‘No.’
‘Nor do I. Have you met the invisible Ostrakov? You have not. Does the invisible Ostrakov exist? Alexandra insists he is a phantom. Alexandra will have a quite different parentage. Well, so would many of us!’
‘May I ask what you have told her about me?’
‘All I know. Which is nothing. That you are a friend of Uncle Anton, whom she refuses to accept as her uncle. That Uncle Anton is ill, which appears to delight her, but probably it worries her very much. I have told her it is her father’s wish to have someone visit her every week, but she tells me her father is a brigand and pushed her mother off a mountain at dead of night. I have told her to speak German but she may still decide that Russian is best.’
‘I understand,’ said Smiley.
‘You are lucky, then,’ Mother Felicity retorted. ‘For I do not.’
Alexandra entered and at first he saw only her eyes : so clear, so defenceless. In his imagination, he had drawn her, for some reason, larger. Her lips were full at the centre, but at the corners already thin and too agile, and her smile had a dangerous luminosity. Mother Felicity told her to sit, said something in Russian, gave her a kiss on her flaxen head. She left, and they heard her keys jingle as she strode off down the corridor, yelling at one of the sisters in French to have this mess cleared up. Alexandra wore a green tunic with long sleeves gathered at the wrists and a cardigan over her shoulders like a cape. She seemed to carry her clothes rather than wear them, as if someone had dressed her for the meeting.
‘Is Anton dead?’ she asked, and Smiley noticed that there was no natural link between the expression on her face and the thoughts in her head.
‘No, Anton has a bad flu,’ he replied.
‘Anton says he is my uncle but he is not,’ she explained. Her German was good, and he wondered whether, despite what Karla had said to Grigoriev, she had that from her mother too, or whether she had inherited her father’s gift for languages, or both. ‘He also pretends he has no car.’ As her father had once done, she watched him without emotion, and without commitment. ‘Where is your list?’ she asked. ‘Anton always brings a list.’
‘Oh, I have my questions in my head.’
‘It is forbidden to ask questions without a list. Questions out of the head are all completely forbidden by my father.’
‘Who is your father?’ Smiley asked.
For a time he saw only her eyes again, staring at him out of their private lonely place. She picked up a roll of Scotch tape from Mother Felicity’s desk, and lightly traced the shiny surface with her finger.
‘I saw your car,’ she said. ‘ “BE” stands for Berne.’
‘Yes, it does,’ said Smiley.
‘What kind of car does Anton have?’
‘A Mercedes. A black one. Very grand.’
‘How much did he pay for it?’
‘He bought it second-hand. About five thousand francs, I should imagine.’
‘Then why does he come and see me on a bicycle?’
‘Perhaps he needs the exercise.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He has a secret.’
‘Have you got a secret, Alexandra?’ Smiley asked.
She heard his question, and smiled at it, and nodded a couple of times as if to someone a long way off. ‘My secret is called Tatiana.’
‘That’s a good name,’ said Smiley. ‘Tatiana. How did you come by that?’
Raising her head, she smiled radiantly at the icons on the wall. ‘It is forbidden to talk about it,’ she said. ‘If you talk about it, nobody will believe you, but they put you in a clinic.’
‘But you are in a clinic already,’ Smiley pointed out.
Her voice did not lift, it only quickened. She remained so absolutely still that she seemed not even to draw breath between her words. Her lucidity and her courtesy were awesome. She respected his kindness, she said, but she knew that he was an extremely dangerous man, more dangerous than teachers or police. Dr Rüedi had invented property and prisons and many of the clever arguments by which the world lived out its lies, she said. Mother Felicity was too close to God, she did not understand that God was somebody who had to be ridden and kicked like a horse till he took you in the right direction.