Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré

‘No, sir.’

‘Good name, anyway.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Known a lot of Bills. They’ve all been good ‘uns.’

With that, in a manner of speaking, the introduction was made. Jim did not tell Roach to go away so Roach stayed on the brow peering downward through his rain-smeared spectacles. The bricks, he noticed with awe, were pinched from the cucumber frame. Several had been loose already and Jim must have loosened them a bit more. It seemed a wonderful thing to Roach that anyone just arrived at Thursgood’s should be so self-possessed as to pinch the actual fabric of the school for his own purposes, and doubly wonderful that Jim had run a lead off the hydrant for his water, for that hydrant was the subject of a special school rule: to touch it at all was a beatable offence.

‘Hey you, Bill. You wouldn’t have such a thing as a marble on you by any chance?’

‘A-sir-what-sir?’ Roach asked, patting his pockets in a dazed way.

‘Marble, old boy. Round glass marble, little ball. Don’t boys play marbles any more? We did when I was at school.’

Roach had no marble but Aprahamian had had a whole collection flown in from Beirut. It took Roach about fifty

seconds to race back to the school, secure one against the wildest undertakings and return panting to the Dip. There he hesitated, for in his mind the Dip was already Jim’s and Roach required leave to descend it. But Jim had disappeared into the caravan, so having waited a moment Roach stepped gingerly down the bank and offered the marble through the doorway. Jim didn’t spot him at once. He was sipping from the beaker and staring out of the window at the black clouds as they tore this way and that over the Quantocks. This sipping movement, Roach noticed, was actually quite difficult, for Jim could not easily swallow standing up straight, he had to tilt his whole twisted trunk backward to achieve the angle. Meanwhile the rain came on really hard again, rattling against the caravan like gravel.

‘Sir,’ said Roach but Jim made no move.

‘Trouble with an Alvis is, no damn springs,’ said Jim at last, more to the window than to his visitor. ‘You drive along with your rump on the white line, eh? Cripple anybody.’ And, tilting his trunk again, he drank.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Roach, much surprised that Jim should assume he was a driver.

Jim had taken off his hat. His sandy hair was close cropped, there were patches where someone had gone too low with the scissors. These patches were mainly on one side, so that Roach guessed that Jim had cut his hair himself with his good arm, which made him even more lopsided.

‘I brought you a marble,’ said Roach.

‘Very good of you. Thanks, old boy.’ Taking the marble he slowly rolled it round his hard, powdery palm and Roach knew at once that he was very skilful at all sorts of things; that he was the kind of man who lived on terms with tools and objects generally. ‘Not level, you see, Bill,’ he confided, still intent upon the marble. ‘Skew-whiff. Like me. Watch,’ and turned purposefully to the larger window. A strip of aluminium beading ran along the bottom, put there to catch the condensation. Laying the marble in it, Jim watched it roll to the end and fall on the floor.

‘Skew-whiff,’ he repeated. ‘Kipping in the stem. Can’t have that, can we? Hey, hey, where’d you get to, you little brute?’

The caravan was not a homely place, Roach noticed, stooping to retrieve the marble. It might have belonged to anyone, though it was scrupulously clean. A bunk, a kitchen chair, a ship’s stove, a Calor gas cylinder. Not even a picture of his wife, thought Roach, who had not yet met a bachelor, with the exception of Mr Thursgood. The only personal things he could find were a webbing kitbag hanging from the door, a set of sewing things stored beside the bunk and a homemade shower made from a perforated biscuit tin and neatly welded to the roof. And on the table one bottle of colourless drink, gin or vodka, because that was what his father drank when Roach went to his flat for weekends in the holidays.

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