The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré

Andy sulks. Stormont stares into his void. But dear, kind Maltby feels constrained to add a few comforting words of his own.

‘My dear chap, you can’t possibly hang on to the whole game, can he, Nigel? It’s share and share alike in my Embassy – isn’t it, Nigel? Nobody’s taking your spies away from you. You’ll still have your network to look after – brief, debrief, pay and so forth. All we want is your Opposition. What could be fairer than that?’

But still, to Fran’s embarrassment, Andy refuses to accept the hand that is so courteously outstretched to him. His glittery little eyes switch to Maltby, then Stormont, then go back to Maltby. He mutters something nobody catches, which is probably as well. He pulls a bitter grin and nods to himself like a man cruelly cheated.

A last symbolic ceremony remains. Mellors stands, ducks beneath the table and reappears with two black leather shoulder bags of the sort Queen’s Messengers cart about, one to each shoulder.

‘Andrew, kindly open up the strongroom for us,’ he commands.

Now everyone is standing. Fran stands too. Shepherd advances on the strongroom, unlocks the grille with a long brass key and pulls it back, exposing a solid steel door with a black dial at its centre. On Mellors’ nod Andy steps forward and, with an expression of such pent-up venom that she is heartily glad she never saw it until now, swivels the dial this way and that until the lock yields. Even then, it takes an encouraging word from Maltby before Andy draws back the door and, with a mocking bow, invites his Ambassador and Head of Chancery to enter ahead of him. Still standing at the table, Fran makes out, beside an oversized red telephone attached to a kind of reconstructed vacuum cleaner, a steel safe with two keyholes. Her father the judge has one like it in his dressing room.

‘One each now,’ she hears Mellors pipe skittishly.

For a moment Fran is in her old school chapel, kneeling in the front pew and watching a huddle of handsome young priests as they chastely turn their backs to her and busy themselves with exciting things in preparation for her First Communion. Gradually her field of view clears and she sees Andy, under Mellors’ parental eye, presenting Maltby and Stormont with one long-stemmed silver-plated key apiece. There is English amusement, which Andy does not share, while each man tries the other’s keyhole before Maltby lets out a jolly ‘Gotcha’ and the safe door clunks open.

But Fran by now is no longer looking at the safe. Her gaze is all upon Andy as he stares and stares at the gold bars that Mellors is taking one by one from his black shoulder bags and handing to Shepherd to be stacked criss-cross like spillikins. And it is Andy’s sagging face that for the last time holds her in its spell because it tells her everything she ever did or didn’t want to know about him. She knows he’s been caught and she has a shrewd notion of what he’s been caught at, though she has no idea at all whether those who have caught him know what they have done. She knows he is a liar, with or without the licence of his profession. She knows the source of the fifty thousand dollars he put on red. It is standing before her with its door open. She entirely understands why he is so angry that he has been forced to give away the keys. And after that Fran can’t watch any more, partly because her eyes have misted over in humiliation and self-disgust and partly because the ungainly frame of Maltby is bearing down on her with a pirate’s grin, asking whether she would regard it as an offence against Creation if he took her to the Pavo Real for a boiled egg.

‘Phoebe has decided to leave me,’ he explains with pride. ‘We’re getting a divorce immediately. Nigel’s plucking up his courage to break it to her. She’ll never believe it if it comes from me.’

Fran took a moment to reply because her first instinct was to shudder and say no thank you very much. It was only when she kept thinking that she realised a number of things she might have realised earlier. Namely that for months she had been touched by Maltby’s devotion to her, and grateful for the presence in her life of a man who longed for her so hopelessly. And that Maltby’s sheepish adoration of her had become a source of priceless support as she wrestled with the knowledge that she was sharing her life with an amoralist whose lack of shame or scruple had at first attracted and now repelled her; whose interest in her had never been more than expedient and carnal; and whose net effect on her had been to instil a craving for the shambling devotion of her Ambassador.

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