The lobby looked dingier than ever. Three old lifts, a wooden barrier, a poster for Mazawattee tea, Bryant’s glass-fronted sentry box with a Scenes of England calendar and a line of mossy telephones.
‘Mr Strickland is expecting you, sir,’ said Bryant as he emerged, and in slow motion stamped a pink chit with the time of day: fourteen fifty-five, P. Bryant, Janitor. The grille of the centre lift rattled like a bunch of dry sticks.
‘Time you oiled this thing, isn’t it?’ Guillam called as he waited for the mechanism to mesh.
‘We keep asking,’ said Bryant, embarking on a favourite lament. ‘They never do a thing about it. You can ask till you’re blue in the face. How’s the family, sir?’
‘Fine,’ said Guillam, who had none.
‘That’s right,’ said Bryant. Looking down Guillam saw his creamy head vanish between his feet. Mary called him strawberry and vanilla, he remembered: red face, white hair and mushy.
In the lift he examined his pass. ‘Permit to enter LS’ ran the headline. ‘Purpose of visit: Banking Section. This document to be handed back on leaving’. And a space marked ‘host’s signature’, blank.
‘Well met, Peter. Greetings. You’re a trifle late I think, but never mind.’
Lauder was waiting at the barrier, all five foot nothing of him, white-collared and secretly on tiptoe to be visited. In Control’s day this floor had been a thoroughfare of busy people. Today a barrier closed the entrance and a rat-faced janitor scrutinised his pass.
‘Good God, how long have you had that monster?’ Guillam asked, slowing down before a shiny new coffee-machine. A couple of girls, filling beakers, glanced round and said, ‘Hullo, Lauder,’ looking at Guillam. The tall one reminded him of Camilla: the same slow-burning eyes, censuring male insufficiency.
‘Ah but you’ve no notion how many man-hours it saves,’ Lauder cried at once. ‘Fantastic. Quite fantastic,’ and all but knocked over Bill Haydon in his enthusiasm.
He was emerging from his room, an hexagonal pepper pot overlooking New Compton Street and the Charing Cross Road. He was moving in the same direction as they were but at about half a mile an hour, which for Bill indoors was full throttle. Outdoors was a different matter; Guillam had seen that too, on training games at Sarratt, and once on a night drop in Greece. Outdoors he was swift and eager; his keen face, in this clammy corridor shadowed and withdrawn, seemed in the free air to be fashioned by the outlandish places where he had served. There was no end to these: no operational theatre, in Guillam’s admiring eyes, that did not bear the Haydon imprint somewhere. Over and again in his own career he had made the same eerie encounter with Bill’s exotic progress. A year or two back, still working on marine intelligence and having as one of his targets the assembly of a team of coast watchers for the Chinese ports of Wenchow and Amoy, Guillam discovered to his amazement that there were actually Chinese stay-behind agents living in those very towns, recruited by Bill Haydon in the course of some forgotten wartime exploit, rigged out with cached radios and equipment, with whom contact might be made. Another time, raking through war records of Circus strongarm men, more out of nostalgia for the period than present professional optimism, Guillam stumbled twice on Haydon’s workname in as many minutes: in forty-one he was running French fishing smacks out of the Helford Estuary; in the same year, with Jim Prideaux as his stringer, he was laying down courier lines across southern Europe from the Balkans to Madrid. To Guillam, Haydon was of that unrepeatable, fading Circus generation, to which his parents and George Smiley also belonged – exclusive and in Haydon’s case blueblooded – which had lived a dozen leisured lives to his own hasty one, and still, thirty years later, gave the Circus its dying flavour of adventure.
Seeing them both, Haydon stood rock still. It was a month since Guillam had spoken to him; he had probably been away on unexplained business. Now, against the light of his own open doorway, he looked strangely black and tall. He was carrying something, Guillam could not make out what it was, a magazine, a file, or a report; his room, split by his own shadow, was an undergraduate mayhem, monkish and chaotic. Reports, flimsies and dossiers lay heaped everywhere; on the wall a baize noticeboard jammed with postcards and press cuttings; beside it, askew and unframed, one of Bill’s old paintings, a rounded abstract in the hard flat colours of the desert.