Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Foreword
PART I - Haverdown
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
PART II - London
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
PART III - Paris
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
PART IV - London
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
PART V - London
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
PART VI - Sainte-Angèle
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Epilogue
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE NAÏVE AND SENTIMENTAL LOVER
JOHN LE CARRÉ, the pseudonym for David Cornwell, was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964. His third novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, became a worldwide bestseller. He has written twenty-one novels, which have been published in thirty-six languages. Many of his books have been made into films, including The Constant Gardener; The Russia House; The Little Drummer Girl; and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
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First published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton 1971
First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf 1972
Published in Penguin Books 2011
Copyright © le Carré Productions, 1971
All rights reserved
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN : 978-1-101-53548-6
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For John Miller
and Michael Truscott,
at Sancreed,
with love.
FOREWORD
JOHN LE CARRÉ
London, November 2000
The Naïve and Sentimental Lover is widely regarded as the blip in my work, the aberration or, more baldly, the turkey. At the time of its publication British critics fell gleefully upon it, welcoming it almost with one voice as the proof, if proof were needed, that I should stick to the “genre” novel and not aspire to “real” literature, to which they alone held the golden key. In the thirty years since publication contrary voices have occasionally made themselves heard, though their message is hardly more consoling. According to them, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover marked my proper departure from the “genre” novel and my first ascent towards the sublime pastures of “real” literature. It was only the chorus of critical philistines, and my excessive sensitivity to it, that drove me from the path of literary virtue, back to the safer, lower, but more lucrative trade of spy writing.
Neither version, surveyed with hindsight, rings true to me. Granted, I dispensed with the paraphernalia of espionage, to the considerable disappointment of a readership avid for more Smiley, more Berlin Wall, more spookery of every kind, and I paid for this in sales and popularity. But my central theme—or so it seemed to me then, and seems to me again now—had not wavered. Aldo Cassidy, like Smiley, is a naïve Hamlet, constantly havering between institutional commitments and unattainable hopes. Like Smiley, or another character close to me later in my work, the luckless Magnus Pym of A Perfect Spy, Cassidy seems to invent inside his own head the dilemma from which he can never escape, since it is made up of the unfordable gulf between dream and reality. Once Cassidy is embarked on his journey of self-discovery, nothing in his life goes away. Therefore the story ends as it begins, and as it could begin again tomorrow. And for me, that was always Smiley’s problem too; he was at war with a continuum; the ultimate solution was an illusion.
There was something else, apart from “literary,” that I was not allowed to be in those days, and that was “funny.” The Naïve and Sentimental Lover was a sixties novel. I wrote it as a sad comedy about the hopes and dreams of a middle-class, inhibited, senior-management, public-school Englishman caught in mid-life crisis at a moment in our social history when followers of the sexual revolution saw themselves locked in mortal conflict with the slaves of convention. It is a matter of history that both sides lost, which is England now. It is a matter of self-knowledge that both sides are in all of us, and probably they always will be. The same hypocrisies that Shamus was mocking are with us today, and will be with us for as long as the permanent, unelected government of middle England continues to rule our lives. We owe our stability to it, but also our imprisonment.
In all my work, as I see it now, I have been hammering away at the same nail. If you read The Constant Gardener, written thirty years after this novel, you will find me at it again. The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, far from being an aberration, is consistent with everything that has been driving me back to my desk all these years. Whether it succeeds as a novel is for you to judge. But however you eventually find, please look for a laugh or two along the way, because these days you’re allowed to.
PART I
Haverdown
1
Cassidy drove contentedly through the evening sunlight, his face as close to the windshield as the safety belt allowed, his foot alteras close to the windshield as the safety belt allowed, his foot alternating diffidently between accelerator and brake as he scanned the narrow lane for unseen hazards. Beside him on the passenger seat, carefully fold
ed into a plastic envelope, lay an Ordnance Survey map of central Somerset. An oilbound compass of the newest type was fastened by suction to the walnut dashboard. At a corner of the windshield, accurately adjusted to his field of view, a copy of the Estate Agent’s particulars issued under the distinguished title of Messrs. Grimble and Outhwaite of Mount Street W. was clipped to an aluminum stand of his own invention. For the attention of Mr. Aldo Cassidy ran the deferential inscription; for Aldo was his first name. He drove, as always, with the greatest concentration, and now and then he hummed to himself with that furtive sincerity common to the tone-deaf.
He was traversing a moor. A flimsy ground mist shifted over rhines and willow trees, slipped in little puffs across the glistening hood of his car, but ahead the sky was bright and cloudless and the spring sun made emeralds of the approaching hills. Touching a lever he lowered the electric window and leaned one side of his head into the rush of air. At once rich smells of peat and silage filled his nostrils. Over the reverent purr of the car’s engine he caught the sounds of cattle and the cry of a cowhand harmlessly insulting them.
“It’s an idyll,” he declared aloud. “It’s an absolute idyll.”
Better still it was a safe idyll, for in the whole wide beautiful world Aldo Cassidy was the only person who knew where he was.
Beyond his conscious hearing, a closed-off chamber of his memory echoed to the awkward chords of an aspiring pianist. Sandra, wife to Aldo, is extending her artistic range.
“Good news from Bristol,” Cassidy said, talking over the music. “They think they can offer us a patch of land. We’ll have to level it of course.”
“Good,” said Sandra, his wife, and carefully rearranged her hands over the keyboard.
“It’s a quarter of a mile from the largest boys’ school and eight hundred yards from the girls’. The city authorities say there’s a fair chance that if we do the levelling and donate the changing rooms, they’ll put up a footbridge on the by-pass.”
She played a ragged chord.
“Not an ugly one, I hope. Town planning is extremely important, Aldo.”
“I know.”
“Can I come?”
“Well you have got your clinic,” he reminded her with tentative severity.
Another chord.
“Yes. Yes, I’ve got my clinic,” Sandra agreed, her voice lilting slightly in counterpoint. “So you’ll have to go alone, won’t you? Poor Pailthorpe.”
Pailthorpe was her private name for him, he could not remember why. Pailthorpe the Bear, probably; bears were their most popular fauna.
“I’m sorry,” said Cassidy.
“It’s not your fault,” said Sandra. “It’s the Mayor’s, isn’t it? After all,” she added speculatively, “he runs the town, doesn’t he?”
“Naughty Mayor,” said Cassidy.
“Naughty Mayor,” Sandra agreed.
“Spank him,” Cassidy suggested.
“Spank, spank,” gaily said Sandra, wife to Aldo, her face in combat with its shadows.
He was a fair-haired man of thirty-eight and quite handsome in certain lights. Like his car he was groomed with loving elegance. From the left-hand buttonhole to the breast pocket of his faultless suit ran a thin gold chain of obvious usefulness whose purpose was nevertheless undefined. Aesthetically it perfectly answered the subdued pin stripe of the cloth behind it; as a piece of rigging it joined the head of the man to the heart, but there was no telling which end if either held the mastery. In both build and looks he might have served as an architectural prototype for the middle-class Englishman privately educated between the wars; one who had felt the wind of battle but never the fire of it. Heavy at the waist, short in the leg, a squire always in the making, he possessed those doggedly boyish features, at once mature and retarded, which still convey a dying hope that his pleasures may be paid for by his parents. Not that he was effeminate. True, the mouth was well advanced from the rest of the face and quite deeply sculptured under the lower lip. True also that as he drove he was guilty of certain affectations which pointed in the female direction, such as brushing aside his forelock or putting back his head and wrinkling his eyes as though a sudden headache had interfered with brilliant thoughts. But if these mannerisms meant anything at all, then most likely they reflected a pleasing sensitivity towards a world occasionally too shrill for him, an empathy as much parental as childish, rather than any unwelcome tendencies left over from public school.
Clearly he was no stranger to the expense account. An untaxable affluence was legible in the thickening of the lower waistcoat (for his safety and comfort he had unfastened the top button of his trousers) and in the widths of white cuff which isolated his hands from manual labour; and there was already about his neck and complexion a sleek rich gloss, a tan almost, flambé rather than sungiven, which only balloon glasses, Bunsen burners, and the fumes of crêpes suzette can faithfully reproduce. Despite this evidence of physical well-being, or perhaps in contrast to it, the outward Cassidy possessed in some devious way the power, even the authority to disturb. Though he was not in the slightest degree pathetic there was something to him which caught the eye and demanded help. Somehow he managed to convey that the encroachments of the flesh had not yet killed the magic of the spirit.
As if in recognition of this protective rôle which Cassidy unconsciously imposed on his environment, the interior of the car was provided with many important adaptations designed to spare him the distressing consequences of collision. Not only had the walls and ceiling and doors been generously upholstered with additional layers of quilt; the steering wheel, the child-proof door handles—already deeply recessed in succulent cavities of felt—the glove compartment, brake lever, even the discreetly concealed fire extinguisher, each was separately encased in hand-stitched leather and padded with a pleasing flesh-like substance calculated to reduce the most drastic impact to no more than a caress. At the rear window a sun-proof canopy, electrically operated and bordered with small silk balls, hung poised to defend at any time the good man’s neck against an overzealous sun or his eyesight against the harmful dazzle of alien headlights. As to the dashboard it was a veritable medicine chest of preventive physic: from blinker lights to ice-alert, from reserve battery to reserve oil supply, from safari petrol tank to auxiliary cooling system its switches anticipated every catastrophe known to nature and the manufacturing industries. Cassidy’s was a car that conveyed rather than transported; a womb, one might even have thought, from whose padded, lubricated interior the occupant had yet to make his entry into the harder world.
“How far to Haverdown, do you mind?”
“Eh?”
“Haverdown.” Should he spell it? Most likely the fellow was illiterate. “Haverdown. The great house. The manor.”
The lolling mouth opened and partially closed, voicelessly mimicking the name; a grimy arm struck towards the hill. “Straight on up over look.”
“And is it far, would you say?” Cassidy enquired loudly, as if addressing the deaf.
“Won’t take you more than five minutes, will it, not in her?”
“Thanks a million. Good luck to you old son.”
In the mirror the yokel’s brown face, frozen into an expression of comic incredulity, watched him out of sight. Well, thought Cassidy, the fellow has seen something of the world today and two shillings won’t make him drunk.
All nature, it seemed, had turned out for his procession. In cottage gardens romping peasant children put aside their ancient games and turned to stare at him as he glided by. How pastoral, he thought; how rude, how vital. From trees and hedgerows buds of varying shades of green were bursting forth with seasonable energy, while in the fields wild daffodils mingled with other flowers he could not identify. Leaving the village, he began climbing a hill. The high banks gave way to sloping wooded glades. Below him farms, fields, churches, and rivers faded into far horizons. Lulled by such a delightful prospect he abandoned himself to the contemplation of his quest.
My pleasurable quest, as the favoured after-dinner speaker called it, my very pleasurable quest.
“A quest for what?” a nagging voice enquired inside him. “A quest towards, or a quest from?”
With an airy shake of his head, Cassidy brushed aside such pedantries. Nonsense, he told his inward audience, I have come to buy a house. Inspect it, cost it, buy it. And if I have not informed my wife, that is my own affair.
“Shall you stay all night?” Sandra remarked very casually. The piano practice temporarily interrupted, they were finishing their evening meal.
“We may not get going till five or so,” Cassidy replied, avoiding the direct answer. “It depends when the Mayor’s free.” A clause of conciliation: “I thought I might take a book to read. If you could find me one.”
Slowly, hand in hand with his cultural advisor, Cassidy the aspiring reader paraded the ranks of Sandra’s bookshelves.
“Now,” she mused, very earnest. “What do Pailthorpes read when they go gallivanting in Bristol?”
“It’s got to be something I can manage when I’m a bit tight,” he warned. They both laughed. “And not—” recalling a previous selection “—not Jane Austen.”
They settled for non-fiction, a straight book suitable to a tired Pailthorpe of little fantasy.
“Sometimes,” said Sandra playfully, “I wonder whether you ever really see these people at all.”
“I don’t,” said nimble Cassidy, volleying at the net. “She’s a blonde and she’s eight feet tall.”
“Sexy,” said Sandra, wife to Aldo, kissing her loyal man. “What’s her name?”
Haverdown.