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Chapter 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Ideology and Morality
Alienation and Connection
Identity and Autonomy
Loyalty and Betrayal
Elites and Others
Summary
Analysis
A week later, Leamas suddenly stops coming to the library. Distressed, Liz wants to go check on him, even though she knows he will not be happy that she is tracking him down. She reflects that he said he would tell her before he left and goes to his flat anyway. At the door of his flat, she hears him groan. She gets a grocer to break down the door and finds him feverish in bed. Afterwards she comes every day for six days, and cooks and cleans and feels she has never been so happy in her life. As they lie in bed together, Leamas grabs Liz’s hair, and she laughs. She asks him if he loves her. He says he does not believe in fairy tales.
When Leamas gets sick and Liz takes care of him, he lets her into his life even more than before. She becomes a part of his daily life and, although he does not say that he loves her or promise her anything, she feels that she loves him and that they have a future together, especially because he makes gestures that suggest real intimacy, like playfully grabbing her hair, which show that there is more to his feelings than he lets on.
Themes
One night Liz gets to his house and finds Leamas dressed, but not shaved. This strikes her as odd. There are also small items like a radio missing from the apartment. They drink a bottle of wine, but Liz senses that something is wrong. She asks him if this is the end. Leamas takes her hands and kisses her in a different way than he ever has before, and tells her things she hardly understands, then bids her goodbye and tells her not to follow him.
Although he does not fill her in on the mission he is about to go on, Leamas clearly opens up to Liz more than he ever meant to. She is also in the apartment to notice the odd signals that something is about to change: he has gotten rid of his few more expensive possessions and has gotten out of bed, but seemingly deliberately not shaved. These are important details the reader is meant to pick up on.
Themes
The next morning, Leamas goes to the grocer and asks him for credit. He asks rudely, after his groceries are packed into a bag. Ford the grocer says he can only give credit to those who have shown him a bank slip, and Leamas retorts that most of the grocer’s customers do not even have bank accounts. When the grocer tries to kick Leamas out of the shop, Leamas punches him twice, fracturing Ford’s cheekbone and dislocating his jaw. The incident is written about in the daily press.
Leamas does not have a reputation for being creditworthy. Based on the small but strange changes that Liz noticed in Leamas’s apartment the night before, it seems likely that punching Ford is a part of the plan that Leamas worked out with Control, not a random action taken in anger.
Themes
