The Secret Pilgrim (46 page)

I was fingering his Markus typewriter. It was in the wardrobe where he kept his opera glasses, stowed under a few shirts. Signed A. Patriot, I thought. “
A
” standing for
Anyone's
, I thought. Anyone who loved him. I'd guessed already and he'd told me already, but the sight of it had excited both of us with a sense of ending.

“So why did you break it off with Sergei?” I asked him, still fingering the keys.

But this time he didn't rise to my flattery. “
I
didn't break it off.
He
did. I haven't ended it now, not if you're stepping into his shoes. Put that away. Cover it over the way you found it, thank you.”

I did as he asked. I hid the evidence of the typewriter.

“What did he say?” I asked carelessly. “How did he break it to you? Or did he write and run?” I was thinking of Sally again.

“Not a lot. You don't need a lot of words when someone's stuck in London and you're in Moscow. The silence speaks for itself.”

He wandered over to his radio and sat before it. I followed close on his heels, ready to restrain him.

“Let's plug her in, shall we, have a nice listen. I could still get a ‘Come back, Cyril,' you never know.”

I watched him set up his transmitter, then fling open the leaded window and toss out the hairline-aerial, which was like a fishing line with a lead sinker but no hook. I watched him peer at his signals plan and type out SOS and his callsign on his squash recorder. Then he linked the recorder to the transmitter and, with a
whizz,
sent it into the ether. He did this several times before he switched over to receive, but nothing came and he didn't expect it to; he was showing m that it never would again.

“He did
tell
me it was over,” he said, staring at the dials. “I'm not accusing him. He did
say.
”

“
What
was over? Spying?”

“Oh no, not spying, that'll go on for ever, won't it? Communism, really. He said Communism was just another minority religion these days, but we hadn't woken up to the fact. ‘Time to hang up your boots, Cyril. Better not come to Russia if you're rumbled, Cyril. You'd be a bit of an embarrassment to the new climate. We might have to give you back as a gesture. We're out of date, you see, you and me. Moscow Centre's decided. It's hard currency that talks to Moscow these days. They need all the pounds and dollars they can get. So I'm afraid we're on the shelf, you and me, we're
de trop
and slightly
déjà vu,
not to say a rather large embarrassment to all concerned. Moscow can't afford to be seen running Foreign Office cypher clerks with access to top secret and above, and they rather regard you and me as more of a liability than an asset, which is the reason why they're calling me home. My advice to you, Cyril, therefore, is to take a nice long holiday, see a doctor and get some
sun and rest, because between you and me you're showing signs of being slightly barking. We'd like to do right by you but we're a bit strapped for hard currency, to be frank. If you'd like a modest couple of thousand, I'm sure we can do you a small something in a Swiss bank, but the larger sums are unavailable till further notice.' He was like a different person talking to me, to be honest, Ned,” he continued, in a tone of valiant incomprehension. “We'd been these great friends and he didn't want me any more. ‘Don't take life so hard, Cyril,' he says. He keeps telling me I'm under strain, too many people inside my head. He's right really, I suppose. I lived the wrong life, that's all. You don't know till it's too late, though, do you, sometimes? You think you're one person, you turn out to be another, same as opera. Still, not to worry, I say. Fight another day. Say not the struggle naught availeth. All grist to the mill. Yes.”

He had pulled back his soft shoulders and inflated himself somehow, seeing himself as a person superior to events. “Right, then,” he said, and we returned spryly to the drawing room.

We had finished. All that remained was to mop up the missing answers and obtain an inventory of what he had betrayed.

We had finished, but it was I, not Frewin, who was resisting the final step. Sitting on the arm of the sofa, he turned his head away from me, smiling over-brightly and offering me his long neck for the knife. But he was waiting for a strike that I was refusing to deliver. His round bald head was craned tensely upward while he leaned away from me as if saying, ‘Do it now, hit me here.' But I couldn't do it. I made no move towards him. I had the notebook in my hand, and enough written down for him to sign and destroy himself. But I didn't move. I was on his stupid side, not theirs. Yet what side was that? Was love an ideology? Was loyalty a political party? Or had we, in our rush to divide the world, divided it the wrong way, failing to notice that the real battle lay between those who were still searching, and those who, in order to prevail had reduced their vulnerability to the lowest common factor of
indifference? I was on the brink of destroying a man for love. I had led him to the steps of his own scaffold, pretending we were taking a Sunday stroll together.

“Cyril?”

I had to repeat his name.

“What is it?”

“I'm supposed to take a signed statement from you.”

“You can tell HQ that I was furthering understanding between great nations,” he said helpfully. I had the feeling that if he had been able, he would have told them for me. “Tell them I was putting an end to the mindless and incredible hostility I had observed for many years in the Tank. That should keep them quiet.”

“Well, they did guess it would be something like that,” I said. “It's just that there's a bit more to it than you understand.

“Also, put in that I wish for a posting. I should like to leave the Tank forthwith and earn out my retirement in a non-classified appointment. I'll accept demotion, I've decided. I'm not short of a bob or two. I'm not proud. A change of work is better than a holiday, I say. Where are you going, Ned? The facilities are the other way.”

I was heading for the door. I was heading for sanity and escape. It was as if my world had reduced itself to this dreadful room. “Just back to the office, Cyril. For an hour or so. I can't produce your statement out of a hat for you, you know. It's got to be properly drawn up on the right forms and so forth. Never mind about the weekend. I never like weekends anyway, to be truthful. Holes in the universe, if you want my secret opinion, weekends are.” Why was I speaking with his cadences? “Not to worry, Cyril. I'll see myself out. You get some rest.”

I wanted to escape before they came. Looking past Frewin's head to the window, I could see Monty and two of his boys climbing out of their van, and a black police car pulling up outside the house—for the Service, thank God, has no powers of arrest.

But Frewin was talking again, the way the dying go on talking after you think they're dead.

“I can't be left alone, Ned, you see. Not any more. I can't explain it to a stranger, Ned, what I've done, not all over again, no one can.”

I heard a footfall on the gravel, then the ring of the doorbell. Frewin's head came up and his eyes found mine and I watched the knowledge dawn in them, and fade in disbelief, and dawn again. I kept my gaze on him while I opened the front door. Palfrey was standing at Monty's shoulder. Behind them stood two uniformed police officers and a man called Redman, better known as Bedlam, from the Service's team of shrinks.

“Marvellous, Ned,” Palfrey murmured, in a hasty aside to me as the others brushed past us into the drawing room. “An absolute
coup.
You'll get a medal, I'll see to it.”

They had put handcuffs on him. It had not occurred to me that they would do that. They had handcuffed his hands behind his back, which made him lift his chin. I walked with him to the van and helped him into it, but by then he had found some kind of dignity of his own, and was no longer bothering whose hand was on his elbow.

“It's not everyone can crack a Modrian-trained spook between breakfast and lunchtime,” said Burr with dour satisfaction. We were eating a muted dinner at Cecconi's, where he had insisted on taking me the same evening. “Our dear brethren across the Park are beside themselves with rage, anger, indignation and envy, which is never bad either.” But he was speaking to me from a world I had temporarily taken leave of.

“He cracked himself,” I said.

Burr looked sharply at me. “I won't have that, Ned. I've not seen a hand played better. You were a whore. You had to be. We're all whores. Whores who pay. I've had enough of your melancholy, come to think of it—sitting over there in Northumberland Avenue, sulking like a stormcloud, caught between your women. If you can't take a decision, that's a decision. Leave your little love and go back to Mabel, if you want my advice, which you don't. I went back to mine last week and it's bloody murder.”

Despite myself I discovered I was laughing.

“So what I've decided is this,” Burr continued when he had generously consented to another enormous plate of pasta. “You're to abandon sulking as a way of life, and you're to abandon the Interrogators' Pool, in which, in my humble opinion, you have been studying your own narcissistic reflection for somewhat too long. And you're to unroll your mat or the Fifth Floor and replace Peter Guillam as my Head of Secretariat, which will suit your Calvinist disposition and rid me of a thoroughly idle officer.”

I did what he suggested—all of it. Not because he had suggested it, but because he had spoken into my mind. I told Sally of my decision the next night and, if nothing else, the wretchedness of the occasion served to ease my memories of Frewin. For a few months, at her request, I continued writing to her from Tunbridge Wells, but it became as difficult as writing home from school. Sally was the last of what Burr had called my little loves. Perhaps I had had a notion that, added together, they could make up one big one.

12

“So it's over,” said Smiley. The glow of the dying fire lit the panelled library, gilding its gappy shelves of dusty books on travel and adventure, and the old, cracked leather of its armchairs, and the foxed photographs of its vanished battalions of uniformed officers with walking sticks, and finally our own assorted faces, turned to Smiley on his throne of honour. Four generations of the Service lounged about the room, but Smiley's quiet voice and the haze of cigar smoke seemed to bind us in a single family.

I did not remember ever quite inviting Toby to join us, but certainly the staff had been expecting him and the mess waiters had scurried out to greet him as he arrived. In his wide, watered-silk lapels and waistcoat with its Balkan frogging, he looked every inch the
Rittmeister.

Burr had hastened directly from Heathrow, changing into his dinner jacket in the back of his chauffeur-driven Rover in deference to George. He had entered almost unremarked, with that soundless dancer's walk of his that big men seem to manage naturally. Then Monty Arbuck spotted him and at once gave up his seat. Burr had recently become the first man to make Coordinator before the age of thirty-five.

And at Smiley's feet lounged my last intake of students, the girls like cut flowers in their evening dresses, the boys keen and freshfaced after their end-of-course exertions in Argyll.

“It's over,” Smiley repeated.

Was it his sudden stillness that alerted us. His altered voice? Or some almost priestly gesture that he made, a stiffening of his tubby body in piety or resolution. I couldn't have told you then, I can't tell you now. But I know I caught no one's eye, yet with his words I felt at once a kind of tensing among us, as if Smiley were calling us to arms—yet what he was talking about had as much to do with laying them down as taking them up.

“It's over, and so am I. Absolutely over. Time you rang down the curtain on yesterday's cold warrior. And please don't ask me back, ever again. The new time needs new people The worst thing you can do is imitate us.”

I think he had intended to end there, but with George you do better not to guess. For all I know, he had committed his entire closing speech to memory before he came, worked on it, rehearsed it word for word. In either case our silence now commanded him, as did our need of ceremony. Indeed, so thorough was our dependence on him at that moment that if he had turned and walked from the room without offering us another word, our disappointment would have turned our love to gall.

“I only ever cared about the
man
,” Smiley announced. And it was typical of his artfulness that he should have opened with a riddle, then waited a moment before setting out to explain it. “I never gave a fig for the ideologies, unless they were mad or evil, I never saw institutions as being worthy of their parts, or policies as much other than excuses for not feeling.
Man,
not the mass, is what our calling is about. It was
man
who ended the Cold War in case you didn't notice. It wasn't weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just
man.
Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we've had enough. It was
their
emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day. Because they have no
heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves. One day, history may tell us who really won. If a democratic Russia emerges—why then, Russia will have been the winner. And if the West chokes on its own materialism, then the West may still turn out to have been the loser. History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose. You asked me how we should think of Russia today.”