‘Bill’s?’
‘God knows. I’m sure Bill doesn’t.’
Next morning, without even wishing to, Smiley established that Bill had been back in London two days, not one. Following the episode Bill showed an uncharacteristic deference towards Smiley and Smiley reciprocated with acts of courtesy which normally belong to a newer friendship. In due course Smiley noticed that the secret was out, and he was still mystified by the speed with which that had happened. He supposed Bill had boasted to someone, perhaps Bland. If the word was correct, Ann had broken three of her own rules. Bill was Circus and he was Set – her word for family and ramifications. On either count he would be out of bounds. Thirdly, she had received him at Bywater Street, an agreed violation of territorial decencies.
Withdrawing once more into his own lonely life, Smiley waited for Ann to say something. He moved into the spare room and arranged for himself plenty of evening engagements in order that he would not be too aware of her comings and goings. Gradually it dawned on him that she was deeply unhappy. She lost weight, she lost her sense of play, and if he didn’t know her better he would have sworn she was having a bad bout of the guilts, even of self-disgust. When he was gentle with her she fended him off; she showed no interest in Christmas shopping and developed a wasting cough which he knew was her signal of distress. If it had not been for Operation Testify, they would have left for Cornwall earlier. As it was, they had to postpone the trip till January, by which time Control was dead, Smiley was unemployed, the scale had tipped: and Ann to his mortification was covering the Haydon card with as many others as she could pull from the pack.
So what happened? Did she break off the affair? Did Haydon? Why did she never speak of it? Did it matter anyway, one among so many? He gave up. Like the Cheshire Cat, the face of Bill Haydon seemed to recede as soon as he advanced upon it, leaving only the smile behind. But he knew that somehow Bill had hurt her deeply, which was the sin of sins.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Returning with a sigh to the unlovable card-table, Smiley resumed his reading of Merlin’s progress since his own enforced retirement from the Circus. The new regime of Percy Alleline, he at once noticed, had immediately produced several favourable changes in Merlin’s lifestyle. It was like a maturing, a settling down. The night dashes to European capitals ceased, the flow of intelligence became more regular and less nervy. There were headaches, certainly. Merlin’s demands for money – requirements, never threats – continued, and with the steady decline in the value of the pound these large payments in foreign currency caused the Treasury much agony. There was even a suggestion at one point, never pursued, that ‘since we are the country of Merlin’s choice, he should be ready to shoulder his portion of our financial vicissitudes’. Haydon and Bland exploded, apparently: ‘I have not the face,’ wrote Alleline with rare frankness to the Minister, ‘to mention this subject to my staff again.’
There was also a row about a new camera, which at great expense was broken into tubular components by Nuts and Bolts section and fitted into a standard lamp of Soviet manufacture. The lamp, after screams of pain, this time from the Foreign Office, was spirited to Moscow by diplomatic bag. The problem was then the drop. The residency could not be informed of Merlin’s identity, nor did it know the contents of the lamp. The lamp was unwieldy, and would not fit the boot of the resident’s car. After several shots, an untidy handover was achieved but the camera never worked and there was bad blood between the Circus and its Moscow residency as a result. A less ambitious model was taken by Esterhase to Helsinki where it was handed – thus Alleline’s memo to the Minister – to ‘a trusted intermediary whose frontier crossing would go unchallenged’.
Suddenly, Smiley sat up with a jolt.
‘We spoke,’ wrote Alleline to the Minister, in a minute dated February 27th this year. ‘You agreed to submit a supplementary estimate to the Treasury for a London house to be carried on the Witchcraft budget.’