Absolute Friends by John le Carré Read Free Book Online Page A

eternally twenty-nine, disdainfully shares his bed and polishes the last of his collection of Indian silver boxes until one by one they mysteriously disappear. But flighty Mrs. McKechnie never strokes Mundy's cheek the way Ayah did, or tells him heroic stories of Mohammed or chafes his hand between both her own until he falls asleep, or replaces his lost talisman of tiger skin to ward off the terrors of the night.
    Sent off to boarding school on the strength of a legacy from a distant aunt and a bursary for the sons of army officers, Mundy is bewildered, then horrified. The Major's parting words, though well intended, have not prepared him for the impact of his new life. "Always remember your mother's watching you, boy, and if a chap combs his hair in public, run like hell," his father urges him huskily as they embrace. On the school train, trying desperately to remember that his mother is watching him, Mundy looks in vain for child beggars clinging to the windows, or station platforms packed with rows of shrouded but unmurdered bodies with their heads covered and their feet poking out, or chaps who comb their hair in public. In place of dung-brown landscapes and blue mountain ranges, he sees only sodden fields and mysterious billboards telling him he is Welcome to the Strong Country.
    On arrival at the place of his incarceration, the former white godling and _baba-log__ is summarily reduced to the rank of Untouchable. By the end of his first term he is voted a colonial freak, and thereafter affects a _chee-chee__ accent in order to capitalize on the distinction. To the rage of his fellows he keeps a wary eye for snakes. When he hears the rumbling of the school's ancient plumbing he dives under his desk, yelling, "Earthquake!" On bath days he equips himself with an old tennis racket for fending off any bats that should fall out of the ceiling, and when the bell tolls for chapel he muses aloud about whether the muezzin is calling him. Dispatched on early-morning runs to quell his libido, he is given to inquiring whether the Dorset crows circling overhead are kites.
    The punishments he attracts do not deter him. During evening prep he burbles half-remembered passages of Koranic scripture taught to him by Ayah, and when the bell for lights-out sounds he can be discovered in his dressing gown bowed before a cracked mirror in the dormitory washroom, pulling his face about as he hunts for signs of darkening skin and shading round the eyes that will confirm him in his secret conviction that he is a twelve-annas-in-the-rupee half-caste rather than the inheritor of his aristocratic mother's dignity. No such luck: he is a Despised One, sentenced to life imprisonment as a snow-white guilty British gentleman of tomorrow's ruling class.
    His one spiritual ally is an outcast like himself: a dignified, ageless, diffident, white-haired refugee in rimless spectacles and a shabby suit who teaches German Extra Studies and cello and lives alone in a redbrick bedsitter on the Bristol Road roundabout. His name is Mr. Mallory. Mundy discovers him reading in a tea shop in the High Street. A grand meeting of masters is currently in progress, so why is Mr. Mallory not attending it?
    "Because I'm not completely a _master,__ Mr. Mundy," he explains, closing his book and sitting bolt upright. "Maybe one day, when I grow up, I become one. But until now, I am a _temporary__ master. Permanently temporary. You wish a piece of cake? I invite you, Mr. Mundy."
    Within the week, Mundy has enrolled for twice-weekly cello lessons, German Extra Studies and German Oral. "I have taken this path because music is all I care about and German is a sort of literary version of music," he writes recklessly to the Major, in a letter seeking his permission to add fifteen pounds to the annual tuition charges.
    The Major's reply is equally impulsive. It comes by telegram or, as the Major would say, signal. "Your application wholeheartedly approved. Your mother musical genius. If