A Perfect Spy by John le Carré Read Free Book Online Page A

to adjust the noose around his neck?
    With the last chime of all, the strains of the voluntary die also. The congregation holds its breath and starts counting to a hundred while it seeks out its favourite actors. The two Watermaster women have arrived early. They sit shoulder to shoulder in the pew for notables directly beneath the pulpit. On almost any other Sunday, Makepeace would have been roosting there between them, all six foot six of him, his long head cocked to one side while he listened to the voluntary with his moist little rosebud ears. But not today because today is extra, today Makepeace is in the wings conferring with our Minister and certain worried trusties from the Appeal Committee.
    Makepeace’s wife, known as Lady Nell, is not yet fifty but already she is hunched and shrivelled like a witch, with a habit of flicking her greying head without warning as if she were shaking off flies. And next to her—a tiny, earnest statue beside Nell’s pecking and stupidity—perches Dorothy, rightly called Dot, an immaculate speck of a lady, young enough to be Nell’s daughter instead of Makepeace’s sister—and she is praying, praying to her Maker, she is pushing her tiny scrumpled fists into her eyes while she pledges her life and death to Him if only He will hear her and make it right. Baptists do not kneel before God, Tom. They squat. But my Dorothy would have stretched herself flat on the Watermaster tiles and kissed the Pope’s big toe that day if God would have let her off the hook.
    Â 
    I have one photograph of her and there have been times—though no longer, I swear it, she is dead for me—when I would have given my soul for just one more. I found it in an old scuffed Bible when I was Tom’s age, in a suburban mansion we were hastily vacating. “To Dorothy with all my special love, Makepeace,” runs the inscription on the inside page. One in all the world. One spotted sepia-brown photograph is all, taken like a pause in flight as she steps down from the taxi, licence number not in frame, clutching a homemade posy of small flowers that could be wild, and her big eyes have too much behind them for our comfort. Is she on her way to a wedding? To her own? Is she calling on a sick relative—on Nell? Where is she? Where is she escaping to this time? She has the flowers to her chin and her elbows pressed together. Her forearms form a vertical line from waist to neck. Long sleeves nipped at the wrist. Muslin gloves, therefore no rings visible, though I have a suspicion of a bulge in the third joint of the third finger of the left hand. A cloche bonnet covers her hair and throws a shadow like a mask across the scaring eyes. Shoulders on a slant, as if she is on the point of losing her balance, and one tiny foot tipped sideways to prevent her. Her pale stockings have the zigzag sheen of silk; her shoes are of patent leather, pointed, buttoned. And somehow I know they pinch her, that they were bought against the clock like the rest of her outfit, in a shop where she is not known and does not wish to be. Her lower face pale as a plant grown in the dark—think of The Glades, the house she was brought up in! An only child, as I was, you can see it at a glance—never mind she has a brother twenty-five years ahead of her.
    Shall I tell you what I found once, in the summerhouse in the Watermasters’ great dark orchard, where I myself, a child like her, was wandering? The colouring book she had won at Bible class, The Life of Our Saviour in Pictures. And do you know what my darling Dot had done with it? Scored out every saintly face with savage crayoning. I was shocked at first, until I understood. Those faces were the dreaded ones from the real world she had no part of. They enjoyed all the companionship and kindly smiles she never had. So she coloured them out. Not in rage. Not in hate. Not even in envy. But because their ease of living was beyond her grasp. Look