Free Smiley's People by John le Carré

“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 M-4 and later claimed to have saved him from going queer.
    “What section are you in, Mostyn?” Smiley asked him.
    “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 a 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