Smiley’s People by John le Carré

‘Greetings, Alexandra Borisovna,’ she heard him whisper, an of a flurry, uttering her patronymic as if it were a state secret.

‘Greetings, Uncle Anton,’ she replied; then Sister Beatitude caught her by the arm and whispered to her to behave herself or else.

Mother Felicity’s study was at once both sparse and sumptuous. It was small and bare and very hygienic, and the Manhas scrubbed it and polished it every day so that it smelt like a swimming pool. Yet her little pieces of Russia glistened like caskets. She had icons, and she had richly framed sepia photographs of princesses she had loved, and bishops she had served, and on her saint’s day – or was it her birthday or the bishop’s? – she had taken them all down and made a theatre of them with candles and a Virgin and a Christ-child. Alexandra knew this because Felicity had called her in to sit with her, and had read old Russian prayers to her aloud, and chanted bits of liturgy in a marching rhythm to her, and given her sweet cake and a glass of sweet wine, all to have Russian company on her saint’s day – or was it Easter or Christmas? Russians were the best in the world, she said. Gradually, though she had had a lot of pills, Alexandra had realized that Felicity-Felicity was stone drunk, so she lifted up her old feet and put a pillow for her, and kissed her hair and let her fall asleep on the tweed sofa where parents sat when they came to enrol fresh patients. It was the same sofa where Alexandra sat now, staring at Uncle Anton while he pulled the little notebook from his pocket. He was having one of his brown days, she noticed : brown suit, brown tie, brown shut.

‘You should buy yourself brown cycle clips,’ she told him in Russian.

Uncle Anton did not laugh. He kept a piece of black elastic like a garter round his notebook and he was unwinding it with a shrewd, reluctant air while he moistened his official lips. Sometimes Alexandra thought he was a policeman, sometimes a priest disguised, sometimes a lawyer or schoolmaster, sometimes even a special kind of doctor. But whatever he was, he clearly wished her to know, by means of the elastic and the notebook, and by the expressions of nervous benevolence, that there was a Higher Law for which neither he nor she was personally responsible, that he did not mean to be her jailer, that he wished her forgiveness – if not her actual love – for locking her away. She knew also that he wished her to know that he was sad and even lonely, and assuredly that he was fond of her, and that in a better world he would have been the uncle who brought her birthday presents, Christmas presents faithfully, and each year chucked her under the chin, ‘My-my, Sasha, aren’t you growing up,’ followed by a restrained pat on some rounded part of her, meaning ‘My-my, Sasha, you’ll soon be ready for the pot.’

‘How is your reading progressing, Alexandra?’ he asked her, while he flattened the notebook in front of him and turned the pages looking for his list. This was small talk. This was not the Higher Law. This was like talk about the weather, or what a pretty dress she was wearing, or how happy she appeared today – not at all like last week.

‘My name is Tatiana and I come from the moon,’ she replied.

Uncle Anton acted as though this statement had not been made, so perhaps she only said it to herself, silently in her mind, where she said a lot of things.

‘You have finished the novel by Turgenev I brought you?’ he asked. ‘You were reading Torrents of Spring, I think.’

‘Mother Felicity was reading it to me but she has a sore throat,’ said Alexandra.

‘So.’

This was a lie. Felicity-Felicity had stopped reading to her as a punishment for throwing her food on the floor.

Uncle Anton had found the page of his notebook with the list on it, and he had found his pencil too, a silver one with a top you pressed; he appeared inordinately proud of it.

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