She seemed to realize her own absurdity and laughed.
She let go his arm and they walked again while she tried to right the ship by asking plain questions. He said weeks, perhaps longer. He said, ‘In a hotel,’ but didn’t say which city or country. She faced him again, and the tears were suddenly running anywhere, worse than before, but they still didn’t move him as he wished they would.
‘George, this is all there is, I promise you,’ she said, halting to make her entreaty. ‘The whistle’s gone, in your world and in mine. We’re landed with each other. There isn’t any more. According to the averages, we’re the most contented people on earth.’
He nodded, seeming to take the point that she had been somewhere he had not, but not regarding it as conclusive. They walked a little more, and he noticed that when she didn’t speak he was able to relate to her, but only in the sense that she was another living creature moving along the same path as himself.
‘It’s to do with the people who ruined Bill Haydon,’ he said to her, either as a consolation, or an excuse for his retreat. But he thought : ‘Who ruined you.’
He had missed his train and there were two hours to kill. The tide was out so he walked along the shore near Marazion, scared by his own indifference. The day was grey, the seabirds were very white against the slate sea. A couple of brave children were splashing in the surf. I am a thief of the spirit, he thought despondently. Faithless, I am pursuing another man’s convictions; I am trying to warm myself against other people’s fires. He watched the children, and recalled some scrap of poetry from the days when he read it :
To turn as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.
Yes, he thought glumly. That’s me.
‘Now, George,’ Lacon demanded. ‘Do you think we set our women up too high, is that where we English middle-class chaps go wrong? Do you think – I’ll put it this way – that we English, with our traditions and our schools, expect our womenfolk to stand for far too much, then blame them for not standing up at all – if you follow me? We see them as concepts, rather than flesh and blood. Is that our hang-up?’
Smiley said it might be.
‘Well if it isn’t, why does Val always fall for shits?’ Lacon snapped aggressively, to the surprise of the couple sitting at the next-door table.
Smiley did not know the answer to that either.
They had dined, appallingly, in the steak-house Lacon had suggested. They had drunk Spanish burgundy out of a carafe, and Lacon had raged wildly over the British political dilemma. Now they were drinking coffee and a suspect brandy. The anti-Communist phobia was overdone : Lacon had declared himself sure of it. Communists were only people, after all. They weren’t red-toothed monsters, not any more. Communists wanted what everyone wanted : prosperity and a bit of peace and quiet. A chance to take a breather from all this damned hostility. And if they didn’t – well, what could we do about it anyway? he had asked. Some problems – take Ireland – were insoluble, but you would never get the Americans to admit anything was insoluble. Britain was ungovernable; so would everywhere else be in a couple of years. Our future was with the collective, but our survival was with the individual, and the paradox was killing us every day.
‘Now, George, how do you see it? You’re out of harness after all. You have the objective view, the overall perspective.’
Smiley heard himself mutttering something inane about a spectrum.
And now the topic that Smiley had dreaded all evening was finally upon them : their seminar on marriage had begun.
‘We were always taught that women had to be cherished,’ Lacon declared resentfully. ‘If one didn’t make ’em feel loved every minute of the day, they’d go off the rails. But this chap Val’s with – well if she annoys him, or speaks out of turn, he’ll like as not give her a black eye. You and I never do that, do we?’