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time was objectionable: Much better, therefore, to let it come out in the manner of our choosing. The right timing, the right amount, the right tone: a lifetime’s experience, they agreed, in every brushstroke. But that was not a view which passed outside their set.
    Back in Hong Kong - clearly, said the Shanghai Bowlers, like the dying; the old boy had had a prophetic instinct of this - Craw’s High Haven story turned out to be his swansong. A month after it appeared he had retired, not from the Colony but from his trade as a scribbler and from the Island too. Renting a cottage in the New Territories, he announced that he proposed to expire under a slanteye heaven. For the Bowlers he might as well have chosen Alaska. It was just too damn far, they said, to drive back when you were drunk. There was a rumour - untrue, since Craw’s appetites did not run in that direction - that he had got himself a pretty Chinese boy as a companion. That was the dwarf’s work: he did not like to be scooped by old men. Only Luke refused to put him out of mind. Luke drove out to see him one mid-morning after nightshift. For the hell of it, and because the old buzzard meant a lot to him. Craw was happy as a sandboy, he reported: quite his former vile self, but a bit dazed to be bearded by Luke without warning. He had a friend with him, not a Chinese boy, but a visiting fireman whom he introduced as George: a podgy, ill-sighted little body in very round spectacles who had apparently dropped in unexpectedly. Aside, Craw explained to Luke that this George was a backroom boy on a British newspaper syndicate he used to work for in the dark ages.
    ‘Handles the geriatric side, your Grace. Taking a swing through Asia.’
    Whoever he was, it was clear that Craw stood in awe of the podgy man, for he even called him ‘your Holiness’. Luke had felt he was intruding and left without getting drunk.
    So there it was. Thesinger’s moonlight flit, old Craw’s near death and resurrection; his swansong in defiance of so much hidden censorship; Luke’s restless preoccupation with the secret world; the Circus’s inspired exploitation of a necessary evil. Nothing planned but, as life would have it, a curtain-raiser to much that happened later. A typhoon Saturday; a ripple on the plunging, fetid, sterile, swarming pool which is Hong Kong; a bored chorus, still without a hero. And, curiously, a few months afterwards, it fell once more to Luke, in his role of Shakespearean messenger, to announce the hero’s coming. The news came over the house wire while he was on stand-by and he published it to a bored audience with his customary fervour:
    ‘Folks! Give ear! I have news! Jerry Westerby’s back on the beat, men! Heading out East again, hear me, stringing for that same damn comic!’
    ‘His lordship!’ the dwarf cried at once in mock ecstasy. ‘A dash of blue blood, I say, to raise the vulgar tone! Oorah for quality, I say.’ With a profane oath, he threw a napkin at the wine rack. ‘Jesus,’ he said, and emptied Luke’s glass.
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The Honourable Schoolboy

Chapter 2 - The Great Call
    0n the afternoon the telegram arrived, Jerry Westerby was hacking at his typewriter on the shaded side of the balcony of his rundown farmhouse, the sack of old books dumped at his feet. The envelope was brought by the black-clad person of the postmistress, a craggy and ferocious peasant who with the ebbing of traditional forces had become the headman of the ragtag Tuscan hamlet. She was a wily creature but today the drama of the occasion had the better of her, and despite the heat she fairly scampered up the arid track. In her ledger the historic moment of delivery was later put at six past five, which was a lie but gave it force. The real time was five exactly. Indoors Westerby’s scrawny girl, whom the