A Perfect Spy by John le Carré

days reported our preachers’ doings as loyally as if they were our footballers. I found them in Dorothy’s same Bible with her photograph. Makepeace accused nobody outright, Makepeace framed no charge. This is the land of innuendo; straight speaking is for sinners. “M.P. sounds Stern Warning against Youthful Covetousness, Greed,” sings the first. “Perils of young Ambition splendidly Highlighted.” In Makepeace’s imposing person, the anonymous writer declares, “are met the poet’s Celtic grace, the Statesman’s eloquence, the lawgiver’s Iron sense of Justice.” The congregation was “spellbound unto the Meekest of its Members,” and none more so than Rick himself, who sits in an enraptured trance, nodding his broad head to the cadences of Makepeace’s rhetoric, even though every Welsh note of it—to the excited ears and eyes of those around him—is hurled at Rick personally down the length of the aisle, and rammed home with a botched stab of the lugubrious Watermaster forefinger.
    The second version takes a less apocalyptic tone. The Highest in the Land was not ranting against youth’s sinfulness, far from it. He was offering succour to the youthful falterer. He was extolling youth’s ideals, likening them to stars. To believe this second version, you would suppose Makepeace had gone star crazy. He couldn’t get away from the things, nor could the writer. Stars as our destiny. Stars that guide Wise Men across deserts to the very Cradle of Truth. Stars to lighten the darkness of our despair, yea even in the pit of sin. Stars of every shape, for every occasion. Shining above us like God’s very light. The writer must have been Makepeace Watermaster’s property, body and soul, if it wasn’t Makepeace himself. Nobody else could have sweetened that awesome, forbidding apparition in the pulpit.
    Though my eyes were not yet open on this day, I see him as clearly as I saw him later in the flesh, and shall see him always: tall as one of his own factory chimneys, and as tapered. Rubbery, with weak pinched shoulders and a wide bendy waist. One jointless arm tipped out at us like a railway signal, one baggy hand flapping on the end of it. And the wet, elastic little mouth that should have been a woman’s, too small even to feed him by, stretching and contracting as it labours to deliver the indignant vowels. And when at long, long last, enough awesome warnings have been uttered, and the penalties of sin outlined in sufficient detail, I see him brace himself and lean back and moisten his lips for the kiss-off, which we children have been begging for these forty minutes while we crossed our legs and died for a pee however often we had peed before we left home. One cutting gives this final preposterous passage in full, and I will give it again now—their text, not mine—though no Watermaster sermon I ever heard later was complete without it, though the words became part of Rick’s very nature, and remained with him all his life and consequently mine, and I would be amazed if they did not ring in his ears as he died, and accompany him as he strode towards his Maker, two pals reunited at last:
    â€œIdeals, my young brethren . . .” I see Makepeace pause here, shoot another glare at Rick and start again: “Ideals, my beloved brethren all, are to be likened unto those splendid stars above us”—I see him lift his sad, starless eyes to the pine roof—“we cannot reach them. Millions of miles separate us from them.” I see him hold out his drooping arms as if to catch a falling sinner. “But oh my brethren, how greatly do we profit from their presence!”
    Remember them, Tom. Jack, you’ll think I’m mad, but those stars, however fatuous, are a crucial piece of operational intelligence, for they lend a first image to Rick’s unquenchable conviction of his destiny, and it didn’t stop