To his landlady, Mrs Gray, Smiley was, quite simply, bereaved. She knew nothing of him as a man, except that his name was Lorimer and he was a retired librarian by trade. But she told her other gentlemen she could feel he had had a loss, which was why he left his bacon, why he went out a lot but always alone, and why he slept with his light on. He reminded her of her father, she said, ‘after Mother went’. And this was perceptive of Mrs Gray, for the aftermath of the two violent deaths hung heavily on Smiley in the lull, though it did the very reverse of slow his hand. She was also right when she called him divided, constantly changing his mind about small things; like Ostrakova, Smiley found life’s lesser decisions increasingly difficult to take.
Toby Esterhase, on the other hand, who dealt with him a great deal, took a more informed view, and one that was naturally brightened by Toby’s own excitement at being back in the field. The prospect of playing Karla ‘at the big table’, as he insisted on describing it, had made a new man of Toby. Mr Benati had become international indeed. For two weeks, he toured the byways of Europe’s seedier cities, mustering his bizarre army of discarded specialists – the pavement artists, the sound-thieves, the drivers, the photographers – and every day, from wherever he happened to be, using an agreed word code, he telephoned Smiley at a succession of numbers within walking distance of the boarding house in order to report his progress. If Toby was passing through London, Smiley would drive to an airport hotel, and debrief him in one of its now familiar bedrooms. George Toby declared – was making a Flucht nach vorn, which nobody has ever quite succeeded in translating. Literally it means ‘an escape forward’, and it implies a desperation certainly, but also a weakness at one’s back, if not an actual burning of boats. Quite what this weakness was, Toby could not describe. ‘Listen,’ he would say, ‘George always bruised easy, know what I mean? You see a lot – your eyes get very painful. George saw too much, maybe.’ And he added, in a phrase which found a modest place in Circus folklore – ‘George has got too many heads under his hat.’ Of his generalship, on the other hand, Toby had no doubt whatever. ‘Meticulous to a fault,’ he declared respectfully – even if the fault included checking Toby’s imprest down to the last Swiss Rappen, a discipline he accepted with a rueful grace. George was nervous, he said, as they all were; and his nervousness came to a natural head as Toby began concentrating his teams, in twos and threes, on the target city of Berne, and very, very cautiously taking the first steps towards the quarry. ‘He got too detailed,’ Toby complained. ‘Like he wanted to be on the pavement with us. A caseman, he finds it hard to delegate, know what I mean?’
Even when the teams were all assembled, all accounted for and briefed, Smiley from his London base still insisted on three days of virtual inactivity while everybody ‘took the temperature of the city’, as he called it, acquiring local clothes and transport, and rehearsed the systems of communication. ‘It’s lace curtain all the way, Toby,’ he repeated anxiously. ‘For every week that nothing happens, Karla will feel that much more secure. But frighten the game just once, and Karla will panic and we’re done for.’ After the first operational swing Smiley summoned Toby home to report yet again : ‘Are you sure there was no eye contact? Did you ring the changes enough? Do you need more cars, more people?’ Then, said Toby, he had to take him through the whole manoeuvre yet again, using street maps and still photographs of the target house, explaining exactly where the static posts were laid, where the one team had peeled off to make room for the next. ‘Wait till you’ve got his pattern,’ said Smiley as they parted. ‘When you’ve got his behaviour pattern, I’ll come. Not before.’
Toby says he made damn sure to take his time.