‘To say what?’
For a long, long while Haydon hesitated, then did not answer. But the answer was written there all the same, in the sudden emptying of his eyes, in the shadow of guilt that crossed his thin face. He came to warn you, Smiley thought; because he loved you. To warn you; just as he came to tell me that Control was mad, but couldn’t find me because I was in Berlin. Jim was watching your back for you right till the end.
Also, Haydon resumed, it had to be a country with a recent history of counter-revolution: Czecho was honestly the only place.
Smiley appeared not quite to be listening.
‘Why did you bring him back?’ he asked. ‘For friendship’s sake? Because he was harmless and you held all the cards?’
It wasn’t just that, Haydon explained. As long as Jim was in a Czech prison (he didn’t say Russian) people would agitate for him, and see him as some sort of key. But once he was back, everyone in Whitehall would conspire to keep him quiet: that was the way of it with repatriations.
‘I’m surprised Karla didn’t just shoot him. Or did he hold back out of delicacy towards you?’
But Haydon had drifted away again into half-baked political assertions.
Then he began speaking about himself, and already, to Smiley’s eye, he seemed quite visibly to be shrinking to something quite small and mean. He was touched to hear that Ionesco had recently promised us a play in which the hero kept silent and everyone round him spoke incessantly. When the psychologists and fashionable historians came to write their apologias for him, he hoped they would remember that that was how he saw himself. As an artist, he had said all he had to say at the age of seventeen, and one had to do something with one’s later years. He was awfully sorry he couldn’t take some of his friends with him. He hoped Smiley would remember him with affection.
Smiley wanted at that point to tell him that he would not remember him in those terms at all, and a good deal more besides, but there seemed no point and Haydon was having another nose bleed.
‘Oh, I’m to ask you to avoid publicity by the way. Miles Sercombe made quite a thing of it.’
Here Haydon managed a laugh. Having messed up the Circus in private, he said, he had no wish to repeat the process in public.
Before he left, Smiley asked the one question he still cared about.
‘I’ll have to break it to Ann. Is there anything particular you want me to pass on to her?’
It required discussion for the implication of Smiley’s question to get through to him. At first, he thought Smiley had said ‘Jan’, and couldn’t understand why he had not yet called on her.
‘Oh your Ann,’ he said, as if there were a lot of Anns around. It was Karla’s idea, he explained. Karla had long recognised that Smiley represented the biggest threat to the mole Gerald. ‘He said you were quite good.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But you had this one price: Ann. The last illusion of the illusionless man. He reckoned that if I was known to be Ann’s lover around the place you wouldn’t see me very straight when it came to other things.’ His eyes, Smiley noticed, had become very fixed. Pewtery, Ann called them. ‘Not to strain it or anything but if it was possible, join the queue. Point?’
‘Point,’ said Smiley.
For instance, on the night of Testify, Karla was adamant that if possible Haydon should be dallying with Ann. As a form of insurance.
‘And wasn’t there in fact a small hitch that night?’ Smiley asked, remembering Sam Collins, and the matter of whether Ellis had been shot. Haydon agreed that there had been. If everything had gone according to plan, the first Czech bulletins should have broken at ten thirty. Haydon would have had a chance to read his club tickertape after Sam Collins had rung Ann, and before he arrived at the Circus to take over. But because Jim had been shot, there was fumble at the Czech end and the bulletin was released after his club had closed.