‘Bloody queer moment to take a holiday, isn’t it?’ Enderby remarked petulantly, when this intelligence was brought to him, together with a string of moans from the staff-side about overtime, travelling time, and allowances for unsocial hours. Then he remembered, and said, ‘Oh my Christ, he’s visiting his bitch goddess. Hasn’t he got enough problems, taking on Karla single-handed?’ The whole episode annoyed Enderby strangely. He fumed all day and insulted Sam Collins in front of everyone. As a former diplomat, he had great contempt for abstracts, even if he took refuge in them constantly.
The house stood on a hill, in a coppice of bare elms still waiting for the blight. It was granite and very big, and crumbling, with a crowd of gables that clustered like torn black tents above the tree tops. Acres of smashed greenhouses led to it; collapsed stables and an untended kitchen garden lay below it in the valley. The hills were olive and shaven, and had once been hill-forts. ‘Harry’s Cornish heap,’ she called it. Between the hills ran the line of the sea, which that morning was hard as slate under the lowering cloud banks. A taxi took him up the bumpy drive, an old Humber like a wartime staff car. This is where she spent her childhood, thought Smiley; and where she adopted mine. The drive was very pitted; stubs of felled trees lay like yellow tombstones either side. She’ll be in the main house, he thought. The cottage where they had passed their holidays together layover the brow, but on her own she stayed in the house, in the room she had had as a girl. He told the driver not to wait, and started towards the front porch, picking his way between the puddles with his London shoes, giving the puddles all his attention. It’s not my world any more, he thought. It’s hers, it’s theirs. His watcher’s eyes scanned the many windows of the front façade, trying to catch a glimpse of her shadow. She’d have picked me up at the station, only she muddled the time, he thought, giving her the benefit of the doubt. But her car was parked in the stables with the morning frost still on it; he had spotted it while he was still paying off the taxi. He rang the bell and heard her footsteps on the flagstones, but it was Mrs Tremedda who opened the door and showed him to one of the drawing-rooms – smoking-room, morning-room, drawing-room, he had never worked them out. A log fire was burning.
‘I’ll get her,’ Mrs Tremedda said.
At least I haven’t got to talk about Communists to mad Harry, Smiley thought, while he waited. At least I haven’t got to hear how all the Chinese waiters in Penzance are standing by for the order from Peking to poison their customers. Or how the bloody strikers should be put up against a wall and shot – where’s their sense of service, for Christ’s sake? Or how Hitler may have been a blackguard, but he had the right idea about the Jews. Or some similar monstrous, but seriously held, conviction.
She’s told the family to keep clear, he thought.
He could smell honey through the wood-smoke and wondered, as he always did, where it came from. The furniture wax? Or was there, somewhere in the catacombs, a honey room, just as there was a gunroom and a fishing-room and a box-room and, for all he knew, a love room? He looked for the Tiepolo drawing that used to hang over the fireplace, a scene of Venice life. They’ve sold it, he thought. Each time he came, the collection had dwindled by one more pretty thing. What Harry spent the money on was anybody’s guess – certainly not the upkeep of the house.
She crossed the room to him and he was glad it was she who was doing the walking, not himself, because he would have stumbled into something. His mouth was dry and he had a lump of cactus in his stomach; he didn’t want her near him, her reality was suddenly too much for him. She was looking beautiful and Celtic, as she always did down here, and as she came towards him her brown eyes scanned him, looking for his mood. She kissed him on the mouth, putting her fingers along the back of his neck to guide him, and Haydon’s shadow fell between them like a sword.