Back in Neuilly, Smiley received Guillam’s intelligence in utter silence. He did not seem surprised, but he seemed in some way appalled, and when he finally spoke – which did not occur until they were all three in the car and speeding towards Arras his voice had an almost hopeless ring. ‘Yes,’ he said – as if Guillam knew the whole history inside out. ‘Yes, that is of course exactly what he would do, isn’t it? He would call Kirov back under the pretext of a promotion, in order to make sure he really came.’
George had not sounded that way, said Guillam – no doubt with the wisdom of hindsight – since the night he unmasked Bill Haydon as Karla’s mole as well as Ann’s lover.
Ostrakova also, in retrospect, had little coherent recollection of that night, neither of the car journey, on which she contrived to sleep, nor of the patient but persistent questioning to which the little plump man subjected her when she woke late the next morning. Perhaps she had temporarily lost her capacity to be impressed – and, accordingly, to remember. She answered his questions, she was grateful to him, she gave him – without the zest or ‘decoration’ – the same information that she had given to the magician, though he seemed to possess most of it already.
‘The magician,’ she said once. ‘Dead. My God.’
She asked after the General, but scarcely heeded Smiley’s non-committal reply. She was thinking of Ostrakov, then Glikman, now the magician – and she never knew his name. Her host and hostess were kind to her also, but as yet made no impression on her. It was raining and she could not see the distant fields.
Little by little, all the same, as the weeks passed, Ostrakova permitted herself an idyllic hibernation. The deep winter came early and she let its snows embrace her; she walked a little, and then a great deal, retired early, spoke seldom, and as her body repaired itself so did her spirit. At first a pardonable confusion reigned in her mind, and she found herself thinking of her daughter in the terms by which the gingery stranger had described her : as the tearaway dissenter and untameable rebel. Then slowly the logic of the matter presented itself to her. Somewhere, she argued, there was the real Alexandra who lived and had her being, as before. Or who, as before, did not. In either case, the gingery man’s lies concerned a different creature altogether, one whom they had invented for their own needs. She even managed to find consolation in the likelihood that her daughter, if she lived at all, lived in complete ignorance of their machinations. Perhaps the hurts which had been visited on her – of the mind as well as of the body – did what years of prayer and anxiety had failed to do, and purged her of her self-recriminations regarding Alexandra. She mourned Glikman at her leisure, she was conscious of being quite alone in the world, but in the winter landscape her solitude was not disagreeable to her. A retired brigadier proposed marriage to her but she declined. It turned out later that he proposed to everybody. Peter Guillam visited her at least every week and sometimes they walked together for an hour or two. In faultless French he talked to her mainly of landscape gardening, a subject on which he possessed an inexhaustible knowledge. That was Ostrakova’s life, where it touched upon this story. And it was lived out in total ignorance of the events that her own first letter to the General had set in train.
NINETEEN
‘Do you know his name really is Ferguson?’ Saul Enderby drawled in that lounging Belgravia cockney which is the final vulgarity of the English upper-class.
‘I never doubted it,’ Smiley said.
‘He’s about all we’ve got left of that whole lamplighter stable. Wise Men don’t hold with domestic surveillance these days. Anti-Party or some damn thing.’ Enderby continued his study of the bulky document in his hand. ‘So what’s your name, George? Sherlock Holmes dogging his poor old Moriarty? Captain Ahab chasing his big white whale? Who are you?’
Smiley did not reply.