Agent Running in the Field

by John le Carré

While I was gravitating between overseas stations, Prue had spent every spare hour reasoning with head teachers and form teachers, attending parents’ evenings, ploughing through books and newspaper articles and trawling advisory services on the internet for guidance on how best to handle your hell-bent daughter, and blaming herself for all of it.

‘Well, Steff, a lot of people will do a lot of things for money and a lot of people will do things for spite or ego. There are also people who do things for an ideal, and wouldn’t take your money if you shoved it down their throats.’

Sometimes it was as if someone else was talking out of him. His voice, which was a good one when it was just being itself, would go up an octave, hit a level and stick there on one didactic note, not for long, but long enough for me to think: hullo, I know this register, and Steff’s got one too. It’s the one you can’t argue with because it just rolls on as if you’re not there, so best nod him along and wait till it’s run its course.

For unbelievers, badminton is a namby-pamby version of squash for overweight men afraid of heart attacks. For true believers there is no other sport. Squash is slash and burn. Badminton is stealth, patience, speed and improbable recovery. It’s lying in wait to unleash your ambush while the shuttle describes its leisurely arc. Unlike squash, badminton knows no social distinctions.

In Ed’s world there was no dividing line between Brexit fanatics and Trump fanatics. Both were racist and xenophobic. Both worshipped at the same shrine of nostalgic imperialism. Once embarked on this theme, he lost all objectivity.

Both are fully identified members of a Kremlin-approved crime syndicate operating out of Odessa. On receiving word of their arrival, Orson ordered an electronic sweep of his duplex. No devices were discovered. It was now up to Percy Price’s intrusion team to remedy that omission.

Only when she comes to the proposed positioning of hidden microphones in the target duplex does her cool desert her. Ilya’s slideshow is giving us a dozen of them, each marked with its own red spot. Marion begs to interrupt:

Prue loves her garden. I am up for the mowing and heavy lifting, but otherwise my finest moment is when I take the gin and tonic out to her on the stroke of six.

Putin had always been a fifth-rate spy. Now he was a spy turned autocrat who interpreted all life in terms of konspiratsia. Thanks to Putin and his gang of unredeemed Stalinists, Russia was not going forward to a bright future, but backwards into her dark, delusional past.

Trump, speaking as if to order, is disowning the findings of his own intelligence services, which have come up with the inconvenient truth that Russia interfered in the 2016 American presidential election. Putin smiles his proud jailer’s smile.

Point about Trump is, he’s a gang boss, born and bred. Brought up to screw civil society all ways up, not be part of it.