‘I asked whether “lateralism” was a word to you.’
‘It most certainly is not.’
‘It’s the “in” doctrine. We used to go up and down. Now we go along.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘In your day the Circus ran itself by regions. Africa, satellites, Russia, China, South East Asia, you name it; each region was commanded by its own juju man, Control sat in heaven and held the strings. Remember?’
‘It strikes a distant chord.’
‘Well today everything operational is under one hat. It’s called London Station. Regions are out, lateralism is in. Bill Haydon’s Commander London Station, Roy Bland’s his number two, Toby Esterhase runs between them like a poodle. They’re a service within a service. They share their own secrets and don’t mix with the proles. It makes us more secure.’
‘It sounds a very good idea,’ said Smiley, studiously ignoring the innuendo.
As the memories once more began seething upward into his conscious mind, an extraordinary feeling passed over him: that he was living the day twice, first with Martindale in the club, now again with Guillam in a dream. They passed a plantation of young pine trees. The moonlight lay in strips between them.
Smiley began, ‘Is there any word of-‘ Then he asked, in a more tentative tone, ‘What’s the news of Ellis?’
‘In quarantine,’ said Guillam tersely.
‘Oh I’m sure. Of course. I don’t mean to pry. Merely, can he get around and so on? He did recover; he can walk? Backs can be terribly tricky, I understand.’
‘The word says he manages pretty well. How’s Ann, I didn’t ask.’
‘Fine. Just fine.’
It was pitch dark inside the car. They had turned off the road and were passing over gravel. Black walls of foliage rose to either side, lights appeared, then a high porch, and the steepled outline of a rambling house lifted above the tree-tops. The rain had stopped, but as Smiley stepped into the fresh air he heard all round him the restless ticking of wet leaves.
Yes, he thought, it was raining when I came here before; when the name Jim Ellis was headline news.
They had washed and in the lofty cloakroom inspected Lacon’s climbing kit mawkishly dumped on the Sheraton chest of drawers. Now they sat in a half circle facing one empty chair. It was the ugliest house for miles around and Lacon had picked it up for a song. ‘A Berkshire Camelot,’ he had once called it, explaining it away to Smiley, ‘built by a teetotal millionaire.’ The drawing room was a great hall with stained-glass windows twenty feet high and a pine gallery over the entrance. Smiley counted off the familiar things: an upright piano littered with musical scores, old portraits of clerics in gowns, a wad of printed invitations. He looked for the Cambridge University oar and found it slung over the fireplace. The same fire was burning, too mean for the enormous grate. An air of need prevailing over wealth.
‘Are you enjoying retirement, George?’ Lacon asked, as if blurting into the ear trumpet of a deaf aunt. ‘You don’t miss the warmth of human contact? I rather would, I think. One’s work, one’s old buddies.’
He was a string bean of a man, graceless and boyish: church and spy establishment, said Haydon, the Circus wit. His father was a dignitary of the Scottish church and his mother something noble. Occasionally the smarter Sundays wrote about him, calling him ‘new-style’ because he was young. The skin of his face was clawed from hasty shaving.
‘Oh I think I manage very well really, thank you,’ said Smiley politely. And to draw it out: ‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure I do. And you? All goes well with you?’
‘No big changes, no. All very smooth. Charlotte got her scholarship to Roedean, which was nice.’
‘Oh good.’
‘And your wife, she’s in the pink and so on?’
His expressions were also boyish.
‘Very bonny, thank you,’ said Smiley, trying gallantly to respond in kind.
They were watching the double doors. From far off they heard the jangle of footsteps on a ceramic floor. Smiley guessed two people, both men. The doors opened and a tall figure appeared half in silhouette. For the fraction of a moment Smiley glimpsed a second man behind him, dark, small and attentive; but only the one man stepped into the room before the doors were closed by unseen hands.