'It is still Enderby in charge, is it, Oliver?' Smiley asked, of Lacon's back.
'Yes, yes, it is still Saul Enderby, your old adversary, and he is doing marvels,' Lacon retorted impatiently. Pulling at the curtain, he unseated it from its Tunners. 'Not your style, I grant you - why should he be? He's an Atlantic man.' He was trying to force the casement. 'Not an easy thing to be under a government like this one, I can tell you.' He gave the handle another savage shove. A freezing draught raced round Smiley's knees. 'Takes a lot of footwork. Mostyn, where's tea? We seem to have been waiting for ever.'
All our lives, thought Smiley.
Over the sound of a lorry grinding up the hill, he heard Strickland again, interminably talking to Saul Enderby. 'I think the point with the press is not to play him down too far, Chief. Dullness is all, in a case like this. Even the private-life angle is a dangerous one, here. What we want is absolute lack of contemporary relevance of any sort. Oh true, true, indeed, Chief, right -' On he droned, sycophantic but alert.
'Oliver-' Smiley began, losing patience. 'Oliver, do you mind, just-'
But Lacon was talking, not listening : 'How's Ann?' he asked vaguely, at the window, stretching his forearms on the sill. 'With you and so forth, I trust? Not roaming, is she? God, I hate autumn.'
'Fine, thank you. How's-' He struggled without success to remember the name of Lacon's wife.
'Abandoned me, dammit. Ran off with her pesky riding instructor, blast her. Left me with the children. The girls are farmed out to boarding-schools, thank God.' Leaning over his hands, Lacon was staring up at the lightening sky. 'Is that Orion up there, stuck like a golf ball between the chimney pots.' he asked.
Which is another death, thought Smiley sadly, his mind staying briefly with Lacon's broken marriage. He remembered a pretty, unworldly woman and a string of daughters jumping ponies in the garden of their rambling house in Ascot.
'I'm sorry, Oliver,' he said.
'Why should you be? Not your wife. She's mine. It's every man for himself in love.'
'Could you close that window, please! ' Strickland called, dialling again. 'It's bloody arctic down this end.'
Irritably slamming the window. Lacon strode back into the room.
Smiley tried a second time : 'Oliver, what's going on?' he asked. 'Why did you need me?'
'Only one who knew him for a start. Strickland, are you nearly done? He's like one of those airport announcers.' he told Smiley with a stupid grin. 'Never done.'
You could break, Oliver, thought Smiley, noticing the estrangement of Lacon's eyes as he came under the light. You've had too much, he thought in unexpected sympathy. We both have.
From the kitchen the mysterious Mostyn appeared with tea : an earnest, contemporary-looking child with flared trousers and a mane of brown hair. Seeing him set down the tray, Smiley finally placed him in the terms of his own past. Ann had had a lover like him once, an ordinand from Wells Theological College. She gave him a lift down the M4 and later claimed to have saved him from going queer.
'What section are you in, Mostyn?' Smiley asked him quietly.
'Oddbins. sir.' He crouched, level to the table, displaying an Asian suppleness. 'Since your day, actually, sir. It's a sort of operational pool. Mainly probationers waiting for overseas postings.'
'I see.'
'I heard you lecture at the Nursery at Sarratt, sir. On the new entrants' course. "Agent handling in the field." It was the best thing of the whole two years.'
'Thank you.'
But Mostyn's calf eyes stayed on him intently.
'Thank you,' said Smiley again, more puzzled than before.
'Milk, sir, or lemon, sir? The lemon was for him,' Mostyn added in a low aside, as if that were recommendation for the lemon.
Strickland had rung off and was fiddling with the waistband of his trousers, making it looser or tighter.
'Yes, well, we have to temper truth, George! ' Lacon bellowed suddenly, in what seemed to be a declaration of personal faith. 'Sometimes people are innocent but the circumstances can make them appear quite otherwise. There was never a golden age. There's only a golden mean. We have to remember that. Chalk it on our shaving mirrors.'
In yellow, Smiley thought.
Strickland was waddling down the room : 'You. Mostyn. Young Nigel. You, sir!'
Mostyn lifted his grave brown eyes in reply.
'Commit nothing to paper whatever,' Strickland warned him, wiping the back of his hand on his moustache as if one or the other were wet. 'Hear me? That's an order from on high. There was no encounter so you've no call to fill in the usual encounter sheet or any of that stuff. You've nothing to do but keep your mouth shut. Understand? You'll account for your expenses as general petty-cash disbursements. To me, direct. No file reference. Understand?'
'I understand,' said Mostyn.
'And no whispered confidences to those little tarts in Registry, or I'll know. Hear me? Give us some tea.'
Something happened inside George Smiley when he heard this conversation. Out of the formless indirection of these dialogues, out of the horror of the scene upon the Heath, a single shocking truth struck him. He felt a pull in his chest somewhere and he had the sensation of momentary disconnection from the room and the three haunted people he had found in it. Encounter? Encounter between Mostyn and Vladimir? God in Heaven, he thought, squaring the mad circle. The Lord preserve, cosset and protect us. Mostyn was Vladimir's case officer! That old man, a General, once our glory, and they farmed him out to this uncut boy! Then another lurch, more violent still, as his surprise was swept aside in an explosion of internal fury. He felt his lips tremble, he felt his throat seize up in indignation, blocking his words, and when he turned to Lacon his spectacles seemed to mist over from the heat :
'Oliver, I wonder if you'd mind finally telling me what I'm doing here,' he heard himself suggesting for the third time, hardly above a murmur.
Reaching out an arm he removed the vodka bottle from its bucket. Still unbidden, he broke the cap and poured himself a rather large tot.
Even then, Lacon dithered, pondered, hunted with his eyes, delayed. In Lacon's world, direct questions were the height of bad taste but direct answers were worse. For a moment, caught in mid-gesture at the centre of the room, he stood staring at Smiley in disbelief. A car stumbled up the hill, bringing news of the real world outside the window. Lauder Strickland slurped his tea. Mostyn was seating himself gingerly on a piano-stool to which there was no piano. But Lacon with his jerky gestures could only scratch about for words sufficiently elliptical to disguise his meaning.
'George,' he said. A shower of rain crashed against the window, but he ignored it. 'Where's Mostyn?' he asked.
Mostyn, no sooner settled, had flitted from the room to cope with a nervous need. They heard the thunder of the flush, loud as a brass band, and the gurgle of pipes all down the building.
Lacon raised a hand to his neck, tracing the raw patches. Reluctantly, he began : 'Three years ago, George - let us start there - soon after you left the Circus - your successor Saul Enderby - your worthy successor - under pressure from a concerned Cabinet - by concerned I mean newly formed - decided on certain far-reaching changes of intelligence practice. I'm giving you the background, George,' he explained, interrupting himself. 'I'm doing this because you're who you are, because of old times, and because-' he jabbed a finger at the window - 'because of out there.'