Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré

Then one evening Smiley peered round Guillam’s door and suggested a drink. Mary didn’t realise who he was and just said ‘Hullo’ in her stylish classless drawl. As they walked out of the Circus side by side Smiley wished the janitors good night with unusual terseness, and in the pub in Wardour Street he said ‘I’ve been sacked,’ and that was all.

From the pub they went to a wine bar off Charing Cross, a cellar with music playing and no one there. ‘Did they give any reason?’ Guillam enquired. ‘Or is it just because you’ve lost your figure?’

It was the word ‘reason’ that Smiley fixed on. He was by then politely but thoroughly drunk, but reason, as they walked unsteadily along the Thames embankment, reason got through to him:

‘Reason as logic, or reason as motive?’ he demanded, sounding less like himself than Bill Haydon, whose pre-war, Oxford Union style of polemic seemed in those days to be in everybody’s ears. ‘Or reason as a way of life?’ They sat on a bench. ‘They don’t have to give me reasons. I can write my own damn reasons. And that is not the same,’ he insisted as Guillam guided him carefully into a cab, gave the driver the money and the address, ‘that is not the same as the half-baked tolerance that comes from no longer caring.’

‘Amen,’ said Guillam, fully realising as he watched the cab pull into the distance that by the rules of the Circus their friendship, such as it was, had that minute ended. Next day Guillam learned that more heads had rolled and that Percy Alleline was to stand in as nightwatchman with the title of acting chief and that Bill Haydon, to everyone’s astonishment, but most likely out of persisting anger with Control, would serve under him; or as the wise ones said, over him.

By Christmas, Control was dead: ‘They’ll get you next,’ said Mary, who saw these events as a second storming of the Winter Palace, and she wept when Guillam departed for the siberias of Brixton, ironically to fill Jim Prideaux’s slot.

Climbing the four steps to the Circus that wet Monday afternoon, his mind bright with the prospect of felony, Guillam passed these events in review and decided that today was the beginning of the road back.

He had spent the previous night at his spacious flat in Eaton Place in the company of Camilla, a music student with a long body and a sad, beautiful face. Though she was not more than twenty, her black hair was streaked with grey, as if from a shock she never talked about. As another effect, perhaps, of the same undescribed trauma, she ate no meat, wore no leather and drank nothing alcoholic; only in love, it seemed to Guillam, she was free of these mysterious restraints.

He had spent the morning alone in his extremely dingy room in Brixton photographing Circus documents, having first drawn a subminiature camera from his own operational stores, a thing he did quite often to keep his hand in. The storeman had asked ‘daylight or electric?’ and they had a friendly discussion about film grain. He told his secretary he didn’t want to be disturbed, closed his door and set to work according to Smiley’s precise instructions. The windows were high in the wall. Even sitting, he could see only the sky and the tip of the new school up the road.

He began with works of reference from his personal safe. Smiley had given him priorities. First the staff directory, on issue to senior officers only, which supplied the home addresses, telephone numbers, names, and worknames of all home-based Circus personnel. Second, the handbook on staff duties, including the fold-in diagram of the Circus’s reorganisation under Alleline. At its centre lay Bill Haydon’s London Station like a giant spider in its own web. ‘After the Prideaux fiasco,’ Bill had reputedly fumed, ‘we’ll have no more damned private armies, no more left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.’ Alleline, Guillam noticed, was billed twice: once as Chief, once as ‘Director Special Sources’. According to rumour it was those sources which kept the Circus in business. Nothing else, in Guillam’s view, could account for the Circus’s inertia at working level and the esteem it enjoyed in Whitehall. To these documents, at Smiley’s insistence, he added the scalphunters’ revised charter, in the form of an Alleline letter beginning ‘Dear Guillam’, and setting out in detail the diminution of his powers. In several cases, the winner was Toby Esterhase, head of Acton lamplighters, the one outstation which had actually grown fatter under lateralism.