Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré

‘What do you want?’

On the table, soaked from the earlier rainfall, was a cruet set left over from lunchtime with a bunch of paper-wrapped cellulose toothpicks in the centre compartment. Taking one, Bland spat the paper on to the grass and began working his back teeth with the fat end.

‘Well, how about a five-thousand-quid backhander out of the reptile fund?’

‘And a house and a car?’ said Smiley, making a joke of it.

‘And the kid to Eton,’ Bland added, and winked across the concrete paving to the boy while he went on working with the toothpick. ‘I’ve paid, see, George. You know that. I don’t know what I’ve bought with it but I’ve paid a hell of a lot. I want some back. Ten years solitary for the fifth floor, that’s big money at any age. Even yours. There must have been a reason why I fell for all that spiel but I can’t quite remember what it was. Must be your magnetic personality.’

Smiley’s glass was still going so Bland fetched himself another from the bar, and something for the boy as well.

‘You’re an educated sort of swine,’ he announced easily as he sat down again. ‘An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function: who dreamed that one up?’

‘Scott Fitzgerald,’ Smiley replied, thinking for a moment that Bland was proposing to say something about Bill Haydon.

‘Well, Fitzgerald knew a thing or two,’ Bland affirmed. As he drank, his slightly bulging eyes slid sideways towards the fence, as if in search of someone. ‘And I’m definitely functioning, George. As a good socialist I’m going for the money. As a good capitalist, I’m sticking with the revolution, because if you can’t beat it spy on it. Don’t look like that, George. It’s the name of the game these days: you scratch my conscience, I’ll drive your Jag, right?’ He was already lifting an arm as he said this. ‘With you in a minute!’ he called across the lawn. ‘Set one up for me!’

Two girls were hovering the other side of the wire fence.

‘Is that Bill’s joke?’ Smiley asked, suddenly quite angry.

‘Is what?’

‘Is that one of Bill’s jokes about materialist England, the pigs-in-clover society?’

‘Could be,’ said Bland and finished his drink. ‘Don’t you like it?’

‘Not too much, no. I never knew Bill before as a radical reformer. What’s come over him all of a sudden?’

‘That’s not radical,’ Bland retorted, resenting any devaluation of his socialism, or of Haydon. ‘That’s just looking out the bloody window. That’s just England now, man. Nobody wants that, do they?’

‘So how do you propose,’ Smiley demanded, hearing himself at his pompous worst, ‘to destroy the acquisitive and competitive instincts in Western society, without also destroying…’

Bland had finished his drink; and the meeting too. ‘Why should you be bothered? You’ve got Bill’s job. What more do you want? Long as it lasts.’

And Bill’s got my wife, Smiley thought, as Bland rose to go; and, damn him, he’s told you.

The boy had invented a game. He had laid the table on its side and was rolling an empty bottle on to the gravel. Each time he started the bottle higher up the table top. Smiley left before it smashed.

Unlike Esterhase, Bland had not even bothered to lie. Lacon’s files made no bones of his involvement with the Witchcraft operation:

‘Source Merlin,’ wrote Alleline, in a minute dated soon after Control’s departure, ‘is in every sense a committee operation… I cannot honestly say which of my three assistants deserves most praise. The energy of Bland has been an inspiration to us all…’ He was replying to the Minister’s suggestion that those responsible for Witchcraft should be honoured in the New Year’s list. ‘While Haydon’s operational ingenuity is at times little short of Merlin’s own,’ he added. The medals went to all three; Alleline’s appointment as Chief was confirmed, and with it his beloved knighthood.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Which left me Bill, thought Smiley.

In the course of most London nights, there is one respite from alarm. Ten, twenty minutes, thirty, even an hour, and not a drunk groans or a child cries or a car’s tyres whine into the collision. In Sussex Gardens it happens around three. That night it came early, at one, as Smiley stood once more at his dormer window peering down like a prisoner at Mrs Pope Graham’s sand patch, where a Bedford van had recently parked. Its roof was daubed with slogans: Sydney ninety days, Athens non stop, Mary Lou here we come. A light glowed inside and he presumed some children were sleeping there in unmarried bliss. Kids, he was supposed to call them. Curtains covered the windows.

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