Read Online The Mission Song by John le Carré - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: John le Carré
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phone a moment, could I? Penelope may not be picking up her messages.’
‘Sorry, darling. Against the regs, I’m afraid.’
Did I know where we were headed? Did I ask? I did not. The life of a secret agent is nothing if not a journey into the unknown, the life of a secret lover no less so. Off we strode with Bridget setting the pace and me with my second-hand shoes hacking at my ankle bones. In the evening sunlight my spirits rose further, assisted perhaps unconsciously by Bridget, who had hoisted my right forearm so high against her that it was nestling under her left breast, which by the feel of its undercurve was self-supporting. When Hannah has lit your lamp for you, it’s natural to see other women in its rays.
‘You really love her, don’t you?’ she marvelled as she steered me through a bunch of Friday-night merrymakers. ‘So many married couples I know, they just bitch at each other. It pisses me off. But you and Penelope aren’t like that, are you? It must be great.’
Her ear was six inches from my mouth and she was wearing a scent called Je Reviens, which is the weapon of choice of Penelope’s younger sister Gail. Gail, apple of her father’s eye, had married a car-park owner from the lower branches of the aristocracy. Penelope, by way of retaliation, had married me. Yet even today it would take a board of top Jesuits to explain what I did next.
For why does a newly anointed adulterer, who hours earlier has abandoned himself body, soul and origins to another woman for the first time in his five-year marriage, feel an irresistible urge to put his deceived wife on a pedestal? Is he trying to re-create the image of her that he has defiled? Is he re-creating the image of himself before he fell? Was my ever-present Catholic guilt catching up with me in the midst of my euphoria? Was praising Penelope to the skies the nearest I could get to praising Hannah without blowing my cover?
It had been my firm intention to draw Bridget out regarding my new employers, and by means of artful questions learn more about the composition of the anonymous Syndicate and its relationship with the many secret organs of the British State that toil night and day for our protection, far removed from the sight of your average punter’s eye. Yet as we threaded our way through near-stationary traffic I embarked upon a full-throated aria to my wife Penelope that proclaimed her the most attractive, exciting, sophisticated and faithful partner a top interpreter and secret soldier of the Crown could have, plus a brilliant journalist combining hard-nosed with compassionate, and this fantastic cook—which anyone would know verged upon the fanciful, seeing who did the cooking. Not everything that I said was totally positive, it couldn’t be. If you’re talking in the rush-hour to another woman about your wife, you can’t help opening up a bit about her negative aspects or you wouldn’t have an audience.
‘But how the hell did Mr and Mrs Right ever find each other in the first place? That’s what
I
want to know,’ Bridget protested, in the aggrieved tones of one who has followed the instructions on the packet without success.
‘Bridget,’ an alien voice inside me answered, ‘here is how.’
It is eight in the evening in Salvo’s dingy bachelor bedsit in Ealing, I tell her as we wait arm-in-arm for the pedestrian lights to change. Mr Amadeus Osman of the WorldWide and Legal Translation Agency is calling me from his malodorous office in the Tottenham Court Road. I am to go directly to Canary Wharf where a Great National Newspaper is offering megabucks for my services. These are still my days of struggle, and Mr Osman owns half of me.
In an hour I am seated in the newspaper’s luxurious offices with its editor one side of me and its shapely ace reporter—guess who?—the other. Before us squats her supergrass, a bearded Afro-Arab merchant seaman who for the price of what I’m earning in a year will dish the dirt on a
‘Sorry, darling. Against the regs, I’m afraid.’
Did I know where we were headed? Did I ask? I did not. The life of a secret agent is nothing if not a journey into the unknown, the life of a secret lover no less so. Off we strode with Bridget setting the pace and me with my second-hand shoes hacking at my ankle bones. In the evening sunlight my spirits rose further, assisted perhaps unconsciously by Bridget, who had hoisted my right forearm so high against her that it was nestling under her left breast, which by the feel of its undercurve was self-supporting. When Hannah has lit your lamp for you, it’s natural to see other women in its rays.
‘You really love her, don’t you?’ she marvelled as she steered me through a bunch of Friday-night merrymakers. ‘So many married couples I know, they just bitch at each other. It pisses me off. But you and Penelope aren’t like that, are you? It must be great.’
Her ear was six inches from my mouth and she was wearing a scent called Je Reviens, which is the weapon of choice of Penelope’s younger sister Gail. Gail, apple of her father’s eye, had married a car-park owner from the lower branches of the aristocracy. Penelope, by way of retaliation, had married me. Yet even today it would take a board of top Jesuits to explain what I did next.
For why does a newly anointed adulterer, who hours earlier has abandoned himself body, soul and origins to another woman for the first time in his five-year marriage, feel an irresistible urge to put his deceived wife on a pedestal? Is he trying to re-create the image of her that he has defiled? Is he re-creating the image of himself before he fell? Was my ever-present Catholic guilt catching up with me in the midst of my euphoria? Was praising Penelope to the skies the nearest I could get to praising Hannah without blowing my cover?
It had been my firm intention to draw Bridget out regarding my new employers, and by means of artful questions learn more about the composition of the anonymous Syndicate and its relationship with the many secret organs of the British State that toil night and day for our protection, far removed from the sight of your average punter’s eye. Yet as we threaded our way through near-stationary traffic I embarked upon a full-throated aria to my wife Penelope that proclaimed her the most attractive, exciting, sophisticated and faithful partner a top interpreter and secret soldier of the Crown could have, plus a brilliant journalist combining hard-nosed with compassionate, and this fantastic cook—which anyone would know verged upon the fanciful, seeing who did the cooking. Not everything that I said was totally positive, it couldn’t be. If you’re talking in the rush-hour to another woman about your wife, you can’t help opening up a bit about her negative aspects or you wouldn’t have an audience.
‘But how the hell did Mr and Mrs Right ever find each other in the first place? That’s what
I
want to know,’ Bridget protested, in the aggrieved tones of one who has followed the instructions on the packet without success.
‘Bridget,’ an alien voice inside me answered, ‘here is how.’
It is eight in the evening in Salvo’s dingy bachelor bedsit in Ealing, I tell her as we wait arm-in-arm for the pedestrian lights to change. Mr Amadeus Osman of the WorldWide and Legal Translation Agency is calling me from his malodorous office in the Tottenham Court Road. I am to go directly to Canary Wharf where a Great National Newspaper is offering megabucks for my services. These are still my days of struggle, and Mr Osman owns half of me.
In an hour I am seated in the newspaper’s luxurious offices with its editor one side of me and its shapely ace reporter—guess who?—the other. Before us squats her supergrass, a bearded Afro-Arab merchant seaman who for the price of what I’m earning in a year will dish the dirt on a
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