Free Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré Page B

stationed there. Singles only. He played it for the army before his decline.He played it with me. In summer holidays on Normandy beaches. In the garden in Neuilly over a washing line for a net, clutching a mahogany tumbler of Scotch in his spare hand. Badminton was the best of him. When I was packed off to Scotland to his godawful school I played badminton there, as he had, and afterwards for my Midlands university. When I was hanging round the Office waiting for myfirst overseas posting, I rustled up a bunch of my fellow trainees and under the cover name of
the Irregulars
we took on all comers.
    And Ed? How did
he
become a convert to the game of games? We’re sitting at the
Stammtisch
. He is crystal-gazing into hislager, the way he did when he was solving the world’s problems or beating his brains about what was wrong with his backhand, or simply not talkingat all but brooding. No question was ever simple once you’d put it to him. Everything needed tracking down to source.
    ‘There was this gym teacher we had at my Grammar,’ he says at last. Broad grin. ‘Took a couple of us over to her club one evening. That was it really. Her with her short skirt and shiny white thighs. Yeah.’

6
    Here, for the edification of my
chers collègues
, is the sum total of whatever I had happened to pick up of Ed’s life away from the badminton court by the time of the Fall.Now that I come to write it down, the extent of it would surprise me were it not for the fact that I am a listener and a rememberer by training and habit.
    He was one of two children born ten years apart into an old Methodist family of North Country miners. His grandfather had come over from Ireland in his twenties. When the mines closed, his dad became a merchant seaman:
    Didn’t see a lot ofhim after that, not really. Came home and got cancer like it was waiting for him –
Ed.
    His father was also an old-style Communist who had burned his Party card in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. I suspect Ed nursed him on his deathbed.
    After his father’s death the family moved to somewhere near Doncaster. Ed won a place at grammar school, don’t ask me which one. His motherspent whatever free time she had from work at adult education classes until they were cut:
    Mum’s got more brain than what she was ever allowed to use, plus she’d got Laura to look after
– Ed.
    Laura being his younger sister who has learning difficulties and is partially disabled.
    At the age of eighteen, he renounced his Christian faith in favour of what he called ‘all-inclusive humanism’ whichI took to be Nonconformism without God, but out of tact I refrained from suggesting this to him.
    From grammar school he went to a ‘new’ university, I am not sure which. Computer Sciences, German an optional extra. Class of degree not specified, so I suspect middling,
new
being his own disparaging term.
    As regards girls – always a delicate area where Ed was concerned, and not one I would haveentered uninvited – either they didn’t like him, or he didn’t like them. I suspect that his urgent preoccupation with world affairs and other mild eccentricities made a demanding life-companion of him. I also suspect he didn’t know his own attraction.
    And of men friends, the people he should be hanging out with in the gym, or sorting the world with, or jogging, cycling, pubbing? Ed never mentioneda single such person to me, and I question whether they existed in his life. Deep down, I suspect, he wore his isolation as a badge of honour.
    He had heard about me on the badminton grapevine and had secured me for his regular opponent. I was his prize. He had no wish to share me.
    When I had reason to ask him what had prompted him to take a job in the media if he loathed it so much, he was atfirst evasive:
    Saw an ad somewhere, interviewed for it. They set a sort of exam paper, said all right, come on in. That’s about it. Yeah
– Ed.
    But when I asked him whether he had