‘To Prideaux? No.’
‘Not a cousin, I mean?’
‘For Heaven’s sake,’ Smiley breathed.
Lacon grew suddenly awkward again, but a dogged purpose kept his gaze on Smiley. ‘And there’s no emotional or other reason which you feel might debar you from the assignment? You must speak up, George,’ he insisted anxiously, as if speaking up were the last thing he wanted. He waited a fraction, then threw it all away: ‘Though I see no real case. There’s always a part of us that belongs to the public domain, isn’t there? The social contract cuts both ways, you always knew that I’m sure. So did Prideaux.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Well, good Lord, he was shot, George. A bullet in the back is held to be quite a sacrifice, isn’t it, even in your world?’
Alone, Smiley stood at the further end of the paddock, under the dripping trees, trying to make sense of his emotions while he reached for breath. Like an old illness, his anger had taken him by surprise. Ever since his retirement he had been denying its existence, steering clear of anything that could touch it off: newspapers, former colleagues, gossip of the Martindale sort. After a lifetime of living by his wits and his considerable memory, he had given himself full-time to the profession of forgetting. He had forced himself to pursue scholarly interests which had served him well enough as a distraction while he was at the Circus, but now that he was unemployed were nothing, absolutely nothing. He could have shouted: Nothing!
‘Burn the lot,’ Ann had suggested helpfully, referring to his books. ‘Set fire to the house. But don’t rot.’
If by rot, she meant conform, she was right to read that as his aim. He had tried, really tried, as he approached what the insurance advertisements were pleased to call the evening of his life, to be all that a model rentier should be; though no one, least of all Ann, thanked him for the effort. Each morning as he got out of bed, each evening as he went back to it usually alone, he had reminded himself that he never was and never had been indispensable. He had schooled himself to admit that in those last wretched months of Control’s career, when disasters followed one another with heady speed, he had been guilty of seeing things out of proportion. And if the old professional Adam rebelled in him now and then and said: You know the place went bad, you know Jim Prideaux was betrayed – and what more eloquent testimony is there than a bullet, two bullets in the back? – Well, he had replied, suppose he did? And suppose he was right? ‘It is sheer vanity to believe that one, fat, middle-aged spy is the only person capable of holding the world together,’ he would tell himself. And other times: ‘I never heard of anyone yet who left the Circus without some unfinished business.’
Only Ann, though she could not read his workings, refused to accept his findings. She was quite passionate, in fact, as only women can be on matters of business, really driving him to go back, take up where he had left off, never to veer aside in favour of the easy arguments. Not of course that she knew anything, but what woman was ever stopped by a want of information? She felt. And despised him for not acting in accordance with her feelings.
And now, at the very moment when he was near enough beginning to believe his own dogma, a feat made no easier by Ann’s infatuation for an out-of-work actor, what happens but that the assembled ghosts of his past – Lacon, Control, Karla, Alleline, Esterhase, Bland, and finally Bill Haydon himself – barge into his cell and cheerfully inform him, as they drag him back to this same garden, that everything which he had been calling vanity is truth?
‘Haydon,’ he repeated to himself, no longer able to stem the tides of memory. Even the name was like a jolt. ‘I’m told that you and Bill shared everything once upon a time,’ said Martindale. He stared at his chubby hands, watching them shake. Too old? Impotent? Afraid of the chase? Or afraid of what he might unearth at the end of it? ‘There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing,’ Ann liked to say – it was a favourite apologia, indeed, for many of her misdemeanours – ‘there is only one reason for doing something. And that’s because you want to.’ Or have to? Ann would furiously deny it: coercion, she would say, is just another word for doing what you want; or for not doing what you are afraid of.