Suleika Dawson - The Secret Heart: John le Carré: an intimate memoir

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First published by Mudlark 2022

FIRST EDITION

Suleika Dawson 2022

Cover layout design by Holly Macdonald HarperCollinsPublishers 2022

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A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Suleika Dawson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008533021

Ebook Edition October 2022 ISBN: 9780008533038

Version 2022-09-27

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For Graham Goodwin again, and this time

for Jeremy Lloyd as well.

Remembering George Greenfield, too.

And for David, of course.

And the human heart is a very mysterious thing.

Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

Ive never let anyone this far in, David told me once, quite early in our relationship. His voice was earnest, his expression suddenly concerned. We might have been in bed, or perhaps just sitting together, I forget. We were certainly post-coital, I remember that. We almost always were. You are safe to love, arent you, Sue? he urged. I need you to be safe.

Safe. A loaded word. This, after all, was the man who educated the world about safe houses. We were in one of his at the time. So safe that I loved him as much as he loved me? That I would continue to be a safe haven for him, whenever he wanted respite from his world? Or safe, meaning Id never call his wife? There could have been another dozen interpretations. There almost always were.

Before I could answer, he laid the underside of his forearm along my thigh.

Look, he said. We have the same skin. The same grain. Cut from the same bale. Well go away again soon. I think we need some more time together under our belts.

David always pressed the we of things, sparing no word or gesture to conjure up an enveloping us-ness around our times together. He was good at it, too; really good. I have yet to discover a word for the mistress-attending equivalent of uxorious, but there ought to be one, just for him. It was wholly beguiling to be an audience of one for the powerful up-close magic he could summon. Nor was it entirely illusory. Real rabbits do emerge from top hats, however they get there to begin with, and large parts of our relationship, whole stretches, were as real as anything has ever been in my life. In his too, I am certain. But I have since come to wonder whether, for David, it was the illusion itself and his own power to invoke it that was most real of all.

There is one further interpretation of what he meant by safe that may have accounted for his worry at the time. David did take me very deep into his world, into his thoughts and hopes, his memories, his besetting concerns and fears, into his carefully guarded private reality. So he might have meant safe that I wouldnt write about him. As indeed I didnt, not for the longest time, until it was safe even if this book may yet constitute a breach of the Unofficial Secrets Act I never actually signed.

So what follows is how it went. With us. This is the story of my time with le Carr the writer and with David the man; with Ronnie the father, too, whom David sent me on a secret mission to find, and in finding the father I discovered still more about the son.

My story, then, just the way I remember it happening, my memory fortified by the many dozens of letters David sent me and by my diaries and notebooks from those years. Ive withheld a few details to spare some blushes most of them my own but otherwise this is a pretty full account of what has unquestionably been one of the most significant relationships of my life. Of his too, I like to think. And right at the beginning of it, as perhaps ought always to be the case in any last moment before things change forever, I remember I yawned

September 1982

It was an early start at the sound studios and I wasnt good with mornings in those days. But Graham had said, Make sure to get your lovely arse round to Woodsies for eight oclock sharp, honey, all right?, so there I was. Prior to that day wed never begun a session before ten. Actors usually arent so good with mornings, either, but that day we werent going to be recording with an actor.

I yawned again as we sat amicably together, mostly in silence, on one of the well-worn blue banquettes in the seventh-floor reception of John Wood Studios at Broadwick Street, Soho. It was just the two of us there, with the senior engineer Derek French Frenchie setting up in his studio.

Why the dawn run anyway? I asked, since I hadnt been told.

The Great Man requested it, Graham replied.

Good to know. Wed been waiting for twenty minutes and the Great Man had yet to appear.

Yes, but why?

Dunno. Maybe he gets going in the morning unlike some. Maybe he wants to finish early so he can go home and give his wife one. Dunno.

Graham Goodwin a tall, silver-haired and habitually laid-back Gent-about-Town; the man who single-handedly started the whole audiobook business; my friend, mentor and employer for the last two years was sounding less bothered than he looked. Hed been getting up periodically, smoothing his jacket collar, shooting his cuffs, checking his tie. That he was wearing a jacket in the studio at all was indicative of his state of mind. The only other session he ever smartened up for was when the reader was Prince Philip.

Anyway, he added, standing up again, he asked me nicely so I said yes.

Starfucker Frenchie called out genially through the open door of the studio.

We heard the lift draw up just then, always heralding its own arrival with such a resounding thud that the rates for the studio nearest to the lift-shaft were significantly lower than for the other two studios on the same floor.

Here we go, Graham said, nudging me to get up too.

But when the lift door slid back it was the receptionist who stepped out, looking less than pleased with the early start. I sat down again and Graham went back to shooting his cuffs.

Audiobooks were known as talking books or books-on-cassette in those days, the pre-digital age, and Graham had started the whole trade. He devised the two-cassette, three-hour abridged reading as a product that was marketable at the price of a paperback and would suit factory requirements in production C90 cassettes being the longest that were reliable for copying from the master tapes then pitched the first six titles to EMI in the late seventies. The new product took off at speed, especially once Walkmans and car cassette players arrived, and has continued its acceleration from analogue to digital to todays download. What is currently the vast catalogue at Audible was originally just Graham Goodwin and a great idea.