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was forced,” said Smiley. “It’s just a question of what by. Did you know he was so lonely? If there was no one in his life but you, I’d have thought it would have been rather obvious.”
    â€œThen why wasn’t it obvious to Personnel?” I said, bridling again. “My God, they grilled us for long enough before they appointed us. Sniffed round our friends and relations and teachers and dons. They know far more about Ben than I do.”
    â€œWhy don’t we just assume that Personnel fell down on the job? He’s human, this is England, we’re the clan. Let’s begin again with the Ben who’s disappeared. The Ben who wrote to you. There was no one close to him but you. Not anyone that you knew of, anyway. There could have been lots of people you didn’t know of, but that’s not your fault. As far as you knew, there was no one. We have that settled. Don’t we?”
    â€œYes!”
    â€œVery well then, let’s talk about what you did know. How’s that?”
    Somehow he brought me down to earth and we talked into the small grey hours. Long after the rain had stopped and the starlings had begun, we were talking. Or I was—and Smiley was listening as only Smiley can, eyes half closed, chins sunk into his neck. I thought I was telling him everything I knew. Perhaps he thought I was too, though I doubt it, for he understood far better than I the levels of self-deception that are the means of our survival.The phone rang. He listened, muttered “Thank you” and rang off. “Ben’s still missing and there are no new pointers,” he said. “You’re still the only clue.” He took no notes that I remember and I don’t know to this day whether he had a recorder running. I doubt it. He hated machines, and besides, his memory was more reliable than theirs.
    I talked about Ben but I talked as much about myself, which was what Smiley wanted me to do: myself as the explanation for Ben’s actions. I described again the parallel nature of our lives. How I had envied him his heroic father—I, who had no father to remember. I made no secret of our shared excitement, Ben’s and mine, when we began to discover how much we had in common. No, no, I said again, I knew of no one woman—except his mother, who was dead. And I believed myself. I am sure I did.
    In childhood, I told Smiley, I used to wonder whether somewhere in the world there was not another version of myself, some secret twin who had the same toys and clothes and thoughts that I did, even the same parents. Perhaps I’d read a book based on this story. I was an only child. So was Ben. I told Smiley all this because I was determined to talk directly to him from my thoughts and memories as they came to me, even if they incriminated me in his eyes. I only know that, consciously, I held nothing back from him, even if I reckoned it potentially ruinous to myself. Somehow Smiley had convinced me that was the least I owed to Ben. Unconsciously—well, that’s another matter altogether. Who knows what a man hides, even from himself, when he is telling the truth for his survival?
    I told him of our first meeting—mine and Ben’s—in the Circus training house in Lambeth where the newly selected entrants were convened. Until then, none of us had met any of his fellow novices. We had hardly met the Circus either, for that matter, beyond the recruiting officer, the selectors and the vetting team. Some of us had only the haziest notion of what we’d joined. Finally we were to be enlightened—about each other, and about our calling—and wegathered in the waiting room like so many characters in a Foreign Legion novel, each with his secret expectations and his secret reasons for being there, each with his overnight bag containing the same quantity of shirts and underpants, marked in Indian ink with his personal number, in obedience to the printed