The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (4 page)

They were beginning to know him elsewhere too, the
gray shambling figure from the Mansions. Not a wasted word did he speak, not a
friend, neither man, woman
nor
beast, did he have. They guessed he was in trouble, run away from his wife like
as not. He never knew the price of anything, never remembered it when he was
told. He patted all his pockets whenever he looked for
change,
he never remembered to bring a basket, always buying shopping bags. They didn’t
like him in the Street, but they were almost sorry for him. They thought he was
dirty, too, the way he didn’t
shave
weekends and his shirts all grubby. A Mrs. McCaird from
Sudbury Avenue
cleaned for him for a
week, but having never received a civil word from him withdrew her labor. She
was an important source of information in the Street, where tradesmen told one
another what they needed to know in case he asked for credit. Mrs. McCaird’s
advice was against credit. Leamas never had a letter, she said, and they agreed
that that was serious. He’d no pictures and only a few books; she thought one of
the books was dirty but couldn’t be sure because it was in foreign writing. It
was her opinion he had a bit to live on, and that that bit was running out. She
knew he drew Benefit on Thursdays. Bayswater was warned, and needed no second
warning. They heard from Mrs. McCaird that he drank like a fish: this was
confirmed by the bartender. Bartenders and charwomen are not in the way of
accommodating their clients with credit, but their information is treasured by
those who are.

Finally he took the job in the library. The Labour
Exchange put him on to it each Thursday morning as he drew his unemployment
benefit, and he’d always turned it down.

“It’s not really your cup of tea,” Mr.
Pitt said, “but the pay’s fair and the
work’s easy for an educated man.”

“What sort of library?” Leamas asked.

“It’s the Bayswater Library for Psychic
Research. It’s an endowment. They’ve got thousands of volumes, all sorts, and
they’ve been left a whole lot more. They want another helper.”

He took his dole and the slip of paper.
“They’re an odd lot,” Mr. Pitt added, “but then you’re not a
stayer anyway, are you? I think it’s time you gave them a try, don’t you?”

It was odd about Pitt. Leamas was certain he’d
seen him before somewhere.
At the Circus, during the war.

The library was like a church hall, and very cold.
The black oil stoves at
either
end made it smell of paraffin. In the middle of the room was a cubicle like a
witness box and inside it sat Miss Crail, the librarian.

It had never occurred to Leamas that he might have
to work for a woman. No one at the Labour Exchange had said anything about
that.

“I’m the new help,” he said; “my name’s
Leamas.”

Miss Crail looked up sharply from her card index,
as if she had heard a rude
word.
“Help?
What do you mean, help?”

“Assistant.
From the Labour Exchange.
Mr. Pitt.” He pushed across
the
counter a form with his
particulars entered in a sloping hand. She picked it up and studied it.

“You are Mr. Leamas.” This was not a
question, but the first stage of a laborious fact-finding investigation.
“And you are from the Labour Exchange.”

“No. I was sent by the Exchange. They told me
you needed an assistant.” “I see.”
A wooden
smile.

At that moment the telephone rang: she lifted the
receiver and began arguing
with
somebody, fiercely. Leamas guessed they argued all the time; there were no
preliminaries. Her voice just
rose
a key and she began
arguing about some tickets for a concert. He listened for a minute or two and
then drifted toward the bookshelves. He noticed a girl in one of the alcoves,
standing on a ladder sorting large volumes.

“I’m the new man,” he said, “my
name’s Leamas.”

She came down from the ladder and shook his hand a little
formally.

“I’m Liz Gold. How d’you do. Have you met
Miss Crail?”

“Yes, but she’s on the phone at the moment.”

“Arguing with her mother I expect. What are
you going to do?”

“I don’t know.
Work.”

“We’re marking at the moment; Miss Crail’s
started a new index.”

She was a tall girl, ungainly, with a long waist
and long legs. She wore flat, ballet type shoes to reduce her height. Her face,
like her body, had large components
which
seemed to hesitate between plainness and beauty. Leamas guessed she was
twenty-two or three, and Jewish.

“It’s just a question of checking that all
the books are m the shelves. This is the reference bit, you see. When you’ve
checked, you pencil in the new reference and
mark it off on the index.”

“What happens then?”

“Only Miss Crail’s allowed to ink in the
reference. It’s the rule.”

“Whose rule?”

“Miss Crail’s.
Why
don’t you start on the archaeology?”

Leamas nodded and together they walked to the next
alcove where a shoe box
full of
cards lay on the floor.

“Have you done this kind of thing
before?” she asked.

“No.” He stopped and picked up a handful
of cards and shuffled through them.
“Mr.
Pitt sent me.
From the Exchange.”
He put the
cards back.

“Is Miss Crail the only person who can ink
the cards, too?” Leamas inquired.
“Yes.”

She left him there, and after a moment’s
hesitation he took out a book and looked at the flyleaf. It was called Archaeological
Discoveries in
Asia Minor
.
Volume
Four.
They only seemed to have
Volume Four.

It was
one
o’clock
and Leamas was very hungry, so he walked over to where Liz
Gold was sorting and said, “What happens about lunch?”

“Oh, I bring sandwiches.” She looked a
little embarrassed. “You can have some
of mine if that would help. There’s no café for miles.”

Leamas shook his head.

“I’ll go out, thanks. Got some shopping to
do.
” She watched him push his way
through the swing doors.

It was
half
past two
when he came back. He smelled of whisky. He had one
shopping bag full of vegetables and
another containing groceries
. He put them down in
a corner of the alcove and wearily
began again on the archaeology books. He’d been’
marking for about ten minutes when he became aware that Miss
Crail was watching
him.

“
Mister
Leamas.”

He was halfway up the ladder, so he looked down
over his shoulder and said,
“Yes?”

“Do you know where these shopping bags come
from?”

“They’re mine.”

“I see. They are yours.” Leamas waited.
“I regret,” she continued at last, “that we do not allow it,
bringing shopping into the library.”

“Where else can I put it? There’s nowhere
else I
can
put it.”

“Not in the library,” she replied.
Leamas ignored her, and returned his
attention
to the archaeology section.

“If you only took the normal lunch
break,” Miss Crail continued, “you would not have time to go shopping
anyway. Neither of
us
does, Miss Gold or myself;
we
do not have time to
shop.”

“Why don’t you take an extra half hour?”
Leamas asked. “You’d have time then. If you’re pushed you can work another
half hour in the evening.
If you’re pressed.”

She stayed for some moments, lust watching him and
obviously thinking of
something
to say. Finally she announced: “I shall discuss it with Mr.
Ironside,” and
went away.

At exactly half past five Miss Crail put on her
coat and, with a pointed “Good night, Miss Gold,” left. Leamas
guessed she had been brooding on the shopping bags
all afternoon. He went into the next alcove where Liz Gold was
sitting on the bottom rung of her ladder reading what looked like a tract. When
she saw Leamas she dropped it guiltily into her handbag and stood up.

“Who’s Mr. Ironside?” Leamas asked.

“I don’t think he exists,” she replied.
“He’s her big gun when she’s stuck for an answer. I asked her once who he
was. She went all shifty and mysterious and said ‘Never mind.’ I don’t think he
exists.”

“I’m not sure Miss Crail does,” said Leamas, and Liz
Gold smiled.

At
six o’clock
she locked up and gave the keys to the curator, a very old man with First World
War shellshock who, said Liz, sat awake all night in case the Germans made a
counterattack. It was bitterly cold outside.

“Got far to go?” asked Leamas.

“Twenty-minute walk. I always walk it. Have
you?”

“Not far,” said Leamas. “Good night.”

He walked slowly back to the flat. He let himself in and turned
the light switch. Nothing happened. He tried the light in the tiny kitchen and
finally the electric fire that plugged in by his bed. On the doormat was a
letter. He picked it up and took it out into the pale yellow light of the
staircase. It was the electricity company, regretting that the area manager had
no alternative but to cut off the electricity until the outstanding account of
nine pounds, four shillings and eightpence had been settled.

He had become an enemy of Miss Crail, and enemies
were what Miss Crail liked. Either the scowled at him or she ignored him, and
when he came close, she began to tremble, looking to left and right, either for
something with which to defend herself, or perhaps for a line of escape.
Occasionally she would take immense umbrage, such as when he hung his
mackintosh on
her
peg, and she stood in front of it shaking for fully five
minutes, until Liz spotted her and called Leamas.

Leamas went over to her and said, “What’s troubling you,
Miss Crail?”

“Nothing,” she replied in a breathy,
clipped way, “nothing at all.”

“Something wrong with my
coat?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Fine,” he replied, and went back to his
alcove. She quivered all that day, and
conducted
a telephone call in a stage whisper for half the morning.

“She’s telling her mother,” said Liz.
“She always tells her mother. She tells her about me too.”

Miss Crail developed such an intense hatred for
Leamas that she found it impossible to communicate with him. On paydays he
would come back from lunch and find an envelope on the third rung of his ladder
with his name misspelled on the
outside.
The first time it happened he took the money over to her with the envelope and
said, “It’s L-E-A, Miss Crail, and only one s.” Whereupon she was
seized with a veritable palsy, rolling her eyes and fumbling erratically with
her pencil until Leamas
went
away. She conspired into the telephone for hours after that.

About three weeks after Leamas began work at the
library Liz asked him to
supper.
She pretended it was an idea that had come to her quite suddenly, at
five o’clock
that evening; she seemed
to realize that if she were to ask him for tomorrow or the next day he would
forget or just not come, so she asked him at
five o’clock
. Leamas seemed reluctant to accept, but in
the end he did.

They walked to her flat through the rain and they
might have been anywhere—
Berlin
,
London
, any
town where paving stones turn to lakes or light in the evening rain, and the
traffic shuffles despondently through wet streets.

It was the first of many meals which Leamas had at
her flat. He came when she asked him, and she asked him often. He never spoke
much. When she discovered he would come, she took to laying the table in the
morning before leaving for the
library.
She even prepared the vegetables beforehand and had the candles on the table,
for she loved candlelight. She always knew that there was something deeply
wrong with Leamas, and that one day, for some reason she could not understand,
he might break and she would never see him again.

She tried to tell him she knew; she said to him
one evening: “You must go when you want. I’ll never follow you,
Alec.”

His brown eyes rested on her for a moment:
“I’ll tell you when,” he replied.

Her flat was a bed-sitting-room and a kitchen. In
the sitting room were two
armchairs,
a sofa-bed, and a bookcase full of paperback books, mainly classics which she
had never read.

After supper she would talk to him, and he would
lie on the sofa, smoking. She never knew how much he heard, she didn’t care.
She would kneel by the sofa holding his hand against her cheek, talking.

Then one evening she said to him, “Alec, what
do you believe in? Don’t laugh—tell me.” She waited and at last he said:

“I believe an eleven bus will take me to
Hammersmith. I don’t believe it’s
driven
by Father Christmas.”

She seemed to consider this and at last she asked
again: “But what do you
believe
in?”

Leamas shrugged.

“You must believe in something,” she
persisted: “something like God—I know
you do, Alec; you’ve got that look sometimes, as if you’d got something
special to do, like a priest. Alec, don’t smile, it’s true.”

He shook his head.

“Sorry, Liz, you’ve got it wrong. I don’t
like Americans and public schools. I don’t like military parades and people who
play soldiers.” Without smiling he added,
“And I don’t like conversations about Life.”

“But Alec, you might as well say—”

“I should have added,” Leamas
interrupted, “that I don’t like people who tell me what I ought to
think.” She knew he was getting angry but she couldn’t stop herself any
more.