Smiley’s feelings towards Roy Bland at that time were ambivalent. Recalling them now, he decided they still were. A don had spotted him, Smiley had recruited him; the combination was oddly akin to the one which had brought Smiley himself into the Circus net. But this time there was no German monster to fan the patriotic flame, and Smiley had always been a little embarrassed by protestations of anti-communism. Like Smiley, Bland had had no real childhood. His father was a docker, a passionate trade unionist, and a Party member. His mother died when Bland was a boy. His father hated education as he hated authority and when Bland grew clever the father took it into his head that he had lost his son to the ruling class and beat the life out of him. Bland fought his way to grammar school and in the holidays worked his ringers, as Toby would say, to the bones, in order to raise the extra fee. When Smiley met him in his tutor’s rooms at Oxford, he had the battered look of someone just arrived from a bad journey.
Smiley took him up, and over several months edged closer to a proposition, which Bland accepted largely, Smiley assumed, out of animosity towards his father. After that he passed out of Smiley’s care. Subsisting on odd grants undescribed, Bland toiled in the Marx Memorial Library and wrote leftish papers for tiny magazines that would have died long ago had the Circus not subsidised them. In the evenings he argued the toss at smoky meetings in pubs and school halls. In the vacations he went to the Nursery, where a fanatic called Thatch ran a charm-school for outward-bound penetration agents, one pupil at a time. Thatch trained Bland in tradecraft and carefully nudged his progressive opinions nearer to his father’s Marxist camp. Three years to the day after his recruitment, partly thanks to his proletarian pedigree, and his father’s influence at King Street, Bland won a year’s appointment as assistant lector in economics at the University of Poznan. He was launched.
From Poland he applied successfully for a post at the Budapest Academy of Sciences and for the next eight years he lived the nomadic life of a minor left-wing intellectual in search of light, often liked but never trusted. He stayed in Prague, returned to Poland, did a hellish two semesters in Sofia and six in Kiev where he had a nervous breakdown, his second in as many months. Once more the Nursery took charge of him, this time to dry him out. He was passed as clean, his networks were given to other fieldmen and Roy himself was brought into the Circus to manage, mainly from a desk, the networks he had recruited in the field. Recently, it had seemed to Smiley, Bland had become very much Haydon’s colleague. If Smiley chanced to call on Roy for a chat, like as not Bill was lounging in his armchair surrounded by papers, charts and cigarette smoke; if he dropped in on Bill it was no surprise to find Bland, in a sweat-soaked shirt, padding heavily back and forth across the carpet. Bill had Russia, Bland the satellites; but already in those early days of Witchcraft, the distinction had all but vanished.
They met at a pub in St John’s Wood, May still, half past five on a dull day and the garden empty. Roy brought a child, a boy of five or so, a tiny Bland, fair, burly and pink-faced. He didn’t explain the boy but sometimes as they talked he shut off and watched him where he sat on a bench away from them, eating nuts. Nervous breakdowns or not Bland still bore the imprimatur of the Thatch philosophy for agents in the enemy camp: self-faith, positive participation, Pied-Piper appeal and all those other uncomfortable phrases which in the high day of the cold war culture had turned the Nursery into something close to a moral rearmament centre.
‘So what’s the deal?’ Bland asked affably.
‘There isn’t one really, Roy. Control feels that the present situation is unhealthy. He doesn’t like to see you getting mixed up in a cabal. Nor do I.’
‘Great. So what’s the deal?’