Agent Running in the Field

by John le Carré

‘Well, I’m Ed,’ he volunteers, repeating Alice’s information for my benefit. In the England I have recently returned to, nobody has a surname.

In the time-honoured British parlour game of placing our compatriots on the social ladder by virtue of their diction I am at best a poor contestant, having spent too much of my life in foreign parts. But to the ear of my daughter Stephanie, a sworn leveller, my guess is that Ed’s diction would pass as just about all right, meaning no direct evidence of a private education.

am not naturally suited to deskwork or the sedentary life, which is the understatement of all time. I can be headstrong and do not respond naturally to discipline. This can be both a defect and a virtue.

depend on yours?’ She smiles, and soon everyone at the table is smiling with her: the same sad, clever, inward smile that is the closest the Service ever gets to a flag. Glib under pressure. Latent aggression good. Recommended.

The natural-born agent-runner is his own man. He may take his orders from London, but in the field he is the master of his fate and the fate of his agents. And when his active years are done, there aren’t going to be many berths waiting for a journeyman spy in his late forties who detests deskwork and has the curriculum vitae of a middle-ranking diplomat who never made the grade.

Not because he knows the terrain, has the experience or speaks Russian. He doesn’t do any of those things. He’s a late-entrant City boy, headhunted for reasons I suspect not even he can fathom, with no linguistic qualifications worth a damn.

persuasion. ‘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.’

‘A minority Tory cabinet of tenth-raters. A pig-ignorant foreign secretary who I’m supposed to be serving. Labour no better. The sheer bloody lunacy of Brexit’ – I break off. I have feelings too. Let my indignant silence say the rest.

But she’s not interested in the way of the world. She’s interested in mine, as becomes apparent on the next ride up: ‘When you were telling other people who to be, did you ever consider who you were?’

The same lilt is replicated in her voice, which is pure Cheltenham Ladies’ College laced with bricklayers’ expletives.

In the workplace it is mandatory to have no strongly held opinion on any subject. Otherwise you’re a leper. It

The biggest gift you can give the young is time, and it was always in my mind that I hadn’t given Steff enough of it, and perhaps Ed’s parents hadn’t been any too generous in that respect either.

One thing I have learned the hard way from Steff: never ask what’s wrong, just give her space. I gave her space, didn’t ask, and the cause of her tears remained her own.

Florence is one of God’s athletes: effortless timing and reactions, agile as a gazelle and too graceful for her own good. Ed

But fail an agent in his hour of need and you fail him for ever, as my mentor Bryn Jordan liked to say. Ed is

And are you by any chance the reason why Florence has decided not to lie for her country, which is a pretty massive decision if lying for your country is your chosen profession? So it’s not until Peterborough that, sheltered by a

Some spies are lightweights pretending to be heavyweights. Some are heavyweights despite themselves. Unless my inflamed memory deceives me, Sergei has just promoted himself to the heavyweight class.

I tell her that success is not a shame, it is an absolution, it is the proof of God’s love. But she has no God. Neither have I.’

On our tours together, we reminisce about old cases we have shared, old agents, old colleagues, and talk like old men. Thanks to Percy I am also discreetly introduced to his Grande Armée of watchers, a privilege that Head Office emphatically does not encourage: after all, one day they may be watching you.

But on our screens is London as we love it to be: multi-ethnic kids playing improvised netball, girls in summer dresses basking in rays of the endless sun, old folk sauntering arm in arm, mothers pushing prams, picnickers under spreading trees, outdoor chess, boules. A friendly

Guy Brammel has decided to open the bowling, as he would say, which makes a certain sense because he is by training a barrister and at his stately home in St Albans he runs his own cricket team. Over the years he has frequently roped me in to play. ‘So, Nat,’ he begins, in his cheery port-and-pheasant voice, ‘pretty bloody bad luck is what you’re telling us, I think. You play an honest game of badminton with a fellow and he turns out to be a member of our sister Service and a bloody Russian spy. Why don’t we take it from the top and go from there? How did the two of you meet, what did you get up to when, omitting no details however slight.’

And that’s Bryn Jordan for you, the river you only cross once. Charms you, listens to your gripes and suggestions, never raises his voice, never judgemental, always above the fray, walks you round the garden until he owns the air you breathe, then skewers you.

He is reaching for an aphorism. As usual, he finds one: ‘Signposts don’t walk in the direction they point, Nat. It is we humble mortals who must choose which way to go. The signpost is not responsible for our decision. Well, is it?’

‘And don’t you worry your head about Dom,’ he urges me with a chuckle. ‘The man’s fucked up everything he’s touched in life, so he’ll be in great demand. Probably got a safe parliamentary seat waiting for him right now.’ We laugh wisely at the world’s wicked ways. As we shake hands, he pats me on the shoulder American-style, and follows me the statutory halfway down the steps. The Mondeo pulls up in front of me. Arthur drives me home.

It’s morning. It has been morning for a long time: morning in the hill forests of Karlovy Vary, morning on

a rain-drenched Yorkshire hilltop, on Ground Beta and the twin screens in the Operations room; morning on Primrose Hill, in the Haven, on court number one at the Athleticus. I have made the tea and squeezed the orange juice and come back to bed: our best time for taking the decisions we couldn’t take yesterday, or discovering what we’ll do at the weekend or where we’ll go on holiday.

True, from the moment Florence blew my cover, Ed didn’t speak to me, even to say goodbye. He was fine with Prue, muttered ‘Cheers, Prue’ and even managed to plant a peck on her cheek. But when my turn came round, he just peered at me through his big spectacles, then looked away as if he’d seen more than he could take. I had wanted to tell him I was a decent man, but it was too late.