Agent Running in the Field - John le Carre Page 0,4

buzz of anti-Bolshevik conspiracy as my half-cousins, step-uncles and wild-eyed great-aunts exchanged whispered messages from the homeland that few of them had ever set foot in – before, waking to my presence, requiring me to be sworn to secrecy whether or not I had understood the secret I should not have overheard. There also I acquired my fascination for the Bear whose blood I shared, for his diversity, immensity and unfathomable ways.

A bland letter flutters through my letter box advising me to present myself at a porticoed building close to Buckingham Palace. From behind a desk as big as a gun turret a retired Royal Navy admiral asks me what games I play. I tell him badminton and he is visibly moved.

‘D’you know, I played badminton with your dear father in Singapore and he absolutely trounced me?’

No, sir, I say, I didn’t know, and wonder whether I should apologize on my father’s behalf. We must have talked of other things but I have no memory of them.

‘And where’s he buried, your poor chap?’ he enquires, as I rise to leave.

‘In Paris, sir.’

‘Ah, well. Good luck to you.’

I am ordered to present myself at Bodmin Parkway railway station carrying a copy of last week’s Spectator magazine. Having established that all unsold copies have been returned to the wholesaler, I steal one from a local library. A man in a green trilby asks me when the next train leaves for Camborne. I reply that I am unable to advise him since I am on my way to Didcot. I follow him at a distance to the car park where a white van is waiting. After three days of inscrutable questions and stilted dinners where my social attributes and head for alcohol are tested, I am summoned before the assembled board.

‘And so, Nat,’ says a grey-haired lady at the centre of the table. ‘Now that we’ve asked you all about yourself, is there something you’d like to ask us for a change?’

‘Well, as a matter of fact there is,’ I reply, having first given a show of earnest reflection. ‘You’ve asked me whether you can depend on my loyalty, but can I depend on yours?’

She smiles, and soon everyone at the table is smiling with her: the same sad, clever, inward smile that is the closest the Service ever gets to a flag.

Glib under pressure. Latent aggression good. Recommended.

*

In the same month that I completed my basic training course in the dark arts, I had the good fortune to meet Prudence, my future wife. Our first encounter was not auspicious. On my father’s death a regiment of skeletons had broken loose from the family cupboard. Half-brothers and half-sisters I had never heard of were laying claim to an estate that over the last fourteen years had been disputed, litigated and picked clean by its Scottish trustees. A friend recommended a City law firm. After five minutes of listening to my woes, the senior partner pressed a bell.

‘One of our very best young lawyers,’ he assured me.

The door opened and a woman of my own age marched in. She was wearing a daunting black suit of the sort favoured by the legal profession, schoolmarm spectacles and heavy black military boots on very small feet. We shook hands. She gave me no second look. To the clunk of her boots she marched me to a cubicle with Ms P. Stoneway LLB on the frosted glass.

We sit down opposite each other, she sternly tucks her chestnut hair behind her ears and produces a yellow legal pad from a drawer.

‘Your profession?’ she demands.

‘Member, HM Foreign Service,’ I reply, and for some unknown reason blush.

After that I remember best her poker back and resolute chin and a stray shaft of sunlight playing on the little hairs of her cheek as I narrate one squalid detail after another of our family saga.

‘I may call you Nat?’ she asks at the end of our first session.

She may.

‘People call me Prue,’ she says, and we set a date for two weeks hence, at which, in the same impassive voice, she gives me the benefit of her researches:

‘I have to inform you, Nat, that if all the disputed assets in your late father’s estate were placed into your hands tomorrow there would not be sufficient funds even to pay my firm’s fees, let alone settle the outstanding claims against you. However,’ she continues before I am able to protest that I will trouble her no further, ‘there is provision within the partnership