Smiley’s People by John le Carré

‘You didn’t think to pick up a morning paper at the station, did you?’ she enquired. ‘Harry’s stopped them again.’

She asked whether he had breakfasted and he lied and said he had. Perhaps they could go for a walk instead, she suggested, as if he were someone wanting to see round the estate. She took him to the gunroom where they rummaged for boots that would do. There were boots that shone like conkers and boots that looked permanently damp. The coast footpath led in both directions out of the bay. Periodically, Harry threw barbed-wire barricades across it, or put up notices saying ‘DANGER LANDMINES’. He was fighting a running battle with the Council for permission to make a camping site, and their refusal sometimes drove him to a fury. They chose the north shoulder and the wind, and she had taken his arm to listen. The north was windier, but on the south you had to go single file through the gorse.

‘I’m going away for a bit, Ann,’ he said, trying to use her name naturally. ‘I didn’t want to tell you over the telephone.’ It was his wartime voice and he felt an idiot when he heard himself using it. ‘I’m going off to blackmail a lover,’ he should have said.

‘Away to somewhere particular, or just away from me?’

‘There’s a job I have to do abroad,’ he said, still trying to escape his Gallant Pilot role, and failing. ‘I don’t think you should go to Bywater Street while I’m away.’

She had locked her fingers through his own, but then she did those things : she handled people naturally, all people. Below them in the rocks’ cleft, the sea broke and formed itself furiously in patterns of writhing foam.

‘And you’ve come all this way just to tell me the house is out of bounds?’ she asked.

He didn’t answer.

‘Let me try it differently,’ she proposed when they had walked a distance. ‘If Bywater Street had been in bounds, would you have suggested that I did go there? Or are you telling me it’s out of bounds for good?’

She stopped and gazed at him, and held him away from her, trying to read his answer. She whispered, ‘For goodness’ sake,’ and he could see the doubt, the pride, and the hope in her face all at once, and wondered what she saw in his, because he himself had no knowledge of what he felt, except that he belonged nowhere near her, nowhere near this place; she was like a girl on a floating island that was swiftly moving away from him with the shadows of all her lovers gathered round her. He loved her, he was indifferent to her, he observed her with the curse of detachment, but she was leaving him. If I do not know myself, he thought, how can I tell who you are? He saw the lines of age and pain and striving that their life together had put there. She was all he wanted, she was nothing, she reminded him of someone he had once known a long time ago; she was remote to him, he knew her entirely. He saw the gravity in her face and one minute wondered that he could ever have taken it for profundity; the next, he despised her dependence on him, and wanted only to be free of her. He wanted to call out ‘Come back’ but he didn’t do it; he didn’t even put out a hand to stop her from slipping away.

‘You used to tell me never to stop looking,’ he said. The statement began like the preface to a question, but no question followed.

She waited, then offered a statement of her own. ‘I’m a comedian, George,’ she said. ‘I need a straight man. I need you.’

But he saw her from a long way off.

‘It’s the job,’ he said.

‘I can’t live with them. I can’t live without them.’ He supposed she was talking about her lovers again. ‘There’s one thing worse than change and that’s the status quo. I hate the choice. I love you. Do you understand?’ There was a gap while he must have said something. She was not relying on him, but she was leaning on him while she wept, because the weeping had taken away her strength. ‘You never knew how free you were, George,’ he heard her say. ‘I had to be free for both of us.’

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