The Mission Song by John le Carré Read Free Book Online

to look at me, I was there for her and I knew she was there for me. And everything that happened afterwards, with me waiting beside the neon-lit gateposts for her to finish duty, and her coming out to join me with her eyes down, and the two of us not embracing in our Mission children’s shyness, but walking hand in hand like earnest students up the hill to her hostel, down a cramped passage that smelled of Asian food to a padlocked door to which she had the key, it all flowed from the looks we had exchanged in the presence of our dying Rwandan patient and from the responsibility we felt for each other while a shared human life was slipping out from under us.
    Which was why, between passionate bouts of lovemaking, we were able to conduct discussions of a sort unavailable to me since the death of Brother Michael, no natural confidant having until now presented himself in my life with the exception of Mr Anderson, and certainly not in the form of a beautiful, laughing, desiring African woman whose sole calling is to the world’s sufferers, and who asks nothing of you, in any language, that you’re not prepared to give. To provide factual accounts of ourselves we spoke English. For our lovemaking French. And for our dreams of Africa, how could we not return to the Congolese-flavoured Swahili of our childhoods with its playful mix of joy and innuendo? In the space of twenty sleepless hours Hannah had become the sister, lover and good friend who had consistently failed to materialise throughout my peripatetic childhood.
    Did we do guilt—we two good Christian children, brought up to godliness and now five-star adulterers? We did not. We did my marriage, and I declared it dead, which I knew for a certainty it was. We did Hannah’s small son Noah, left behind with her aunt in Uganda, and we jointly longed for him. We did solemn promises, and politics, and swapped memories, and drank cranberry juice with sparkling water, and ate take-in pizza, and made love right up to the moment when she reluctantly puts on her uniform and, resisting my entreaties for one last embrace, skips down the hill to the hospital for an anaesthetics class she’s attending before beginning night shift with her dying patients while I go hunting for a taxi because, due to the bombings, the Underground is part-operational at best, and the bus will take too long, and Heavens above, look at the time. Her parting words, spoken in Swahili, were nonetheless ringing in my ears. Holding my face between her hands, she was gently shaking her head in joyous marvel.
    ‘Salvo,’ she said. ‘When your mother and father made you, they must have loved each other very much.’

3
    ‘All right if I open a window?’ I called out to Fred my white driver.
    Snug in the rear cushions of the Mondeo as it wove expertly through the dense Friday-evening traffic, I was enjoying feelings of liberation bordering on euphoria.
    ‘Please yourself, mate,’ he responded lustily, but my needle-sharp ear immediately spotted beneath the colloquialisms the trace of an English public school accent. Fred was my age and drove with aplomb. I liked him already. Lowering the window, I let the warm night air wash over me.
    ‘Any idea where we’re heading, Fred?’
    ‘Bottom end of South Audley Street.’ And assuming my concern to be directed at the speed of his driving, which it wasn’t: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you there in one piece.’
    I wasn’t worrying but I was taken aback. My encounters with Mr Anderson had until now occurred at his Ministry’s headquarters in Whitehall in a richly carpeted dungeon set at the end of a labyrinth of green-painted brick corridors guarded by sallow janitors with walkie-talkies. On its walls hung tinted photographs of Mr Anderson’s wife, daughters and spaniels, interspersed with gold-framed testimonials awarded to his other love, the Sevenoaks Choral Society. And it was in this dungeon, after I had been summoned by confidential letter to a