Read Online Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré - Free Book Online
Authors: John le Carré
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bureaucratic circuit. Till overnight, to his wife’s unmistakable discomfort, George Smiley had removed himself from her sight, and set up camp in the meagre attics behind his throne-room in the Circus. Soon the gloom of the place seemed to work itself into the fabric of his face, like dust into the complexion of a prisoner. While in Chelsea, Ann Smiley pined, taking very hardly to her unaccustomed role of wife abandoned.
Dedication, said the knowing. Monkish abstinence. George is a saint. And at his age.
Balls, the Martindale faction retorted. Dedication to what? What was there left, in that dreary red-brick monster, that could possibly command such an act of self-immolation? What was there anywhere, in beastly Whitehall or, Lord help us, in beastly England, that could command it any more?
Work, said the knowing.
But what work? came the falsetto protests of these self-appointed Circus-watchers, handing round, like Gorgons, their little scraps of sight and hearing. What did he do up there, shorn of three-quarters of his staff, all but a few old biddies to brew his tea, his networks blown to smithereens? His foreign residencies, his reptile fund frozen solid by the Treasury - they meant his operational accounts - and not a friend in Whitehall or Washington to call his own? Unless you counted that loping prig Lacon at the Cabinet Office to be his friend, always so determined to go down the line for him at every conceivable opportunity. And naturally Lacon would put up a fight for him: what else had he? The Circus was Lacon’s power base. Without it, he was - well, what he was already, a capon. Naturally Lacon would sound the battle cry.
‘It’s a scandal,’ Martindale announced huffily, as he cropped his smoked eel and steak-and-kidney and the club’s own claret, up another twenty pence a crack. ‘I shall tell everybody.’
Between the villagers of Whitehall and the villagers of Tuscany, there was sometimes surprisingly little to choose.
Time did not kill the rumours. To the contrary they multiplied, taking colour from his isolation and calling it obsession.
It was remembered that Bill Haydon had not merely been George Smiley’s colleague, but Ann’s cousin and something more besides. Smiley’s fury against him, they said, had not stopped at Haydon’s death: he was positively dancing on Bill’s grave. For example, George had personally supervised the clearing of Haydon’s fabled pepper-pot room overlooking the Charing Cross Road, and the destruction of every last sign of him, from his indifferent oil-paintings by his own hand to the leftover oddments in the drawers of his desk; even the desk itself, which he had ordered sawn up, and burned. And when that was done, they maintained, he had called in Circus workmen to tear down the partition walls. Oh yes, said Martindale.
Or, for another example, and frankly a most unnerving one, take the photograph which hung on the wall of Smiley’s dingy, throne-room, a passport photograph by the look of it, but blown up far beyond its natural size, so that it had a grainy and some said spectral look. One of the Treasury boys spotted it during an ad-hoc conference about scrapping the operational bank accounts.
‘Is that Control’s portrait by the by?’ he had asked of Peter Guillam, purely as a bit of social chit chat. No sinister intent behind the question. Well, surely one was allowed to ask? Control, other names still unknown, was the legend of the place. He had been Smiley’s guide and mentor for all of thirty years. Smiley had actually buried him, they said: for the very secret, like the very rich, have a tendency to die unmourned.
‘No, it bloody well isn’t Control,’ Guillam the cupbearer had retorted, in that off-hand, supercilious way of his. ‘It’s Karla.’
And who was Karla when he was at home?
Karla, my dear, was the workname of the Soviet case officer who had recruited Bill Haydon in the first place, and had the running of him thereafter. ‘A
Dedication, said the knowing. Monkish abstinence. George is a saint. And at his age.
Balls, the Martindale faction retorted. Dedication to what? What was there left, in that dreary red-brick monster, that could possibly command such an act of self-immolation? What was there anywhere, in beastly Whitehall or, Lord help us, in beastly England, that could command it any more?
Work, said the knowing.
But what work? came the falsetto protests of these self-appointed Circus-watchers, handing round, like Gorgons, their little scraps of sight and hearing. What did he do up there, shorn of three-quarters of his staff, all but a few old biddies to brew his tea, his networks blown to smithereens? His foreign residencies, his reptile fund frozen solid by the Treasury - they meant his operational accounts - and not a friend in Whitehall or Washington to call his own? Unless you counted that loping prig Lacon at the Cabinet Office to be his friend, always so determined to go down the line for him at every conceivable opportunity. And naturally Lacon would put up a fight for him: what else had he? The Circus was Lacon’s power base. Without it, he was - well, what he was already, a capon. Naturally Lacon would sound the battle cry.
‘It’s a scandal,’ Martindale announced huffily, as he cropped his smoked eel and steak-and-kidney and the club’s own claret, up another twenty pence a crack. ‘I shall tell everybody.’
Between the villagers of Whitehall and the villagers of Tuscany, there was sometimes surprisingly little to choose.
Time did not kill the rumours. To the contrary they multiplied, taking colour from his isolation and calling it obsession.
It was remembered that Bill Haydon had not merely been George Smiley’s colleague, but Ann’s cousin and something more besides. Smiley’s fury against him, they said, had not stopped at Haydon’s death: he was positively dancing on Bill’s grave. For example, George had personally supervised the clearing of Haydon’s fabled pepper-pot room overlooking the Charing Cross Road, and the destruction of every last sign of him, from his indifferent oil-paintings by his own hand to the leftover oddments in the drawers of his desk; even the desk itself, which he had ordered sawn up, and burned. And when that was done, they maintained, he had called in Circus workmen to tear down the partition walls. Oh yes, said Martindale.
Or, for another example, and frankly a most unnerving one, take the photograph which hung on the wall of Smiley’s dingy, throne-room, a passport photograph by the look of it, but blown up far beyond its natural size, so that it had a grainy and some said spectral look. One of the Treasury boys spotted it during an ad-hoc conference about scrapping the operational bank accounts.
‘Is that Control’s portrait by the by?’ he had asked of Peter Guillam, purely as a bit of social chit chat. No sinister intent behind the question. Well, surely one was allowed to ask? Control, other names still unknown, was the legend of the place. He had been Smiley’s guide and mentor for all of thirty years. Smiley had actually buried him, they said: for the very secret, like the very rich, have a tendency to die unmourned.
‘No, it bloody well isn’t Control,’ Guillam the cupbearer had retorted, in that off-hand, supercilious way of his. ‘It’s Karla.’
And who was Karla when he was at home?
Karla, my dear, was the workname of the Soviet case officer who had recruited Bill Haydon in the first place, and had the running of him thereafter. ‘A
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