The Honorable Schoolboy

by John le Carré

  Guillam came back eventually, but only to sweep Molly off on leave, and he refused to say anything at all. Those who saw him on his swift passage through the fifth floor said he looked shot-about, and obviously in need of a break. Also he seemed to have had an accident to his collar-bone; his right shoulder was all strapped up. From the housekeepers it became known that he had spent a couple of days in the care of the Circus leech at his private clinic in Manchester Square. But still there was no Smiley, and the housekeepers showed only a steely bonhomie when asked when he would return. The housekeepers in these cases become the Star Chamber, feared but needed. Unobtrusively Karla’s portrait disappeared, the wits said for cleaning.

  What was odd, and in a way rather terrible, was that none of them thought to drop in on the little house in Bywater Street and simply ring the doorbell. If they had done so they would have found Smiley there, most likely in his dressing-gown, either clearing up plates or preparing food he didn’t eat. Sometimes, usually at dusk, he took himself for a solitary walk in the park and peered at people as if he half recognised them, so that they peered in return, and then looked down. Or he would go and sit himself in one of the cheaper cafés in the King’s Road, taking a book for company and sweet tea for refreshment—for he had abandoned his good intentions about saccharin for his waistline. They would have noticed that he spent a deal of time looking at his hands, and polishing his spectacles on his tie, or re-reading the letter Ann had left for him, which was very long, but only because of repetitions.

  Lacon called on him and so did Enderby, and once Martello came along with them, dressed in his London character again; for everyone agreed, and none with greater sincerity than Smiley, that in the interest of the service the hand-over should be as smooth and painless as possible. Smiley made certain requests regarding staff and these were carefully noted by Lacon, who let him understand that toward the Circus—if toward no one else—Treasury was at present in a spending mood. In the secret world at least, sterling was on the up. It was not merely the success of the Dolphin affair which accounted for this change of heart, Lacon said. The American enthusiasm for Enderby’s appointment had been overwhelming. It had been felt even at the highest diplomatic levels. “Spontaneous applause” was how Lacon described it.

  “Saul really knows how to talk to them,” he said.

  “Oh, does he. Ah, good. Well, good,” Smiley said and bucked his head in approval, as the deaf do.

  Even when Enderby confided to Smiley that he proposed to appoint Sam Collins as his head of operations, Smiley showed nothing but courtesy toward the suggestion. Sam was a hustler, Enderby explained, and hustlers were what Langley liked these days.

  “Ah, yes. No doubt,” said Smiley.

  The two men agreed that Roddy Martindale, though he had bags of entertainment value, was not cut out for the game. Old Roddy really was too queer, said Enderby, and the Minister was scared stiff of him. Nor did he exactly go down swimmingly with the Americans, even the ones that happened to be that way themselves. Also, Enderby was a bit chary of taking in any more Etonians. Gave the wrong impression.

  A week later the housekeepers reopened Sam’s old room on the fifth floor and removed the furniture. Collins’s ghost laid for good, said certain unwise voices with relish. Then on the Monday an ornate desk arrived, with a red leather top, and several fake hunting prints from the walls of Sam’s club, which was in the process of being taken over by one of the larger gambling syndicates, to the satisfaction of all parties.

  Little Fawn was not seen again. Not even when several of the more muscular London outstations were revived, including the Brixton scalp-hunters, to whom he had formerly belonged, and the Acton lamplighters under Toby Esterhase. But he was not missed either. Like Sam Collins somehow, he had stalked the story without ever quite belonging to it; but unlike Sam, he stayed in the thickets when it ended, and never reappeared.

  To Sam Collins, on his first day back in harness, fell the task of breaking the sad news of Jerry’s death. He did it in the rumpus room, just a small, unaffected speech, and everyone agreed he did it well. They had not thought he had it in him.

  “For fifth-floor ears only,” he told them. His audience was stunned, then proud. Connie wept and tried to claim Jerry as another of Karla’s victims, but she was held back in this for want of information about who or what had killed him. It was operational, went the word, and it was noble.

  Back in Hong Kong, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club showed much initial concern for its missing children Luke and Westerby. Thanks to heavy lobbying by its members, a full-scale confidential enquiry was set up, under the chairmanship of the vigilant Superintendent Rockhurst, to solve the double riddle of their disappearance. The authorities promised full publication of all findings, and the United States Consul General offered five thousand dollars of his own money to anyone coming forward with helpful information. As a gesture to local feeling he included Jerry Westerby’s name in the offer.

  The two became known as “the missing newsmen,” and suggestions of a disgraceful attachment between them were rampant. Luke’s bureau matched the five-thousand-dollar figure, and the dwarf, though he was inconsolable, entered a strong bid to have the moneys paid to him. It was he, after all, working on both fronts at once, who had learned from Deathwish that the Cloudview Road apartment, which Luke had last used, had been redecorated from floor to ceiling before the Rocker’s sharp-eyed investigators got round to visiting it. Who ordered this? Who paid? Nobody knew. It was the dwarf also who collected firsthand reports that Jerry had been seen at Kai Tak airport interviewing Japanese package tourists. But the Rocker’s committee of enquiry was obliged to reject these reports. The Japanese concerned were “willing but unreliable witnesses,” they said, when it came to identifying a round-eye who sprang at them after a long journey.

  As to Luke—well, the way he had been going, they said, he was heading for some kind of breakdown anyway. The knowing spoke of amnesia brought on by alcohol and fast living. After a while even the best stories grow cold. Rumours went out that the two men had been seen hunting together during the Hué collapse—or was it Danang?—and drinking together in Saigon. Another had them sitting side by side on the waterfront at Manila.

  “Holding hands?” the dwarf asked.

  “Worse” was the reply.

  The Rocker’s name was also in wide circulation, thanks to his success in a recent spectacular narcotics trial mounted with the help of the American Drug Enforcement Administration. Several Chinese and a glamorous English adventuress, a heroin carrier, were featured, and though as usual the Mr. Big was never brought to justice, it was said the Rocker came within an ace of nailing him. “Our tough but honest trouble-shooter,” wrote the South China Morning Post in an editorial praising his astuteness. “Hong Kong could do with more like him.”

  For other distractions the Club could turn to the dramatic reopening of High Haven behind a twenty-foot floodlit wire perimeter patrolled by guard dogs. But there were no free lunches any more and the joke soon faded.

  As to old Craw, for months he was not seen and not spoken of. Till one night he appeared, looking much aged and soberly dressed, and sat in his former corner gazing into space. A few were still left who recognised him. The Canadian cowboy suggested a rubber of Shanghai bowling, but he declined. Then a strange thing happened. An argument broke out concerning a silly point of Club protocol. Nothing serious at all: whether some item of tradition about signing chits was still useful to the Club’s running. As trifling as that. But for some reason it made the old fellow absolutely furious. Rising to his feet, he stomped toward the lifts, tears pouring down his face, while he hurled one insult after another at them.

  “Don’t change anything,” he advised them, shaking his stick in fury. “The old order changeth not, let it all run on. You won’t stop the wheel—not together, not divided—you snivelling, arselicking novices! You’re a bunch of suicidal tits to try!”

  Past it, they agreed, as the doors
closed on him. Poor fellow. Embarrassing.

  Was there really a conspiracy against Smiley, of the scale that Guillam supposed? If so, how was it affected by Westerby’s own maverick intervention? No information is available and even those who trust each other well are not disposed to discuss the question. Certainly there was a secret understanding between Enderby and Martello, that the Cousins should have first bite of Nelson—as well as joint credit for procuring him—against their championship of Enderby for chief. Certainly Lacon and Collins, in their vastly different spheres, were party to it. But at what point they proposed to seize Nelson for themselves and by what means—for instance, the more conventional recourse of a concerted démarche at ministerial level in London—will probably never be known. But there can be no doubt, as it turned out, that Westerby was a blessing in disguise. He gave them the excuse they were looking for.

  And did Smiley know of the conspiracy, deep down? Was he aware of it, and did he secretly even welcome the solution? Peter Guillam, who has since had two good years in exile in Brixton to consider his opinion, insists that the answer to both questions is a firm yes. There is a letter George wrote to Ann Smiley—he says—in the heat of the crisis, presumably in one of the long waiting periods in the isolation ward. Guillam leans heavily on it for his theory. Ann showed it to him when he called on her in Wiltshire, in the hope of bringing about a reconciliation, and though the mission failed, she produced it from her handbag in the course of their talk. Guillam memorised a part, he claims, and wrote it down as soon as he got back to the car. Certainly the style flies a lot higher than anything Guillam would aspire to for himself:

  I honestly do wonder, without wishing to be morbid, how I reached this present pass. So far as I can ever remember of my youth, I chose the secret road because it seemed to lead straightest and furthest toward my country’s goal. The enemy in those days was someone we could point at and read about in the papers. Today, all I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole of life in terms of conspiracy. That is the sword I have lived by, and as I look round me now I see it is the sword I shall die by as well. These people terrify me, but I am one of them. If they stab me in the back, then at least that is the judgment of my peers.

  As Guillam points out, the letter was essentially from Smiley’s blue period.

  These days, he says, the old boy is much more himself. Occasionally he and Ann have lunches, and Guillam personally is convinced that they will simply get together one day and that will be that. But George never mentions Westerby. And nor does Guillam, for George’s sake.