“These people would eventually be used against military targets,” he said angrily. “Purely military. Control accepts that.”
“Oh quite.” Smiley seemed to have given up. “And if you want a conventional set, no doubt we can dig one up.”
The waiter brought a decanter of port. Leclerc watched Smiley pour a little into his glass, then slide the decanter carefully across the polished table.
“It’s quite good, but I’m afraid it’s nearly finished. When this is gone we shall have to break into the younger ones. I’m seeing Control first thing tomorrow. I’m sure he’ll have no objection. About the documents, I mean. And crystals. We could advise you on frequencies, I’m sure. Control made a point of that.”
“Control’s been very good,” Leclerc confessed. He was slightly drunk. “It puzzles me sometimes.”
Twelve
Two days later, Leiser arrived at Oxford. They waited anxiously for him on the platform, Haldane peering among the hurrying faces in the crowd. It was Avery, curiously, who saw him first: a motionless figure in a camel’s hair coat at the window of an empty compartment.
“Is that he?” Avery asked.
“He’s traveling first class. He must have paid the difference.” Haldane spoke as if it were an affront.
Leiser lowered the window and handed out two pigskin cases shaped for the trunk of a car, a little too orange for nature. They greeted one another briskly, shaking hands for everyone to see. Avery wanted to carry the luggage to the taxi, but Leiser preferred to take it himself, a piece in each hand, as if it were his duty. He walked a little away from them, shoulders back, staring at the people as they went by, startled by the crowd. His long hair bounced with each step.
Avery, watching him, felt suddenly disturbed.
He was a man; not a shadow. A man with force to his body and purpose to his movement, but somehow theirs to direct. There seemed to be nowhere he would not walk. He was recruited; and had assumed already the anxious, brisk manner of an enlisted man. Yet, Avery accepted, no single factor wholly accounted for Leiser’s recruitment. Avery was already familiar, during his short association with the Department, with the phenomenon of organic motivation; with operations which had no discernible genesis and no conclusion, which formed part of an unending pattern of activity until they ceased to have any further identity; with that progress of fruitless courtships which, in the aggregate, passed for an active love life. But as he observed this man bobbing beside him, animate and quick, he recognized that hitherto they had courted ideas, incestuously among themselves; now they had a human being upon their hands, and this was he.
They climbed into the taxi, Leiser last because he insisted. It was midafternoon, a slate sky behind the plane trees. The smoke rose from the North Oxford, chimneys in ponderous columns like proof of a virtuous sacrifice. The houses were of a modest stateliness; romantic hulls redecked, each according to a different legend. Here the turrets of Avalon, there the carved trellis of a pagoda; between them the monkey-puzzle trees, and the half-hidden washing like butterflies in the wrong season. The houses sat decently in their own gardens, the curtains drawn, first lace and then brocade, petticoats and skirts. It was like a bad watercolor, the dark things drawn too heavy, the sky gray and soiled in the dusk, the paint too worked.
They dismissed the taxi at the corner of the street. A smell of leaf-mold lingered in the air. If there were children they made no noise. The three men walked to the gate. Leiser, his eyes on the house, put down his suitcases.
“Nice place,” he said with appreciation. He turned to Avery: “Who chose it?”
“I did.”
“That’s nice.” He patted his shoulder. “You did a good job.” Avery, pleased, smiled and opened the gate; again Leiser was determined that the others should pass through first. They took him upstairs and showed him his room. He still carried his own luggage.
“I’ll unpack later,” he said. “I like to make a proper job of it.”
He walked through the house in a critical way, picking things up and looking at them; he might have come to bid for the place.