Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré Read Free Book Online Page A

Ann, I didn’t ask.”
    “Fine. Just fine.”
    It was pitch dark inside the car. They had turned off the road and were passing over gravel. Black walls of foliage rose to either side, lights appeared, then a high porch, and the steepled outline of a rambling house lifted above the treetops. The rain had stopped, but as Smiley stepped into the fresh air he heard all round him the restless ticking of wet leaves.
    Yes, he thought, it was raining when I came here before, when the name Jim Ellis was headline news.
     
    They had washed and, in the lofty cloakroom, inspected Lacon’s climbing kit mawkishly dumped on the Sheraton chest of drawers. Now they sat in a half-circle facing one empty chair. It was the ugliest house for miles around and Lacon had picked it up for a song. “A Berkshire Camelot,” he had once called it, explaining it away to Smiley, “built by a teetotal millionaire.” The drawing-room was a great hall with stained-glass windows twenty feet high and a pine gallery over the entrance. Smiley counted off the familiar things: an upright piano littered with musical scores, old portraits of clerics in gowns, a wad of printed invitations. He looked for the Cambridge University oar and found it slung over the fireplace. The same fire was burning, too mean for the enormous grate. An air of need prevailing over wealth.
    “Are you enjoying retirement, George?” Lacon asked, as if blurting into the ear trumpet of a deaf aunt. “You don’t miss the warmth of human contact? I rather would, I think. One’s work, one’s old buddies.”
    He was a string bean of a man, graceless and boyish: church and spy establishment, said Haydon, the Circus wit. His father was a dignitary of the Scottish church and his mother something noble. Occasionally the smarter Sundays wrote about him, calling him “new-style” because he was young. The skin of his face was clawed from hasty shaving.
    “Oh, I think I manage very well, really, thank you,” said Smiley politely. And to draw it out: “Yes. Yes, I’m sure I do. And you? All goes well with you?”
    “No big changes, no. All very smooth. Charlotte got her scholarship to Roedean, which was nice.”
    “Oh, good.”
    “And your wife, she’s in the pink and so on?”
    His expressions were also boyish.
    “Very bonny, thank you,” said Smiley, trying gallantly to respond in kind.
    They were watching the double doors. From far off they heard the jangle of footsteps on a ceramic floor. Smiley guessed two people, both men. The doors opened and a tall figure appeared half in silhouette. For the fraction of a moment, Smiley glimpsed a second man behind him, dark, small, and attentive; but only the one man stepped into the room before the doors were closed by unseen hands.
    “Lock us in, please,” Lacon called, and they heard the snap of the key. “You know Smiley, don’t you?”
    “Yes, I think I do,” said the figure as he began the long walk towards them out of the far gloom. “I think he once gave me a job, didn’t you, Mr. Smiley?”
    His voice was as soft as a southerner’s drawl, but there was no mistaking the colonial accent. “Tarr, sir. Ricki Tarr from Penang.”
    A fragment of firelight illuminated one side of the stark smile and made a hollow of one eye. “The lawyer’s boy, remember? Come on, Mr. Smiley, you changed my first nappies.”
    And then, absurdly, they were all four standing, and Guillam and Lacon looked on like godparents while Tarr shook Smiley’s hand once, then again, then once more for the photographs.
    “How are you, Mr. Smiley? It’s real nice to see you, sir.”
    Relinquishing Smiley’s hand at last, he swung away in the direction of his appointed chair, while Smiley thought, Yes, with Ricki Tarr it could have happened. With Tarr, anything could have happened. My God, he thought; two hours ago I was telling myself I would take refuge in the past. He felt thirsty, and supposed it was fear.
     
    Ten? Twelve years ago? It was not his