Agent Running in the Field - John le Carre Page 0,3

level, I am a British subject of mixed birth, an only child born in Paris, my late father being at the time of my conception an impecunious major of Scots Guards on attachment to NATO headquarters in Fontainebleau, and my mother the daughter of insignificant White Russian nobility residing in Paris. For White Russian read also a good dollop of German blood on her father’s side, which she alternately invoked or denied at whim. History has it that the couple first met at a reception held by the last remnants of the self-styled Russian Government-in-Exile at a time when my mother was still calling herself an art student and my father was close on forty. By morning they were engaged to be married: or so my mother told it, and given her life passage in other areas I have little reason to doubt her word. Upon his retirement from the army – swiftly enforced, since at the time of his infatuation my father possessed a wife and other encumbrances – the newlyweds settled in the Paris suburb of Neuilly in a pretty white house supplied by my maternal grandparents where I was soon born, thus enabling my mother to seek other diversions.

I have left till last the stately, all-wise person of my beloved language tutor, minder and de facto governess, Madame Galina, purportedly a dispossessed countess from the Volga region of Russia with claims to Romanov blood. How she ever arrived in our fractious household remains unclear to me, my best guess being that she was the cast-off mistress of a great-uncle on my mother’s side who, after fleeing Leningrad, as it then was, and making himself a second fortune as an art dealer, devoted his life to acquiring beautiful women.

Madame Galina was fifty if a day when she first appeared in our household, very plump but with a kittenish smile. She wore long dresses of swishy black silk and made her own hats, and lived in our two attic rooms with everything that she owned in the world: her gramophone, her icons, a pitch-dark painting of the Virgin that she insisted was by Leonardo, box upon box of old letters and photographs of grandparental princelings and princesses surrounded by dogs and servants in the snow.

Second to my personal welfare, Madame Galina’s great passion was for languages, of which she spoke several. I had barely mastered the elements of English spelling before she was pressing Cyrillic script on me. Our bedtime readings were a rotation of the same child’s story, each night a different language. At gatherings of Paris’s fast-dwindling community of White Russian descendants and exiles from the Soviet Union, I performed as her polyglot poster child. It is said I speak Russian with a French intonation, French with a Russian intonation, and such German as I have with a mixture of both. My English on the other hand remains for better or worse my father’s. I am told it even has his Scottish cadences, if not the alcoholic roar that accompanied them.

In my twelfth year, my father succumbed to cancer and melancholy and with Madame Galina’s help I attended to his dying needs, my mother being otherwise engaged with the wealthiest of her admirers, a Belgian arms dealer for whom I had no regard. In the uneasy triangle that followed my father’s demise I was deemed surplus to requirements and packed off to the Scottish Borders, to be billeted in the holidays with a dour paternal aunt, and in term time at a spartan Highlands boarding school. Despite the school’s best efforts not to educate me in any indoor subject, I obtained entry to a university in the English industrial Midlands, where I took my first awkward steps with the female sex and scraped a third-class degree in Slavonic Studies.

I have for the last twenty-five years been a serving member of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service – to its initiated, the Office.

*

Even today my recruitment to the secret flag appears preordained, for I don’t remember contemplating any other career or wishing for one, except possibly badminton or climbing in the Cairngorms. From the moment my university tutor asked me shyly over a glass of warm white wine whether I had ever considered doing something ‘a bit hush-hush for your country’ my heart lifted in recognition and my mind went back to a dark apartment in Saint-Germain that Madame Galina and I had frequented every Sunday until my father’s death. It was there that I had first thrilled to the