The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (5 page)

“That’s because you don’t
want
to
think, you don’t dare! There’s some
poison
in your mind, some hate. You’re a fanatic, Alec, I know you are, but I don’t
know what about. You’re a fanatic who doesn’t want to convert people, and
that’s a dangerous thing. You’re like a man who’s…sworn vengeance or
something.”

The brown eyes rested on her. When he spoke she
was frightened by the menace in his voice.

“If I were you,” he said roughly,
“I’d mind my own business.”

And then he smiled, a roguish Irish smile. He hadn’t smiled like
that before and Liz knew he was putting on the charm.

“What does Liz believe in?” he asked,
and she replied:

“I can’t be had that easy, Alec.”

Later that night they talked about it again.
Leamas brought it up—he asked her whether she was religious.

“You’ve got me wrong,” she said,
“all wrong. I don’t believe in God.”
“Then what do you believe in?”

“History.”

He looked at her in astonishment for a moment,
then
laughed.

“Oh Liz…oh no!
You’re not a
bloody Communist?”

She nodded, blushing like a small girl at his
laughter, angry and relieved that
he
didn’t care.

She made him stay that night and they became lovers.
He left at five in the
morning.
She couldn’t understand it; she was so proud and he seemed ashamed.

He left her flat and turned down the empty street toward the
park. It was foggy. Some way down the road—not far, twenty yards, perhaps a bit
more— stood the figure of a man in a raincoat, short and rather plump. He was
leaning against the
railings of
the park, silhouetted in the shifting mist. As Leamas approached, the mist
seemed to thicken, closing in around
the figure at the railings, and when it parted the
man was gone.

Then one day about a week later, he didn’t come to
the library. Miss Crail was delighted; by half-past eleven she had told her
mother, and on returning from lunch she stood in front of the archaeology
shelves where he had been working since he came. She stared with theatrical
concentration at the rows of books, and Liz knew
she was pretending to work out whether Leamas had stolen
anything.

Liz entirely ignored her for the rest of that day,
failed to reply when she addressed her, and worked with assiduous application.
When the evening came she
walked
home and cried herself to sleep.

The next morning she arrived early at the library.
She somehow felt that the
sooner
she got there, the sooner Leamas might come; but as the morning dragged on
her hopes faded, and she knew he
would never come. She had forgotten to make sandwiches for herself that day so
she decided to take a bus to the
Bayswater
Road
and go to the A.B.C. Café? She felt sick and
empty, but not hungry. Should she go and
find him? She had promised never to follow him, but he had promised to tell
her; should she go and find him?

She hailed a taxi and gave his address.

She made her way up the dingy staircase and
pressed the bell of his door. The bell seemed to be broken; she heard nothing.
There were three bottles of milk on
the
mat and a letter from the electricity company. She hesitated a moment, then
banged on the door, and she heard the faint groan of a man. She rushed
downstairs to
the flat below,
hammered and rang at the door. There was no reply so she ran down
another flight and found herself in
the back room of a grocer’s shop. An old woman sat in a corner, rocking back
and forth in her chair.

“The top flat,” Liz almost shouted,
“somebody’s very ill. Who’s got a key?” The old woman looked at her
for a moment,
then
called toward the front room, where
the shop was.

“Arthur, come in here, Arthur, there’s a girl
here!”

A man in brown overalls and a gray trilby hat
looked round the door and said,
“Girl?”

“There’s someone seriously ill in the top flat,”
said Liz. “He can’t get to the front door to open it. Have you a
key?”

“No,” replied the grocer, “but I’ve
got a hammer,” and they hurried up the stairs together, the grocer, still
in his trilby, carrying a heavy screwdriver and a hammer. He knocked on the
door sharply, and they waited breathless for an answer. There was none.

“I heard a groan before, I promise I did,” Liz
whispered.

“Will you pay for this door if I bust
it?”

“Yes.”

The hammer made a terrible noise. With three blows
he had wrenched out a piece of the frame and the lock came with it. Liz went in
first and the grocer followed. It was bitterly cold in the room and dark, but
on the bed in the corner they could make out the figure of a man.

Oh God, thought Liz, if he’s dead I don’t think I
can touch him. But she went to him and he was alive. Drawing the curtains, she
knelt beside the bed.

“I’ll call you if I need you, thank
you,” she said without looking back, and the
grocer nodded and went downstairs.

“Alec, what is it, what’s making you ill?
What is it, Alec?”

Leamas moved his head on the pillow. His sunken
eyes were closed. The dark
beard
stood out against the pallor of his face.

“Alec, you must tell me, please, Alec.”
She was holding one of his hands in hers. The tears were running down her
cheeks. Desperately she wondered what to do;
then, getting up, she ran to the tiny kitchen and put on a
kettle. She wasn’t quite
clear
what she would make, but it comforted her to do something. Leaving the kettle
on the gas she picked up her handbag, took Leamas’ key from the bedside table
and ran downstairs, down the four flights into the street, and crossed the road
to Mr. Sleaman, the chemist. She bought some calf’s-foot jelly, some breast of
chicken, some
essence of beef
and a bottle of Aspirin. She got to the door, then went back and bought a packet
of rusks. Altogether it cost her sixteen shillings, which left four
shillings in her handbag and eleven
pounds in her post office savings bank book, but she
couldn’t draw any of that till tomorrow. By the time she
returned to his flat the kettle was just boiling.

She made the beef tea like her mother used to in a
glass with a teaspoon in to stop its cracking, and all the time she glanced
toward him as if she were afraid he
was dead.

She had to prop him up to make him drink the tea. He had only one
pillow and there were no cushions in the room, so taking his overcoat down from
the back of the door she made a bundle of it and arranged it behind the pillow.
It frightened her to touch him; he was so drenched in sweat that his short gray
hair was damp and slippery. Putting the cup beside the bed, she held his head
with one hand and fed him the tea with the other. After he had taken a few
spoonfuls, she crushed two Aspirin and gave them to him in. the spoon. She
talked to him as if he were a child, sitting on the edge of the bed looking at
him, sometimes letting her fingers run over his head and face, whispering his
name over and over again: “Alec, Alec.”

Gradually his breathing became more regular, his
body more relaxed, as he
drifted
from the taut pain of fever to the calm of sleep; Liz, watching him, sensed
that the worst was over. Suddenly she realized it was almost dark.

Then she felt ashamed because she knew she should
have cleaned and tidied.
Jumping
up, she fetched the carpet sweeper and a duster from the kitchen and set to
work with feverish energy. She found a clean tea cloth and spread it neatly on
the bedside table and she washed up the odd cups and saucers which lay around
the kitchen. When everything was done she looked at her watch and it was half-past
eight. She put the kettle on and went
back to the bed. Leamas was looking at her.

“Alec, don’t be cross, please don’t,” she
said. “I’ll go, I promise I will, but let
me make you a proper meal. You’re ill, you can’t go on like
this, you’re—Oh, Alec,” and she broke down and wept, holding both hands
over her face, the tears running
between
her fingers like the tears of a child. He let her cry, watching her with his
brown eyes, his hands holding the sheet.

She helped him wash and shave and she found some
clean bedclothes. She
gave him
some calf’s-foot
jelly,
and some breast of chicken
from the jar she’d bought at Mr. Sleaman’s. Sitting on the bed she watched him
eat, and she thought she had never been so happy before.

Soon he fell asleep, and she drew the blanket over his shoulders
and went to the window. Parting the threadbare curtains, she raised the sash
and looked out. The two windows in the courtyard above the warehouse were lit.
In one she could see the flickering blue shadow of a television screen, the
figures before it held motionless in its spell; in the other a woman, quite
young, was arranging curlers in her hair. Liz wanted to weep at the crabbed
delusion of their dreams.

She fell asleep in the armchair and did not wake
until it was nearly light,
feeling
stiff and cold. She went to the bed: Leamas stirred as she looked at him and
she touched his lips with the tip of her finger. He did not open his eyes but
gently took her arm and drew her down onto the bed, and suddenly she wanted him
terribly,
and nothing mattered,
and she kissed him again and again and when she looked at him he seemed to be
smiling.

She came every day for six days. He never spoke to
her much and once, when she asked him if he loved her, he said he didn’t
believe in fairy tales. She would
lie
on the bed, her head against his chest, and sometimes he would put his thick
fingers in her hair, holding it quite tight, and Liz laughed and said it hurt.
On Friday
evening she found him
dressed but not shaved, and she wondered why he hadn’t shaved. For some
imperceptible reason she was alarmed. Little things were missing from the room—his
clock and the cheap portable radio that had been on the table. She wanted to
ask and did not dare. She had bought some eggs and ham and she cooked them for
their supper while Leamas sat on the bed and smoked one cigarette
after another. When supper was ready
he went to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of red wine.

He hardly spoke at supper, and she watched him,
her fear growing until she could bear it no more and she cried out suddenly,
“Alec…oh Alec…what is it? Is it good-bye?”

He got up from the table, took her hands and
kissed her in a way he’d never done before, and spoke to her softly for a long
time, told her things she only dimly
understood,
only
half heard because all the time she knew it was the end and nothing
mattered any more.

“Good-bye, Liz,” he said.
“Good-bye,” and then: “Don’t follow me. Not again.”
Liz nodded and muttered, “Like
we said.” She was thankful for the biting cold of the street and for the
dark which hid her tears.

It was the next morning, a
Saturday,
that
Leamas asked at the grocer’s for credit. He did it without much
artistry, in a way not calculated to ensure him success.
He ordered half a dozen items—they didn’t come to more than a
pound—and when they had been wrapped and put into the shopping bag he said,
“You’d better send me
that
account.”

The grocer smiled a difficult smile and said,
“Fm afraid I can’t do that.” The “sir” was definitely
missing.

“Why the hell not?”
asked Leamas, and the queue behind him stirred uneasily.
“Don’t know you,” replied
the grocer.

“Don’t be bloody
silly,
”
said Leamas, “I’ve been coming here for four months.”
The grocer colored. “We always
ask for a banker’s reference before giving credit,” he said, and Leamas
lost his temper.

“Don’t talk bloody cock!” he shouted.
“Half your customers have never seen the inside of a bank and never bloody
well will” This was heresy beyond bearing, since it was true.

“I don’t know you,” the grocer repeated
thickly, “and I don’t like you. Now get out of my shop.” And he tried
to recover the parcel which unfortunately Leamas was already holding.

Opinions later differed as to what happened next.
Some said the grocer, in trying to recover the bag, pushed Leamas; others say
he did not. Whether he did or not, Leamas hit him, most people think twice,
without disengaging his right hand, which still held the shopping bag. He
seemed to deliver the blow not with his fist but with the side of his left
hand, and then, as part of the same phenomenally rapid movement, with the left
elbow; and the grocer fell straight over and lay as still as a rock. It was
said in court later, and not contested by the defense, that the grocer had two
injuries—a fractured cheekbone from the first blow and a dislocated jaw from
the
second. The coverage in the
daily press was adequate, but not
over-elaborate
.

At night he lay on his bunk listening to the sounds
of the prisoners. There was a boy who sobbed and an old lag who sang “On Ilkley
Moor bar t’at,” beating out the time on his food tin. There was a warder
who shouted, “Shut up, George, you miserable sod,” after each verse,
but no one took any notice. There was an Irishman who sang songs about the
IRA,
though the others said he was in for rape.

Leamas took as much exercise as he could during
the day in the hope that he
would
sleep at night; but it was no good. At night you knew you were in prison: at
night there was nothing, no trick of vision or self-delusion which saved you from
the nauseating enclosure of the cell. You could not keep out the taste of
prison, the smell of prison uniform, the stench of prison sanitation heavily
disinfected, the noises of captive men. It was then, at night, that the
indignity of captivity became urgently
insufferable,
it was then that Leamas longed to walk in the friendly sunshine of a
London
park. It was then
that he hated the grotesque steel cage that held him, had to
force back the urge to fall upon the
bars with his bare fists, to split the skulls of his guards and burst into the
free, free space of London. Sometimes he thought of Liz. He
would direct his mind toward her
briefly like the shutter of a camera, recall for a moment the soft-hard touch
of her long body,
then
put her from his memory. Leamas
was not a man accustomed to living on dreams.