Karla, he thought. What a place to look for you.
He parked, and his arrival set loose a bedlam as dogs sobbed in torment and thin walls thundered to desperate bodies. He walked to the house, carrier-bag in hand, the bottles bumping against his legs. Above the din he heard his own feet rattling up the six steps of the veranda. A notice on the door read : ‘If OUT do NOT leave pets on spec.’ and underneath, seemingly added in a fury, ‘No bloody monkeys.’
The bell-pull was a donkey’s tail in plastic. He reached for it but the door had already opened and a frail pretty woman peered at him from the interior darkness of the cabin. Her eyes were timid and grey, she had that period English beauty which had once been Ann’s : accepting, and grave. She saw him and Stopped dead. ‘Oh, Lord,’ she whispered. ‘Gosh.’ Then looked downward at her brogues, brushing back her forelock with one finger, while the dogs barked themselves hoarse at him from behind their wire.
‘I’m sorry, Hilary,’ said Smiley, with great gentleness. ‘It’s only for an hour, I promise. That’s all it is. An hour.’
A deep, masculine voice, very slow, issued out of the darkness behind her. ‘What is it, Hils?’ growled the voice. ‘Bog-weevil, budgie or giraffe?’
The question was followed by a slow thud like the movement of cloth over something hollow.
‘It’s human, Con,’ Hilary called over her shoulder, and went back to looking at her brogues.
‘She human or the other thing?’ the voice demanded.
‘It’s George, Con. Don’t be cross, Con.’
‘George?’ Which George? George the Lorry, who waters my coal, or George the Meat, who poisons my dogs?’
‘It’s just some questions,’ Smiley assured Hilary in the same deeply compassionate tone. ‘An old case. Nothing momentous, I promise you.’
‘It doesn’t matter, George,’ Hilary said, still looking downward. ‘Honestly. It’s fine.’
‘Stop all that flirting!’ the voice from inside the house commanded. ‘Unhand her, whoever you are!’
As the thudding drew gradually nearer Smiley leaned past Hilary and spoke into the doorway. ‘Connie, it’s me,’ he said. And once again, his voice did everything possible to signal his goodwill.
First came the puppies – four of them, probably whippets in a fast pack. Next came a mangy old mongrel with barely life enough to reach the veranda and collapse. Then the door shuddered open to its fullest extent and revealed a mountainous woman propped crookedly between two thick wooden crutches, which she did not seem to hold. She had white hair clipped short as a man’s, and watery, very shrewd eyes that held him fiercely in their stare. So long was her examination of him, in fact, so leisured and minute – his earnest face, his baggy suit, the plastic carrier-bag dangling from his left hand, his whole posture of waiting meekly to be admitted – that it gave her an almost regal authority over him, to which her stillness, and her troubled breathing, and her crippled state only contributed greater strength.
‘Oh my giddy aunts,’ she announced, still studying him, and blew out a stream of air. ‘Jumping whatevers. Damn you, George Smiley. Damn you and all who sail in you. Welcome to Siberia.’
Then she smiled, and her smile was so sudden, and fresh, and little-girl, that it almost washed away the long questioning that had gone before it.
‘Hullo, Con,’ said Smiley.
Her eyes, notwithstanding her smile, stayed on him still. They had the pallor of a new-born baby’s.
‘Hils,’ she said, at last. ‘I said Hils!’
‘Yes, Con?’
‘Go feed the doggy-wogs, darling. When you’ve done that, feed the filthy chickadees. Glut the brutes. When you’ve done that, mix tomorrow’s meal, and when you’ve done that, bring me the humane killer so that I can despatch this interfering whatsit to an early Paradise. George, follow me.’
Hilary smiled but seemed unable to move till Connie softly pushed an elbow into her to get her going.
‘Hoof it, darling. There’s nothing he can do to you now. He’s shot his bolt, and so have you, and, God knows, so have I.’
It was a house of day and night at once. At the centre, on a pine table littered with the remains of toast and Marmite, an old oil lamp shed a globe of yellow light, intensifying the darkness round it. The gleam of blue rain clouds, streaked by sunset, filled the far French windows. Gradually, as Smiley followed Connie’s agonizingly slow procession, he realized that this one wooden room was all there was. For an office, they had the rolltop desk laden with bills and flea powder; for a bedroom the brass double bedstead with its heap of stuffed toy animals lying like dead soldiers between the pillows; for a drawing-room Connie’s rocking-chair and a crumbling wicker sofa; for a kitchen a gas ring fired from a cylinder; and for decoration the unclearable litter of old age.