John le Carré - The Honourable Schoolboy

'Still right?' he asked.

'It's just up,' she said, as if she were sick of telling him. 'It's just up, and then the house, and bingo. I mean, Christ, what do you think I am, a bloody nitwit?'

'I won't say a thing,' said Jerry. He put his arm round her and she pressed in to him, giving herself exactly as she had done on the dancing floor.

They heard a blare of music from the temple as somebody tested the loudspeakers, and after it the wail of a slow tune. The bay was in view again. A crowd had gathered on the shore. Jerry saw more puffs of smoke and, in the windless heat of this side of the island, caught a whiff of joss. The water was blue and clear and calm. Round it, white lights burned on poles. The Ko launch had not stirred, nor had the police.

'See him?' he asked.

She was studying the crowd. She shook her head.

'Probably having a kip after lunch,' she said carelessly.

The beating of the sun was ferocious. When they entered the shadow of the hillside it was like a sudden dusk, and when they reached the sunlight it stung their faces like the heat of a close fire. The air was alive with dragonflies, the hillside strewn with big boulder, but where bushes grew they wound and straggled everywhere, producing rich trumpets, red and white and yellow. Old picnic cans lay in profusion.

'And that's the house you meant?'

'I told you,' she said.

It was a ruin: a broken brown-plastered villa with gaping walls and a view. It had been built with some grandeur above a dried-up stream and was reached by a concrete footbridge. The mud stank and hummed with insects. Between palms and bracken the remains of a verandah gave a vast prospect of the sea and of the bay. As they crossed the footbridge he took her arm.

'So let's play it from here,' he said. 'No interrogations. Just tell.'

'We walked up here, like I said. Me, Drake, and bloody Tiu. The boys brought a basket and the booze. I said where are we going? and he said picnic. Tiu didn't want me but Drake said I could come. You hate walking, I said. I've never even seen you cross a road before! Today we walk, he says, doing his Captain of Industry Act. So I tag along and shut up.'

A thick cloud was already obscuring the peak above them and rolling slowly down the hill. The sun had vanished. In moments the cloud reached them, and they were alone at the world's end, unable to see even their feet. They groped their way into the house. She sat apart from him, on a bust roof beam. Chinese slogans were daubed in red paint down the door pillars. The floor was littered with picnic refuse and long twists of lining paper.

'He tells the boys to hop it so they hop it; him and Tiu have a long earnest natter in whatever they're speaking this week, and halfway through lunch he breaks into English and tells me Po Toi's his island. It's where he first landed when he left China. The boat people dumped him here. My people, he calls them. That's why he comes to the festival every year and that's why he gives money to the temple, and that's why we've sweated up the bloody hill for a picnic. They then go back into Chinese, and I get the feeling Tiu is tearing him off a strip for talking too much, but Drake's all excited and little-boy and won't listen. Then they go on up.'

'Up?'

'Up to the top. Old ways are the best, he says to me. We shall stick to what is proven — then his Baptist bit hold fast to that which is good, Liese. That is what God likes. '

Jerry glanced into the fog-bank above him, and he could have sworn he heard the crackle of a small plane, but at that moment he didn't mind too much whether it was there or not: because he had the two things he most badly needed. He had the girl with him, and he had the information: for now he finally understood exactly what she had been worth to Smiley and Sam Collins, and how she had unconsciously betrayed to them the vital clue to Ko's intentions.

'So they went on to the top. Did you go with them?'

'No.'

'Did you see where they went?'

'To the top. I told you.'

'Then what?'

'They looked down the other side. Talked. Pointed. More talk, more pointing, then down they come again and Drake's even more excited, the way he gets when he's brought off a big deal and Number One's not there to disapprove. Tiu looks dead solemn, and that is the way he gets when Drake acts fond of me. Drake wants to stay and have a couple of brandies so Tiu goes back to Hong Kong in a huff. Drake gets amorous and decides we'll spend the night on the boat and go home in the morning, so that's what we do.'

'Where does he moor the boat? Here? In the bay?'

'No.'

'Where?'

'Off Lantau.'

'You went straight there, did you?'

She shook her head. 'We did a round of the island.'

'This island?'

'There was a place he wanted to look at in the dark. A bit of coast round the other side. The boys had to shine the lamps on it. That's where I land in fifty-one, he said. The boat people were frightened to put into the main harbour. They were frightened of police and ghosts and pirates and customs men. They say the islanders will cut their throats. '

'And in the night?' said Jerry softly. 'While you were moored off Lantau?'

'He told me he had a brother and loved him.'

'That was the first time he told you?'

She nodded.

'He tell you where the brother was?'

'No.'

'But you knew?'

This time she didn't even nod.

From below, the clatter of the festival rose crisscross through the cloud. He lifted her gently to her feet.

'Bloody questions,' she muttered.

'They're nearly over,' he promised. He kissed her and she let him, but did not otherwise take part.

'Let's go up and take a look,' he said.

Ten minutes more and the sunlight returned and blue sky opened above them, With Lizzie leading, they scrambled quickly over several false peaks toward the saddle. The sounds from the bay stopped and the colder air filled with screaming, wheeling guns. They approached the crest, the path widened, they walked side by side. A few steps more and the wind had hit them with a force that made them gasp and reel back. They were at the knife-edge, looking down into an abyss. At their very feet the cliff fell vertical to a boiling sea, and the foam smothered the headlands. Dumpling clouds were blowing from the east and behind them the sky was black. Perhaps two hundred metres down lay an inlet which the breakers did not cover. Fifty yards out from it, a brown shoal of rock checked the sea's force, and the spume washed it in white rings.

'That it?' he yelled above the wind. 'He landed there? That bit of coast?'

'Yes.'

'Shone the lights on it?'

'Yes.'

Leaving her where she stood, he moved slowly up the knife-edge, crouching almost double while the wind rushed over his ears and covered his face in a sticky salt sweat and his stomach screamed in pain from what he supposed was a punctured gut or internal bleeding or both. At the inmost point before the cliff cut back into the sea, he once more looked down and now he thought he could just make out a skimpy path, sometimes no more than a seam of rock, or a ridge of rough grass, eking its way cautiously toward the inlet.

There was no sand in the inlet but some of the rocks looked dry. Returning to her, he led her away from the knife-edge. The wind dropped, and they heard the din of the festival again much louder than before. The snap of firecrackers made a toy war.

'It's his brother Nelson,' he explained. 'In case you hadn't gathered, Ko's bringing him out of China. Tonight's the night. Trouble is, he's a much sought-after character. Lot of people would like a chat with him. That's where Mellon came in. He took a breath. 'My view is that you should get the hell out of here. How do you see that? Drake's not going to want you around, that's for sure.'