Our Game by John le Carré

taped down, varnished, and enamelled, then, as now, its basket life long over. And around its crown, tattered but victorious, our sacred House hatband. I heard his mellow voice with its bogus Italian accent ripping theatrically through the Venice sunlight as he yells his crazy salutation: It's a-Timbo! The Boy-a Bishop himself! And you're his a-lovely bride-a!
    "We took him to restaurants, visited his awful digs—he was living with a Pomeranian countess, naturally—and one morning I woke up and had this inspiration: He's exactly what we're looking for, the one we've been talking about at the Friday seminars. We'll sign him up and take him all the way through."
    "And it didn't bother you that he was your friend?" she suggested.
    At the word friend, a different pain swept over me. Friend? I never came near him, I thought. Familiar maybe, but friend never. He was the risk I would never take.
    "It would have bothered me a lot more if he had been my enemy, Marjorie," I heard myself replying silkily. "We're talking the depths of the Cold War. We were fighting for our survival. We believed in what we were doing." I could not resist the gibe: "I imagine these days that comes a little harder."
    And then, in case the New Era had blurred her memory of the old one, I explained what it meant to take someone all the way through: how the agent-running section was constantly under pressure to find a young man—in those days it had to be a man—to trail his coat at the busy-bee Russian recruiters who were working the Oxbridge circuit from the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. And how Larry fitted in almost every possible way the profile we had drawn of the man we dreamed of finding, or they did—we could even send him back to Oxford to do a third year and sit his Finals.
    "Blast the fellow, he landed an outright First against my rather shaky Second," I said with a sporting laugh, which no one shared: not Merriman, who was continuing his examination of the ceiling, or Waldon, who had set his jaw in such grim lock that you could have wondered whether he would ever speak again.
    And how we would give the Russian recruiters precisely what they were looking for and had found for themselves in the past to such effect, I went on: a classy Englishman on the slide, an intellectual explorer, a Golden Boy Going Wrong, a God-seeker sympathetic to the Party but not compromised by formally belonging to it, unanchored, immature, unstable, politically omnivorous, crafty in a vague way, and, when he died to be, larcenous—
    "So you propositioned him," Marjorie Pew interrupted, managing to make it sound as if I had picked Larry up in a public lavatory.
    I laughed. My laughter was annoying her, so I was doing quite a lot of it.
    "Oh my goodness, not for months, Marjorie. We had to fight it through the system first. A lot of people on the Top Floor said he'd never accept the discipline. His school reports were awful, university reports worse. Everyone said he was brilliant, but for what? Can I make a point here?"
    "Please do."
    "The recruitment of Larry was a group operation. When he agreed to take the veil, my section head decided I should have the handling of him. But only on the understanding that I report to him before and after every meeting with Larry."
    "So why did he take the veil, as you call it?" she asked.
    Her question filled me with a deep tiredness. If you don't know now, you never will, I wanted to tell her. Because he was footloose. Because he was a soldier. Because God told him to and he didn't believe in God. Because he had a hangover. Or hadn't. Because the dark side of him liked an airing too. Because he was Larry and I was Tim and it was there.
    "He relished the challenge of it, I suppose," I said. "To be what you are, but more so. He liked the idea of being a free servant. It answered his sense of duty."
    "A what?"
    "It was a bit of German he had in his head. Frei sein ist Knecht. To be free is to be a vassal."
    "Is that