‘If I had died,’ she demanded suddenly, ‘rather than Control, say, how would you feel towards Bill?’
Smiley was still pondering his answer when she threw in: ‘I sometimes think I safeguard your opinion of him. Is that possible? That I somehow keep the two of you together. Is that possible?’
‘It’s possible.’ He added: ‘Yes, I suppose I’m dependent on Bill in a way.’
‘Is Bill still important in the Circus?’
‘More than he was, probably.’
‘And he still goes to Washington, wheels and deals with them, turns them upside down?’
‘I expect so. I hear so.’
‘Is he as important as you were?’
‘I suppose.’
‘I suppose,’ she repeated. ‘I expect. I hear. Is he better then? A better performer than you, better at the arithmetic? Tell me. Please tell me. You must.’
She was strangely excited. Her eyes, tearful from the wind, shone desperately upon him, she had both hands on his arm, and like a child was dragging on him for an answer.
‘You’ve always told me that men aren’t to be compared,’ he replied awkwardly. ‘You’ve always said, you didn’t think in that category of comparison.’
‘Tell me!’
‘All right: no, he’s not better.’
‘As good?’
‘No.’
‘And if I wasn’t there, what would you think of him then? If Bill were not my cousin, not my anything? Tell me. Would you think more of him, or less?’
‘Less, I suppose.’
‘Then think less now. I divorce him from the family, from our lives, from everything. Here and now. I throw him into the sea. There. Do you understand?’
He understood only: go back to the Circus, finish your business. It was one of a dozen ways she had of saying the same thing.
Still disturbed by this intrusion on his memory, Smiley stood up in rather a flurry and went to the window, his habitual lookout when he was distracted. A line of seagulls, half a dozen of them, had settled on the parapet. He must have heard them calling, and remembered that walk to Lamorna.
‘I cough when there are things I can’t say,’ Ann had told him once. What couldn’t she say then? he asked glumly of the chimney pots across the street. Connie could say it, Martindale could say it; so why couldn’t Ann?
‘Three of them and Alleline,’ Smiley muttered aloud. The seagulls had gone, all at once, as if they had spotted a better place. ‘Tell them they’re buying their way in with counterfeit money.’ And if the banks accept the money? If the experts pronounce it genuine, and Bill Haydon praises it to the skies? And the Cabinet Office files are full of plaudits for the brave new men of Cambridge Circus, who have finally broken the jinx?
He had chosen Esterhase first because Toby owed Smiley his career. Smiley had recruited him in Vienna, a starving student living in the ruins of a museum of which his dead uncle had been curator. He drove down to Acton and bearded him at the Laundry across his walnut desk with its row of ivory telephones. On the wall, kneeling Magi, questionable Italian seventeenth century. Through the window, a closed courtyard crammed with cars and vans and motorbikes, and rest-huts where the teams of lamplighters killed time between shifts. First Smiley asked Toby about his family: there was a son who went to Westminster and a daughter at medical school, first year. Then he put it to Toby that the lamplighters were two months behind on their worksheets and when Toby hedged he asked him outright whether his boys had been doing any special jobs recently, either at home or abroad, which for good reasons of security Toby didn’t feel able to mention in his returns.
‘Who would I do that for, George?’ Toby had asked, dead-eyed. ‘You know in my book that’s completely illegal.’ And idiom, in Toby’s book, had a way of being ludicrous.
‘Well, I can see you doing it for Percy Alleline, for one,’ Smiley suggested, feeding him the excuse: ‘After all, if Percy ordered you to do something and not to record it, you’d be in a very difficult position.’
‘What sort of something, though, George, I wonder?’