The Looking Glass War by John Le Carré

Author:John Le Carré
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Espionage
ISBN: 9780141967479
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 1963-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

12

Two days later, Leiser arrived at Oxford. They waited anxiously for him on the platform, Haldane peering among the hurrying faces in the crowd. It was Avery, curiously, who saw him first: a motionless figure in a camel-hair coat at the window of an empty compartment.

‘Is that him?’ Avery asked.

‘He’s travelling first class. He must have paid the difference.’ Haldane spoke as if it were an affront.

Leiser lowered the window and handed out two pigskin cases shaped for the boot of a car, a little too orange for nature. They greeted one another briskly, shaking hands for everyone to see. Avery wanted to carry the luggage to the taxi, but Leiser preferred to take it himself, a piece in each hand, as if it were his duty. He walked a little away from them, shoulders back, staring at the people as they went by, startled by the crowd. His long hair bounced with each step.

Avery, watching him, felt suddenly disturbed.

He was a man; not a shadow. A man with force to his body and purpose to his movement, but somehow theirs to direct. There seemed to be nowhere he would not walk. He was recruited; and had assumed already the anxious, brisk manner of an enlisted man. Yet, Avery accepted, no single factor wholly accounted for Leiser’s recruitment. Avery was already familiar, during his short association with the Department, with the phenomenon of organic motivation; with operations which had no discernible genesis and no conclusion, which formed part of an unending pattern of activity until they ceased to have any further identity; with that progress of fruitless courtships which, in the aggregate, passed for an active love life. But as he observed this man bobbing beside him, animate and quick, he recognised that hitherto they had courted ideas, incestuously among themselves; now they had a human being upon their hands, and this was he.

They climbed into the taxi, Leiser last because he insisted. It was mid-afternoon, a slate sky behind the plane trees. The smoke rose from the North Oxford chimneys in ponderous columns like proof of a virtuous sacrifice. The houses were of a modest stateliness; romantic hulls redecked, each according to a different legend. Here the turrets of Avalon, there the carved trellis of a pagoda; between them the monkey-puzzle trees, and the half-hidden washing like butterflies in the wrong season. The houses sat decently in their own gardens, the curtains drawn, first lace and then brocade, petticoats and skirts. It was like a bad water-colour, the dark things drawn too heavy, the sky grey and soiled in the dusk, the paint too worked.

They dismissed the taxi at the corner of the street. A smell of leaf mould lingered in the air. If there were children they made no noise. The three men walked to the gate. Leiser, his eyes on the house, put down his suitcases.

‘Nice place,’ he said with appreciation. He turned to Avery: ‘Who chose it?’

‘I did.’

‘That’s nice.’ He patted his shoulder. ‘You did a good job.

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