I was free to browse in the cardboard boxes and filing cabinets stuffed with his personal papers. I arrived one April morning, and was welcomed by his wife, Jane, who set me up with a desk and a chair in the old garage that housed his archive. To reach it, you turned off a country lane and drove for about a mile along a grassy track towards the beckoning blue. In particular, my mind went back to the occasion when I first visited his house in west Cornwall, in a dramatic and isolated position, perched high on the cliffs overlooking the sea.
I recall one time when he remarked: “If I were writing my biography, the question I would be asking me now is…” It felt like good-humoured sparring, and I often felt that he was at least one step ahead of me. Usually, I would visit him at his house in Hampstead, arriving in the late morning for a couple of hours’ interview before we would go off to a relaxed lunch together in a local pub, and then return to continue the conversation until I would depart in the early evening, fortified by several glasses of Armagnac. Of course, I never met ‘John le Carré’ I knew him by his real name of David Cornwell. For a period of several years, we would meet frequently, every couple of months or so, to talk about his past. When I heard the sad news of John le Carré’s death, I remembered the many hours we spent together while I was writing his biography.
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