Haldane listened courteously. When it was over he asked, “How did they pick you up in the first place, do you know?” The space between them was very great.
“They never told me,” he said blankly, as if it were not proper to inquire.
“Of course you are the man we need. You’ve got the German background, if you understand me. You know them, don’t you? You have the German experience.”
“Only from the war,” Leiser said.
They talked about the training school. “How’s that fat one? George somebody. Little sad bloke.”
“Oh .. . he’s well, thank you.”
“He married a pretty girl.” He laughed obscenely, raising his right forearm in an Arab gesture of sexual prowess. “God Christ,” he said, laughing again. “Us little blokes! Go for anything.”
It was an extraordinary lapse. It seemed to be what Haldane had been waiting for. He watched him coolly for a long time. The silence became remarkable. Deliberately he stood up; he seemed suddenly very angry; angry at Leiser’s silly grin and this whole cheap, incompetent flirtation; at these meaningless repetitive blasphemies and this squalid derision of a person of quality.
“Do you mind not saying that? George Smiley happens to be a friend of mine.”
He called the waiter and paid the bill, stalked quickly from the restaurant, leaving Leiser bewildered and alone, his White Lady held delicately in his hand, his brown eyes turned anxiously toward the doorway through which Haldane had so abruptly vanished.
Eventually he left, making his way back by the footbridge, slowly through the dark and the rain, staring down on the double alley of streetlights and the traffic passing between them. Across the road was his garage, the line of illuminated pumps, the tower crowned with its neon heart of sixty-watt bulbs, alternating green and red. He entered the brightly lit office, said something to the boy, walked slowly upstairs toward the blare of music.
Haldane waited till he had disappeared from sight, then hurried back to the restaurant to order a taxi.
She had turned the phonograph on. She was listening to dance music, sitting in his chair, drinking. “Christ, you’re late,” she said. “I’m starving.”
He kissed her.
“You’ve eaten,” she said. “I can smell the food.”
“Just a snack, Bett. I had to. A man called; we had a drink.”
“Liar.”
He smiled. “Come off it, Betty. We’ve got a dinner date, remember?”
“What man?”
The flat was very clean. Curtains and carpets were flowered, the polished surfaces protected with lace. Everything was protected; vases, lamps, ashtray, all were carefully guarded, as if Leiser expected nothing from nature but stark collision. He favored a suggestion of the antique: it was reflected in the scrolled woodwork of the furniture and the wrought iron of the lamp brackets. He had a mirror framed in gold and a picture made of fretwork and plaster; a new clock with weights which turned in a glass case.
When he opened the cocktail cabinet it played a brief tune on a music box.
He mixed himself a White Lady, carefully, like a man making up medicine. She watched him, moving her hips to the record, holding her glass away to one side as if it were her partner’s hand, and the partner were not Leiser.
“What man?” she repeated.
He stood at the window, straight-backed like a soldier. The flashing heart on the roof played over the houses, caught the staves of the bridge and quivered in the wet surface of the Avenue. Beyond the houses was the church, like a cinema with a spire, fluted brick with vents where the bells rang. Beyond the church was the sky. Sometimes he thought the church was all that remained, and the London sky was lit with the glow of a burning city.
“Christ, you’re really gay tonight.”
The church bells were recorded, much amplified to drown the noise of traffic. He sold a lot of petrol on Sundays. The rain was running harder against the road; he could see it shading the beams of the car lights, dancing green and red on the tarmac.
“Come on, Fred, dance.”
“Just a minute, Bett.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake what’s the matter with you? Have another drink and forget it.”