The Honorable Schoolboy

by John le Carré

  “Oh, my Christ,” said Mrs. Pelling hopelessly.

  “Not your Christ. My Mellon. Take that down, Oates. Let me see you write it down. Mellon. The name of her commanding officer in the British Secret Service was M-e-l-l-o-n. Like the fruit but twice the l’s. Mellon. Pretending to be a plain simple trader. And making quite a decent thing of it. Naturally, an intelligent man, he would. But underneath”—Mr. Pelling drove a fist into his open palm, making an astonishingly loud noise—“but underneath the bland and affable exterior of a British businessman, this same Mellon, two l’s, was fighting a secret and lonely war against Her Majesty’s enemies, and my Lizzie was helping him do it. Drug dealers, Chinese, homosexuals, every single foreign element sworn to the subversion of our island nation, my gallant daughter Lizzie and her friend Colonel Mellon between them fought to check their insidious progress! And that’s the honest truth.”

  “Now ask me where she gets it from,” said Mrs. Pelling and, leaving the door open, trailed away down the corridor grumbling to herself. Glancing after her, Smiley saw her pause and seem to tilt her head, beckoning to him from the gloom. They heard a distant door slam shut.

  “It’s true,” said Pelling stoutly, but more quietly. “She did, she did, she did. My daughter was a senior and respected operative of our British intelligence.”

  Smiley did not reply at first, he was too intent on writing; so for a while there was no sound but the slow scratch of his pen on paper, and the rustle as he turned the page.

  “Good. Well, then, I’ll just take those details, too, if I may. In confidence, naturally. We come across quite a lot of it in our work, I don’t mind telling you.”

  “Right,” said Mr. Pelling and, sitting himself vigorously on a plastic-covered stool, he pulled a single sheet of paper from his wallet and thrust it into Smiley’s hand. It was a letter, handwritten, one and a half sides long, and very badly spelt; the script was at once grandiose and childish, with high, curled “I”s for the first person, while the other characters appeared more cautiously.

  It began “My dearest darling Pops,” and it ended “Your One True Daughter Elizabeth,” and the message between, the bulk of which Smiley committed to his memory, ran like this: “I have arrived in Vientiane which is a flat town, a bit French and wild but don’t wory, I have important news for you which I have to impart immediately. It is possible you may not hear from me for a bit but don’t worry even if you hear bad things. I’m all right and cared for and doing it for a Good Cause you would be proud of. As soon as I arrived I contacted the British Trade Counsul Mister Mackervoor (British) and he sent me for a job to Mellon. I’m not aloud to tell you so you’ll have to trust me but Mellon is his name and he’s a well-off English trader here but that’s only half the story. Mellon is Dispatching me on a mision to Hong Kong and I’m to investgate Bullion and Drugs, pretending otherwise, and he’s got men everywhere to look after me and his real name isn’t Mellon. Mackervoor is in on it only secretly. If anything happens to me it will be worth it anyway because you and I know the Country matters and what’s one life among so many in Asia where life counts for nought anyway? This is good Work, Dad, the kind we dreamed of you and me and specially you when you were in the war fighting for your family and loved ones. Pray for me and look after Mum. I will always love even in prison.”

  Smiley handed back the letter.

  “There’s no date,” he objected flatly. “Can you give me the date, Mr. Pelling? Even approximately?”

  Pelling gave it not approximately but exactly; not for nothing had he spent his working life handling the Royal Mails.

  “She’s never written to me since,” said Mr. Pelling proudly, folding the letter back into his wallet. “Not a word, not a peep have I had out of her from that day to this. Totally unnecessary. We’re one. It was said, I never alluded to it, neither did she. She’d tipped me the wink. I knew. She knew I knew. You’ll never get finer understanding between daughter and father than that. Everything that followed: Ricardo, whatever his name was— alive, dead, who cares? Some Chinaman she’s on about—forget him. Men friends, girl-friends, business—disregard everything you hear. It’s cover, the lot. They own her, they control her completely. She works for Mellon and she loves her father. Finish.”

  “You’ve been very kind,” said Smiley, packing together his papers. “Please don’t worry, I’ll see myself out.”

  “See yourself how you like,” Mr. Pelling said with a flash of his old wit.

  As Smiley closed the door, he had resumed his armchair, and was ostentatiously looking for his place in the Daily Telegraph.

  In the dark corridor the smell of drink was stronger. Smiley had counted nine paces before the door slammed, so it must have been the last door on the left, and the farthest from Mr. Pelling. It might have been the lavatory, except the lavatory was marked with a sign saying “Buckingham Palace Rear Entrance,” so he called her name very softly and heard her yell, “Get out!”

  He stepped inside and found himself in her bedroom, and Mrs. Pelling sprawled on the bed with a glass in her hand, riffling through a heap of picture postcards. The room itself, like her husband’s, was fitted up for a separate existence, with a cooker and a sink and a pile of unwashed plates. Round the walls were snapshots of a tall and very pretty girl, some with boy-friends, some alone, mainly against Oriental backgrounds. The smell was of gin and cat.

  “He won’t leave her alone,” Mrs. Pelling said. “Nunc won’t. Never could. He tried but he never could. She’s beautiful, you see,” she explained for the second time, and rolled on to her back while she held a postcard above her head to read it.

  “Will he come in here?”

  “Not if you dragged him, darling.”

  Smiley closed the door, sat in a chair, and once more took out his notebook.

  “She’s got a dear sweet Chinaman,” she said still gazing at the postcard upside down. “She went to him to save Ricardo and then she fell in love with him. He’s a real father to her, the first she ever had. It’s all come out all right after all. All the bad things. They’re over. He calls her ‘Liese,’ ” she said. “He thinks it’s prettier for her. Funny, really. We don’t like Germans. We’re patriotic. And now he’s fiddling her a lovely job, isn’t he?”

  “I understand she prefers the name Worth, rather than Worthington. Is there a reason for that, that you know of?”

  “Cutting that boring schoolmaster down to size, I should think.”

  “When you say she did it to save Ricardo, you mean of course that—”

  Mrs. Pelling let out a stage groan of pain.

  “Oh, you men. When? Who? Why? How? In the bushes, dear. In a telephone box, dear. She bought Ricardo his life, darling, with the only currency she has. She did him proud, then left him. What the hell, he was a slug.” She took up another postcard and studied the picture of palm trees and an empty beach. “My little Lizzie went behind the hedge with half of Asia before she found her Drake. But she found him.”

  As if hearing a noise, she sat up sharply and stared at Smiley most intently while she straightened her hair. “I think you’d better go, dear,” she said, in the same low voice, while she turned herself toward the mirror. “You give me the galloping creeps, to be honest. I can’t do with trustworthy faces round me. Sorry, darling, know what I mean?”

  At the Circus, Smiley took no more than a couple of minutes to confirm what he already knew: that Mellon was the work name of Sam Collins.

  11

  SHANGHAI EXPRESS

  In the scheme of things as they are now conveniently remembered, there is at this point a deceptive condensation of events. Somewhere around here in Jerry’s life, Christmas came and went in a succession of aimless drinking sessions at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, and a series of last-minute parcels to Cat clumsily wrapped in holly paper at all hours of the night. A revised trace request on Ricardo was submitted formally to the Cousins, and Smiley took it to the Annexe in person in order to explain himself more full
y to Martello. But the request got snarled up in the Christmas rush—not to mention the impending collapse of Vietnam and Cambodia—and didn’t complete its round of the American departments till well into the New Year, as the dates in the Dolphin file show. Indeed, the crucial meeting with Martello and his friends on the Drug Enforcement side did not take place till early February.

  The wear of this prolonged delay on Jerry’s nerves was appreciated intellectually within the Circus, but not, in the continued mood of crisis, felt or acted on. For that, one may again blame Smiley, depending where one stands, but it is very hard to see what more he could have done short of calling Jerry home, particularly since Craw continued to report favourably on his general disposition. The fifth floor was working flat out all the time, and Christmas was hardly noticed apart from a rather battered sherry party at midday on the twenty-fifth, and a break later while Connie and the mothers played the Queen’s speech very loud in order to shame heretics like Guillam and Molly Meakin, who found it hilarious and did bad imitations of it in the corridors.

  The formal induction of Sam Collins to the Circus’s meagre ranks took place on a really freezing day in mid-January, and it had a light side and a dark side. The light side was his arrest. He arrived at ten exactly, on a Monday morning, not in a dinnerjacket but in a dapper grey overcoat with a rose in the buttonhole, looking miraculously youthful in the cold. But Smiley and Guillam were out, cloistered with the Cousins, and neither the janitors nor the housekeepers had any brief to admit him, so they locked him in a basement for three hours where he shivered and fumed till Smiley returned to verify the appointment. There was more comedy about his room. Smiley had put him on the fourth floor next to Connie and di Salis, but Sam wouldn’t wear that and wanted the fifth. He considered it more suitable to his acting rank of co-ordinator. The poor janitors humped furniture up and down stairs like coolies.

  The dark side was harder to describe, though several tried. Connie said Sam was “frigid,” a disturbing choice of adjective. To Guillam he was “hungry,” to the mothers “shifty,” and to the burrowers “too smooth by half.” The strangest thing, to those who did not know the background, was his self-sufficiency. He drew no files, he made no bids for this or that responsibility, and he scarcely used the telephone, except to place gambling bets or oversee the running of his club. But his smile went with him everywhere. The typists declared that he slept in it, and handwashed it at weekends. Smiley’s interviews with him took place behind closed doors, and bit by bit the product of them was communicated to the team.

  Yes, the girl had fetched up in Vientiane with a couple of hippies who had overrun the Katmandu trail. Yes, when they dumped her she had asked Mackelvore to find her a job. And yes, Mackelvore had passed her on to Sam, thinking that on looks alone she must be exploitable: all, reading between the lines, much as the girl had described in her letter home. Sam had a couple of low-grade drug ploys mouldering on his books and was otherwise, thanks to Haydon, becalmed, so he thought he might as well put her alongside the flying boys and see what came up. He didn’t tell London, because London at that point was killing everything. He just went ahead with her on trial and paid her out of his management fund. What came up was Ricardo. He also let her follow an old lead to the bullion racket in Hong Kong; but that was all before he realised she was a total disaster. It was a positive relief to Sam, he said, when Ricardo took her off his hands and got her a job with Indocharter.

  “So what else does he know?” Guillam demanded indignantly. “That’s not much of a ticket, is it, for screwing up the pecking order, horning in on our meetings.”

  “He knows her,” said Smiley patiently, and resumed his study of Jerry Westerby’s file, which of late had become his principal reading. “We are not above a little blackmail ourselves from time to time,” he added with maddening tolerance, “and it is perfectly reasonable that we should have to submit to it occasionally.” Whereas Connie, with unwonted coarseness, startled everyone by paraphrasing—apparently—President Johnson on the subject of J. Edgar Hoover. “George would rather have Sam Collins inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in,” she declared, and gave a schoolgirl giggle at her own audacity.

  And most particularly, it was not till mid-January, in the course of his continued excursions into the minutiae of the Ko background, that Doc di Salis unveiled his amazing discovery of the survival of a certain Mr. Hibbert, a China missionary in the Baptist interest, whom Ko had mentioned as a referee when he applied to read law in London.

  All much more spread out, therefore, than the contemporary memory conveniently allows—and the strain on Jerry accordingly all the greater.

  * * *

  “There’s the possibility of a knighthood,” Connie Sachs said. They had said it already on the telephone.

  It was a very sober scene. Connie had bobbed her hair. She wore a dark brown hat and a dark brown suit, and she carried a dark brown handbag to contain the radio microphone. Outside in the little drive, in a blue cab with the engine and the heater on, Toby Esterhase, the Hungarian pavement artist, wearing a peak cap, pretended to doze while he received and recorded the conversation on the instruments beneath his seat. Connie’s extravagant shape had acquired a prim discipline. She held a Stationery Office notebook handy, and a Stationery Office ballpoint pen between her arthritic fingers. As to the remote di Salis, the art had been to modernise him a little. Under protest, he wore one of Guillam’s striped shirts, with a dark tie to match. The result, somewhat surprisingly, was quite convincing.

  “It’s extremely confidential,” Connie said to Mr. Hibbert, speaking loud and clear. She had said that on the telephone as well.

  “Enormously,” di Salis muttered in confirmation, and flung his arms about till one elbow settled awkwardly on his knobbly knee, and a crabbed hand enclosed his chin, then scratched it.

  The Governor had recommended one, she said, and now it was up to the Board to decide whether or not they would pass the recommendation on to the Palace. And on the word “Palace” she cast a restrained glance at di Salis, who at once smiled brightly but modestly, like a celebrity at a chat show. His strands of grey hair were slicked down with cream, and looked (said Connie later) as though they had been basted for the oven.

  “So you will understand,” said Connie, in the precise accents of a female news-reader, “that in order to protect our noblest institutions against embarrassment, a very thorough enquiry has to be made.”

  “The Palace,” Mr. Hibbert echoed, with a wink in di Salis’s direction. “Well, I’m blowed. The Palace—hear that, Doris?” He was very old. The record said eighty-one, but his features had reached the age where they were once more unweathered. He wore a clerical dog-collar, a tan cardigan with worn leather patches on the elbows, and a shawl around his shoulders. The background of the grey sea made a halo round his white hair. “Sir Drake Ko,” he said. “That’s one thing I’d not thought of, I will say.” His North Country accent was so pure that, like his snowy hair, it could have been put on. “Sir Drake,” he repeated. “Well, I’m blowed. Eh, Doris?”

  A daughter sat with them, thirty to forty-odd, blond, and she wore a yellow frock and powder but no lipstick. Since girlhood, nothing seemed to have happened to her face beyond a steady fading of its hopes. When she spoke, she blushed, but she rarely spoke. She had made pastries, and sandwiches as thin as handkerchiefs, and seed-cake on a doily; to strain the tea she used a piece of muslin with beads to weight it stitched around the border.

  From the ceiling hung a pronged parchment lampshade made in the shape of a star. An upright piano stood along one wall with the score of “Lead, Kindly Light” open on its stand. A sampler of Kipling’s “If ” hung over the empty fire grate, and the velvet curtains on either side of the sea window were so heavy they might have been there to screen off an unused part of life. There were no books; there was not even a Bible. There was a very big colour television set and there was a long line of Christmas cards hung laterally over st
ring, wings downward, like shot birds half-way to hitting the ground. There was nothing to recall the China coast, unless it was the shadow of the winter sea. It was a day of no weather and no wind. In the garden, cacti and shrubs waited dully in the cold. Walkers went quickly on the promenade.

  They would like to take notes, Connie added. For it is Circus folklore that when the sound is being stolen, notes should be taken, both as fall-back and for cover.

  “Oh, you write away,” Mr. Hibbert said encouragingly. “We’re not all elephants, are we, Doris? Doris is, mind—wonderful her memory is, good as her mother’s.”

  “So what we’d like to do first,” said Connie—careful all the same to match the old man’s pace—“if we may, is what we do with all character witnesses, as we call them. We’d like to establish exactly how long you’ve known Mr. Ko, and the circumstances of your relationship with him.”

  Describe your access to Dolphin, she was saying, in a somewhat different language.

  Talking of others, old men talk about themselves, studying their image in vanished mirrors.

  “I was born to the calling,” Mr. Hibbert said. “My grandfather, he was called. My father, he had—oh, a big parish in Macclesfield. My uncle died when he was twelve, but he still took the Pledge, didn’t he, Doris? I was in missionary training school at twenty. By twenty-four, I’d set sail for Shanghai to join the Lord’s Life Mission. The Empire Queen, she was called. We’d more waiters than passengers, the way I remember it. Oh, dear.”

  He aimed to spend a few years in Shanghai teaching and learning the language, he said, and then with luck transfer to the China Inland Mission and move to the interior.

  “I’d have liked that. I’d have liked the challenge. I’ve always liked the Chinese. The Lord’s Life wasn’t posh, but it did a job. Now, those Roman schools—well, they were more like your monasteries, and with all that that entails,” said Mr. Hibbert.