With much of it, Smiley might in other circumstances have agreed: it was the tone, rather than the music, which alienated him.
‘In capitalist America economic repression of the masses is institutionalised to a point which not even Lenin could have foreseen.
‘The cold war began in 1917 but the bitterest struggles lie ahead of us, as America’s deathbed paranoia drives her to greater excesses abroad…”
He spoke not of the decline of the West, but of its death by greed and constipation. He hated America very deeply, he said, and Smiley supposed he did. Haydon also took it for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nation’s political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.
Finally he came to his own case. At Oxford, he said, he was genuinely of the right, and in the war, it scarcely mattered where one stood as long as one was fighting the Germans. For a while, after forty-five, he said, he had remained content with Britain’s part in the world, till gradually it dawned on him just how trivial this was. How and when was a mystery. In the historical mayhem of his own lifetime he could point to no one occasion: simply he knew that if England were out of the game, the price of fish would not be altered by a farthing. He had often wondered which side he would be on if the test ever came; after prolonged reflection he had finally to admit that if either monolith had to win the day, he would prefer it to be the East.
‘It’s an aesthetic judgment as much as anything,’ he explained, looking up. ‘Partly a moral one, of course.’
‘Of course,’ said Smiley politely.
From then on, he said, it was only a matter of time before he put his efforts where his convictions lay.
That was the first day’s take. A white sediment had formed on Haydon’s lips, and he had begun weeping again. They agreed to meet tomorrow at the same time.
‘It would be nice to go into the detail a little if we could, Bill,’ Smiley said as he left.
‘Oh and look, tell Jan, will you?’ Haydon was lying on the bed, staunching his nose again. ‘Doesn’t matter a hoot what you say, long as you make it final.’ Sitting up, he wrote out a cheque and put it in a brown envelope. ‘Give her that for the milk bill.’
Realising perhaps that Smiley was not quite at ease with this brief, he added: ‘Well, I can’t take her with me, can I? Even if they let her come, she’d be a bloody millstone.’
The same evening, following Haydon’s instructions, Smiley took a tube to Kentish Town and unearthed a cottage in an unconverted mews. A flat-faced fair girl in jeans opened the door to him; there was a smell of oil paint and baby. He could not remember whether he had met her at Bywater Street so he opened with: ‘I’m from Bill Haydon. He’s quite all right but I’ve got various messages from him.’
‘Jesus,’ said the girl softly. ‘About bloody time and all.’
The living room was filthy. Through the kitchen door he saw a pile of dirty crockery and he knew she used everything until it ran out, then washed it all at once. The floorboards were bare except for long psychedelic patterns of snakes and flowers and insects painted all over them.
‘That’s Bill’s Michelangelo ceiling,’ she said conversationally. ‘Only he’s not going to have Michelangelo’s bad back. Are you government?’ she asked, lighting a cigarette. ‘He works for government, he told me.’ Her hand was shaking and she had yellow smudges under her eyes.
‘Oh look, first I’m to give you that,’ said Smiley, and delving in an inside pocket handed her the envelope with the cheque.
‘Bread,’ said the girl, and put the envelope beside her.
‘Bread,’ said Smiley, answering her grin, then something in his expression, or the way he echoed that one word, made her take up the envelope and rip it open. There was no note, just the cheque, but the cheque was enough: even from where Smiley sat, he could see it had four figures.