Work Text:
i.
The builders had started on the third floor and moved up, like an infestation of termites. Two weeks into the renovations Smiley had ordered, they had managed to gut seemingly every non-load-bearing wall at Circus Headquarters. Cursed despite himself with a former fieldsman's adaptability, Guillam could no longer discern the fine grit of plaster dust in his coffee, though he was aware of its continued adulteration as an abstract concern. He had outright abandoned both Brixton and his cheerless flat; he slept and worked in the office Smiley had assigned him, which meant in practice that he did not sleep at all. He had managed to attain that curious blankness that came with prolonged insomnia, without compromising performance – very much – a deliberate balance which he meant to maintain for some time. His workload was ludicrous and would benefit from an even keel. Given the general shambles, decreased awareness of his surroundings was an acceptable tradeoff; perhaps desirable. Then he nearly walked into someone when trying to enter the fifth floor senior staff men's lavatory.
The other man was exiting in a hurry. Guillam looked at him: one of the younger analysts from the East Germany desk, not cleared to wander the fifth floor at all. Cornwall, he thought, or Cornwell. He looked pale, and instead of scurrying he blocked Guillam's way.
"I must show you something," he said. "Sir." The fifth floor had been reduced to a shell of itself, but Cornwall – Cornwell – might have encountered Smiley, or Esterhase still, or... Guillam was the ranking man, it was his hour. They went back into the loo, God help them.
He knew what Cornwell had found. Nevertheless he was unprepared when the man wedged his hand gingerly behind the porcelain reservoir and came up with the microphone that had been affixed, unseen, between it and the tiled wall. One of six missing; Smiley's builder-ferrets had retrieved four. The transmitter had been built into a stairwell. The stairwell had been remodeled in accordance with fire regulations eight years ago, just before Guillam's North African network had been blown sky high from one day to the next. Guillam stared at the small black object, and felt fury and helpless admiration sweep him from head to foot, in successive waves.
"Should I turn this over to Acton, sir?"
David Cornwell, that was it. An Oxford man. Four months ago Guillam had stood in this spot, with Bill Haydon no further away than Cornwell was now, adjusting his tie in the mirror. Delivering a joke in that careless way he had. "So-and-so, gleaming in ignorance like a jellied pig's foot in aspic. Still, the cousins must defend their own. Surely—?" And Guillam had told him, of course. Sometimes they'd traded notes on their tailors.
The gambit's economy; its maddening flair. In Control's day the senior staff men's lavatory had been reserved by fiat for fifth floor residents: the antechamber of the hasty alliance and the sidewise tip. What, then, of the hideous orange soundproofing that sheathed the meeting grounds proper?
"Put that back and stay here," he said. "Don't go anywhere and don't tell anyone else about it. I'll be back shortly."
Smiley, when brought in, merely looked glum. (Cornwell looked quietly thrilled, before being dismissed.) There was a fierceness to him, these days, the focus of obsession turned outward; Guillam himself had walked often enough under the infamous grainy portrait of Karla, printed large and pinned up. But at certain reminders he would sink back into himself, as if slipping under surface ice. Guillam would find out later that the sixth microphone had been discovered that morning, on the roof, where luminaries like Alleline and Bland were wont to take their constitutional.
"A pity Bill didn't tell us very much before he went," Guillam said.
What he meant was: we loved him for stunts like this. Damn him.
Smiley blinked, once, twice, and looked up slowly. "Peter," he said, "Bill is dead."
And that was the first Guillam heard of it.
"Central?" he said, aware that it made no sense.
"No," said Smiley.
He did not elaborate, but a clipped binder appeared on Guillam's desk some hours later. Baldly or subtly, insofar as Guillam could reconstruct, it told enough to ensure that anyone who had been present could infer the rest for himself, while no one who had not been would be encouraged in the attempt. He thought of previously dismissed incidents – motion at the corner of his eye, tree-shadows and empty street corners, are you quite sure you were not followed? – and could not determine, later, when he fell asleep.
If he had thought about it, he might have expected to dream of Bill; or of Richard, again, in avoidance of which event Guillam worked until he could not remember the churn of his own mind as he slept. But it was Reda who came, padding silent into a torrid pink-washed room in Tangier, where the ceiling fan creaked and slatted shades cast bars of light and shadow across the table between them; and Guillam knew both man and room for the memories they were.
Richard was not like that – not yet. It seemed to Guillam that his sleeping self did not have the understanding he possessed upon waking: it was like a startled child, looking up from its toys and asking: but where did…? What happened to…? Why haven't we…? Surely Guillam was ridiculous, his child-mind knew, all he had to do was get on the train and return home, where Richard awaited him. Those were happy dreams, invariably so.
"I'm sorry," he said to Reda, because he had said it to Richard; but Richard could never understand. It seemed to him that he had never said anything of importance to Reda. They had been of the same world, and both shadow and light had lain unacknowledged between them. "It blindsided me, I never saw it coming. I couldn't help you."
"I never asked for your help," Reda said. He leant forward, smiling, and the smile moved Guillam even in memory. He had wide-set eyes, darkly luminous. "You asked for ours – for which you proffered gratitude, and promises of future alliance. A political solution. In private, to me, you admitted the complexity of the issue. But we agreed the risk was worthwhile. You remember this?"
"I do."
"My people have a longer memory than yours. But no matter: the cause belonged to us and remains ours. Others will see it to fruition. For my part," he laid his hand, lightly, against Guillam's arm, "I aided you, for friendship's sake. Honour it as gladly given. Do not forget."
"I won't," Guillam said, "I can't," and woke, slumped in his chair. The first coherent understanding he had was that he had barely thought of Tangier, and of Reda not at all, for years. And the second, settling over him uneasily, an abstract insight with no freeing sentiment behind it: that in the end – with what he knew now – it had never been his fault.
ii.
Guillam had never known Jim Prideaux, though he'd had him pointed out at a Christmas party once, years ago, and had subsequently shaken his hand: a hewn-rock crag of a man, long-limbed and dark-eyed, with an impression about him of banked energy. Otherwise, he'd heard the trainee stories from the Nursery at Sarratt. The scalp-hunters had been Bill Haydon's brainchild, and Prideaux had been his choice of commandant – a flawless marksman, and in a tag team with Haydon, the best field officer of his era. Haydon himself had ascended to Control's inner circle long before Guillam's preferment to the decision-making level, and Guillam had never associated him with the Brixton fief, even after his own exile. Subtlety was the byword these days, and the scalp-hunters had coalesced into a blunt instrument, which Bill assuredly had never been.
He'd taken his full measure of Prideaux on the job, in absentia. Not by the office he'd inherited, which had been spartan; but by his secretary’s silence, and the speculative air of his motley charges. They'd tested him, in turns, and as one or two out of the dozen were usually on furlough, kicking their heels in the common room down the hall, the issue had frequently impinged on the boundary of workplace professionalism. It had dawned on Guillam on several occasions that he was contending with loyalty, never admitted, to the man he had replaced; as well as resentment, for slights that would never now see resolution.
Ricki Tarr – he remembered – had been among the most insolent. After his first assignments under Guillam's aegis he'd hung around, lounging by the door in that ridiculous sheared-lamb overcoat, acting the wide-eyed naif while his gaze swept Guillam from head to toe and back. Wipe that look off your face; put away that knife. Prideaux had evidently considered him incident-prone; Istanbul was not the first time Tarr had gone off the grid. Guillam had not liked him more. He had known, but not considered, what later became evident during their mole-hunt: namely that Smiley had recruited Tarr, and Tarr could have been Smiley's man entirely, had George wished to play that line out himself. Which in the end, for all intents and purposes, he had done.
"Over-reaction," George had chided him, gently, after the blow-up with the Testify file. "Though as a matter of course you manage him well."
Guillam had looked away, shaken. Smiley’s fish hooks made themselves known principally by their effect: it had been on the tip of his tongue to confess – what?
That he had enjoyed making Tarr bleed. That nothing inherent about Brixton had ever caused him to waver; he had always known he could bring the scalp-hunters to heel. That some deep-set part of him had surveyed Ricki Tarr – in particular – with recognition, homing in on the vulnerable need behind the challenge. He somehow knew, too, that Tarr had welcomed the exercise of power. Perhaps he had needed it to ground him. It had pushed Guillam off balance to realize that Tarr trusted him, well and truly: that when the chips were down he'd reported to Guillam, and would submit without question to whatever discipline Guillam chose to mete.
Later on, cold with self-loathing after Richard, he had decided that if the matter were important, Smiley would have known and taken it into account already. And that furthermore, it might have gone easier on Guillam if he'd had to break it off with a Ricki instead of a Richard. Just another pouting, pretty boy of indeterminate class, of the type Bill Haydon brought around to parties – it was rumoured – to scandalize the ton. Someone who didn't matter. Bill had had it figured out long ago.
And what of Jim Prideaux, then?
A movement in the trees. A quiet presence at the fringes of the Christmas party, who had grown animated – at the time Guillam had made nothing of it – only within the charmed circle of Haydon's attention. A rifle bullet from beyond Sarratt's fence, whence hardly anyone could have made the shot. Handwriting as bold as a signed affidavit.
Some shadows did not disappear with daylight; only deepened, grew hard-edged.
Guillam himself had made a confessor of Bill, over the years, but he had never touched on this: of all his secrets the oldest, and the most closely held. Though Bill had known, most likely. The way Smiley had known about Guillam; the way Guillam had known about Bill himself. Impossible to determine, now, whether Bill might have provided him with a grain of truth in comfort, or if his solidarity would have been false to the core. At any rate, Guillam had always been aware that he could not have borne to play Bill's part in this. He knew his own weakness: amidst the endless slog of meetings, the hard work and danger and secrecy, he needed to love. To love, and to know himself loved, even if it remained unspoken. Even if he were to court the inevitable loss.
iii.
The first Christmas after Control's ouster had been subdued; the second sepulchral. By the third, some months post-renovation, Operation Dolphin was in full swing, and even Connie Sachs – Connie! – was back in harness, riding herd on the burrowers in their mission to collate every last piece of evidence that may have been kiboshed by the Circus's resident mole. Smiley had reinstalled her, and Esterhase too; that old hand at surviving purges. For Guillam himself there was no more talk of Brixton. He had realized it was business as usual when his secretary had finally left off the sackcloth she'd donned for Prideaux, and taken up a collection for the party.
It was not the same, of course. How could it be? Control gone, Bill gone. Percy Alleline and Roy Bland and Jim Prideaux – all gone. The Lady Ann, likewise, did not grace the gathering with her presence. Guillam found Smiley past midnight, in a quiet spot overlooking the dark courtyard, staring unfocussed at his own reflection in the glass. He had a whisky and soda in hand, and David Cornwell was just taking his leave.
"He's resigned," Smiley said some minutes later, out of the blue. "Trying his hand at novel-writing, I'm afraid."
Guillam looked at him, baffled, then thought: of course. The East German desk had been Smiley's, once.
There were many such Cornwells, and Tarrs, buried throughout the Circus and beyond. More than any masterstroke of tradecraft, Smiley's people were his imprimatur, inked on the organization he could not abandon. Guillam himself was of that count, he supposed.
Not for the first time, he thought that if he had not known about Ann – and that even before he'd met George – he would be in no small danger. He had a susceptibility to the type.
There had been Peter Guillam the boarder, once, long before Peter Guillam of the Circus: a boy golden in the eyes of his peers and miserable within, knotted with unspeakable knowledge. A wealthy foreign mother, a father in the Service, a divorce. Insuperable alienation, as if Peter Guillam had not been made for the world and could never be. Then a Classics master who had been younger than the rest by twenty years. The usual story.
Guillam, now, could hardly recall his first love's face with effort, though he remembered the soft, measured cadence of his voice – Richard's had been something like, and for that matter George Smiley's. The man had never touched him; had barely acknowledged even to deflect what must have been apparent in the boy's every trembling look and move. Instead he had taken pains to teach Guillam to still himself. To hide in plain sight; to see. And above all the training he would later receive, from within or without the Circus, Guillam had accrued the benefits of that early lesson.
Would he be here – now – otherwise?
It had occurred to him to wonder, with hindsight, if his Classics master had had a past with the Circus, or some other service. Resettlement might have chosen such a pasture, for a spy whose love was a silent, watchful thing.
"As long as he doesn't mean to publish his memoirs," he said in answer. Smiley looked up at him, then, seeming to return somewhat to himself; his gaze was owlish.
"Were he to do so you would stand a very good chance of heroism, Peter," he said. "You're quite the Sarratt nursery rhyme these days, I’m told."
"Good God," Guillam said, embarrassed beyond belief. What of Smiley, if so? But the Nursery corralled recruits for whom Control was ancient history, and who in time would traduce all their doings into myth. Or piss-poor analysis, which was the same thing.
Smiley touched his elbow, gently.
"We'll have another long day tomorrow," he said. "You should rest."
Being precise, he did not say, go home.