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instructions on the unheaded notepaper. My number was nine and Ben’s was ten. There were two people ahead of me when I walked into the waiting room, Ben and a stocky little Scot called Jimmy. I nodded at Jimmy, but Ben and I recognised each other at once—I don’t mean from school or university but as people who bear a physical and temperamental similarity to one another.
    â€œEnter the third murderer,” he said, shaking my hand. It seemed a wonderfully inappropriate moment to be quoting Shakespeare. “I’m Ben, this is Jimmy. Apparently we’ve got no surnames any more. Jimmy left his in Aberdeen.”
    So I shook Jimmy’s hand as well, and waited on the bench beside Ben to see who came through the door next.
    â€œFive to one he’s got a moustache, ten to one a beard, thirty to one green socks,” said Ben.
    â€œAnd evens on a cloak,” I said.
    I told Smiley about the training exercises in unfamiliar towns when we had to invent a cover story, meet a contact and withstand arrest and interrogation. I let him sense how such exploits deepened our companionship, just as sharing our first parachute jumps deepened it, or compass-trekking at night across the Scottish Highlands, or looking out dead-letter boxes in godforsaken inner cities, or making a beach landing by submarine.
    I described to him how the directing staff would sometimes drop a veiled reference to Ben’s father, just to emphasise their pride in having the son to teach. I told him about our leave weekends, how we would go once to my mother’s house in Gloucestershire and once to his father’s in Shropshire. And how, each parent being widowed, we had amused ourselves with the notion that we might broker a marriage between them. But the chances in reality weresmall, for my mother was stubbornly Anglo-Dutch, with jolly sisters and nephews and nieces who all looked like Breughel models, whereas Ben’s father had become a scholarly recluse whose only known surviving passion was for Bach.
    â€œAnd Ben reveres him,” said Smiley, prodding again at the same spot.
    â€œYes. He adored his mother but she’s dead. His father has become some sort of icon for him.”
    And I remember noticing to my shame that I had deliberately avoided using the word “love,” because Ben had used it to describe his feelings for me.
    I told him about Ben’s drinking, though again I think he knew. How Ben normally drank little and often nothing at all, until an evening would come along—say, a Thursday and the weekend already looming—when he would drink insatiably, Scotch, vodka, anything, a shot for Ben, a shot for Arno. Then reel off to bed, speechless but inoffensive. And how on the morning after, he looked as if he had undergone a fortnight’s cure at a health farm.
    â€œAnd there was really nobody but you?” Smiley mused. “Poor you, what a burden, coping with all that charm alone.”
    I reminisced, I wandered, I told him everything as it came to me, but I knew he was still waiting for me to tell him something I was keeping back, if we could find out what it was. Was I conscious of withholding? I can only reply to you as I afterwards replied to myself: I did not know I knew. It took me a full twenty-four hours more of self-interrogation to winkle my secret out of its dark corner. At four a.m., he told me to go home and get some sleep. I was not to stray from my telephone without telling Personnel what I was up to.
    â€œThey’ll be watching your flat, naturally,” he warned me as we waited for my cab. “You won’t take it personally, will you? If you imagine being on the loose yourself, there are really very few ports you’d feel safe to head for in a storm. Your flat could rank high on Ben’s list. Assuming there isn’t anybody else except his father. Buthe wouldn’t go to him, would he? He’d be ashamed. He’d want you. So they watch