In the middle of December, for reasons I’m coming to, I woke early in a posh hotel. I lay semi-dozing while my partner, Jo, was in the shower, and eventually worked out how to tune the bedside radio, an internet device, to Radio 4. The six o’clock pips sounded as a bathrobed Jo emerged, earbuds in place: on her digital radio she heard the headlines some seconds ahead of me, and as she sat on the bed, her smile faltered. What’s the matter, I asked. John le Carré’s died, she said. A heartbeat or two later, while the internet transmission caught up with the digital, the radio confirmed this. John le Carré had died. And then, after a similar timelag, the news landed somewhere inside me. John le Carré had died.
We spent much of the morning in isolation. We were visiting a TV set where an adaptation of my novel Slow Horses was being filmed, and had to be proved Covid-free before we were allowed to mingle. It would be bad form, and very expensive, to infect anyone famous. Jo worked and I read and, when patchy wifi allowed, checked my emails. Will Smith, the lead writer on the show, got in touch; we shared our memories of an evening at the Royal Festival Hall three years ago, listening to le Carré discuss George Smiley. A gifted mimic, he treated us to his impersonation of Alec Guinness on the phone (‘How did you know it was me?’) while other incarnations of Smiley appeared on screens behind him. They included images of Gary Oldman, who played George in the movie of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I remember first seeing Oldman as Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy, playing the doomed young punk with the intensity of an unexploded bomb.
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