The Honorable Schoolboy

by John le Carré

  The result appeared in its fullest version in a Sydney morning newspaper, which was beyond the long arm of Anglo-American censorship. By common consent, it recalled the master’s vintage years. It ran to two thousand words. Typically, he did not lead with the High Haven story at all, but with the “mysteriously empty wing” of the British Embassy in Bangkok, which till a month ago had housed a strange body called the Seato Coordination Unit, as well as a Visa Section boasting six second secretaries. Was it the pleasures of the Soho massage parlours, the old Australian enquired sweetly, which lured the Thais to Britain in such numbers that six second secretaries were needed to handle their visa applications? Strange too, he mused, that since their departure and the closure of that wing, long queues of aspirant travellers had not formed outside the Embassy.

  Gradually—he wrote at ease, but never carelessly—a surprising picture unfolded before his readers. He called British intelligence “the Circus.” He said the name derived from the address of that organisation’s secret headquarters, which overlooked a famous intersection of London streets. The Circus had not merely pulled out of High Haven, he said, but out of Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, Tokyo, Manila, and Djakarta as well. And Seoul. Even solitary Taiwan was not immune, where an unsung British Resident was discovered to have shed three clerk-drivers and two secretarial assistants only a week before the article went to press.

  “A hoods’ Dunkirk,” Craw called it, “in which charter DC-3s replaced the Kentish fishing fleets.”

  What had prompted such an exodus? Craw offered several nimble theories. Were we witnessing yet one more cut in British government spending? The writer was sceptical. In times of travail, Britain’s tendency was to rely more, not less, on spies. Her entire Empire history urged her to do so. The thinner her trade routes, the more elaborate her clandestine efforts to protect them. The more feeble her colonial grip, the more desperate her subversion of those who sought to loosen it. No: Britain might be on the breadline, but the spies would be the last of her luxuries to go. Craw set up other possibilities and knocked them down. A gesture of détente toward mainland China? he suggested, echoing the cowboy’s point. Certainly Britain would do anything under the sun to keep Hong Kong clear of Mao’s anti-colonial zeal—short of giving up her spies.

  Thus old Craw arrived at the theory he liked best: “Right across the Far Eastern chequerboard,” he wrote, “the Circus is performing what is known in the spy-trade as a duck-dive.”

  But why?

  The writer now quoted his “senior American prebends of the intelligence church militant in Asia.” American intelligence agents generally, he said, and not just in Asia, were “hopping mad about lax security in the British organisations.” They were hopping highest about the recent discovery of a top Russian spy—he threw in the correct trade name of “mole”—inside the Circus’s London headquarters: a British traitor, whom they declined to name, but who, in the words of the senior prebends, had “compromised every Anglo-American clandestine operation worth a dime for the last twenty years.” Where was the mole now? the writer had asked his sources. To which, with undiminished spleen, they had replied: “Dead. In Russia. And hopefully both.”

  Craw had never wanted for a wrap-up, but this one, to Luke’s fond eye, had a real sense of ceremony about it. It was almost an assertion of life itself, if only of the secret life:

  “Is Kim, the boy spy, vanished for good, then, from the legends of the East?” he asked. “Shall the English pundit never again stain his skin, slip into native costume, and silently take his place beside the village fires? Do not fear,” he insisted, “the British will be back! The time-honoured sport of spot-the-spook will be with us once again! The spy is not dead: he sleepeth.”

  The piece appeared. In the Club, it was fleetingly admired, envied, forgotten. A local English-language paper with strong American connections reprinted it in full, with the result that the mayfly, after all, enjoyed another day of life. The old boy’s charity benefit, they said: a doffing of the cap before he passes from the stage. Then the overseas network of the B.B.C. ran it, and finally the Colony’s own torpid radio network ran a version of the B.B.C.’s version, and for a full day there was debate about whether Big Moo had decided to take the muzzle off the local news services. Yet even with this protracted billing, nobody—not Luke, not even the dwarf—saw fit to wonder how the devil the old man had known the back way into High Haven.

  Which merely proved, if proof were ever needed, that journalists are no quicker than anybody else at spotting what goes on under their noses. It was a typhoon Saturday, after all.

  Within the Circus itself, as Craw had correctly called the seat of British intelligence, reactions to Craw’s piece varied according to how much was known by those who were doing the reacting. In Housekeeping Section, for instance, which was responsible for such tatters of cover as the Circus could gather to itself these days, the old boy released a wave of pent-up fury that can only be understood by those who have tasted the atmosphere of a secret department under heavy siege. Even otherwise tolerant spirits became savagely retributive. Treachery! Breach of contract! Block his pension! Put him on the watch list! Prosecution the moment he returns to England!

  Down the market a little, those less rabid about their security took a kindlier view, though it was still uninformed. Well, well, they said a little ruefully, that was the way of it; name us a joe who didn’t blow his top now and then, and specially one who’d been left in ignorance for as long as poor old Craw had. And after all, he’d disclosed nothing that wasn’t generally available, now had he? Really, those housekeeper people should show a little moderation. Look how they went for poor Molly Meakin the other night, sister to Mike and hardly out of ribbons, just because she left a bit of blank stationery in her waste basket!

  Only those at the inmost point saw things differently. To them, old Craw’s article was a discreet masterpiece of disinforma-tion; George Smiley at his best, they said. Clearly, the story had to come out, and all were agreed that censorship at any time was objectionable. Much better therefore to let it come out in the manner of our choosing. The right timing, the right amount, the right tone: a lifetime’s experience, they agreed, in every brushstroke. But that was not a view which passed outside their set.

  Back in Hong Kong—clearly, said the Shanghai Bowlers, the old boy, like the dying, had had a prophetic instinct of this—Craw’s High Haven story turned out to be his swan-song. A month after it appeared, he had retired, not from the Colony but from his trade as a scribbler and from the Island too. Renting a cottage in the New Territories, he announced that he proposed to expire under a slant-eye heaven. For the Bowlers, he might as well have chosen Alaska. It was just too damn far, they said, to drive back when you were drunk. There was a rumour—untrue, since Craw’s appetites did not run in that direction—that he had got himself a pretty Chinese boy as a companion. That was the dwarf’s work: he did not like to be scooped by old men.

  Only Luke refused to put him out of mind. Luke drove out to see him one mid-morning after night-shift. For the hell of it, and because the old buzzard meant a lot to him. Craw was happy as the day is long, he reported; quite his former vile self, but a bit dazed to be bearded by Luke without warning. He had a friend with him, not a Chinese boy, but a visiting fireman whom he introduced as George: a podgy, ill-sighted little body in very round spectacles who had apparently dropped in unexpectedly. Aside, Craw explained to Luke that this George was a back-room boy on a British newspaper syndicate he used to work for in the dark ages.

  “Handles the geriatric side, Your Grace. Taking a swing through Asia.”

  Whoever he was, it was clear that Craw stood in awe of the podgy man, for he even called him “Your Holiness.” Luke had felt he was intruding and left without getting drunk.

  So there it was: Thesinger’s moonlight flit; old Craw’s near death and resurrection; his swan-song in defiance of so much hidden censorship; Luke’s restless preoccupation with the secret world; the Cir
cus’s inspired exploitation of a necessary evil. Nothing planned but, as life would have it, a curtain-raiser to much that happened later. A typhoon Saturday; a ripple on the plunging, fetid, sterile, swarming pool that is Hong Kong; a bored chorus, still without a hero. And curiously, a few months afterwards, it fell once more to Luke, in his role of Shakespearean messenger, to announce the hero’s coming. The news came over the house wire while he was on stand-by, and he published it to a bored audience with his customary fervour.

  “Folks! Give ear! I have news! Jerry Westerby’s back on the beat, men! Heading out East again, hear me, stringing for that same damn comic!”

  “His Lordship,” the dwarf cried at once, in mock ecstasy. “A desh of blue blood, I say, to raise the vulgar tone! ’Oorah for quality, I say.” With a profane oath, he threw a napkin at the wine rack. “Jesus,” he said, and emptied Luke’s glass.

  2

  THE GREAT CALL

  On the afternoon the telegram arrived, Jerry Westerby was hacking at his typewriter on the shaded side of the balcony of his rundown farmhouse, a sack of old books dumped at his feet. The envelope was brought by the black-clad person of the postmistress, a craggy and ferocious peasant who, with the ebbing of traditional forces, had become the headman of the ragtag Tuscan hamlet. She was a wily creature, but today the drama of the occasion had the better of her, and despite the heat she fairly scampered up the arid track. In her ledger the historic moment of delivery was later put at six past five, which was a lie but gave it force. The real time was five exactly. Indoors, Westerby’s scrawny girl, whom the village called “the orphan,” was hammering at a stubborn piece of goat’s meat, vehemently, the way she attacked everything. The greedy eye of the postmistress spotted her at the open window and from a good way off: elbows stuck out all ways and her top teeth jammed onto her lower lip—scowling, no doubt, as usual.

  Whore, thought the postmistress passionately; now you have what you have been waiting for!

  The radio was blaring Verdi; the orphan would hear only classical music, as the whole village had learned from the scene she had made at the tavern the evening when the blacksmith tried to choose rock music on the juke-box. She had thrown a pitcher at him. So what with the Verdi, and the typewriter, and the goat, said the postmistress, the row was so deafening that even an Italian would have heard it.

  Jerry sat like a locust on the wood floor, she recalled—maybe he had one cushion—and he was using the book-sack as a footstool. He sat splay-footed, typing between his knees. He had bits of fly-blown manuscript spread round him, which were weighted with stones against the red-hot breezes that plagued his scalded hilltop, and a wicker flask of the local red at his elbow, no doubt for the moments, known even to the greatest artists, when natural inspiration failed him. He typed the eagle’s way, she told them later amid admiring laughter: much circling before he swooped.

  He wore what he always wore, whether he was loafing fruitlessly around his bit of paddock tilling the dozen useless olive trees which the rogue Marcello had palmed off on him, or paddling down to the village with the orphan to shop, or sitting in the tavern over a sharp one before embarking on the long climb home: buckskin boots, which the orphan never brushed and were consequently worn shiny at the toe; ankle socks, which she never washed; a filthy shirt, once white; and grey shorts, which looked as though they had been frayed by hostile dogs and which an honest woman would long ago have mended. And he greeted the postmistress with that familiar burry rush of words, at once bashful and enthusiastic, which she did not understand in detail, but only generally, like a news broadcast, and could copy, through the black gaps of her decrepit teeth, with surprising flashes of fidelity.

  “Mama Stefano, gosh, super, must be boiling. Here, sport, wet your whistle,” he exclaimed, while he slopped down the brick steps with a glass of wine for her, grinning like a schoolboy, which was his nickname in the village: the schoolboy—a telegram for the schoolboy, urgent from London! In nine months, no more than a wad of paperback books and the weekly scrawl from his child, and now out of a blue sky this monument of a telegram, short like a demand, but fifty words prepaid for the reply! Imagine, fifty, the cost alone! Only natural that as many as possible should have tried their hand at reading it.

  They had choked at first over “Honourable.” “The Honourable Gerald Westerby.” Why? The baker, who had been a prisoner of war in Birmingham, produced a battered dictionary: “having honour, title of courtesy given to the son of a nobleman.” Of course. Signora Sanders, who lived across the valley, had already declared the schoolboy to be of noble blood. The second son of a press baron, she had said: Lord Westerby, a newspaper proprietor, dead. First the paper had died, then its owner—thus Signora Sanders, a wit; they had passed the joke round. Next “regret,” which was easy. So was “advise.” The postmistress was gratified to discover, against all expectation, how much good Latin the English had assimilated despite their decadence. The word “guardian” came harder, for it led to “protector,” thence inevitably to unsavoury jokes among the menfolk, which the postmistress angrily quelled.

  Till at last, step by step, the code was broken and the story out. The schoolboy had a guardian, meaning a substitute father. This guardian lay dangerously ill in hospital, demanding to see the schoolboy before he died. He wanted nobody else. Only Honourable Westerby would do. Quickly they filled in the rest of the picture for themselves: the sobbing family gathered at the bedside, the wife prominent and inconsolable, refined priests administering the last sacraments, valuables being locked away, and all over the house—in corridors, back kitchens—the same whispered words, “Westerby—where is Honourable Westerby?”

  Lastly the telegram’s signatories remained to be interpreted. There were three and they called themselves “solicitors,” a word which triggered one more burst of dirty innuendo before “notary” was arrived at, and faces abruptly hardened. Holy Maria. If three notaries were involved, then so were large sums of money. And if all three had insisted upon signing, and prepaid that fifty-word reply to boot, then not just large but mountainous sums! Acres! Wagonloads! No wonder the orphan had clung to him so—the whore! Suddenly everyone was clamouring to make the hill-climb. Guido’s Lambretta would take him as far as the water tank; Mario could run like a fox; Manuela, the chandler’s girl, had a tender eye—the shadow of bereavement sat well on her. Repulsing all volunteers, and handing Mario a sharp cuff for his presumption, the postmistress locked the till and left her idiot son to mind the shop, though it meant twenty sweltering minutes and—if that cursed furnace of a wind was blowing up there—a mouthful of red dust for her toil.

  They had not made enough of Jerry at first. She regretted this now as she laboured through the olive groves, but the error had its reasons. First, he had arrived in winter when the cheap buyers come. He arrived alone, but wearing the furtive look of someone who has recently dumped a lot of human cargo, such as children, wives, mothers; the postmistress had known men in her time, and she had seen that wounded smile too often not to recognise it in Jerry. “I am married but free,” it said, and neither claim was true.

  Second, the scented English major had brought him, a known pig who ran a property agency for exploiting peasants—yet another reason to spurn the schoolboy. The scented major showed him several desirable farmhouses, including one in which the postmistress herself had an interest—also, by coincidence, the finest—but the schoolboy settled instead for the pederast Franco’s hovel stuck on this forsaken hilltop she was now ascending. The devil’s hill, they called it; the devil came up here when hell became too cool for him. Slick Franco, of all people, who watered his milk and his wine and spent his Sundays simpering with popinjays in the town square! The inflated price was half a million lire, of which the scented major tried to steal a third, merely because there was a contract.

  “And everyone knows why the major favoured slick Franco,” she hissed through her frothing teeth, and her pack of supporters made knowing “tch-tch” noises at each ot
her, till she again ordered them to shut up.

  Also, as a shrewd woman, she distrusted something in Jerry’s make-up. A hardness buried in the lavishness. She had seen it with Englishmen before, but the schoolboy was in a class by himself, and she distrusted him; she held him dangerous through his restless charm. Today, of course, one could put down those early failings to the eccentricity of a noble English writer, but at the time the postmistress had shown him no such indulgence.

  “Wait till the summer,” she had warned her customers in a snarl, soon after his first shambling visit to her shop—pasta, bread, flykiller. “In the summer he’ll find out what he’s bought, the cretin.” In the summer, slick Franco’s mice would storm the bedroom, Franco’s fleas would devour him alive, and Franco’s pederastic hornets would chase him round the garden and the devil’s red-hot wind would burn his parts to a frazzle. The water would run out, he would be forced to defecate in the fields like an animal. And when winter came round again the scented pig major could sell the house to another fool, at a loss to everyone but himself.

  As to celebrity, in those first weeks the schoolboy showed not a shred of it. He never bargained, he had never heard of discounts, there was not even pleasure in robbing him. And when, in the shop, she drove him beyond his few miserable phrases of kitchen Italian, he did not raise his voice and bawl at her like the real English but shrugged happily and helped himself to whatever he wanted. A writer, they said; well, who was not? Very well, he bought quires of foolscap from her. She ordered more, he bought them. Bravo. He possessed books: a mildewed lot, by the look of them, which he carried in a grey jute sack like a poacher’s, and before the orphan came they would see him striding off into the middle of nowhere, the book-sack slung over his shoulder, for a reading session. Guido had happened on him in the Contessa’s forest, perched on a log like a toad and leafing through them one after another, as if they were all one book and he had lost his place. He also possessed a typewriter of which the filthy cover was a patchwork of worn-out luggage labels: bravo again. Just as any long-hair who buys a paint pot calls himself an artist: that sort of writer. In the spring, the orphan came and the postmistress hated her too.