‘Lucky no one followed it up,’ he said, helping himself to another of Smiley’s cigarettes. ‘Which one was I by the way?’ he asked conversationally. ‘I forget.’
‘Tailor. I was Beggarman.’
By then Smiley had had enough, so he slipped out, not bothering to say goodbye. He got into his car and drove for an hour anywhere, till he found himself on a side road to Oxford doing eighty, so he stopped for lunch and headed for London. He still couldn’t face Bywater Street so he went to a cinema, dined somewhere and got home at midnight slightly drunk to find both Lacon and Miles Sercombe on the doorstep, and Sercombe’s fatuous Rolls, the black bedpan, all fifty foot of it, shoved up on the kerb in everyone’s way.
They drove to Sarratt at a mad speed, and there, in the open night under a clear sky, lit by several hand torches and stared at by several white-faced inmates of the Nursery, sat Bill Haydon on a garden bench facing the moonlit cricket field. He was wearing striped pyjamas under his overcoat; they looked more like prison clothes. His eyes were open and his head was propped unnaturally to one side, like the head of a bird when its neck has been expertly broken.
There was no particular dispute about what had happened. At ten thirty Haydon had complained to his guards of sleeplessness and nausea: he proposed to take some fresh air. His case being regarded as closed, no one thought to accompany him and he walked out into the darkness alone. One of the guards remembered him making a joke about ‘examining the state of the wicket’. The other was too busy watching the television to remember anything. After half an hour they became apprehensive so the senior guard went off to take a look while his assistant stayed behind in case Haydon should return. Haydon was found where he was now sitting; the guard thought at first that he had fallen asleep. Stooping over him, he caught the smell of alcohol – he guessed gin or vodka – and decided that Haydon was drunk, which surprised him since the Nursery was officially dry. It wasn’t till he tried to lift him that his head flopped over, and the rest of him followed as dead weight. Having vomited (the traces were over there by the tree), the guard propped him up again and sounded the alarm.
Had Haydon received any messages during the day? Smiley asked.
No. But his suit had come back from the cleaners and it was possible a message had been concealed in it – for instance inviting him to a rendezvous.
‘So the Russians did it,’ the Minister announced with satisfaction to Haydon’s unresponsive form. ‘To stop him peaching, I suppose. Bloody thugs.’
‘No,’ said Smiley. ‘They take pride in getting their people back.’
‘Then who the hell did?’
Everyone waited on Smiley’s answer, but none came. The torches went out and the group moved uncertainly towards the car.
‘Can we lose him just the same?’ the Minister asked on the way back.
‘He was a Soviet citizen. Let them have him,’ said Lacon, still watching Smiley in the darkness.
They agreed it was a pity about the networks. Better see whether Karla would do the deal anyhow. ‘He won’t,’ said Smiley.
Recalling all this in the seclusion of his first-class compartment, Smiley had the curious sensation of watching Haydon through the wrong end of a telescope. He had eaten very little since last night, but the bar had been open for most of the journey.
Leaving King’s Cross he had had a wistful notion of liking Haydon, and respecting him: Bill was a man, after all, who had had something to say and had said it. But his mental system rejected this convenient simplification. The more he puzzled over Haydon’s rambling account of himself, the more conscious he was of the contradictions. He tried at first to see Haydon in the romantic newspaper terms of a Thirties intellectual, for whom Moscow was the natural Mecca. ‘Moscow was Bill’s discipline,’ he told himself. ‘He needed the symmetry of an historical and economic solution.’ This struck him as too sparse, so he added more of the man whom he was trying to like: ‘Bill was a romantic and a snob. He wanted to join an elitist vanguard and lead the masses out of the darkness.’ Then he remembered the half-finished canvases in the girl’s drawing room in Kentish Town: cramped, overworked and condemned. He remembered also the ghost of Bill’s authoritarian father – Ann had called him simply the Monster – and he imagined Bill’s Marxism making up for his inadequacy as an artist, and for his loveless childhood. Later of course it hardly mattered if the doctrine wore thin. Bill was set on the road and Karla would know how to keep him there. Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided, seeing Bill again stretched out on the floor in Bywater Street, while Ann played him music on the gramophone.