The Honourable Schoolboy

by John le Carré

  'And you still have not received any direct word of her?' Smiley enquired meekly. 'Not a letter, not even that postcard to Ian, nothing?'

  'Not a sausage.'

  Smiley wrote. 'Mr Worthington, to your knowledge, has your wife ever used another name?' For some reason the question threatened to annoy Peter Worthington quite considerably. He flared, as if he were responding to impertinence in class, and his finger shot up to command silence. But Smiley hurried on. 'Her maiden name, for instance? Perhaps an abbreviation of her married one, which in a non-English speaking country could create difficulties with the natives -'

  'Never. Never, never. You have to understand basic human behavioural psychology. She was a text-book case. She couldn't wait to get rid of her father's name. One very good reason why she married me was to have a new father and a new name. Once she'd got it, why should she give it up? It was the same with her romancing, her wild, wild story telling. She was trying to escape from her environment. Having done so, having succeeded, having found me, and the stability which I represent, she naturally no longer needed to be someone else. She was someone else. She was fulfilled. So why go?'

  Again Smiley took his time. He looked at Peter Worthington as if in uncertainty, he looked at his file, he turned to the last entry, tipped his spectacles and read it, obviously not by any means for the first time.

  'Mr Worthington. if our information is correct, and we have good reason to believe it is — I'd say our estimate was a conservative eighty per cent sure, I'd go that far — your wife is at present using the surname Worth. And she is using a forename with a German spelling, curiously enough, L-I-ES-E. Pronounced not Liza, I am told, but Leesa. I wondered whether you were in a position to confirm or deny this suggestion, also the suggestion that she is actively connected with a Far Eastern jewellery business with ramifications extending to Hong Kong and other major centres. She appears to be living in a style of affluence and good social appearance, moving in quite high circles.'

  Peter Worthington absorbed very little of this, apparently. He had taken a position on the floor, but seemed unable to lower his knees. Cracking his fingers once more, he glared impatiently at the music stands crowded like skeletons into the corner of the room, and was already trying to speak before Smiley had ended.

  'Look. This is what I want. That whoever approaches her should make the right kind of point. I don't want any passionate appeals, no appeals to conscience. All that's out. Just a straight statement of what's offered, and she's welcome. That's all.'

  Smiley took refuge in the file.

  'Well before we come to that, if we could just continue going through the facts, Mr Worthington -'

  'There aren't facts,' said Peter Worthington, thoroughly irritated again. 'There are just two people. Well, three with Ian. There aren't facts in a thing like this. Not in any marriage. That's what life teaches us. Relationships are entirely subjective. I'm sitting on the floor. That's a fact. You're writing. That's a fact. Her mother was behind it. That's a fact. Follow me? Her father is a raving criminal lunatic. That's a fact. Elizabeth is not the daughter of the Queen of Sheba or the natural grandchild of Lloyd George. Whatever she may say. She has not got a degree in Sanskrit, which she chose to tell the headmistress who still believes it to this day. When are we going to see your charming Oriental wife again? She knows no more about jewellery than I do. That's a fact.'

  'Dates and places,' Smiley murmured to the file. 'If I could just check those for a start.'

  'Absolutely,' said Peter Worthington handsomely, and from a green tin tea-pot refilled Smiley's cup. Blackboard chalk was worked into his large fingertips. It was like the grey in his hair.

  'It was really the mother that messed her up, I'm afraid, though,' he went on, in the same entirely reasonable tone. 'All that urgency about putting her on the stage, then ballet, then trying to get her into television. Her mother just wanted Elizabeth to be admired. As a substitute for herself, of course. It's perfectly natural, psychologically. Read Berne. Read anyone. That's just her way of defining her individuality. Through her daughter. One must respect that those things happen. I understand all that, now. She's okay, I'm okay, the world's okay, Ian's okay, then suddenly she's off.'

  'Do you happen to know whether she communicates with her mother, incidentally?'

  Peter Worthington shook his head.

  'Absolutely not, I'm afraid. She'd seen through her entirely by the time she left. Broken with her completely. The one hurdle I can safely say I helped her over. My one contribution to her happiness -'

  'I don't think we have her mother's address here,' said Smiley, leafing doggedly through the pages of the file. 'You don't -'

  Peter Worthington gave it to him rather loud, at dictation speed.

  'And now the dates and places,' Smiley repeated. 'Please.'

  She had left him two years ago. Peter Worthington repeated not just the date but the hour. There had been no scene — Peter Worthington didn't hold with scenes — Elizabeth had had too many with her mother — they'd had a happy evening, as a matter of fact, particularly happy. For a diversion he'd taken her to the kebab house.

  'Perhaps you spotted it as you came down the road? The Knossos, it's called, next door to the Express Dairy?'

  They'd had wine and a real blow-out, and Andrew Wiltshire, the new English master, had come along to make a three. Elizabeth had introduced this Andrew to Yoga only a few weeks before. They had gone to classes together at the Sobell Centre and become great buddies.

  'She was really into Yoga,' he said with an approving nod of the grizzled head. 'It was a real interest for her. Andrew was just the sort of chap to bring her out. Extrovert, unreflective, physical... perfect for her,' he said determinedly.

  The three of them had returned to the house at ten, because of the babysitter, he said: himself, Andrew and Elizabeth. He'd made coffee, they'd listened to music, and around eleven Elizabeth gave them both a kiss and said she was going over to her mother's to see how she was.

  'I had understood she had broken with her mother,' Smiley objected mildly, but Peter Worthington chose not to hear.

  'Of course, kisses mean nothing with her,' Peter Worthington explained, as a matter of information. 'She kisses everybody, the pupils, her girlfriends — she'd kiss the dustman, anyone. She's very outgoing. Once again, she can't leave anyone alone. I mean every relationship has to be a conquest. With her child, the waiter at the restaurant... then when she's won them, they bore her. Naturally. She went upstairs, looked at Ian and I've no doubt used the moment to collect her passport and the housekeeping money from the bedroom. She left a note saying sorry and I haven't seen her since. Nor's Ian,' said Peter Worthington.

  'Er, has Andrew heard from her?' Smiley enquired, with another tilt of his spectacles.

  'Why should he have done?'

  'You said they were friends, Mr Worthington. Sometimes third parties become intermediaries in these affairs.'

  On the word affair, he looked up and found himself staring directly into Peter Worthington's honest, abject eyes: and for a moment the two masks slipped simultaneously. Was Smiley observing? Or was he being observed? Perhaps it was only his embattled imagination or did he sense, in himself and in this weak boy across the room, the stirring of an embarrassed kinship? 'There should be a league for deceived husbands who feel sorry for themselves. You've all got the same boring, awful charity!' Ann had once flung at him. You never knew your Elizabeth, Smiley thought, still staring at Peter Worthington: and I never knew my Ann.

  'That's all I can remember really,' said Peter Worthington. 'After that, it's a blank.'

  'Yes,' said Smiley, inadvertently taking refuge in Worthington's repeated assertion. 'Yes, I understand.'

  He rose to leave. A little boy was standing in the doorway. He had a shrouded, hostile stare. A placid heavy woman stood behind him, holding him by both wrists above his head, so that he seemed to swing from her, though really he was standing by himself.

  'Look, there's
Daddy,' said the woman, gazing at Worthington with brown, attaching eyes.

  'Jenny, hi. This is Mr Standfast from the Foreign Office.'

  'How do you do?' said Smiley politely and after a few minutes' meaningless chatter, and a promise of further information in due course, should any become available, quietly took his leave.

  'Oh and happy Christmas,' Peter Worthington called from the steps.

  'Ah yes. Yes indeed. And to you too. To all of you. Happy indeed, and many more of them.'

  In the transport café they put in sugar unless you asked them not to, and each time the Indian woman made a cup, the tiny kitchen filled with steam. In twos and threes, not talking, men ate breakfast, lunch or supper, depending on the point they had reached in their separate days. Here also Christmas was approaching. Six greasy coloured glass balls dangled over the counter for festive cheer, and a net stocking appealed for help for spastic kids. Smiley stared at an evening paper, not reading it. In a corner not twelve feet from him little Fawn had taken up the babysitter's classic position. His dark eyes smiled agreeably on the diners and on the doorway. He lifted his cup with his left hand, while his right idled close to his chest. Did Karla sit like this? Smiley wondered. Did Karla take refuge among the unsuspecting? Control had. Control had made a whole second, third or fourth life for himself in a two-roomed upstairs flat, beside the Western bypass, under the plain name of Matthews, not filed with housekeepers as an alias. Well, 'whole' life was an exaggeration. But he had kept clothes there, and a woman, Mrs Matthews herself, even a cat. And taken golf lessons at an artisans' club on Thursday mornings early, while from his desk in the Circus he poured scorn on the great unwashed, and on golf, and on love, and on any other piffling human pursuit which secretly might tempt him. He had even rented a garden allotment, Smiley remembered, down by a railway siding. Mrs Matthews had insisted on driving Smiley to see it in her groomed Morris car on the day he broke the sad news to her. It was as big a mess as anyone else's allotment: standard roses, winter vegetables they hadn't used, a toolshed crammed with hosepipes and seedboxes.

  Mrs Matthews was a widow, pliant but capable.

  'All I want to know,' she had said, having read the figure on the cheque. 'All I want to be sure of, Mr Standfast: is he really dead, or has he gone back to his wife?'

  'He is really dead,' Smiley assured her, and she believed him gratefully. He forbore from adding that Control's wife had gone to her grave eleven years ago, still believing her husband was something in the Coal Board.

  Did Karla have to scheme in committees? Fight cabals, deceive the stupid, flatter the clever, look in distorting mirrors of the Peter Worthington variety, all in order to do the job?

  He glanced at his watch, then at Fawn. The coinbox stood next to the lavatory. But when Smiley asked the proprietor for change, he refused it on the grounds that he was too busy.

  'Hand it over, you awkward bastard!' shouted a long-distance driver all in leather. The proprietor briskly obliged.

  'How did it go?' Guillam asked, taking the call on the direct line.

  'Good background,' Smiley replied.

  'Hooray,' said Guillam.

  Another of the charges later levelled against Smiley was that he wasted time on menial matters, instead of delegating them to his subordinates.

  There are blocks of flats near the Town and Country Golf Course on the northern fringes of London that are like the superstructure of permanently sinking ships. They lie at the end of long lawns where the flowers are never quite in flower, the husbands man the lifeboats all in a flurry at about eight-thirty in the morning and the women and children spend the day keeping afloat until their menfolk return too tired to sail anywhere. These buildings were built in the thirties and have stayed a grubby white ever since. Their oblong, steelframed windows look on to the lush billows of the links, where weekday women in eyeshades wander like lost souls. One such block is called Arcady Mansions, and the Pellings lived in number seven, with a cramped view of the ninth green which vanished when the beeches were in leaf. When Smiley rang the bell he heard nothing except the thin electric tinkle: no footsteps, no dog, no music. The door opened and a man's cracked voice said 'Yes?' from the darkness, but it belonged to a woman. She was tall and stooping. A cigarette hung from her hand.

  'My name is Oates,' Smiley said, offering a big green card encased in cellophane. To a different cover belongs a different name.

  'Oh it's you is it? Come in. Dine, see the show. You sounded younger on the telephone,' she boomed in a curdled voice striving for refinement. 'He's in here. He thinks you're a spy,' she said, squinting at the green card. 'You're not, are you?'

  'No,' said Smiley. 'I'm afraid not. Just a snooper.'

  The flat was all corridors. She led the way, leaving a vapour trail of gin. One leg slurred as she walked, and her right arm was stiff. Smiley guessed she had had a stroke. She dressed as if nobody had ever admired her height or sex. And as if she didn't care. She wore flat shoes and a mannish pullover with a belt that made her shoulders broad.

  'He says he's never heard of you. He says he's looked you up in the telephone directory and you don't exist.'

  'We like to be discreet,' Smiley said.

  She pushed open a door. 'He exists,' she reported loudly, ahead of her into the room. 'And he's not a spy, he's a snooper.'

  In a far chair, a man was reading the Daily Telegraph, holding it in front of his face so that Smiley only saw the bald head, and the dressing gown, and the short crossed legs ending in leather bedroom slippers; but somehow he knew at once that Mr Pelling was the kind of small man who would only ever marry tall women. The room carried everything he could need in order to survive alone. His television, his bed, his gas fire, a table to eat at and an easel for painting by numbers. On the wall hung an over-coloured portrait photograph of a very beautiful girl with an inscription scribbled diagonally across one corner, in the way that film stars wish love to the unglamorous. Smiley recognised it as Elizabeth Worthington. He had seen a lot of photographs already.

  'Mr Oates, meet Nunc,' she said, and all but curtsied.

  The Daily Telegraph came down with the slowness of a garrison flag, revealing an aggressive, glittering little face with thick brows and managerial spectacles.

  'Yes. Well just who are you precisely?' said Mr Pelling. 'Are you Secret Service or aren't you? Don't shilly shally, out with it and be done. I don't hold with snooping you see. What's that?' he demanded.

  'His card,' said Mrs Pelling, offering it. 'Green in hue.'

  'Oh, we're exchanging notes are we? I need a card too, then, Cess, don't I? Better get some printed, my dear. Slip down to Smith's, will you?'

  'Do you like tea?' Mrs Pelling asked, peering down at Smiley with her head on one side.

  'What are you giving him tea for?' Mr Pelling demanded, watching her plug in the kettle. 'He doesn't need tea. He's not a guest. He's not even Intelligence. I didn't ask him. Stay the week,' he said to Smiley. 'Move in if you like. Have her bed. Bullion Universal Security Advisers, my Aunt Fanny.'

  'He wants to talk about Lizzie, darling,' said Mrs Pelling, setting a tray for her husband. 'Now be a father for a change.'

  'Fat lot of good her bed would do you, mind,' said Mr Pelling, taking up his Telegraph again.

  'For those kind words,' said Mrs Pelling and gave a laugh. It consisted of two notes, like a birdcall, and was not meant to be funny. A disjointed silence followed.

  Mrs Pelling handed Smiley a cup of tea. Accepting it, he addressed himself to the back of Mr Pelling's newspaper. 'Sir, your daughter Elizabeth is being considered for an important appointment with a major overseas corporation. My organisation has been asked in confidence — as a normal but very necessary formality these days — to approach friends and relations in this country and obtain character references.'

  'That's us, dear,' Mrs Pelling explained, in case her husband hadn't understood.

  The newspaper came down with a snap. 'Are you suggesting my daughter is of bad ch
aracter? Is that what you're sitting here, drinking my tea, suggesting?'

  'No, sir,' said Smiley.

  'No, sir,' said Mrs Pelling, unhelpfully.

  A long silence followed, which Smiley was at no great pains to end. 'Mr Pelling,' he said finally, in a firm and patient voice. 'I understand that you spent many years in the Post Office, and rose to a high position.'

  'Many, many years,' Mrs Pelling agreed.

  'I worked,' said Mr Pelling from behind his newspaper once more. 'There's too much talk in the world. Not enough work done.'

  'Did you employ criminals in your department?'

  The newspaper rattled, then held still.

  'Or Communists?' said Smiley, equally gently.

  'If we did we damn soon got rid of them,' said Mr Pelling, and this time the newspaper stayed down.

  Mrs Pelling snapped her fingers. 'Like that,' she said.

  'Mr Pelling,' Smiley continued, in the same bedside manner, 'the position for which your daughter is being considered is with one of the major eastern companies. She will be specialising in air transport and her work will give her advance knowledge of large gold shipments to and from this country, as well as the movement of diplomatic couriers and classified mails. It carries an extremely high remuneration. I don't think it unreasonable — and I don't think you do — that your daughter should be subject to the same procedures as any other candidate for such a responsible — and desirable — post.'