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"He couldn't think up any more stories. The truths which he had locked away so deeply were the only things that suggested themselves."
Into the blur of familiar strangers (interrogators, guards, medicos, muscle), marched the little frosty man with a resemblance to head boy. He entered the room near the end of the marathon session, seating himself at the table with his hands folded, and watched Jim's face as the other men worked him. By the time someone propped Jim up along the opposite edge of the table, he had no stories left to use for cover. By then every line of defense had been blown.
Afterwards two guards returned Jim to a cell, and for the first time they let him sleep. When an unforgiving spasm in his shoulder finally woke him, Jim reflected that while Control might well be cracked, he had not been wrong about the mole. Moscow Centre had been well briefed, and had needed Jim only to corroborate, to fill in the occasional gaps. For as long as Jim had held out against them, in the end he'd kept nothing back, even down to the colors of the crayons Control had used to mark the Stevcek dossier. The little man had extracted the details efficiently, probing until he had delineated the precise boundaries of Control's suspicions. Then he was through. Jim imagined the information stashed in the man's trouser pocket, jostling against Smiley's cigarette lighter.
All the facts were in the possession of Moscow Centre. Yes, but the dreams that cornered Jim like wolves belonged to him alone.
---
"You can't judge Bill by things like that. Artists have totally different standards. See things we can't see. Feel things that are beyond us."
Oxford, ages ago. Reclining on the sofa in his rooms, Bill opines that Sarratt is "a green, drowsy backwater, making up in parochialism what it lacks in charm. The local dullards are convinced that their poky little church comprises the heart of the village, never dreaming that in their midst dwells a raw, secret core of power."
Jim looks up from his essay and smiles. "A raw, secret core of power. Are you a poet, too, then?" he asks.
"If I am," says Bill pettishly, "you don't have to sound so bloody surprised."
"Said nothing about surprised," mutters Jim, his gaze drifting down again. And it's true--he cannot bring himself to feel surprised at any new proficiency Bill might suddenly demonstrate, only at the readiness with which he has taken Jim under his wing and his bedclothes.
"All right, then," says Bill, the nearest he'll come to an apology for speaking tartly. From where he lies, he stretches his hand out towards Jim, beckoning him nearer. Bill reaches up for the back of Jim's head, pulls him down and presses up into his lips. When he breaks away, he meets Jim's eyes and smiles coolly. "I don't claim to be serious about poetry, of course," he tells him. "But there are certain situations in life that inspire in one a bit of literary excess--and I believe that one's recruitment into the Great Game represents such a moment. You'll feel the same sort of energy when you first arrive at the Nursery, however you choose to express it."
"So will you be there, too, do you think?"
"Oh, yes," says Bill, directing his attentions to Jim's earlobe. "Darling, who better to carry you across the threshold?"
---
"'You're a lucky man, Jim,' he kept saying. 'You've been ordered to become a lotus-eater.'"
But Jim left those memories behind him in the East. He had drawn a line. There had been no word from Bill since Jim had been returned from Czecho, nor would there ever be. Jim tried not to remember why and how he knew this to be true.
The money from Toby was in the glovebox of the Alvis. A map to some second-rate prep school lay folded on the passenger seat, with the route to Jim's second-rate future traced faintly in pencil. These items, along with the two bullets lodged in Jim's back, constituted the Circus's tepid thanks for his service to crown and country. Repatriation: a rather grand word for such a halfhearted enterprise.
It would be the last time he lay eyes on Sarratt, Jim reminded himself as he drove away. His last real glimpse of the place was the village church. In his mirror he watched the structure recede into obscurity, until the flint and brick began to blur together. Then he shook his head and focused his attention on the road that led him away from there, stretching out before him.
---
"The unpaid Bill"
Foolish Jim, to have imagined that grey stone church would be the last he would see of Sarratt. For how could the final image be other than the Nursery; how could it be other than Bill? With him it all began and ended.
As Jim crept through the woods, the building came into view, looking grim and weary. It was a lonely thing to gaze again upon an old lover, to confront the degeneration wrought by time.
Still, there were certainties that could never alter: once a scalphunter, always a scalphunter. In the moonlight one neck snaps just like another.
---
"Learn the facts, Steed-Asprey used to say, then try on the stories like clothes."
After it was done, Jim settled neatly back into the business of forgetting. The military rhythms of school life, the volatile energy of the boys, the drink when others' backs are turned: there are a variety of factors that gave him aid in the process.
As for the scrutiny of the past, the dissection of ancient history, Jim leaves that task to Smiley and the rest. Let the others sort through the facts and assemble them to their liking--Jim has given enough. He claims only one forfeit, a small one: slender enough to grasp between two fingers. In the photograph they are a world unto themselves. Time is stopped for them. He can feel it. Bill's arm presses tight around Jim's shoulder blades, and there can be no question about who or what is true.
