about my Ann, not in as many words. About his Ann. I assumed he had one. I had asked myself, lazily no doubt, what would a man think of in such a situation, what would I? And my mind came up with a subjective answer: his woman. Is it called projection or substitution? I detest those terms but I’m sure one of them applies. I exchanged my predicament for his, that is the point, and as I now realise I began to conduct an interrogation with myself – he didn’t speak, can you imagine? There were certain externals, it is true, to which I pinned the approach. He looked connubial; he looked like half a union; he looked too complete to be alone in all his life. Then there was his passport, describing Gerstmann as married; and it is a habit in all of us to make our cover stories, our assumed personae, at least parallel with the reality.’ He lapsed again into a moment of reflection. ‘I often thought that. I even put it to Control: we should take the opposition’s cover stories more seriously, I said. The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal. The fifty-year-old who knocks five years off his age. The married man who calls himself a bachelor; the fatherless man who gives himself two children … Or the interrogator who projects himself into the life of a man who does not speak. Few men can resist expressing their appetites when they are m...

Whatever could he do, he a child? That was his guilt. That was the thread that led directly back to the misfortune of his parents. That was the predicament that threw upon his hunched shoulders the responsibility night and day for preserving the world’s peace. Roach the watcher – ‘best watcher in the whole damn unit’, to use Jim Prideaux’s treasured words – had finally watched too well. He would have sacrificed everything he possessed, his money, his leather photograph case of his parents, whatever gave him value in the world, if it would buy him release from the knowledge which had consumed him since Sunday evening.

‘Old boy,’ said Jerry Westerby shyly, in a voice that seemed to come out of the ground. ‘Well I’ll be damned. Hey, Jimmy!’ His hand, which he laid on Smiley’s arm while he signalled for refreshment with the other, was enormous and cushioned with muscle, for Jerry had once been wicket-keeper for a county cricket team. In contrast to other wicket-keepers he was a big man, but his shoulders were still hunched from keeping his hands low.

But the only way to talk to Jerry was to talk like Jerry’s newspaper: short sentences; facile opinions.

Jerry Westerby was that extremely rare person, the perfect witness. He had no fantasy, no malice, no personal opinion. Merely: the thing was rum.

‘Holy God,’ said Jim. With a handkerchief taken from his sleeve, he wiped away the sweat and whatever else was glistening on his face.

It must be a habit of the trade, he decided: we talk better when there’s a view.

To judge by his voice, Jim had had enough. He spoke fast and angrily, with that same military shortness that was his refuge from intellectual incursions.

First the semi-basement where she lived herself, full of plants and that medley of old postcards, brass table tops and carved black furniture which seems to attach itself to travelled British ladies of a certain age and class.

Occasionally an empty train raced past, leaving a still greater emptiness behind.

It worried him that he felt so bankrupt; that whatever intellectual or philosophical precepts he clung to broke down entirely now that he was faced with the human situation.

Was not Bill also betrayed? Connie’s lament rang in his ears: ‘Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves … You’re the last, George, you and Bill.’ He saw with painful clarity an ambitious man born to the big canvas, brought up to rule, divide and conquer, whose visions and vanities all were fixed, like Percy’s, upon the world’s game; for whom the reality was a poor island with scarcely a voice that would carry across the water.

His butchered agents in Morocco, his exile to Brixton, the daily frustration of his efforts as daily he grew older and youth slipped through his fingers; the drabness that was closing round him; the truncation of his power to love, enjoy and laugh; the constant erosion of the plain, heroic standards he wished to live by; the checks and stops he imposed on himself in the name of tacit dedication; he could fling them all in Haydon’s sneering face.

‘Waiting won’t make her come, you know,’ he said once. ‘Time the mountain went to Mohammed. Faint heart never won fair lady, if I may say so.’

For the rest of that term, Jim Prideaux behaved in the eyes of Roach much as his mother had behaved when his father went away. He spent a lot of time on little things, like fixing up the lighting for the school play and mending the soccer nets with string, and in French he took enormous pains over small inaccuracies. But big things, like his walks and solitary golf, these he gave up altogether, and in the evenings stayed in and kept clear of the village.