The Spy Who Came in From the Cold Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 the 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, andconducted
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 theoutside.
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 Leamaswent
away. She conspired into the telephone for hours after that.
    About three weeks after Leamas began work at the
library Liz asked him tosupper.
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 thelibrary.
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 twoarmchairs,
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’sdriven
by Father Christmas.”
    She seemed to consider this and at last she asked
again: “But what do youbelieve
in?”
    Leamas shrugged.
    “You must believe in