'Wouldn't dream of it, old boy.'
'And if he does get in touch in the next few days,' Smiley went on - in that remote contingency, his tone suggested - 'you could even warn me, actually. Then I can back you up. Don't ring me, come to think of it, ring this number.'
Suddenly Jerry Westerby was in a hurry; that story about the West Brom striker couldn't wait. But as he accepted Smiley's card he did ask with a queer, embarrassed glance away from him: 'Nothing untoward going on is there, old boy? No dirty work at the crossroads?' The grin was quite terrible. 'Tribe hasn't gone on the rampage or anything?'
Smiley laughed and lightly laid a hand on Jerry's enormous, slightly hunched shoulder.
'Any time,' said Westerby.
'I'll remember.'
'I thought it was you, you see: you who telephoned the old man.'
'It wasn't.'
'Maybe it was Alleline.'
'I expect so.'
'Any time,' said Westerby again. 'Sorry, you know. Love to Ann.' He hesitated.
'Come on, Jerry, out with it,' said Smiley.
'Toby had some story about her. I told him to stuff it up his shirt front. Nothing to it, is there?'
'Thanks, Jerry. So long. How.'
'I knew there wasn't,' said Jerry, very pleased, and lifting his finger to denote the feather, padded off into his own reserves.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Waiting that night, alone in bed at the Islay but not yet able to sleep, Smiley took up once more the file which Lacon had given him in Mendel's house. It dated from the late Fifties, when like other Whitehall departments the Circus was being pressed by the competition to take a hard look at the loyalty of its staff. Most of the entries were routine: telephone intercepts, surveillance reports, endless interviews with dons, friends and nominated referees. But one document held Smiley like a magnet; he could not get enough of it. It was a letter, entered baldly on the index as 'Haydon to Fanshawe, February 3rd, 1937'. More precisely it was a handwritten letter, from the undergraduate Bill Haydon to his tutor Fanshawe, a Circus talent-spotter, introducing the young Jim Prideaux as a suitable candidate for recruitment to British intelligence. It was prefaced by a wry explication de texte. The Optimates were 'an upper-class Christ Church club, mainly old Etonian,' wrote the unknown author. Fanshawe (P. R. de T. Fanshawe, Lgion d'Honneur, OBE, Personal File so and so) was its founder, Haydon (countless cross-references) was in that year its leading light. The political complexion of the Optimates, to whom Haydon's father had also in his day belonged, was unashamedly conservative. Fanshawe, long dead, was a passionate Empire man and 'the Optimates were his private selection tank for The Great Game', ran the preface. Curiously enough, Smiley dimly remembered Fanshawe from his own day: a thin eager man with rimless spectacles, a Neville Chamberlain umbrella and an unnatural flush to his cheeks as if he were still teething. Steed-Asprey called him the fairy godfather.
'My dear Fan, I suggest you stir yourself to make a few enquiries about the young gentleman whose name is appended on the attached fragment of human skin.' [Inquisitors' superfluous note: Prideaux.] 'You probably know Jim - if you know him at all - as an athleticus of some accomplishment. What you do not know but ought to is that he is no mean linguist nor yet a total idiot either...'
[Here followed a biographical summary of surprising accuracy:... Lyce Lakanal in Paris, put down for Eton never went there, Jesuit day-school Prague, two semesters Strasbourg, parents in European banking, small aristo, live apart... ]
'Hence our Jim's wide familiarity with parts foreign, and his rather parentless look, which I find irresistible. By the way: though he is made up of all different bits of Europe, make no mistake: the completed version is devoutly our own. At present, he is a bit of a striver and a puzzler, for he has just noticed that there is a World Beyond the Touchline and that world is me.
'But you must first hear how I met him.
'As you know, it is my habit (and your command) now and then to put on Arab costume and go down to the bazaars, there to sit among the great unwashed and give ear to the word of their prophets, that I may in due course better confound them. The juju man en vogue that evening came from the bosom of Mother Russia herself: one Academician Khlebnikov presently attached to the Soviet Embassy in London, a jolly, rather infectious little fellow, who managed some quite witty things among the usual nonsense. The bazaar in question was a debating club called the Populars, our rival, dear Fan, and well known to you from other forays I have occasionally made. After the sermon a wildly proletarian coffee was served, to the accompaniment of a dreadfully democratic bun, and I noticed this large fellow sitting alone at the back of the room, apparently too shy to mingle. His face was slightly familiar from the cricket field; it turns out we both played in some silly scratch team without exchanging a word. I don't quite know how to describe him. He has it, Fan. I am serious now.'
Here the handwriting, till now ill-at-ease, spread out as the writer got into his stride:
'He has that heavy quiet that commands. Hard-headed, quite literally. One of those shrewd quiet ones that lead the team without anyone noticing. Fan, you know how hard it is for me to act. You have to remind me all the time, intellectually remind me, that unless I sample life's dangers I shall never know its mysteries. But Jim acts from instinct... he is functional... He's my other half, between us we'd make one marvellous man, except that neither of us can sing. And Fan, you know that feeling when you just have to go out and find someone new or the world will die on you?'
The writing steadied again.
' "Yavas Lagloo," says I, which I understand is Russian for meet me in the woodshed or something similar, and he says "Oh hullo," which I think he would have said to the Archangel Gabriel if he'd happened to be passing.
' "What is your dilemma?" says I.
'"I haven't got one," says he, after about an hour's thought.
' "Then what are you doing here? If you haven't a dilemma how did you get in?"
'So he gives a big placid grin and we saunter over to the great Khlebnikov, shake his tiny paw for a while then toddle back to my rooms. Where we drink. And drink. And Fan, he drank everything in sight. Or perhaps I did, I forget. And come the dawn, do you know what we did? I will tell you, Fan. We walked solemnly down to the Parks, I sit on a bench with a stopwatch, big Jim gets into his running kit and lopes twenty circuits. Twenty. I was quite exhausted.
'We can come to you any time, he asks nothing better than to be in my company or that of my wicked, divine friends. In short, he has appointed me his Mephistopheles and I am vastly tickled by the compliment. By the by, he is virgin, about eight foot tall and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge. Do not be alarmed.'
The file died again. Sitting up, Smiley turned the yellowed pages impatiently, looking for stronger meat. The tutors of both men aver (twenty years later) that it is inconceivable that the relationship between the two was 'more than purely friendly'... Haydon's evidence was never called... Jim's tutor speaks of him as 'intellectually omnivorous after long starvation' - dismisses any suggestion that he was 'pink'. The confrontation which takes place at Sarratt begins with long apologies, particularly in view of Jim's superb war record.
Jim's answers breathe a pleasing straightforwardness after the extravagance of Haydon's letter. One representative of the competition present, but his voice is seldom heard. No, Jim never again met Khlebnikov or anyone representing himself as his emissary... No, he never spoke to him but on that one occasion. No, he had no other contact with Communists or Russians at that time, he could not remember the name of a single member of the Populars...