Smiley’s People by John le Carré

The door flew open and Alexandra beard Felicity-Felicity’s courtly voice, harrying her like an old nurse in a Russian play : ‘Sasha! You must get up immediately! Sasha, wake up immediately! Sasha, wake up! Sasha!’

She came a step nearer. Alexandra wondered whether she was going to pull back the sheets and yank her to her feet. Mother Felicity could be rough as a soldier, for all her aristocratic blood. She was not a bully, but she was blunt and easily provoked.

‘Sasha, you will be late for breakfast. The other girls will look at you and laugh and say that we stupid Russians are always late. Sasha? Sasha, do you want to miss prayers? God will be very angry with you, Sasha. He will be sad and He will cry. He may have to think of ways of punishing you.’

Sasha, do you want to go to Untersee?

Alexandra pressed her eyelids closer together. I am six years old and need my sleep, Mother Felicity. God make me five, God make me four. I am three years old and need my sleep, Mother Felicity.

‘Sasha, have you forgotten it is your special day? Sasha, have you forgotten you have your visitor today?’

God make me two, God make me one, God make me nothing and unborn. No, I have not forgotten my visitor, Mother Felicity. I remembered my visitor before I went to sleep. I dreamt of him, I have thought of nothing else since I woke. But, Mother Felicity, I do not want my visitor today, or any other day. I cannot, cannot live the lie, I don’t know how, and that is why I shall not, shall not, shall not let the day begin!

Obediently, Alexandra clambered out of bed.

‘There,’ said Mother Felicity, and gave her a distracted kiss before bustling off down the corridor, calling ‘Late again! Late again!’ and clapping her hands – ‘Shoo, shoo!’ – just as she would to a flock of silly hens.

TWENTY-THREE

The train journey to Thud took half an hour and from the station Smiley drifted, window-shopping, making little detours. Some guys get heroic and want to die for their countries, he thought… Burning, that touches the stubbornness in people… He wondered what it would touch in himself.

It was a day of darkening blankness. The few pedestrians were slow shadows against the fog, and lake steamers were frozen in the locks. Occasionally the blankness parted enough to offer him a glimpse of castle, a tree, a piece of city wall. Then swiftly closed over them again. Snow lay in the cobbles and in the forks of the knobbly spa trees. The few cars drove with their lights on, their tyres crackling in the slush. The only colours were in shop windows : gold watches, ski clothes like national flags. ‘Be there eleven earliest,’ Toby had said; ‘eleven is already too early, George, they won’t arrive till twelve.’ It was only ten-thirty but he wanted the time, he wanted to circle before he settled; time, as Enderby would say, to get his ducks in a row. He entered a narrow street and saw the castle lift directly above him. The arcade became a pavement, then a staircase, then a steep slope, and he kept climbing. He passed an English Tea-Room, an American-Bar, an Oasis Night-Oub, each hyphenated, each neon-lit, each a sanitized copy of a lost original. But they could not destroy his love of Switzerland. He entered a square and saw the bank, the very one, and straight across the road the little hotel exactly as Toby had described it, with its café-restaurant on the ground floor and its barracks of rooms above. He saw the yellow mail van parked boldly in the no-parking bay, and he knew it was Toby’s static post. Toby had a lifelong faith in mail vans; he stole them wherever he went, saying nobody noticed or remembered them. He had fitted new number-plates but they looked older than the van. Smiley crossed the square. A notice on the bank door said ‘OPEN MONDAY TO THURSDAY 07.45-17.00, FRIDAY 07.45-18.15’. ‘Grigoriev likes the lunch-hour because in Thun nobody wastes his lunch hour going to the bank,’ Toby had explained. ‘He has completely mistaken quiet for security, George. Empty places, empty times, Grigoriev is so conspicuous he’s embarrassing.’ He crossed a foot-bridge. The time was ten to eleven. He crossed the road and headed for the little hotel with its unencumbered view of Grigoriev’s bank. Tension in a vacuum, he thought, listening to the slip of his own feet and the gurgle of water from the gutters; the town was out of season and out of time. Burning, George, that’s always a hazard. How would Karla do it? he wondered. What would the absolutist do which we are not doing ourselves? Smiley could think of nothing, short of straight physical abduction. Karla would collect the operational intelligence, he thought, then he would make his approach – risking the hazard. He pushed the café door and the warm air sighed to him. He made for a window table marked ‘RESERVED’. ‘I’m waiting for Mr Jacobi,’ he told the girl. She nodded disapprovingly, missing his eye. The girl had a cloistered pallor, and no expression at all. He ordered café-crème in a glass, but she said that if it came in a glass, he would have to have schnapps with it.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *