The Honourable Schoolboy

by John Le Carré

The spy is not dead: he sleepeth.’

The task of an intelligence service, Smiley announced firmly, was not to play chase games but to deliver intelligence to its customers.

Mrs Lacon, whose intolerance had a beatific innocence about it, began complaining about Jews. ‘I mean they don’t even eat the same food as we do,’ she said. ‘Penny says they get special herring things for lunch.’

nothing is insecure but thinking makes it so.

‘Lunch,’ Martindale announced without much optimism. They ate it upstairs, glumly, off plastic catering trays delivered by van. The partitions were too low, and Guillam’s custard flowed into his meat.

‘We’re like those bloody glow-worms,’ the orphan had whispered to him once, raging about her childhood, ‘carting the bloody fire round on our backs.’

As he climbed aboard the Air Cambodge Caravelle the ground hostess turned her lovely face to him and, in her best lilting English, melodiously wished him a nice fright.

He read the Jours de France to put some French back into his mind, then remembered Candide and read that. He had brought Conrad because in Phnom Penh he always read Conrad, it tickled him to remind himself he was sitting in the last of the true Conrad river ports.

So meta!

‘Press,’ said Jerry, which explains any lunacy.

The lecture to the boy continued. ‘What are you saying to him?’ ‘I am explaining the principles of democracy.’ ‘What are they?’ ‘No Communism and no generals,’ he replied and laughed.

Even now, he needed that long to bring himself to the point, because Jerry at heart was a soldier and voted with his feet. In the beginning was the deed, Smiley liked to say to him, in his failed-priest mood, quoting from one of his German poets. For Jerry, that simple maxim had become a pillar of his uncomplicated philosophy. What a man thinks is his own business. What matters is what he does.

‘It’s a replay,’ she said finally. ‘What of?’ ‘I don’t know. It’s all to be exactly the way it happened before.’ ‘So what happened before?’ ‘Whatever it was,’ she said wearily, ‘it’s going to happen again.’

‘The old order’s hoofing it,’ she warned whoever would listen. ‘That twerp Enderby is oiling through the back door. It’s a pogrom.’

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.