Honourable Schoolboy (2 page)

‘Your Graces,’ said old Craw with a sigh. ‘Pray silence for my son. I fear he would have parley with us. Brother Luke, you have committed several acts of war today and one more will meet with our severe disfavour. Speak clearly and concisely, omitting no detail, however slight, and thereafter hold your water, sir.’

In their tireless pursuit of legends about one another, old Craw was their Ancient Mariner. Craw had shaken more sand out of his shorts, they told each other, than most of them would ever walk over; and they were right. In Shanghai, where his career had started, he had been teaboy and city editor to the only English-speaking journal in the port. Since then, he had covered the Communists against Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang against the Japanese and the Americans against practically everyone. Craw gave them a sense of history in this rootless place. His style of speech, which at typhoon times even the hardiest sight pardonably find irksome, was a genuine hangover from the Thirties, when Australia provided the bulk of journalists in the Orient; and the Vatican, for some reason, the jargon of their companionship.

So Luke, thanks to old Craw, finally got it out.

‘Gentlemen! - Dwarf, you damn Polack, leave go my foot! - Gentlemen.’ He paused to dab his mouth with a handkerchief. ‘The house known as High Haven is for sale and his Grace Tufty Thesinger has flown the coop.’

Nothing happened but he didn’t expect much anyway. Journalists are not given to cries of amazement nor even incredulity.

‘High Haven,’ Luke repeated sonorously, ‘is up for grabs. Mr Jake Chiu, the well-known and popular real estate entrepreneur, more familiar to you as my personal irate landlord, has been charged by Her Majesty’s majestic government to dispose of High Haven. To wit, peddle. Let me go, you Polish bastard, I’ll kill you!’

The dwarf had toppled him. Only a flailing, agile leap saved him from injury. From the floor, Luke hurled more abuse at his assailant. Meanwhile, Craw’s large head had turned to Luke, and his moist eyes fixed on him a baleful stare that seemed to go on for ever. Luke began to wonder which of Craw’s many laws he might have sinned against. Beneath his various disguises, Craw was a complex and solitary figure, as everyone round the table knew. Under the willed roughness of his manner lay a love of the East which seemed sometimes to string him tighter than he could stand, so chat there were months when he would disappear from sight altogether, and like a sulky elephant go off on his private paths until he was once more fit to live with.

‘Don’t burble, your Grace, do you mind?’ said Craw at last, and tilted back his big head imperiously. ‘Refrain from spewing low-grade bilge into highly salubrious water, will you, Squire? High Haven’s the spookhouse. Been the spookhouse for years. Lair of the lynx-eyed Major Tufty Thesinger formerly of Her Majesty’s Rifles, presently Hong Kong’s Lestrade of the Yard. Tufty wouldn’t fly the coop. He’s a hood, not a tit. Give my son a drink, Monsignor,’ - this to the Shanghainese barman -’he’s wandering.’

Craw intoned another fire order and the Club returned to its intellectual pursuits. The truth was, there was little new to these great spy-scoops by Luke. He had a long reputation as a failed spook-watcher, and his leads were invariably disproved. Since Vietnam, the stupid lad saw spies under every carpet. He believed the world was run by them, and much of his spare time, when he was sober, was spent hanging round the Colony’s numberless battalion of thinly-disguised China-watchers and worse, who infested the enormous American Consulate up the hill. So if it hadn’t been such a listless day, the matter would probably have rested there. As at was, the dwarf saw an opening to amuse, and seized it:

‘Tell us, Lukie,’ he suggested, with a queer upward twisting of the hands, ‘are they selling High Haven with contents or as found?’

The question won him a round of applause. Was High Haven worth more with its secrets or without?

‘Do they sell it with Major Thesinger?’ the South African photographer pursued, in his humourless sing-song, and there was more laughter still, though it was no more affectionate. The photographer was a disturbing figure, crewcut and starved, and his complexion was pitted like the battlefields he loved to taunt. He came from Cape Town, but they called him Deathwish the Hun. The saying was, he would bury all of them, for he stalked them like a mute.

For several diverting minutes now, Luke’s point was lost entirely under a spate of Major Thesinger stories and Major Thesinger imitations in which all but Craw joined. It was recalled that the Major had made his first appearance on the Colony as an importer, with some fatuous cover down among the Docks; only to transfer, six months later, quite improbably, to the Services’ list and, complete with his staff of pallid clerks and doughy, well-bred secretaries, decamp to the said spookhouse as somebody’s replacement. In particular his tête-à-tête luncheons were described, to which, as it now turned out, practically every journalist listening had at one time or another been invited. And which ended with laborious proposals over brandy, including such wonderful phrases as: ‘Now look here old man if you should ever bump into an interesting Chow from over the river, you know - one with access, follow me? just you remember High Haven!’ Then the magic telephone number, the one that ‘rings spot on my desk, no middlemen, tape recorders, nothing, right?’ - which a good half dozen of them seemed to have in their diaries: ‘Here, pencil this one on your cuff’, pretend it’s a date or a girlfriend or something. Ready for it? Hong Kongside five-zero-two-four…’

Having chanted the digits in unison, they fell quiet. Somewhere a clock chimed for three fifteen. Luke slowly stood up and brushed the dust from his jeans. The old Shanghainese waiter gave up his post by the racks and reached for the menu in the hope that someone might eat. For a moment, uncertainty overcame them. The day was forfeit. It had been so since the first gin. In the background a low growl sounded as the Rocker ordered himself a generous luncheon:

‘And bring me a cold beer, cold, you hear, boy? Muchee coldee. Chop chop.’ The Superintendent had his way with natives and said this every time. The quiet returned.

‘Well, there you are, Lukie.’ the dwarf called, moving away. ‘That’s how you win your Pulitzer, I guess. Congratulations, darling. Scoop of the year.’

‘Ah, go impale yourselves, the bunch of you,’ said Luke carelessly and started to make his way down the bar to where two sallow girls sat, army daughters on the prowl. ‘Jake Chin showed me the damn letter of instruction, didn’t he? On Her Majesty’s damn Service, wasn’t it? Damn crest on the top, lion screwing a goat. Hi sweethearts, remember me? I’m the kind man who bought you the lollipops at the fair.’

‘Thesinger don’t answer,’ Deathwish the Hun sang mournfully from the telephone. ‘Nobody don’t answer. Not Thesinger, not his duty man. They disconnected the line.’ In the excitement, or the monotony, no one had noticed Deathwish slip away.

Till now, old Craw the Australian had lain dead as a dodo. Now, he looked up sharply.

‘Dial it again, you fool,’ he ordered, tart as a drill sergeant.

With a shrug, Deathwish dialled Thesinger’s number a second time, and a couple of them went to watch him do it. Craw stayed put, watching from where he sat. There were two instruments. Deathwish tried the second, but with no better result.

‘Ring the operator,’ Craw ordered, across the room to them. ‘Don’t stand there like a pregnant banshee. Ring the Operator, you African ape!’

Number disconnected, said the operator.

‘Since when, man?’ Deathwish demanded, into the mouthpiece.

No information available, said the operator.

‘Maybe they got a new number, then, right, man?’ Deathwish howled into the mouthpiece; still at the luckless operator. No one had ever seen him so involved. Life for Deathwish was what happened at the end of a viewfinder: such passion was only attributable to the typhoon.

No information available, said the operator.

‘Ring Shallow Throat,’ Craw ordered, now quite furious. ‘Ring every damned stripe-pants in the Colony!’

Deathwish shook his long head uncertainly. Shallow Throat was the official government spokesman, a hate-object to them all. To approach him for anything was bad face.

‘Here, give him to me,’ said Craw and rising to his feet shoved them aside to get to the phone and embark on the lugubrious courtship of Shallow Throat. ‘Your devoted, Craw, sir, at your service. How’s your Eminence in mind and health? Charmed, sir, charmed. And the wife and veg, sir? All eating well, I trust? No scurvy or typhus? Good. Well now, perhaps you’ll have the benison to advise me why the hell Tufty Thesinger’s flown the coop?’

They watched him, but his face had set like a rock, and there was nothing more to read there.

‘And the same to you, sir!’ he snorted finally and slammed the phone back on its cradle so hard the whole table bounced. Then he turned to the old Shanghainese waiter. ‘Monsignor Goh, sir, order me a petrol donkey and oblige! Your Graces, get off your arses, the pack of you!’

‘What the hell for?’ said the dwarf, hoping to be included in the command.

‘For a story, you snotty little Cardinal, for a story your lecherous, alcoholic Eminences. For wealth, fame, women and longevity!’

His black mood was indecipherable to any of them.

‘But what did Shallow Throat say that was so damn bad?’ the shaggy Canadian cowboy asked, mystified.

The dwarf echoed him. ‘Yeah, so what did he say, Brother Craw?’

‘He said no comment,’ Craw replied with fine dignity, as if the words were the vilest slur upon his professional honour.

So up the Peak they went, leaving only the silent majority of drinkers to their peace: restive Deathwish the Hun, long Luke, then the shaggy Canadian cowboy, very striking in his Mexican revolutionary moustache, the dwarf, attaching as ever, and finally old Craw and the two army girls: a plenary session of the Shanghai Junior Baptist Conservative Bowling Club, therefore, with ladies added - though the Club was sworn to celibacy. Amazingly, the jolly Cantonese driver took them all, a triumph of exuberance over physics. He even consented to give three receipts for the full fare, one for each of the journals represented, a thing no Hong Kong taxi-driver had been known to do before or since. It was a day to break all precedents. Craw sat in the front wearing his famous soft straw hat with Eton colours on the ribbon, bequeathed to him by an old comrade in his will. The dwarf was squeezed over the gear lever, the other three men sat in the back, and the two girls sat on Luke’s lap, which made it hard for him to dab his mouth. The Rocker did not see fit to join them. He had tucked his napkin into his collar in preparation for the Club’s roast lamb and mint sauce and a lot of potatoes.

‘And another beer! But cold this time, hear that, boy? Muchee coldee, and bring it chop chop.’

But once the coast was clear, the Rocker also made use of the telephone, and spoke to Someone in Authority, just to be on the safe side, though they agreed there was nothing to be done.

The taxi was a red Mercedes, quite new, but nowhere kills a car faster than the Peak, climbing at no speed forever, air-conditioners at full blast. The weather continued awful. As they sobbed slowly up the concrete cliff’s they were engulfed by a fog thick enough to choke on. When they got out it was even worse. A hot, unbudgeable curtain had spread itself across the summit, reeking of petrol and crammed with the din of the valley. The moisture floated in hot fine swarms. On a dear day they would have had a view both ways, one of the loveliest on earth: northward to Kowloon and the blue mountains of the New Territories which hid from sight the eight hundred million Chinese who lacked the privilege of British rule; southward to Repulse and Deep Water Bays and the open China Sea. High Haven after all had been built by the Royal Navy in the Twenties in all the, grand innocence of that service, to receive and impart a sense of power. But that afternoon, if the house had not been set among the trees, and in a hollow where the trees grew tall in their effort to reach the sky, and if the trees had not kept the fog out, they would have had nothing to look at but the two white concrete pillars with the bell-buttons marked ‘day’ and ‘night’ and the chained gates they supported. Thanks to the trees, however, they saw the house clearly, though it was set back fifty yards. They could pick out the drainpipes, fire escapes and washing lines and they could admire the green dome which the Japanese army had added during their four years’ tenancy.

Hurrying to the front in his desire to be accepted, the dwarf pressed the bell marked ‘day’. A speaker was let into the pillar and they all stared at it, waiting for it to say something or, as Luke would have it, puff out pot-smoke. At the roadside, the Cantonese driver had switched on his radio full and it was playing a whining Chinese love song, on and on. The second pillar was blank except for a brass date announcing the Inter Services Liaison Staff, Thesinger’s threadbare cover. Deathwish the Hun had produced a camera and was photographing as methodically as if he were on one of his native battlefields.

‘Maybe they don’t work Saturdays,’ Luke suggested, while they continued to wait, at which Craw told him not to be bloody silly: spooks worked seven days a week and round the clock, he said. Also they never ate, apart from Tufty.

‘Good afternoon to you,’ said the dwarf.

Pressing the night bell, he had put his twisted red lips to the vents of the speaker and affected an upper-class English accent, which to give him credit he managed surprisingly well.

‘My name is Michael Hanbury-Steadly-Heamoor, and I’m personal bumboy to Big Moo. I should like, pliss, to speak to Major Thesinger on a matter of some urgency, pliss, there is a mushroom-shaped cloud the Major may not have noticed, it appearce to be forming over the Pearl River and it’s spoiling Big Moo’s golf. Thenk you. Will you kindly open the gate?’

One of the blonde girls gave a titter.

‘I didn’t know he was a Steadly-Heamoor,’ she said.

Abandoning Luke, they had tethered themselves to the shaggy Canadian’s arm, and spent a lot of time whispering in his ear.