Our Game by John le Carré Read Free Book Online

I love it. Its fictions and its facts. I love everybody, all the time. Best of all I love whoever I was speaking to last."
    "And the corollary to that?"
    "And the corollary to that is that you've got to be jolly careful what you ask of me. Because I'll do it. You're such an eloquent swine. Such a brick. Got to be sparing, follow me? Ration yourself. Don't take all of me all the time."
    Then he turns and lifts his face to me, and I see the alcoholic tears running down it like rainwater, though they don't seem to affect his voice, which as always is self-consciously mellow: "I mean it's all right for you, selling your soul. You haven't got one. But what about mine?"
    I ignore his appeal. "The Russians are recruiting left, right, and centre," I say in the voice of pure reason that he hates the most. "They're totally unscrupulous and very successful. If the Cold War ever turns hot, they'll have us over a barrel unless we can beat them at their own game."
    And my tactic works, for the next day, contrary to everybody's expectation except mine, Larry makes the fallback rendezvous with his contact and, in his role of Secret Protector of the Righteous once more, goes through his paces like an angel. Because in the end—such was my younger man's conviction in those days—in the end, properly led, the parson's son always comes to heel, his purblind innocence notwithstanding.
    My passport lay in the top right drawer of my desk. A blue-and-gold true British ninety-four-page foreigner-frightener of the old school, in the name of Timothy D'Abell Cranmer, accompanied by no children, profession not given, expires seven years hence, let's hope before its bearer.
    Bring your passport, Merriman had said.
    Why? Where does he want me to go? Or is he saying, in the spirit of old comradeship: You've got till three tomorrow afternoon to run for it?
    My ears were singing. I heard screaming, then sobbing, then the groaning of the wind. A storm was getting up. God's anger. Yesterday a crazy autumn snowfall and tonight a veritable sea storm, slapping the shutters and whistling in the eaves and making the house crack. I stood at the study window, watching the raindrops slash across the glass. I peered into the blackness and saw Larry's pale face grinning at me, and Larry's pretty white hand tap-tapping on the windowpane.
    It is New Year's Eve, but Emma has her backache and is in no mood to celebrate. She has retired to her royal apartments, where she is stretched out on her bed board. Our sleeping arrangements would be a puzzle to anyone looking for the conventional lovers' bower. There is her side of the house and there is my side, which is how we agreed that it should be from the day she came to me: each would have his sovereignty, his territory, his right to aloneness. She demanded this and I granted it, never quite believing she would hold me to my promise. But she does. Even when I take her tea or broth or whatever I decide will cheer her up, I knock and wait until I hear her telling me I may approach. And tonight, because it is New Year's Eve, our first, I am allowed to lie on the floor beside her, holding her hand while we talk to the ceiling and her stereo plays lute music and the rest of England makes merry.
    "He really is the end," she complains—with humour of a sort, it is true, but not enough to conceal her disappointment. "I mean even Larry knows when it's Christmas. He could at least have rung."
    So I explain to her, not for the first time, that Christmas is an abomination to him; how every Christmas since I have known him he has threatened to convert to Islam; and how every Christmas he undertakes some crazy grudge-trip in order to escape the awfulness of English sub-Christian revelry. I paint a facetious picture of him trekking across inhospitable desert with a bunch of Bedouin Arabs. But I have the feeling she is barely listening.
    "After all, there's nowhere in the world you can't ring from these days," she says severely.
    For the