Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré Read Free Book Online Page B

she’ll wait for me, he thought.
    He remembered the day he met her. He told himself that story often, because good luck was rare in Jerry’s life, where women were concerned, and when it happened he liked to roll it around the tongue, as he would say. A Thursday. He’d taken his usual lift to town, in order to do a spot of shopping, or maybe to see a fresh set of faces and get away from the novel for a while; or maybe just to bolt from the screaming monotony of that empty landscape, which more often was like a prison to him, and a solitary one at that; or conceivably he might just hook himself a woman, which occasionally he brought off by hanging round the bar of the tourist hotel. So he was sitting reading in the trattoria in the town square - a carafe, plate of ham, olives - and suddenly he became aware of this skinny, rangy kid, red-head, sullen face and a brown dress like a monk’s habit and a shoulder bag made out of carpet stuff.
    ‘Looks naked without a guitar,’ he’d thought.
    Vaguely, she reminded him of his daughter Cat, short for Catherine, but only vaguely because he hadn’t seen Cat for ten years, which was when his first marriage fell in. Quite why he hadn’t seen her, he could even now not precisely say. In the first shock of separation, a confused sense of chivalry told him Cat did better to forget him. ‘Best if she writes me off: Put her heart where her home is.’ When her mother remarried, the case for self-denial seemed all the stronger. But sometimes he missed her very badly, and most likely that was why, having caught his interest, the girl held it. Did Cat go round like that, alone and spiked with tiredness? Had Cat got her freckles still, and a jaw like a pebble? Later, the girl told him she’d jumped the wall. She’d got herself a governess job with some rich family in Florence. Mother was too busy with the lovers to worry about the kids, but the husband had lots of time for the governess. She’d grabbed what cash she could find and bolted and here she was: no luggage, the police alerted, and using her last chewed banknote to buy herself one square meal before perdition.
    There was not a lot of talent in the square that day - there never was - and by the time she sat down, that kid had got just about every able-bodied fellow in town giving her the treatment, from the waiters upward, purring ‘beautiful missus’ and much rougher stuff besides, of which Jerry missed the precise drift, but it had them all laughing at her expense. Then one of them tried to tweak her breast, at which Jerry got up and went over to her table. He was no great hero, quite the reverse in his secret view, but a lot of things were going around in his mind, and it might just as well have been Cat who was getting shoved into a corner. So yes: anger. He therefore clapped one hand on the shoulder of the small waiter who had made the dive for her, and one hand on the shoulder of the big one who had applauded such bravado, and he explained to them, in bad Italian, but in a fairly reasonable way, that they really must stop being pests, and let the beautiful missus eat her meal in peace. Otherwise he would break their greasy little necks. The atmosphere wasn’t too good after that, and the little one seemed actually to be squaring for a fight, for his hand kept travelling toward a back pocket, and hitching at his jacket, till a final look at Jerry changed his mind for him. Jerry dumped some money on the table, picked up her bag for her, went back to collect his book-sack, and led her by the arm, all but lifting her off the ground, across the square to the Apollo,
    ‘Are you English?’ she asked on the way.
    ‘Pips, core, the lot,’ Jerry snorted furiously, which was he first time he saw her smile: It was a smile definitely worth working for: her bony little face lit up like a urchin’s through the grime.
    So, simmered down a bit, Jerry fed her, and with the advent of calm he began spinning the tale a bit, because