The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

At exactly half past five Miss Crail put on her coat and, with a pointed 'Good night, Miss Gold,' left. Leamas guessed she had been brooding on the shopping bags all afternoon. He went into the next alcove where Liz Gold was sitting on the bottom rung of her ladder reading what looked like a tract. When she saw Leamas she dropped it guiltily into her handbag and stood up.

'Who's Mr. Ironside?' Leamas asked.

'I don't think he exists,' she replied. 'He's her big gun when she's stuck for an answer. I asked her once who he was. She went all shifty and mysterious and said 'Never mind.' I don't think he exists.'

'I'm not sure Miss Crail does,' said Leamas, and Liz Gold smiled.

At six o'clock she locked up and gave the keys to the curator, a very old man with First World War shellshock who, said Liz, sat awake all night in case the Germans made a counterattack. It was bitterly cold outside.

'Got far to go?' asked Leamas.

'Twenty-minute walk. I always walk it. Have you?'

'Not far,' said Leamas. 'Good night.'

He walked slowly back to the flat. He let himself in and turned the light switch. Nothing happened. He tried the light in the tiny kitchen and finally the electric fire that plugged in by his bed. On the doormat was a letter. He picked it up and took it out into the pale yellow light of the staircase. It was the electricity company, regretting that the area manager had no alternative but to cut off the electricity until the outstanding account of nine pounds, four shillings and eightpence had been settled.

* * *

He had become an enemy of Miss Crail, and enemies were what Miss Crail liked. Either she scowled at him or she ignored him, and when he came close, she began to tremble, looking to left and right, either for something with which to defend herself, or perhaps for a line of escape. Occasionally she would take immense umbrage, such as when he hung his mackintosh on her peg, and she stood in front of it shaking for fully five minutes, until Liz spotted her and called Leamas.

Leamas went over to her and said, 'What's troubling you, Miss Crail?'

'Nothing,' she replied in a breathy, clipped way, 'nothing at all.'

'Something wrong with my coat?'

'Nothing at all.'

'Fine,' he replied, and went back to his alcove. She quivered all that day, and conducted a telephone call in a stage whisper for half the morning.

'She's telling her mother,' said Liz. 'She always tells her mother. She tells her about me too.'

Miss Crail developed such an intense hatred for Leamas that she found it impossible to communicate with him. On paydays he would come back from lunch and find an envelope on the third rung of his ladder with his name misspelled on the outside. The first time it happened he took the money over to her with the envelope and said, 'It's L-E-A, Miss Crail, and only one s.' Whereupon she was seized with a veritable palsy, rolling her eyes and fumbling erratically with her pencil until Leamas went away. She conspired into the telephone for hours after that.

About three weeks after Leamas began work at the library Liz asked him to supper. She pretended it was an idea that had come to her quite suddenly, at five o'clock that evening; she seemed to realize that if she were to ask him for tomorrow or the next day he would forget or just not come, so she asked him at five o'clock. Leamas seemed reluctant to accept, but in the end he did.

They walked to her flat through the rain and they might have been anywhere—Berlin, London, any town where paving stones turn to lakes or light in the evening rain, and the traffic shuffles despondently through wet streets.

It was the first of many meals which Leamas had at her flat. He came when she asked him, and she asked him often. He never spoke much. When she discovered he would come, she took to laying the table in the morning before leaving for the library. She even prepared the vegetables beforehand and had the candles on the table, for she loved candlelight. She always knew that there was something deeply wrong with Leamas, and that one day, for some reason she could not understand, he might break and she would never see him again.

She tried to tell him she knew; she said to him one evening: 'You must go when you want. I'll never follow you, Alec.'

His brown eyes rested on her for a moment: 'I'll tell you when,' he replied.

Her flat was a bed-sitting-room and a kitchen. In the sitting room were two armchairs, a sofa-bed, and a bookcase full of paperback books, mainly classics which she had never read.

After supper she would talk to him, and he would lie on the sofa, smoking. She never knew how much he heard, she didn't care. She would kneel by the sofa holding his hand against her cheek, talking.

Then one evening she said to him, 'Alec, what do you believe in? Don't laugh—tell me.' She waited and at last he said:

'I believe an eleven bus will take me to Hammersmith. I don't believe it's driven by Father Christmas.'

She seemed to consider this and at last she asked again: 'But what do you believe in?'

Leamas shrugged.

'You must believe in something,' she persisted: 'something like God—I know you do, Alec; you've got that look sometimes, as if you'd got something special to do, like a priest. Alec, don't smile, it's true.'

He shook his head.

'Sorry, Liz, you've got it wrong. I don't like Americans and public schools. I don't like military parades and people who play soldiers.' Without smiling he added, 'And I don't like conversations about Life.'

'But Alec, you might as well say—'

'I should have added,' Leamas interrupted, 'that I don't like people who tell me what I ought to think.' She knew he was getting angry but she couldn't stop herself any more.

'That's because you don't want to think, you don't dare! There's some poison in your mind, some hate. You're a fanatic, Alec, I know you are, but I don't know what about. You're a fanatic who doesn't want to convert people, and that's a dangerous thing. You're like a man who's...sworn vengeance or something.'

The brown eyes rested on her. When he spoke she was frightened by the menace in his voice.

'If I were you,' he said roughly, 'I'd mind my own business.'

And then he smiled, a roguish Irish smile. He hadn't smiled like that before and Liz knew he was putting on the charm.

'What does Liz believe in?' he asked, and she replied:

'I can't be had that easy, Alec.'

Later that night they talked about it again. Leamas brought it up—he asked her whether she was religious.

'You've got me wrong,' she said, 'all wrong. I don't believe in God.'

'Then what do you believe in?'

'History.'

He looked at her in astonishment for a moment, then laughed.

'Oh Liz...oh no! You're not a bloody Communist?'

She nodded, blushing like a small girl at his laughter, angry and relieved that he didn't care.

She made him stay that night and they became lovers. He left at five in the morning. She couldn't understand it; she was so proud and he seemed ashamed.

* * *

He left her flat and turned down the empty street toward the park. It was foggy. Some way down the road— not far, twenty yards, perhaps a bit more— stood the figure of a man in a raincoat, short and rather plump. He was leaning against the railings of the park, silhouetted in the shifting mist. As Leamas approached, the mist seemed to thicken, closing in around the figure at the railings, and when it parted the man was gone.

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