Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré Read Free Book Online

toward the door.
    Dumbfounded, the postmistress detained her, then showered her with questions.
    But who was he? What had he done with his youth? A journalist, said the Sanders, and gave what she knew of the family background; the father a flamboyant figure, fair-haired like the son, kept racehorses, she had met him again not long before his death and he was still a man. Like the son he was never at peace: women and houses, changing them all the time; always roaring at someone, if not at his son then at someone across the street. The postmistress pressed harder. But in his own right: was the schoolboy distinguished in his own right? Well, he had certainly worked for some distinguished newspapers, put it that way, said the Sanders, her smile mysteriously broadening.
    ‘It is not the English habit, as a rule, to accord distinction to journalists,’ she explained, in her classic, Roman way of talking.
    But the postmistress needed more, far more. His writing, his book, what was all that about? So long! So much thrown away! Basketsful, the rubbish carter had told her - for no one in his right mind would light a fire up there in summertime. Beth Sanders understood the intensity of isolated people, and knew that in barren places their intelligence must fix on tiny matters. So she tried, she really tried to oblige. Well, he certainly had travelled incessantly, she said, coming back to the counter and putting down her parcel. Today of were travellers, of course, breakfast in London, lunch in Rome, dinner in Delhi, but Signor Westerby had been exceptional even by that standard. So perhaps it was a travel book, she ventured.
    But why had he travelled? the postmistress insisted, for whom no journey was without a goal: why?
    For the wars, the Sanders replied patiently: for wars, pestilence and famine. ‘What else had a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life’s miseries?’ she asked.
    The postmistress shook her head wisely, all her senses boxed upon the revelation: the son of a blond equestrian lord who bellowed, a mad traveller, a writer in distinguished newspapers! And was there a particular theatre? she asked - a corner of God’s earth - in which he was a specialist? He was mostly in the East, the Sanders thought, after a moment’s reflection. He had been everywhere, but there is a kind of Englishman for whom only the East is home. No doubt that was why he had come to Italy. Some men go dull without the sun.
    And some women, too, the postmistress shrieked, and they had a good laugh.
    Ah the East, said the postmistress, with a tragic slanting of the head - war upon war, why didn’t the Pope stop it? As Mama Stefano ran on this way, the Sanders seemed to remember something. She smiled slightly at first, and her smile grew. An exile’s smile, the postmistress reflected, watching her: she is like a sailor remembering the sea.
    ‘He used to drag a sackful of books around,’ she said. ‘We used to say he stole them from the big houses.’
    ‘He carries it now!’ the postmistress cried, and told how Guido had stumbled on him in the Contessa’s forest, the schoolboy reading on the log..
    ‘He had notions of becoming a novelist, I believe,’ the Sanders continued, in the same vein of private reminiscence: ‘I remember his father telling us. He was frightfully angry. Roared all over the house.’
    ‘The schoolboy? The schoolboy was angry?’ Mama Stefano exclaimed, now quite incredulous.
    ‘No, no. The father.’ The Sanders laughed aloud. In the English social scale, she explained, novelists- rated even worse than journalists. ‘Does he also paint still?’
    ‘Paint? He is a painter?’
    He tried, said the Sanders, but the father forbade that also. Painters were the lowest of all creatures, she said, amid fresh laughter: only the successful ones were remotely tolerable.
    Soon after this multiple bombshell the blacksmith - the same blacksmith who had been the target of the orphan’s pitcher - reported having