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The last person in the world that Lady Ann Sercomb thought she would marry was one George Smiley, small, squat, terribly dressed, owlish, the list could go on. She had always imagined herself with somebody a little racier, with a little more class, and while George wasn’t exactly from the wrong side of the tracks, he wasn’t an expected match for somebody of Ann’s level. As in, he was plain old middle-class English, and not the more glamorous designation of aristocracy. Perhaps that was why Ann decided to give him a chance, and perhaps that was why she decided to accept his unexpected proposal, the scandal of it – who knew? Certainly not the rest of the Circus, and certainly not Ann, and probably not even George, either.
As a couple they were mismatched, an odd sight to look at. George was short, and even without her heels Ann towered over him. On some days she found it endearing; on others it was another one of her gripes. He was rather round, too, not unbearably so now but Ann could tell it would be something that would continue to creep up on him until the end of his life.
“Perhaps one day you will be as round as you are tall,” she commented once, watching as he got dressed for work, and of course he simply smiled as though he might actually be amused. That was the problem with her George, Ann thought. He was completely unflappable.
She had nicknamed him ‘toad’ quite early on in their relationship, because he did look a bit like a toad, admittedly, and that was what people in Ann’s circle had often said of him – was she really going to marry the toad? Did she expect him to turn into a prince when she kissed him? But there was something that Ann found practically alluring about the way nothing fazed George in the slightest; he was fully aware of what Ann’s friends thought about him, and of course what they said about him. He was smart, Ann could say that much about him. The man was fiercely intelligent and never missed a beat, so she was absolutely certain that he caught all of the jabs directed at him between the lines. He would never rise to them, instead politely deflecting the blow until gradually, all but Ann’s bitterest friends and relatives stopped even trying. She found that attractive, she supposed. The quiet confidence he could give out, even when he was shifting around and endlessly cleaning his glasses and blinking at everybody in the room as though he kept forgetting that they were there.
It was a curse of Ann’s that she could never let herself have a good thing for very long, and she had known it the minute George had proposed to her. On the one hand she knew it would create a scandal, that there would be plenty to answer to from her parents and other eligible suitors, and indeed that was one of the reasons that she had said yes. But another part of her, that part that she kept carefully hidden away from everybody except those she thought would truly appreciate it – well. That part of her wanted to test him. That part of her wanted to know if he really was as unflappable as he seemed.
“Nothing seems to shock you,” she complained one day, as they sat at a fine table in a fine restaurant that Ann had chosen simply because she thought George would feel out of place in it; he did, of course, but he passed it off very well, the perfect example of courtesy and politeness, pronouncing the names of all the food correctly and ensuring that she was always poured wine first. “What is it like, to be so firm? I suppose the entire place could blow up right now and you would crawl out of the wreckage only concerned about cleaning your glasses.”
Despite his size George seemed small in the seat opposite her. He had the full view of the room whereas Ann had to make do with only seeing him, but that was a consequence of bringing him out to strange places. He always insisted on having the seat with the best view of the room around him, and she would be very unobservant indeed if she didn’t see him taking a mental note of all the entrances and exits, and the faces of their fellow diners, especially the ones whose eyes would linger on their table for too long. It was all entirely innocent, Ann knew; or at least, innocent in the way that George was thinking. It was abundantly clear to Ann that she was the object of the attention thrown at the table, but she supposed such things didn’t need to be brought up in such polite company.
“Of course I wouldn’t only be concerned with that,” George replied, and his voice was even, as though this were a perfectly normal conversation to have and he had no reason whatsoever to be suspicious that his wife might be trying to get another rise out of him, though how she would do it or why she would want to was still a mystery to him. That was another thing about him, Ann remembered. He didn’t need to understand things to accept them. She wondered what that was like, to simply roll with things even when everything seemed so unfair or unnecessary. George was a mystery to her, truly. She couldn’t imagine thinking that way herself.
“So what would you be concerned about, toad?” she teased. “Your work? Or would you be annoyed that you might need another suit? I suppose you could always patch that one up.”
“I think it would be time to retire it, if it were to be caught in an explosion,” George said, dutifully turning to look at the sleeves. “This one does look a little threadbare, don’t you think?”
“I think all your clothes look a little threadbare,” Ann replied, before, feeling suddenly generous, she threw him a bone. “I think it’s endearing on you. Most men would look scruffy if they wore what you wore but I think you manage to carry it. You look like an eccentric university professor rather than a vagrant.”
“Well, I suppose that is nice to know,” George said, and while Ann thought he must be pleased, because he was always pleased when she said something even remotely complimentary to him, he of course didn’t show too much of it.
“So come on, then,” she prompted, when the waiter had been by to refill their drinks. She felt pleasantly tipsy, a slight heat to her cheeks, and simultaneously she wanted to cause trouble and play the loyal wife. Sometimes she liked to play pretend, she supposed. She could be the good wife, she could be nice, they could have a good evening. “What else would you be worried about?”
“What do you think?” George asked, looking pointedly at her. She laughed, deliberately drawing attention to herself, liking the way that heads would turn, that women would wish for her confidence and men would wonder what she was doing with somebody who looked like George, with his shabby suits and ill-matched colours contrasted against her aristocratic features.
“You can be such a romantic,” she said, a little louder than necessary, just in case the eyes were still on her, which she was sure they would be. She reached across the table and lay her hand over George’s, gently stroking circles with her thumb. “It’s very endearing. Truly. Sometimes I forget that you can be quite the gentleman.”
“I hope not too often,” George said, and Ann laughed again, like it was the funniest joke she had ever heard.
She liked to tease him, even though he was a gentleman about that, too. She had learned early on in their marriage that he would never feel entitled to her, no matter how much she might tease and hint, and he would never push her no matter how far she took it before deciding to feign sleepiness or headache. The game had, unfortunately, stopped being fun rather quickly, so she had changed tactics and instead lavished affection on him when he least expected it: when he got home from work and she happened to be at home as well; when he was up late in his study; waking him early before work. Of course he always had time for her, in a gentlemanly way as well as in the way she would have expected – sometimes she wondered if she might be able to make him late for work one day, but oddly the thought had seemed too cruel and she had giggled, shaking her head when George asked her what was funny. He hadn’t pressed it, and she was glad. She didn’t know how she would manage to explain that. Lady Ann finds her limits, and that is where they are!
Sleeping with George wasn’t an unpleasant experience, though he certainly wasn’t Ann’s type. She much preferred taller, thinner, darker men, which of course placed George in the realms of decidedly not her type. All the more reason for everybody to wonder how it had happened – Ann knew for a fact that her friends were used to her bringing someone around from a different country and profession each time: a painter from Spain, a poet from Italy, a dancer from Brazil – she never thought she would get that lucky again, and to be fair she thought that had said dancer proposed to her she would have created an even bigger scandal than marrying George Smiley, because she would have quite happily eloped to Brazil with him and left the aristocracy to deal with the drama. No, it wasn’t unpleasant, but it wasn’t something she could picture herself sticking to for the rest of her life, either. But then again, who had managed that so far?
“Do you ever think about other women, George?” she asked him brightly one evening, when he was reading in bed and she was sitting in front of her mirror in her nightgown, combing her long hair down past her shoulders.
“Of course I don’t,” George said, and the terrible thing was, Ann could believe him.
“That’s nonsense,” she said, despite this belief. “Every man thinks of other women, even if he has no intention of going through with anything. You must think of them, sometimes. Even if it was completely innocent.”
“How can it be completely innocent?” George asked. Ann heard a page flip.
“Because you’re not going to go and sleep with her just because you think about it, are you?” Ann asked, raising an eyebrow at George’s reflection in the mirror. He was looking at her now, his eyes hidden behind the glint of the bedside lamp on his glasses. “Or are you one of those people who believes in the thought idea, that if you even so much as think about it you’re practically cheating?”
“I can’t say that other people interest me, that’s all,” George said simply, as though he really did believe there was nothing more to it. Ann supposed he probably didn’t think there was anything else to it – concepts such as monogamy and matrimony came shockingly easy to him, and Ann sometimes desperately wished she could understand. Perhaps then she would stop feeling so disjointed all the time, as though everything about her life was simply a pretend game, like when she and her cousins would all dress up in what they thought were fancy clothes and play pretend at having houses, having jobs, having wives and husbands and babies. Sometimes she felt like an older, overgrown version of herself as a little girl, pouring imaginary tea into toy teacups and rocking her baby dolls as though they were squalling infants, waiting for her imaginary husband to come home from his imaginary job. The thought angered her, briefly but nevertheless, and she tightened her grip on her hairbrush. George, of course, noticed.
“Is something wrong?” he asked, and Ann took hold of herself, fixing a smile onto her face that she knew George wouldn’t believe for a damn moment.
“Nothing is wrong,” she said simply. “I was just surprised, that’s all. I didn’t expect it of a man.”
“Would you be more comforted to know that I do think of other women?” George asked, frowning in what Ann thought could be genuine confusion. She turned in her chair to face the real George rather than his reflection, as though it might somehow make all this seem realer.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly, trying to think ahead and work out if George might be going somewhere with this. It wasn’t like him to try and play her at her own games, though she thought that he absolutely did know about them by now. “I just think it’s strange. Every man looks at other women. Did you have anybody before me?”
“Of course I did,” George replied. “But it wasn’t the same. I didn’t marry any of them. I married you.”
“If you weren’t married to me, would you look at other women?”
“I don’t think so. I have a wife. Why would I want to look at anybody else?”
“Oh, George,” Ann said, sighing sadly. “George, you silly old toad. You’re too good for me, do you know that?”
She wasn’t sure when she realised that George knew of her infidelities, but of course she wasn’t surprised to know that he did. At first she wasn’t sure what to think about the fact that he didn’t seem to react. She wanted to be angry at him; that was her first thought. How could he pretend to care about her when he didn’t even fight for her? She wanted him to yell at her, she wanted him to demand to know who the other man was, she wanted him to go and confront her lover in some dramatic display of dominance and affection. She was angry that he did none of those things and she was angry because she didn’t think he would have the courage to even if she offered it all up on a plate. She couldn’t tell what about her appearance had tipped him off – it was probably one of his spy things, some slight smear of her lipstick that even she couldn’t detect, or some single hair out of place that she thought she had fixed – but something had tipped him off nonetheless and he had looked at her for a long moment, her excuse as to where she had been hanging in the air.
“You know what Sally is like,” Ann had said into the silence, and what the hell was happening to her? She was breaking one of her own fundamental rules – if she gave an excuse she was to stick rigidly to it, she was to give no further answers unless she could imply that the other person was an idiot for not guessing it, and if faced with scrutiny – especially scrutinising silence – she was to never, ever begin talking into it. She had no idea how George had managed to make her break this rule, because she had been using it to great success since she had been a little girl, and even the withering stare of her own father had never dragged any extra information from her lips. Even as she thought all this she could hear more words tumbling out of her, as though they were physically hurting her by staying inside.
“She always says that we’ll have one more drink before we say goodbye, and then she always keeps you nattering in the hallway until you’ve been there for so long that you really need another drink for the road,” she said, hearing how forced her voice was, a deliberate and failing attempt at casual conversation. She took her coat off and hung it by the door, she took her shoes off and put them with the rest, and still she could not stop herself from speaking. “Before you know it there’s been another two hours gone and you’re another bottle of wine down. I don’t know how she does it. I said I was going to be good tonight, and this is what she does to me. You’re lucky you don’t have to deal with her, George. You’d hate it. She talks nonstop, and she’s fascinated by you.”
“Is she.”
It wasn’t a question. George’s voice was slightly strange, Ann thought. It wasn’t too far off how he usually sounded when he had been working and one of her especially late arrivals had shaken him out of whatever papers he had been buried in, but this time there was a different quality to it, as though he were piecing things together. She had heard it only a couple of times before, usually when passing by his study and hearing him on the phone to colleague, and quite suddenly she felt as though she had been caught as surely as if George had walked in on her and her lover of the evening.
As always, Ann found herself angry. She hated being caught, and she especially hated it when it wasn’t her fault in the slightest. Of course she would marry a nosy little toad, always seeing things where there shouldn’t be things to see. It was just her bloody luck.
“What are you looking at me like that for?” she snapped, breaking another one of her rules – never show heightened emotion, because it was surely a sign of guilt.
“Like what?” George asked, perfectly pleasant now, and whatever look she had been hoping to see on his face – anger, hatred, betrayal – was refusing to show itself. Ann wished she still had her coat on, because she wanted to draw it around herself in the sudden cold. She wanted him to react, she wanted him to show her something; she would have even been happy for him to push her up against the wall, to yell at her, to shake her. He did nothing. They stood with barely eight feet between them but it may as well have been half the planet.
“I don’t know,” she said, trying to recover. She reached up and began taking her earrings out. “You just looked at me strangely. Perhaps I’ve had more wine than I thought.”
Her voice was light again, her glittery hostess’s voice. She knew he would be able to see right through it, but he could see right through everything, so what was the point? He was impossible, knowing her games and not reacting in the slightest, knowing her games and letting her play them. Quite suddenly she felt humiliated; exposed. Was this what he was trying to do?
“I was just worried about you,” George said simply. “You were late home. I was afraid that something had happened to you.”
“What would happen to me?” she asked, her voice slightly too harsh. She reeled it back in. “You know nothing happens around here, George.”
“You never know who you might meet,” George said, and Ann tried to work out if there was supposed to be another meaning in there, if he was playing one of his wretched spy games with her.
“Well, I’m home now,” she said, flashing him a winning smile. “So you don’t have to worry anymore, do you?”
“No,” George agreed amiably. “I don’t. I’m glad you had a good time.”
Again Ann tried to work out if there was any hidden message or if she was reading too deeply into things. What would be worse, she wondered. Would it be worse if he was playing games with her, dropping little passive aggressive messages to let her know he knew, letting her know that he doesn’t care so she couldn’t feel as though she’d won? Or would it be worse if he genuinely had no clue – not about the affairs, of course, because she knew plain as day that he knew about those, but perhaps he didn’t know what he was doing? Perhaps he was such a natural at these games – games that Ann thought were hers, that were hers – that he could have her running around in circles without even realising it? Good lord. It would surely be worse to be beaten by an amateur.
They looked at one another and Ann tried to work out what was on his face. He was as unflappable as always; any hint of hurt or grief she thought she could see was likely a trick of the light.
“Well,” she said. “I need to go and finish getting changed. I think I’ll have a bath, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course,” George said, and it was as if none of the last ten minutes had happened. “I have some work to finish up in the study, but I’ll be quiet coming upstairs. I shouldn’t disturb you getting into bed.”
“I don’t mind,” she said. “You’re quiet as a mouse, for a toad.”
She walked closer, pausing ever so briefly as she passed him to get to the stairs. She wondered if she should kiss him and decided against it. She didn’t usually kiss him when she got home. He might think she was playing too much. Why did she care anyway? He knew. Oh, damn it. He knew, but he couldn’t prove. She still had that on him.
“I love you,” he said, as she began to climb the stairs.
“Sorry?” she asked, looking back at him. It had not been what she had expected to hear.
“I said I love you,” George said, clearly, unashamed, and Ann swallowed, running her hand along the banister.
“Oh,” she said. “Silly me. I love you too. Goodnight, toad.”