The Secret Pilgrim by John le Carré Page B

couldn’t know it at the time, was in low water, dogged by unaccountable failure. The arrest of Ben’s agents, tragic in itself, was only the latest in a chain of catastrophes reaching across the globe. In northern Japan, an entire Circus listening station and its three-man staff had vanished into thin air. In the Caucasus, our escape lines had been rolled up overnight. We had lost networks in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, all in a space of months. And in Washington our American Cousins were voicing ever-louder dissatisfaction with our reliability, and threatening to cut the special cord for good.
    In such a climate, monstrous theories became daily fare. A bunker mentality develops. Nothing is allowed to be accidental, nothing random. If the Circus triumphed, it was because we were allowed to do so by our opponents. Guilt by association was rife. In the American perception, the Circus was nurturing not one mole but burrows of them, each cunningly advancing the career of every other. And what joined them was not so much their pernicious faith in Marx—though that was bad enough—it was their dreadful English homosexuality.
    I read Ben’s letter. Twenty lines long, unsigned, on white unwatermarked Service stationery, one side. Ben’s handwriting but awry, no crossings out. So yes, probably he was drunk.
    It called me “Ned my darling.” It laid Ben’s hands along my face and drew my lips to his. It kissed my eyelids and my neck and, thank God, on the physical front it stopped there.
    It was without adjectives, without art, and the more appalling for its lack of them. It was not a period piece, it was not affected. It was not arch, Greek or nineteen-twenties. It was an unobstructed cry of homosexual longing from a man I had known only as my good companion.
    But when I read it, I knew it was the real Ben who had written it. Ben in torment confessing feelings I had never been aware of, but which when I read them I accepted as true. Perhaps that already made me guilty—I mean, to be the object of his desire, even if I had never consciously attracted it, and did not desire him in return. His letter said sorry, then it ended. I didn’t think it was unfinished. He had nothing more to say.
    â€œI didn’t know,” I said.
    I handed Smiley back the letter. He returned it to his pocket. His eyes didn’t leave my face.
    â€œOr you didn’t know you knew,” he suggested.
    â€œI didn’t know,” I repeated hotly. “What are you trying to make me say?”
    You must try to understand Smiley’s eminence, the respect his name awoke in someone of my generation. He waited for me. I shall remember all my life the compelling power of his patience. A sudden shower of rain fell, with the handclap that London showers make in narrow sweets. If Smiley had told me he commanded the elements, I would not have been surprised.
    â€œIn England you can’t tell anyway,” I said sulkily, trying to collect myself. God alone knows what point I was trying to make. “Jack Arthur’s not married, is he? Nowhere to go in the evenings. Drinks with the lads till the bar closes. Then drinks a bit more. No one says Jack Arthur’s queer. But if they arrested him tomorrow in bed with two of the cooks, we’d say we’d known it all along. Or I would. It’s imponderable.” I stumbled on, all wrong, groping fora path and finding none. I knew that to protest at all was to protest too much, but I went on protesting all the same.
    â€œAnyway, where was the letter found?” I demanded, trying to recover the initiative.
    â€œIn a drawer of his desk. I thought I told you.”
    â€œAn empty drawer?”
    â€œDoes it matter?”
    â€œYes, it does! If it was jammed in among old papers, that’s one thing. If it was put there to be found by you people, that’s another. Maybe he was forced to write it.”
    â€œOh, I’m sure he