'Dates and places,' Smiley murmured to the file. 'If I could just check those for a start.'
'Absolutely,' said Peter Worthington handsomely, and from a green tin tea-pot refilled Smiley's cup. Blackboard chalk was worked into his large fingertips. It was like the grey in his hair.
'It was really the mother that messed her up, I'm afraid, though,' he went on, in the same entirely reasonable tone. 'All that urgency about putting her on the stage, then ballet, then trying to get her into television. Her mother just wanted Elizabeth to be admired. As a substitute for herself, of course. It's perfectly natural, psychologically. Read Berne. Read anyone. That's just her way of defining her individuality. Through her daughter. One must respect that those things happen. I understand all that, now. She's okay, I'm okay, the world's okay, Ian's okay, then suddenly she's off.'
'Do you happen to know whether she communicates with her mother, incidentally?'
Peter Worthington shook his head.
'Absolutely not, I'm afraid. She'd seen through her entirely by the time she left. Broken with her completely. The one hurdle I can safely say I helped her over. My one contribution to her happiness -'
'I don't think we have her mother's address here,' said Smiley, leafing doggedly through the pages of the file. 'You don't -'
Peter Worthington gave it to him rather loud, at dictation speed.
'And now the dates and places,' Smiley repeated. 'Please.'
She had left him two years ago. Peter Worthington repeated not just the date but the hour. There had been no scene — Peter Worthington didn't hold with scenes — Elizabeth had had too many with her mother — they'd had a happy evening, as a matter of fact, particularly happy. For a diversion he'd taken her to the kebab house.
'Perhaps you spotted it as you came down the road? The Knossos, it's called, next door to the Express Dairy?'
They'd had wine and a real blow-out, and Andrew Wiltshire, the new English master, had come along to make a three. Elizabeth had introduced this Andrew to Yoga only a few weeks before. They had gone to classes together at the Sobell Centre and become great buddies.
'She was really into Yoga,' he said with an approving nod of the grizzled head. 'It was a real interest for her. Andrew was just the sort of chap to bring her out. Extrovert, unreflective, physical... perfect for her,' he said determinedly.
The three of them had returned to the house at ten, because of the babysitter, he said: himself, Andrew and Elizabeth. He'd made coffee, they'd listened to music, and around eleven Elizabeth gave them both a kiss and said she was going over to her mother's to see how she was.
'I had understood she had broken with her mother,' Smiley objected mildly, but Peter Worthington chose not to hear.
'Of course, kisses mean nothing with her,' Peter Worthington explained, as a matter of information. 'She kisses everybody, the pupils, her girlfriends — she'd kiss the dustman, anyone. She's very outgoing. Once again, she can't leave anyone alone. I mean every relationship has to be a conquest. With her child, the waiter at the restaurant... then when she's won them, they bore her. Naturally. She went upstairs, looked at Ian and I've no doubt used the moment to collect her passport and the housekeeping money from the bedroom. She left a note saying sorry and I haven't seen her since. Nor's Ian,' said Peter Worthington.
'Er, has Andrew heard from her?' Smiley enquired, with another tilt of his spectacles.
'Why should he have done?'
'You said they were friends, Mr Worthington. Sometimes third parties become intermediaries in these affairs.'
On the word affair, he looked up and found himself staring directly into Peter Worthington's honest, abject eyes: and for a moment the two masks slipped simultaneously. Was Smiley observing? Or was he being observed? Perhaps it was only his embattled imagination or did he sense, in himself and in this weak boy across the room, the stirring of an embarrassed kinship? 'There should be a league for deceived husbands who feel sorry for themselves. You've all got the same boring, awful charity!' Ann had once flung at him. You never knew your Elizabeth, Smiley thought, still staring at Peter Worthington: and I never knew my Ann.
'That's all I can remember really,' said Peter Worthington. 'After that, it's a blank.'
'Yes,' said Smiley, inadvertently taking refuge in Worthington's repeated assertion. 'Yes, I understand.'
He rose to leave. A little boy was standing in the doorway. He had a shrouded, hostile stare. A placid heavy woman stood behind him, holding him by both wrists above his head, so that he seemed to swing from her, though really he was standing by himself.
'Look, there's Daddy,' said the woman, gazing at Worthington with brown, attaching eyes.
'Jenny, hi. This is Mr Standfast from the Foreign Office.'
'How do you do?' said Smiley politely and after a few minutes' meaningless chatter, and a promise of further information in due course, should any become available, quietly took his leave.
'Oh and happy Christmas,' Peter Worthington called from the steps.
'Ah yes. Yes indeed. And to you too. To all of you. Happy indeed, and many more of them.'
In the transport café they put in sugar unless you asked them not to, and each time the Indian woman made a cup, the tiny kitchen filled with steam. In twos and threes, not talking, men ate breakfast, lunch or supper, depending on the point they had reached in their separate days. Here also Christmas was approaching. Six greasy coloured glass balls dangled over the counter for festive cheer, and a net stocking appealed for help for spastic kids. Smiley stared at an evening paper, not reading it. In a corner not twelve feet from him little Fawn had taken up the babysitter's classic position. His dark eyes smiled agreeably on the diners and on the doorway. He lifted his cup with his left hand, while his right idled close to his chest. Did Karla sit like this? Smiley wondered. Did Karla take refuge among the unsuspecting? Control had. Control had made a whole second, third or fourth life for himself in a two-roomed upstairs flat, beside the Western bypass, under the plain name of Matthews, not filed with housekeepers as an alias. Well, 'whole' life was an exaggeration. But he had kept clothes there, and a woman, Mrs Matthews herself, even a cat. And taken golf lessons at an artisans' club on Thursday mornings early, while from his desk in the Circus he poured scorn on the great unwashed, and on golf, and on love, and on any other piffling human pursuit which secretly might tempt him. He had even rented a garden allotment, Smiley remembered, down by a railway siding. Mrs Matthews had insisted on driving Smiley to see it in her groomed Morris car on the day he broke the sad news to her. It was as big a mess as anyone else's allotment: standard roses, winter vegetables they hadn't used, a toolshed crammed with hosepipes and seedboxes.
Mrs Matthews was a widow, pliant but capable.
'All I want to know,' she had said, having read the figure on the cheque. 'All I want to be sure of, Mr Standfast: is he really dead, or has he gone back to his wife?'
'He is really dead,' Smiley assured her, and she believed him gratefully. He forbore from adding that Control's wife had gone to her grave eleven years ago, still believing her husband was something in the Coal Board.
Did Karla have to scheme in committees? Fight cabals, deceive the stupid, flatter the clever, look in distorting mirrors of the Peter Worthington variety, all in order to do the job?