Our Game

TWO

I AM NOT given to panic, but that night I came as near to it as I had ever come. Which of us were they pursuing—Larry or me? Or both of us? How much did they know of Emma? Why had Checheyev visited Larry in Bath and when, when, when? Those policemen weren't looking for some fringe academic who had gone walkabout for a few days. They were on a trail, smelling blood, hunting someone who appealed to their most aggressive instincts.

Yet who did they think he was—Larry, my Larry, our Larry? What had he done? This talk of money, Russians, deals, Checheyev, me, socialism, me again ... How could Larry be anything except what we had made him: a directionless English middle-class revolutionary, a permanent dissident, a dabbler, a dreamer, a habitual rejecter; a ruthless, shiftless, philandering, wasted, semicreative failure, too clever not to demolish an argument, too mulish to settle for a flawed one?

And who did they think I was—this solitary retired civil servant, speaking his foreign languages to himself, making wine, and playing the Good Samaritan in his desirable Somerset vineyard? You should keep a dog indeed! Why should they assume, just because I was alone, that I was incomplete? Why pursue me, merely because they couldn't get their hands on Larry or Checheyev? And Emma—my fragile, or not so fragile, departed mistress of Honeybrook: how long before she too is in their sights? I went upstairs. No, I didn't. I ran. The telephone was by my bed, but as I lifted the receiver I humbled myself by forgetting the number I meant to dial, a thing that in the tightest operational situations had never happened to me through my entire secret life.

Yet why had I come upstairs at all? There was a perfectly good phone in the drawing room, another in the study. Why had I rushed upstairs? I remembered some gung-ho lecturer at training school boring us on the arts of siege-breaking. When people panic, he said, they panic upward. They make for lifts, escalators, stairs, any way to go up, not down. By the time the boys go in, anyone who is not too petrified to move is in the attic.

I sat on the bed. I dropped my shoulders to relax them. I rolled my head around on the advice of some colour-supplement guru I had read on the subject of do-it-yourself massage. I felt no relief. I crossed the gallery to Emma's side of the house, stood outside her door, and listened—for what, I didn't know. The tap-tap of her typewriter as it promiscuously embraced each Hopeless Cause in turn? Her doting murmurs on the telephone until I cut them off? Her tribal music from remotest Africa—Guinea, Timbuktu? I tried the door handle. It was locked. By me. I listened again but did not enter. Was I afraid of her ghost? Her straight, accusing, over-innocent stare that said: Keep out, I'm dangerous, I've scared myself and now I'm scaring you? About to return to my own side, I paused at the long landing window and gazed at the far outlines of the walled garden glowing in the pale light of the greenhouses.

* * *

It is a warm, late-summer Sunday at Honeybrook. We have been together six months. First thing this morning we have stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the bottling room, while Cranmer the great viniculturalist breathlessly measures the sugar content of our Madeleine Angevine grapes, yet another of Uncle Bob's questionable selections. The Madeleine is as capricious as any other woman, a visiting French expert assured me, with much winking and nodding: ripe and ready me day, over the hill the next. Prudently, I do not relay this sexist analogy to Emma. I am praying for seventeen percent but sixteen percent will promise a harvest. In the fabled annee of 1976, Uncle Bob touched an amazing twenty percent before the English wasps had their share and the English rain the rest. Emma watches as I nervously hold the refractometer to the light. "Pushing eighteen percent," I intone at last, in a voice better suited to a great general on the eve of battle. "We pick in two weeks."

Now we are lounging in the walled garden among our vines, telling ourselves that by our presence we are nurturing them to the last stage of their fruition. Emma has the swing chair and is wearing the Watteau look that I encourage in her: wide hat, long skirt, her blouse unbuttoned to the sun, while she sips Pimm's and reads sheets of music and I watch her, which is all I want to do for the rest of my life. Last night we made love. This morning after our sugar-measuring ceremony we made more love, as I pretend to myself that I can tell by the polish of her skin and the lazy pleasure in her eyes.

"I reckon if we got a sensible crew in, we could clear this lot in one day," I declare boldly.

She turns a page, smiling.

"Uncle Bob made the mistake of inviting friends. Hopeless. Total waste of time. Real villagers will pick you six tons in a day. Five anyway. Not that we've got more than three here, at the outside."

Her head lifts, she smiles but says nothing. I conclude that she is gently mocking me for my yeoman's fantasies.

"So I reckon if we have Ted Lanxon and the two Toiler girls, and if Mike Ambry isn't ploughing, and maybe Jack Taplow's two sons from the choir could come after church if they're free—in exchange for our support at Harvest Festival, naturally...."

An expression of distraction passes across her young face, and I fear that I am boring her. Her brow puckers, her hands lift to close her blouse. Then I realise to my relief that it is merely some sound that she has heard and I have not, for her musician's ear hears everything before I do. Then I hear it too: the wheeze and clatter of a frightful car as it pulls up in the sweep. And I know at once whose car it is. I do not have to wait until I recognise the familiar voice, never raised yet never too quiet to hear.

"Timbo. Cranmer, for God's sake. Hell are you hiding, man? Tim?"

After which, because Larry always finds you, the door of the walled garden swings open and he is standing there, slim as a whip in his not very white shirt and baggy black trousers and disgraceful buckskin hoots. the Pettifer forelock dangling artistically over his right eye. And I know that, nearly a year late, just when I am beginning to believe I have heard the last of him, he has come to claim the first of my promised Sunday lunches.

"Larry! Fantastic! Good heavens!" I cry. We shake hands, then to my surprise he embraces me, his designer stubble scraping against my freshly shaved cheek. All the time he was my joe, he never once embraced me. "Marvellous. You've made it at last. Emma, this is Larry." I am holding his arm now. Again, the holding, is all new to me. "God sent us both to Winchester and then to Oxford, and I haven't been able to get rid of him since. Right, Larry?"

At first he seems unable to focus on her. He is guillotine pale and a little fierce: his Lubyanka glower. To judge by his breath, he is still drunk after an all-night binge, probably with the university porters. But as usual his looks do not reveal this. According to his looks, he is a studious and sensitive duellist, about to die too young. He stands before her, head tipped critically back to examine her. He rubs his knuckles along his jaw. He smiles his scampish, self-deprecating smile. She smiles, scampish also, the shadow of her sun hat making a mystery of her upper face, a thing she knows perfectly well.

"Well, stone the crows," he declares happily. "Turn, beauty, turn. Who is she, Timbo? Hell did you find her?"

"Under a toadstool," I reply proudly, which if unsatisfactory to Larry sounds a great deal better than "in a physiotherapist's waiting room in Hampstead on a wet Friday evening."

Then their two smiles connect and light each other—hers quizzical, and his, perhaps because of her beauty, momentarily less confident of its reception. But a mutual smile of recognition all the same, even if it doesn't quite know what it recognises.

But I know.

I am their broker, their intermediary. I have guided Larry's search for more than twenty years. I am guiding Emma's now, protecting her from what in the past she has too often found, and swears she doesn't want to find again. Yet as I observe my two destiny-seekers taking stock of one another, I realise that I have only to step out of the ring to be forgotten.

"She knows nothing," I tell Larry firmly as soon as I get him alone in the kitchen. "I'm a retired Treasury boffin. You're you. That's absolutely it. There's no subtext. Okay?"

"Still living the old lie, eh?"

"Aren't you?"

"Oh sure. All the time. So what's she?"

"What do you mean?"

"What's she doing here? She's half your age."

"She's half yours too. Less three years. She's my girl. What do you think she's doing here?"

He has his face in the fridge, where he is looking for cheese. Larry is always hungry. Sometimes I wonder what he would have eaten all those years if he hadn't been my joe. A local cheddar takes his fancy.

"Where's the bloody bread? Then a beer, if you don't mind. A beer first, then an alcohol."

He scented her, I think, as I rummage for his bloody bread. His voices have told him I'm living with a girl, and he's come to check her out.

"Hey, saw Diana the other day," he says, in the deliberately careless voice he uses for referring to my ex-wife. "Looks ten years younger. Sends her love."

"That's new," I say.

"Well, not in as many words. But implied, as the great loves always are. The same old creamy look in her eyes whenever your name crops up."

Diana was till now his ultimate secret weapon against me.

Having ridiculed her to hell and back while I was married to her, he now professes a brotherly fondness for her and wheels it out whenever he thinks it will discomfit me.

"Heard of him?" Emma protests that evening, offended that I should even have to ask. "Darling, I've sat at Lawrence Pettifer's feet since infancy. Well, not literally. But metaphorically he's a god."

So as quite often happens, I learn something new about her. A few years ago—it is Emma's nature, I would almost say her tradecraft, not to be precise—she decided that mere music was not enough for her and that she would therefore educate herself. So instead of doing the Alternative Music Festival in Devon—which honestly, Tim, is all tai chi and pot these days, she explains with a disdainful smile that does not convince me in the least—she plumped for a summer foundation course in politics and philosophy at Cambridge: "And I mean on the radical stuff, which was what I went for, naturally. Pettifer on practically anything was absolutely mandatory...." She is doing too much with her hands. "I mean his paper on 'Artists in Revolt' ... and 'The Materialist Desert' ..." She seems suddenly to run out, and since she has the titles right but doesn't go beyond them, I wonder rather unkindly whether she had read him or only heard about him.

After which the subject of Larry is by tacit agreement shelved. The next Sunday we clean The Sulky Hun and prepare him for battle. All the while we do this I am listening for Larry's beastly car, but it doesn't materialise. But the Sunday afterwards, surer than Fate and once more unanounced, Larry appears, arrayed this time in a French peasant blouson and his tattered Winchester straw boater, which we used to call a strat, and a spotted red neckerchief, with its ends flying away like wings.

"All right, fine. Very funny," I warn him with less than my customary grace. "But if you're picking grapes, you bloody pick them."

And of course he picks his heart out, which is Larry to the life. When you want him to zig, he zags. When you want him to zag, he casts a spell over your girl. Three weeks later fermentation is complete, and we rack the wine off the yeast as a prelude to rough filtering. And by then I am laying three places at table automatically: one for Cranmer, one for Emma, one for the metaphorical god at whose feet she has been sitting since infancy.

* * *

I ran down to the study and dug out my address book. Under Merriman nothing, but then I'm not looking for Merriman. I'm looking for Mary, which is my homophobe code name for him. Emma, I was certain, would never have dreamed of invading my address book. But if she had, she would have found, instead of Merriman, a woman called Mary who lived in Chiswick and had an office in London. Larry, on the other hand, made a point of reading my private correspondence and anybody else's without a qualm. And who should blame him? If you encourage a man to dissemble and steal hearts, you have only yourself to thank when he turns round and robs you of your secrets and whatever else you've got.

"Hullo?" A woman's voice.

"Is that six six nine six?" I asked. "This is Arthur."

It was not her telephone number I was quoting to her but my personal key code. There had been a time when I was impressed by such devices.

"Yes, Arthur, who do you want?" she asked in a minor-royal drawl.

It occurred to me that my key code had revealed me as an ex-member rather than a current one. Hence her unyielding tone, since ex-members are by definition trouble. I imagined her tall, horsy, and thirty-something, with a name like Sheena. There had been a time when I regarded Sheenas as the backbone of England.

"I'd like to speak to Sidney, please," I replied. "Sort of by yesterday, if it's possible."

Sidney for Jake Merriman. Arthur for Tim Cranmer, alias Timbo. Nobody who is anybody uses his own name. What good had it ever done us, this cloak-and-dagger rigmarole? What harm had it done us, this endless wrapping up and hiding of our identities? Squeak. Ping. A mysterious resonance as computer speaks to computer, then to God. The sound of water running out of a bath.

"Sidney will call you back in two minutes, Arthur. Wait where you are."

And with a click she vanished.

But where am I? How will Sidney know where to reach me? Then I remembered that all the stuff about tracing calls went out with bustles and the old building. My phone number was probably on her screen before she picked up the phone to me. She even knew which extension I was speaking from: Cranmer is in his study. . . . Cranmer is scratching his arse. . . . Cranmer is lovesick. . . . Cranmer is an anachronism. . . . Cranmer is thinking that as eternity is reckoned, there's a lifetime in a second, and wondering where he read it. . . . Cranmer is picking up the phone again. . . .

A vacuum, followed by more electronic matter. I had prepared my speech. I had prepared my tone. Detached. No unseemly emotion, which Merriman deplores. No suggestion that yet another ex-member might be trying to talk himself back into the fold, a thing for which ex-members are notorious. I heard Merriman and started to apologise for ringing late on Sunday night, but he wasn't interested.

"Have you been playing silly buggers with your telephone?"

"No. Why?"

"I've been trying to get hold of you since Friday evening. You've changed your number. Why the devil didn't you tell us?"

"I rather imagined you'd have your ways of finding out.”

“At the weekend? You're joking."

I closed my eyes. British Intelligence has to wait till Monday morning to get hold of an unlisted number. Try telling that to the latest useless watchdog committee charged with making us cost-effective, or accountable, or—joke of jokes—open.

Merriman was asking me whether I had had a visit from the police.

"An Inspector Percy Bryant and a Sergeant Oliver Luck," I replied. "They said they came from Bath. I thought they came from Central Casting."

Silence while he consulted his diary, or a colleague, or for all I knew his mother. Was he in the Office? Or his desirable Chiswick gent's res, just a poodle's pee-walk from the Thames? "The earliest I can manage is tomorrow at three," he said, in the voice my dentist uses when he is being asked to fit a worthless pain case into a lucrative schedule: Well, does it really hurt? "You know where we are these days, I suppose? You can get here all right?"

"I can always ask a policeman," I said.

He didn't find that funny. "Come to the main door and bring your passport."

"My what?"

He had gone. I took a grip on myself: Calm down. That wasn't Zeus talking, that was Jake Merriman, lightest of the Top Floor lightweights. Any lighter he'd blow off the roof, we used to say. Jake's idea of a crisis was a bad olive in his dry martini. Besides, what was so sensational about Larry going missing? It was only because the police had got into the act. What about some of the other times when Larry had gone missing? At Oxford, when he decides to bicycle to Delphi rather than sit his Prelims? In Brighton, on the day he is supposed to make his first clandestine rendezvous with a Russian courier but prefers instead to get drunk with a circle of congenial fellow souls he has picked up in the bar of the Metropole?

* * *

It is three in the morning. As my agent, Larry is still cutting his milk-teeth. We are parked on another of our remote hilltops, this time on the Sussex Downs. The lights of Brighton are below us. Beyond them lies the sea. Stars and a half-moon make a nursery window of the sky.

"Don't see the goal, Timbo, old horse," Larry is protesting as he peers myopically through the windscreen. He is a boy still, in silhouette a Pan child—long eyelashes and full lips. His air of reckless daring and highborn purpose greatly endears him to his Communist suitors. They do not understand—and how should they?—that their newest conquest can turn full circle in an instant if his perpetual craving for action is not answered; that Larry Pettifer would rather see the world hurtling towards catastrophe than standing still. "You've got the wrong man, Timbo. Need a lesser sort of chap. Bigger sort of shit."

Here, eat something, Larry, I say, giving him a piece of pork pie. Here, have another swig of lime juice. For this is the crime I commit each time he starts to weaken: I talk down the resistance in him; I wave the awful flag of duty. I do my head prefect number, the way I used to speak to him at school when Larry was a parson's son in revolt and I was king of Babylon.

"Can you hear me?"

"Hearing you."

"It's called service, remember? You're cleaning the political drains. It's the dirtiest job democracy has on offer. If you want to leave it to someone else, we'll all understand."

Long silence. Larry drunk is never stupid. Sometimes he is a lot more perspicacious drunk than sober. And I have flattered him. I have offered him the high, hard road.

"You don't think, democratically speaking, Timbo, that we might actually be better off with dirty drains, do you?" he asks, now playing the custodian of our libertarian democracy.

"No, I don't. But if that's your view, you'd better say so and go home."

Which is perhaps a little heavy of me, but I am still at the geedy stage with Larry: he is my creation and I must have whichever strings I have to pull in order to keep him mine. It is only a few weeks since the reigning head resident at the Soviet Embassy in London, a man supposedly named after an endless fan dance, recruited him as his agent. Now every time Larry is with Brod I worry myself sick. I dare not think what seditious opinions are swaying his moody, impressionable nature, filling the vacuum of his constant boredom. When I send him out into the world, I intend that he should come back to me more mine than when he left me. And if this sounds like some possessioner's fantasy, it is also the way we young puppetmasters have been taught to run our joes: as our wards, as our other family, as the men and women we are there to lead, counsel, service, motivate, nurture, complete, and own.

So Larry listens to me, and I listen to me. And surely I am as persuasive and reassuring as it is possible to be. Which is perhaps why Larry falls asleep for a while, because suddenly his sweating, boy-genius head lurches into the vertical, as if he has just woken up.

"Got a serious problem, Timbo," he announces in a brave, confiding voice. "Top serious, actually. Ultra."

"Tell it to me," I say generously.

But my heart is already in my boots. A woman, I am thinking. Yet another. She's pregnant, she's cut her wrists, left home, her husband is looking for Larry with a horsewhip. A car, I am thinking: yet another. He has smashed one, stolen one, parked one and forgotten where. All of these problems have arisen at least once in our brief operational life together, and in low moments I have begun to ask myself whether Larry is worth the candle, which is what the Top Floor has been asking me almost from the start of our endeavour.

"It's my innocence," he explains.

"Your what?"

He reiterates, very precisely. "Our problem, Timbo, is my purblind, incurable, omnivorous innocence. I can't leave life alone. I love it. Its fictions and its facts. I love everybody, all the time. Best of all I love whoever I was speaking to last."

"And the corollary to that?"

"And the corollary to that is that you've got to be jolly careful what you ask of me. Because I'll do it. You're such an eloquent swine. Such a brick. Got to be sparing, follow me? Ration yourself. Don't take all of me all the time."

Then he turns and lifts his face to me, and I see the alcoholic tears running down it like rainwater, though they don't seem to affect his voice, which as always is self-consciously mellow: "I mean it's all right for you, selling your soul. You haven't got one. But what about mine?"

I ignore his appeal. "The Russians are recruiting left, right, and centre," I say in the voice of pure reason that he hates the most. "They're totally unscrupulous and very successful. If the Cold War ever turns hot, they'll have us over a barrel unless we can beat them at their own game."

And my tactic works, for the next day, contrary to everybody's expectation except mine, Larry makes the fallback rendezvous with his contact and, in his role of Secret Protector of the Righteous once more, goes through his paces like an angel. Because in the end—such was my younger man's conviction in those days—in the end, properly led, the parson's son always comes to heel, his purblind innocence notwithstanding.

* * *

My passport lay in the top right drawer of my desk. A blue-and-gold true British ninety-four-page foreigner-frightener of the old school, in the name of Timothy D'Abell Cranmer, accompanied by no children, profession not given, expires seven years hence, let's hope before its bearer.

Bring your passport, Merriman had said.

Why? Where does he want me to go? Or is he saying, in the spirit of old comradeship: You've got till three tomorrow afternoon to run for it?

My ears were singing. I heard screaming, then sobbing, then the groaning of the wind. A storm was getting up. God's anger. Yesterday a crazy autumn snowfall and tonight a veritable sea storm, slapping the shutters and whistling in the eaves and making the house crack. I stood at the study window, watching the raindrops slash across the glass. I peered into the blackness and saw Larry's pale face grinning at me, and Larry's pretty white hand tap-tapping on the windowpane.

* * *

It is New Year's Eve, but Emma has her backache and is in no mood to celebrate. She has retired to her royal apartments, where she is stretched out on her bed board. Our sleeping arrangements would be a puzzle to anyone looking for the conventional lovers' bower. There is her side of the house and there is my side, which is how we agreed that it should be from the day she came to me: each would have his sovereignty, his territory, his right to aloneness. She demanded this and I granted it, never quite believing she would hold me to my promise. But she does. Even when I take her tea or broth or whatever I decide will cheer her up, I knock and wait until I hear her telling me I may approach. And tonight, because it is New Year's Eve, our first, I am allowed to lie on the floor beside her, holding her hand while we talk to the ceiling and her stereo plays lute music and the rest of England makes merry.

"He really is the end," she complains—with humour of a sort, it is true, but not enough to conceal her disappointment. "I mean even Larry knows when it's Christmas. He could at least have rung."

So I explain to her, not for the first time, that Christmas is an abomination to him; how every Christmas since I have known him he has threatened to convert to Islam; and how every Christmas he undertakes some crazy grudge-trip in order to escape the awfulness of English sub-Christian revelry. I paint a facetious picture of him trekking across inhospitable desert with a bunch of Bedouin Arabs. But I have the feeling she is barely listening.

"After all, there's nowhere in the world you can't ring from these days," she says severely.

For the fact is that Larry has by now become our worry bead, our errant genius. Almost nothing in our lives takes place without some sort of nod at him. Even our latest cuvee, though it will not be drinkable for a year, bears the in-house nickname Château Larry.

"We ring him often enough," she complains. "I mean he could at least let us know he's all right."

Actually it is she who rings him, though it would be an infringement of her sovereignty to point this out. She rings him to make sure he got home safely; to ask him whether it's really all right to buy South African grapes these days; to remind him that he's pledged to go to dinner with the dean, or present himself sober and correct at a meeting of the Senior Common Room.

"Perhaps he's picked up some beautiful girl," I suggest, more hopefully than she can possibly imagine.

"Then why doesn't he tell us? Bring her, if he must, the bitch. It's not as if we're going to disapprove, is it?"

"Far from it."

"I just hate thinking of him being alone."

"At Christmas."

"Any time. I just get the feeling, whenever he walks out of the door, he'll never come back. He's—I don't know—endangered somehow."

"I think you may find he's a bit less delicate than you suppose," I say, also to the ceiling.

I have noticed recently that we talk better without eye contact. Perhaps it is the only way we can talk at all. "Peaked early, that's Larry's trouble. Brilliant at university, fizzled in the real world. There were two or three like that in my generation. But they're survivors. Takers is a better word."

Call it cover, call it something shabbier: again and again over the last weeks I have heard myself play the long-suffering Good Samaritan while in my secret heart I am the worst Samaritan on earth.

But tonight God has had enough of my duplicity. For hardly have I spoken than I hear, not the crowing of a cock, but the sound of tapping at a ground-floor window. But so distinctly—so much in time with the rhythm of her lute music—that for a second I wonder whether it's a tap-tapping in my own head, until Emma's hand tears itself free of mine as if I'd stung her, and she rolls onto her side and sits up. And like Larry, she doesn't shout, she speaks. To him. As if Larry, not I, were lying alongside her. "Larry? Is that you? Larry?"

And from below us, after the tap-tapping, I hear the down-soft voice that defies gravity and three-foot-thick stone walls in its ability to find you wherever you are hiding. He hasn't heard her, of course. He can't have done. He has no earthly reason to know where we are or whether we're at home at all. True, a couple of downstairs lights are burning, but I do that anyway to discourage burglars. And my Sunbeam is locked safely in its garage, out of sight.

"Hey, Timbo. Emm. Darlings. Let down the drawbridge. I'm home. You remember Larry Pettifer the great educator? Pettifer the Petomane? Happy New Year. Happy, happy what-the-hell."

Emm is his name for her. She does not object to it. To the contrary, I am beginning to think she wears it like his favour.

* * *

And I? Have I no lines in this cabaret? Is it not my role, my duty, to humour him? To rush to my bedroom window, throw up the sash, lean out, yell at him: "Larry, it's you, you made it—are you alone? Listen, Emma's back is playing her up. I'll be down!" To be delighted, welcome him, my oldest friend, alone on New Year's Eve? Timbo, his rock, the one that crushed him, as he likes to say? To rush downstairs, put on the outside lights, and peer at him through the fish-eye as I unbolt the locks, his Byronic frame rocking in the darkness? Fling my arms round him in accordance with our new habit of embracing—round his beloved green Austrian raincoat that he calls his moleskin—though he is soaked to the bone, having driven most of the way from London by car until the blasted thing developed a will of its own and rolled into a ditch, obliging him to hitch a lift from a bunch of drunk spinsters? His designer stubble tonight is not one day old but six, and there is a superior glow about him that is more than drink: some sheen, some sparkle of distant places. I was right, I think: he has been on one of his heroic voyages, and now he's going to boast about it.

"Bad back?" he is saying. "Emm? Bollocks. Can't have a bad back, not tonight, not Emm!"

He's right.

Already with Larry's arrival Emma has undergone a magical cure. At midnight she is about to begin her day again, as if she has never had a backache in her life. Chasing round my dressing room as I run Larry's bath—rooting out fresh socks for him, slacks, shirt, a pullover, and a pair of bedroom slippers to replace his dreadful buckskin boots—I listen to her scamper back and forth across her bedroom in joyous indecision. My designer jeans or my long fireside skirt that Tim bought me for my birthday? Her cupboard door shrieks; the skirt has it. My high white blouse or the low black? High white; Tim doesn't like me tarty. And with the high white I can wear the intaglio necklace that Tim insisted on giving me for Christmas.

We dance.

Dancing embarrasses me, but Emma, if she remembers this, chooses to disregard it. Larry is a natural: now a stately Colonial British fox-trotter, now a crazy Cossack or whatever he thinks he is, hands on hips, strutting round her in imperious rings, slapping the polished wood floor with my bedroom slippers. We sing, though I am no singer and in church have long learned to mouth the hymns rather than incant them. First we stand in a tight triangle, listening to the clock strike twelve. Then we link arms, one soft white arm apiece, and belt out "Auld Lang Syne" while Larry camps a Winchester choirboy's descant and the intaglios glint and bob at Emma's throat. And though her eyes and smiles are for me, I do not need to take lessons in the school of love to know that every contour and inlet of her body, from the pitch of her dark head to the chaste arrangement of her skirt, is referred to him. And when at half past three it is our second bedtime of the night, and Larry is flopped in the wing chair, dead bored again and watching us, and I stand behind her and work her shoulders for her, I know it is his hands, not mine, that she is feeling on her body.

"So anyway, you've been on one of your trips," I say to him next morning, finding him in the kitchen ahead of me, making himself tea and baked beans on toast. He has not slept. All through the small hours I have listened to him prowling my study, rummaging among my books, pulling open drawers, stretching out, getting up again. All through the night I have endured the rank stink of his beastly Russian cigarettes: Prima for when he wants to feel like a cloth-cap intellectual; Belomorkanal when he's needing a little soothing lung cancer, he likes to say.

"So anyway, yes, I have," he agrees at last. For he has been untypically reticent about his absence, reviving in me the hope that he has found a woman of his own.

"Middle East?" I suggest.

"Not really."

"Asia?"

"Not really. Strictly European, in fact. Bulwark of European civilisation."

I don't know whether he is trying to shut me up or provoke me into trying harder, but either way I deny him the pleasure. I am not his keeper anymore. Resettled joes though when did Larry ever settle in the first place?—are the responsibility of Welfare Section, unless other arrangements are made in writing.

"Anyway, it was somewhere nice and pagan," I suggest, about to turn to other subjects.

"Oh, it was nice and pagan, all right. For the full Christmas experience, try tasteful Grozny in December. Pitch dark, stinks of oil, dogs are all drunk, teenagers wear gold and carry Kalashnikovs."

I stare at him. "Grozny in Russia?"

"Chechenia, actually. North Caucasus. It's gone independent. Unilaterally. Moscow's a bit miffed."

"How did you get there?"

"Thumbed a lift. Flew to Ankara. Flew to Baku. Sneaked up the coast a bit. Turned left. Piece of cake."

"What were you doing?"

"Seeing old friends. Friends of friends."

"Chechens?"

"One or two. And some of their neighbours."

"Have you told the Office?"

"Didn't think I'd bother, actually. Christmas trip. Nice mountains. Fresh air. What's it to them? Does Emm do shoog in her tea?"

He is halfway to the kitchen door, a fresh teacup in his hand.

"Here. Give that to me," I say sharply, taking it from him. "I'm going upstairs anyway."

Grozny? I repeat to myself, over and over. According to recent press reports from the region, Grozny today is one of the most inhospitable cities on earth. Not even Larry, I would have wagered, would risk immolation by bloodthirsty Chechens as an antidote to English Christmas. So is he lying? Or trying to shock me? What does he mean by old friends, friends of friends, neighbours? Grozny and then where? Has the Office re-recruited him without telling me? I refuse to be drawn. I behave as if the entire conversation never happened. And so does Larry—except for his damned smile and his superior glow of far away.

* * *

"Emm's agreed to do a spot of dogsbodying for me," Larry is saying as we saunter on the upper terrace one sunlit Sunday evening. "Help out with a few of my Hopeless Causes. That all right by you?"

It is no longer just Sunday lunch by now. Sometimes the three of us are so happy together that Larry feels obliged to stay for supper too. In the eight weeks since he has been coming to us, the tenor of his visits has changed entirely. Gone the dreary stories of academic lowlife. Instead we have Larry redux, Larry the world-dreamer and Sunday sermoniser. one moment raging against the shameful Western inertia, the next painting treacly visions of altruistic wars conducted by a United Nations strike force empowered to put on its Batman uniform and head off tyranny, pestilence, and famine at a moment's notice. And since I happen to regard such fantasies as dangerous hogwash, it is my luckless role to act the family skeptic.

"So who will she be saving?" I enquire with too much sarcasm. "The Marsh Arabs? The ozone layer? Or the dear old common whale?"

Larry laughs and claps a hand on my shoulder, which at puts me on my guard. "All of 'em, blast you, Timbo, just to spite you. Single-handed."

But as his hand stays on my shoulder and I return his overbright smile, I am bothered by something more substantial than his nickname for her. What I see on the surface of his smile is the promise of a mischievous but harmless rivalry. But what I read behind it is the warning of an imminent reckoning: "You started me running, Timbo, remember?" he is saying, with his mocking eyes. "That doesn't mean you can switch me off."

But I have a dilemma, and that is provided by my conscience—or, as Larry would have it, my guilt. I am Larry's friend as well as his inventor. And as his friend, I know that the so-called Hopeless Causes with which he beats the fetid air of Bath—Stop the Outrage in Rwanda, Don't Let Bosnia Bleed to Death, Action for Molucca Now—are the only means he has to fill the void the Office left behind when it dumped him and continued on its way.

"Well, I hope she's of some help to you," I say handsomely. "You can always use the stables, you know, if you need more office space."

But when I catch his expression a second time, I like it no better than the first. And when a day or two later I pick my moment to find out what exactly Larry has roped her into, I bump up against, of all things, a wall of secrecy.

"It's sort of Amnesty stuff," she says, without looking up from her typewriter.

"Sounds marvellous. So what does that involve—getting people out of political prison and so forth?"

"It's all of it really." She types something.

"Quite a canvas, then," I suggest awkwardly, for it is a strain to keep the conversation going across the length of her attic studio.

* * *

It is a lot of Sundays later, but all Sundays have become one. They are Larry day, then they are Larry-and-Emma day, then they are hell, which for all its variations has a suffocating sameness. More accurately it is early Monday morning, and first light is breaking over the Mendips. Larry left us a full half hour ago, yet the clatter of his dreadful car clanking and farting down the drive rings in my ears, and his sweetly modulated "Sleep well, darlings" is an order my head stubbornly refuses to obey—as Emma's does too, apparently, for she is standing at the window of my bedroom, a naked sentry, marking how the black puffs of cloud break and regroup against the fiery sunrise. I never in my life saw anything so unreachable or beautiful as Emma with her long black hair falling down her back, naked, gazing at the dawn.

"That's exactly what I want to be," she says in the chatty, over-enthusiastic tone I am beginning to suspect in her. "I want to be broken up and put together again."

"That's what you came here for, darling," I remind her. But she no longer likes me sharing her dreams.

"What is it about you both?" she says.

"Which both?"

She ignores this. She knows, and I know, that there is only one other partner in our lives.

"What sort of friends were you?" she asks.

"We weren't boyfriends, if that's what you're thinking."

"Perhaps you should have been."

Sometimes I resent her tolerance. "Why?"

"You'd have got it out of your systems. Most of the public school Englishmen I know had boyhood love affairs with other boys. Didn't you even have a crush on him?"

"I'm afraid I didn't. No."

"Perhaps he had a crush on you. His shining older knight. His role model."

"Are you being sarcastic?"

"He says you were a big influence on him. His straight man. Even after school."

Call it tradecraft, call it lover's frenzy: I am ice cold. Operational cold. Has Larry broken omerta—Larry, after twenty years before the secret mast, has made a Come-to-Jesus confession to my girl? Using the self-same specious formulations that he once flung in the face of his long-suffering case officer? Cranmer perverted the humanity in me, Emma, Cranmer seduced me, exploited my purblind innocence, Made me a liar and dissembler.

"What else did he tell you?" I ask with a smile.

"Why? Is there more?" She is still naked, but now her nakedness no longer pleases her, so she takes up a wrap and covers herself before returning to her vigil.

"I just wondered what form my evil influence is supposed to have taken."

"He didn't say evil. You did." Now it was her turn to force a laugh. "I can wonder whether I'm caught between the two of you, can't I? You've probably been to prison together. That would explain why the Treasury chucked you out at forty-seven."

I have to believe for her sake that she means this as a joke; as an escape from a subject that is threatening to get out of hand. She is probably waiting for me to laugh. But suddenly the gap between us is unbridgeable and we are both afraid. We have never been this far apart or stood so consciously before the unsayable.

"Will you go to his lecture?" she asks, in a mistaken effort to change the subject.

"What lecture? I'd have thought a lecture every Sunday was enough."

I know perfectly well what lecture. It's called "The Squandered Victory: Western Foreign Policy since 1988," and it is yet another Pettifer diatribe on the moral bankruptcy of Western foreign policy.

"Larry has invited us to his memorial lecture at the university," she replies, wishing me to know by her voice that she is exercising supernatural patience. "He's given us two tickets and wants to take us on to a curry afterwards."

But I am too threatened, too alert, too angry to be agreeable. "I don't think I'm a curry man these days, thank you, Emma. And as to your being caught between us—"

"Yes?"

I stop myself in time, but only just. Unlike Larry, I detest large talk; all life has taught me to leave dangerous things unsaid. What use to tell her it isn't Emma who is caught between myself and Larry, but Cranmer who is caught between his two creations? I want to shout at her that if she is seeking examples of undue influence, she need look no further than Larry's manipulation of herself; at his remorseless moulding and seduction of her by weekly and now daily appeals to her infinitely approachable conscience; at his unscrupulous recruitment of her as his helpmeet and body servant under the guise of the so-called Hopeless Causes he continues to espouse; and that if deception is her enemy, let her look for it in her newfound friend.

But I say none of it. Unlike Larry, I am not a confrontation man. Not yet.

"... I only want you to be free," I say. "I don't want you to be trapped by anyone."

But in my head the helpless scream is like a bandsaw: He's playing you! It's what he does! Why can't you see beyond your nose? He'll raise you higher and higher, and when he's bored with you he'll leave you up there, tottering on the brink without him. He's all the things you wanted to escape, rolled into one by me.

* * *

It's my Dark Age. It's the rest of my life before Emma. I'm listening to Larry at his posturing worst, boasting to me about his conquests. Seventeen years have passed since Cranmer's pep talk to his tearful young agent on the Brighton hilltop. Today Larry is rated the best gun in the Office's arsenal of joes. Where are we? In Paris? Stockholm? In one of our London pubs, never the same twice running? We are in the safe flat in the Tottenham Court Road, before they pulled it down to make way for another chunk of modern nowhere, and Larry is pacing, drinking Scotch, scowling his Great Conductor scowl, and I am watching him.

His waistband at half-mast round his slender hips. The ash of his beastly cigarette spilling over the unbuttoned black waistcoat that he has recently decided is his hallmark. His fine fingers pointed upward as he milks the air to the rhythm of his half-wisdoms. The famous Pettifer forelock, now shot with grey but still swinging across his brow in immature revolt. Tomorrow he leaves for Russia again, officially for a month's academic powwow at Moscow State University, in reality for his annual spell of rest and recreation at the hands of his latest KGB controller, the unlikely assistant cultural attache Konstantin Abramovich Checheyev.

There is something majestic as well as anachronistic about the way Moscow handles Larry these days: VIP treatment at Sheremetyevo Airport, a Zil with blackened windows to whisk him to his apartment, the best tables, the best tickets, the best girls. And Checheyev flown over from London to play majordomo in the background. Step through the looking glass, you could imagine they were paying him the departing honours due to a long-standing agent of the British secret service.

"Loyalty to women is a load of junk," Larry declares as he pokes out his coated tongue and studies its reflection. "How can I be responsible for a woman's feelings when I'm not responsible for my own?" He flops into an armchair. Why does even his clumsiest movement have such a careless grace? "With women, the only way to find out what's enough is to do too much," he announces, and practically tells me to write that down for posterity.

I try not to think critically of Larry at times like this. My job is to cosy him along, accommodate his moods, talk up his courage, ride his insults, and come up smiling every time.

* * *

"Tim?"

"Yes, Emma."

"I need to know."

"Whatever you like," I say generously, and close my book. One of her women's novels, and I am finding it hard going.

We are in the breakfast room, a circular pepper pot stuck onto the southeast corner of the house by Uncle Bob. The morning sun makes it a pleasant place to sit. Emma is standing in the doorway. Ever since she went alone to Larry's lecture, I have scarcely seen her.

"It's a lie, isn't it?" she says.

Drawing her gently into the room, I close the door so that Mrs. Benbow cannot overhear us. "What's a lie?"

"You are. You don't exist. You made me go to bed with someone who wasn't there."

"You mean Larry?"

"I mean you! Not Larry. You! Why should you think I've been to bed with Larry? You!"

Because you have, I think. But by now, in order to hide her face from me, she is embracing me. I look down and am surprised to see my right hand operating on its own initiative, patting her back and bestowing comfort on her because I have misunderstood her cover story. And it occurs to me that when there's nothing useful left for you to do on the whole of God's earth, patting someone's back is as good a way to pass the time as any. She is choking and sobbing against me, she is blurting Larry, Tim, and accusing me in preference to accusing herself, though much of what she is saying is mercifully lost in my shirtfront. I catch the word façade, or perhaps it is charade. And the word fiction, but it could have been friction.

Meanwhile I am doing a good deal of thinking about who is ultimately to blame for this scene and others like it. For in the world where Larry and I did our growing up, it would be quite wrong to suppose that merely because the right hand is bestowing consolation, the left is not considering covert action of its own.

* * *

And still she can't leave me. Sometimes in the depth of night she creeps into my room like a thief and makes love to me without saying a word. Then creeps away, leaving her tears on my pillow before the daylight finds her out. A week goes by with scarcely a nod passing between us while each inhabits his separate space. The only sound from her side of the house is the tap-tapping of her typewriter: Dear Friend, Dear Supporter, Dear God, get me out of here, but how? She telephones, but I have no idea who she speaks to, though I guess. Occasionally Larry telephones, and if I take the call I am all sweetness and so is he, as befits two spies at war.

"Hi, Timbo. How's tricks?"

There is only one trick I can think of, and he has played it. But who cares when we are such good friends?

"Very chirpy, thanks. Just fine. It's for you, darling. From Mission Control," I say, passing the call through to her on the internal exchange.

Next day I instruct the exchange to disconnect my telephone, but still she neither runs nor stays.

"Just for information, how will I know when you've left me?" I ask her one night when we meet like ghosts on the landing between our two sides.

"I'll have taken my piano stool with me," she replies.

She means the fold-up stool for her back that she brought to the house on the day she moved in with me. A friendly Swedish osteopath made it for her; how friendly I may only guess.

"And I'll give you the jewellery back," she adds severely. And I see in her face a glance of angry panic, as if she has misspoken and is cursing herself for doing so.

She means the ever growing collection of costly trinkets that I have been buying her from Mr. Appleby of Wells in order to fill gaps in our relationship that can't be filled.

The next day being Sunday, it is required practice that I go to church. When I return, there are the marks of the departed piano stool in the carpet in front of the Bechstein. But she has not left the jewellery behind. And such is the madness of deceived lovers that the absence of her jewellery provides me with a certain forlorn hope—though never enough to weaken the resolve of my left hand.

* * *

I lay dressed on my bed, my reading light switched on. I lay to my side of it—my pillows, my half. Try her; my tempter whispered. But sanity prevailed, and instead of lifting the receiver, I reached down and pulled the jack from the wall, sparing myself the humiliation of being passed yet again from one slack-mouthed cutout to another:

"Emma's not here, I'm afraid, Tim, no. . .. Better try Lucy....” “Hang on, Tim, Luce is playing in Paris. Try Sarah....” “Hey, Deb, it's Tim; what's Sarah's number these days?" But Sarah, if she can be found, knows no better than anyone else where Emma is. "Maybe at John-and-Gerry's, Tim, only they've gone to the rave. Or try Pat, she'll know." But Pat's phone gives only a high-pitched wail, so perhaps she's gone to the rave as well.

* * *

The village clock chimed six. But in my mind's eye I was watching the two policemen's faces floating in the fish-eye lens. And somewhere behind them, Larry's face, drowned and swollen like their own, staring up at me from the moonlit water of Priddy Pool.