Ann rang. Once again, perhaps, he had dozed off, for his recollection ever afterwards was that he did not hear the ring of the phone at all, but simply her voice as he slowly lifted the receiver to his ear : ‘George, George,’ as if she had been crying for him a long time, and he had only now summoned the energy or the caring to answer her.
They began their conversation as strangers, much as they began their love-making.
‘How are you?’ she asked.
‘Very well, thank you. How are you? What can I do for you?’
‘I meant it,’ Ann insisted. ‘How are you? I want to know.’
‘And I told you I was well.’
‘I rang you this morning. Why didn’t you answer?’
‘I was out.’
Long silence while she appeared to consider this feeble excuse. The telephone had never been a bother to her. It gave her no sense of urgency.
‘Out working?’ she asked.
‘An administrative thing for Lacon.’
‘He begins his administration early these days.’
‘His wife’s left him,’ Smiley said by way of explanation.
No answer.
‘You used to say she would be wise to,’ he went on. ‘She should get out fast, you used to say, before she became another Civil Service geisha.’
‘I’ve changed my mind. He needs her.’
‘But she, I gather, does not need him,’ Smiley pointed out, taking refuge in an academic tone.
‘Silly woman,’ said Ann, and another longer silence followed, this time of Smiley’s making while he contemplated the sudden unwished-for mountain of choice she had revealed to him.
To be together again, as she sometimes called it.
To forget the hurts, the list of lovers; to forget Bill Haydon, the Circus traitor, whose shadow still fell across her face each time he reached for her, whose memory he carried in him like a constant pain. Bill his friend, Bill the flower of their generation, the jester, the enchanter, the iconoclastic conformer; Bill the born deceiver, whose quest for the ultimate betrayal led him into the Russians’ bed, and Ann’s. To stage yet another honeymoon, flyaway to the South of France, eat the meals, buy the clothes, all the let’s-pretend that lovers play. And for how long? How long before her smile faded and her eyes grew dull and those mythical relations started needing her to cure their mythical ailments in far-off places?
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘Hilda’s.’
‘I thought you were in Cornwall.’
Hilda was a divorced woman of some speed. She lived in Kensington, not twenty minutes’ walk away.
‘So where’s Hilda?’ he asked when he had come to terms with this intelligence.
‘Out.’
‘All night?’
‘I expect so, knowing Hilda. Unless she brings him back.’
‘Well then I suppose you must entertain yourself as well as you can without her,’ he said, but as he spoke he heard her whisper, ‘George.’
A profound and vehement fear seized hold of Smiley’s heart. He glared across the room. at the reading chair and saw the contact photograph still on the book-rest beside her magnifying glass; in a single surge of memory, he reconstructed all the things that had hinted and whispered to him throughout the endless day; he heard the drum-beats of his own past, summoning him to one last effort to externalize and resolve the conflict he had lived by; and he wanted her nowhere near him. Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman. Gifted with the clarity that htlnger, tiredness and confusion can supply, Smiley knew for certain she must have no part in what he had to do. He knew – he was barely at the threshold – yet he still knew that it was just possible, against all the odds, that he had been given, in late age, a chance to return to the rained-off contests of his life and play them after all. If that was so, then no Ann, no false peace, no tainted witness to his actions, should disturb his lonely quest. He had not known his mind till then. But now he knew it.
‘You mustn’t,’ he said. ‘Ann? Listen. You mustn’t come here. It has nothing to do with choice. It’s to do with practicalities. You mustn’t come here.’ His own words rang strangely to him.