Our Game

SIX

"OUR USUAL, WAS it, Mr. Cranmer?"

"If you please, Tom."

"Expect you're looking forward to your Senior Citizen's any day now."

"Thank you, Tom, I have a few years to wait, and I'm glad to do it."

Laughter in which I share, for this is our standing bad joke every other Friday when I buy my ticket to Paddington and take my place on the platform among the London suits. And if today had been an ordinary Friday, I am sure I would have fantasised a little, imagining I was still in harness. And Emma in the good days would have playfully straightened my tie for me, and smoothed the lapels of my jacket, and wished me a nice day at the office, darling, before treating me to a last, delicious, disgracefully suggestive kiss. And in the bad days, she would have watched my departure from the shadows of her upper window, unaware apparently that I was watching her also, in the wing mirror of my Sunbeam, knowing that I was leaving her alone all day to her typewriter and telephone, and Larry thirty miles down the road.

But this morning I was feeling, in place of Emma's amateurish eye, the prickle of professional surveillance on my back. Bartering trivia with a forlorn baronet known locally as poor Percy, who, having inherited a thriving engineering business and run it into the ground, now sold life insurance on commission, I had glimpsed Tom the ticket clerk's silhouette ease across the window of his office to the telephone and speak into it with his back to me. And as the train pulled out of the station I spotted a man in a country cap and raincoat standing in the car park, zealously waving at a woman a few seats behind me, who paid him not the least attention. He was the same man who had followed me in his Bedford van from the crossroads at the end of my lane.

Arbitrarily I awarded Tom to the police, and the cap and raincoat to Munslow. Good luck to them, I thought. Let all pursuing parties note that on this duty Friday, Tim Cranmer is once more going about his customary business.

I was wearing my blue pinstripe. I dress up to people; I can't help it. If I am calling on the vicar, I don a tweed suit; watching a cricket match, a blazer and a sporting tie. And if, after four days' nightmarish incarceration inside my own head, I am attending the bimonthly trustees' meeting of the Charles Lavender Urban and Rural Trust for Wales under the stewardship of Pringle Brothers PLC of Threadneedle Street, I cannot help but look a little like a banker myself as I board the train, study the financial pages of my newspaper, step into the chauffeur-driven car that awaits me among Brunel's splendid arches, give Pringle's uniformed doorman good morning, and see reflected in the glass-and-mahogany door the same unoccupied cab with its light off that had followed me all the way from Praed Street.

* * *

"Mr. Cranmer, hellao, reelly grite to see you," Jamie's supine secretary, Pandora, whined in her Roedean Cockney as I entered the leathery Edwardian antechamber of which she was the mistress.

"Hell's teeth, Tim!" cried Jamie Pringle, all sixteen stone of him, in his striped shirt and mulberry braces, as he forced me into touch with a crushing handshake. "Don't tell me it's Friday week already, what, what?"

Pringle's an arsehole, I heard Larry saying in my inner ear. Was. Is now And ever shall be. Amen.

Monty drifted in like his own shadow. He wore a hollowed black waistcoat and stank of the cigarettes he wasn't allowed to smoke on the partners' floor. Monty kept the books and paid our quarterly expenses with cheques that Jamie signed.

After him came Paul Lavender, still shaking from the hazardous voyage by Rolls-Royce from his house in Mount Street. Paul was feline and fair and seventy, and very slow-moving in patent moccasins with languid tassels. His father, our benefactor, had started life as a schoolmaster in Llandudno, before founding a hotel chain and selling it for a hundred million pounds.

After Paul came Dolly and Eunice, his two spinster sisters. Dolly wore a diamond racehorse. Years ago Dolly had won the Derby, or so she claimed, though Eunice swore Dolly had never owned anything larger than an overfed chihuahua.

And after them again came Henry, the Lavenders' family solicitor. It was thanks to Henry that we met so often. And at four hundred pounds an hour, who could blame him?

"Plonk still holding up?" he asked doubtfully as we shook hands.

"Oh, I think so, thank you. Rather well."

"Cheap Frog stuff not pricing you out of the market at all? I must have been reading the wrong newspapers."

"I'm afraid you must, Henry," I said.

* * *

We were seated round the famous Pringle boardroom table. Each of us had before him one copy of the minutes of the last meeting, one statement of the accounts, and one Wedgwood bone china teacup with a sugared shortbread biscuit on the saucer. Pandora poured. Paul rested his head on one bloodless hand and closed his eyes.

Jamie, our chairman, was about to speak. The fists that thirty years ago had clawed muddy rugger balls out of seething scrums converged upon a tiny pair of gold-framed half-lenses and pulled them on ear by ear. The market, Jamie said, was depressed. He held the foreigners to blame:

"What with your Germans refusing to cut their interest rates, your yen going through the roof, and your High Street takings going through the floor—" He peered about him in bemusement, as if he had forgotten where he was. "I'm afraid that U.K. gilts are weathering something of a trough." Then he gave a nod at Henry, who with a frightful clack opened the two levers of a fibreglass document case and read us an interminable report:

Discussion with the local authorities regarding the provision of sports facilities in the inner cities is proceeding at the pace one has to expect of local civil servants, Jamie....

The trust's offer of an extra children's ward at the Lavender Hospital for Mothers cannot be taken further until additional trust monies are set aside for staffing. None are presently available for such a purpose, Jamie....

Our proposal to supply a mobile library to meet the needs of children in illiterate areas has run up against political objections from the local council—one side arguing that the days of free libraries are dead and buried, another that the selection of books should be determined by the county's education authorities, Jamie....

"Bloody bollocks!"

Eunice had exploded. At about this stage in the proceedings, she usually did.

"Our dad would be turning in his grave," she roared in her smothered Welsh accent. "Free books for the ignorant? That's daylight bloody Communism!"

Equally furiously, Dolly disagreed. She usually did.

"That's a living lie, Eunice Lavender. Dad would be standing up and clapping his hands off. Children's what he prayed for with his last breath. He loved us. Didn't he, Paulie?"

But Paul was in some far Wales of his own. His eyes were still closed, and he wore a misty smile.

Jamie Pringle deftly passed the ball to me. "Tim. Very quiet today. Got a view?"

For once my diplomatic skills eluded me. On any other day I could have dredged up a distracting topic for him: pressed Henry to move faster in his dealings with the city authorities, raised an eyebrow at the Pringle administration costs, which were the only item in the accounts to show an increase. But this morning I had too much of Larry in my head. Wherever I looked round the table, I kept seeing him lounging in one of the empty thrones, dressed in my grey suit that he'd never given back, spinning us some story about this chum in Hull.

"Monty. Your shout," Jamie ordered.

So Monty dutifully cleared his throat, seized a piece of paper from a pile before him, and treated us to a report on our distributable income. But alas, after deduction of charges, costs, and sundry disbursements, there was for the tenth meeting running no income to distribute. Not even the House of Pringle had yet come up with a formula for distributing percentages of nothing to the Poor and Needy Gentlefolk of Wales as defined by the Borders Act of whenever it was.

* * *

We lunched. That much I know. In the panelled sanctum where we always lunched. We were served by Mrs. Peters in white gloves, and we polished off a couple of magnums of the 1955 Cheval Blanc, which the trust had thoughtfully laid down twenty years ago for the resuscitation of its hard-pressed officers. But I forget, thank God, almost everything of our dreadful conversation. Dolly hated niggers: I remember that. Eunice thought them lovely. Monty thought they were all right in Africa. Paul preserved his mandarin smile. A splendid ship's clock, which by tradition determined House of Pringle time, kept noisy record of our progress. By two-thirty, Dolly and Eunice had stormed out in a red-faced huff. By three, Paul had remembered something he had to do, or was it somewhere he had to go, or someone to meet? Must be his barber, he decided. Henry and Monty left with him, Henry murmuring outstanding matters in his ear at four hundred pounds an hour, and Monty desperate for the first of a large number of cigarettes to get him back to par.

* * *

Jamie and I sat pensively over our decanter of partners' port.

"Jolly good, then," he said profoundly. "Yes. Well, then. Cheers. Here's to us."

In a moment, if I did nothing to stop him, he was going to launch himself upon the great issues of our time: the cockiness of women, the mystery of where North Sea oil profits had gone—he gravely feared to the unemployed—or how decent banking had been ruined by the computer. And in thirty minutes exactly, Pandora would pop her stupid pedigree face round the door and remind Mr. Jamie that he had another meeting before close of play: which was Pringle Brothers code for "The chauffeur is waiting to drive you to the airport for your golf at St. Andrew's" or "You promised to take me to Deauville for the weekend."

I asked after Henrietta, Jainie's wife. I always did, and dared not vary the ritual.

"Henrietta is bloody marvellous, thank you," Jamie replied defensively. "Hunt's imploring her to stay on, but old Hen isn't sure she wants to. Getting a bit tired, frankly, of the Antis buggering everything up."

I asked after his children.

"Kids are doing splendidly, Tim, thank you. Marcus is captain o' Fives, Penny's coming out next spring. Not real coming out, not the way the girls did it in our day. But a lot better than nothing," he added, and gazed wistfully past me at the illustrious names of Pringle's Fallen of Two Wars.

I asked whether he'd seen any of the mob recently, meaning our crowd at Oxford. Not since the Oriel bash at Boodle's, he replied. I asked who had been there. It took me two more moves before, seemingly off his own bat, he was talking about Larry. And really it was no great work of art on my part, because in our year if you talked old buddies, sooner or later you talked Larry.

"Extraordinary chap," Jamie pronounced with the absolute certainty of his kind. "Gifted, vast talents, charm. Decent Christian background. father in the Church, all that. But no stability. In life, if you haven't got stability, got nothing. Pinko one week, chucking it all in next. Chucked it in for good this time. Corns are all capitalists now. Worse than the bloody Yanks." And then, almost too easily, as if my guardian angel were whispering in his ear: "Came to see me not long ago. Bit seedy, I thought. Bit hangdog. Certain awareness of having backed the wrong side there, I rather think. Natural enough when you look at it."

I let out a delighted laugh. "Jamie! You're not telling me Larry's become a capitalist entrepreneur, are you? I think that's too ripe."

But Jamie, though he could laugh like a maniac without warning—and usually without humour—only helped himself to more port and waxed more sonorous. "Don't know what he's become, to be frank. Not my business. More than a mere entrepreneur, that's for sure. Something bit more eloquent of the moment, if you ask me," he added darkly, ramming the decanter at me as if he never wanted to see it again. "Not a lot of due respect there either, to be frank."

"Oh dear," I said.

"Rather exaggerated idea of himself." A resentful swallow of port. "Bit of overcompensation going on. Lot of crap about our duty to help the newly freed nations find their feet, right old wrongs, establish norms of social justice. Asked me whether I intended to pass by on the other side. 'Steady on, old boy,' I said. 'Hang about. Weren't you one of the chaps who gave the Sovs a bit of a leg up? You've got me a bit foxed, if you don't mind my saying. Bit stumped. Confused.' "

I leaned forward, showing him that I was all attention. I composed my face into an expression of fascinated, sycophantic incredulity. I strove with all my body language to will his damned story out of the fogged thickets of his lonely little mind: "Go on, Jamie. This is riveting. More."

"Only duty I've got is to this house, I told him. Wouldn't listen. I thought he was an intellectual sort of chap. How can you be an intellectual, not listen? Talked straight through me. Called me an ostrich. I'm not an ostrich. I'm a family man. Pathetic."

"But what on earth did he want you to do, Jamie? Turn over Pringle Brothers to Oxfam?" It flitted through my mind as I said this that it wouldn't be at all a bad idea. But my face, if it was doing its job, revealed only my sincere sympathy that Jamie should have been the target of such bad form.

A half minute's silence while he rounded up his intellectual resources. "Soviet Communist Party was going private. Right?"

"Right."

"That was the story. Selling off Party property. Buildings. Rest homes, offices, transport, sports palaces, schools, hospitals, foreign embassies, land galore, priceless paintings, Faberge, Christ knows what. Billions of dollars of the stuff. Make sense?"

"Indeed it does. Russia Limited. It began in secret with Gorbachev, then it ran riot."

"How Larry got in on the act, anybody's bloody guess. Pringle Brothers doesn't have his connections, pleased to say." Yet another huge swallow of port. "Wouldn't want 'em. Wouldn't touch 'em with a barge pole, thank you. No way, Jose."

"But, Jamie—" I dared not sound as if I cared, though my time was running out. "But, Jimminy"—his Oxford nickname—"sport, what was he asking you to do? Buy the Kremlin? I'm fascinated."

Jamie's reddened gaze fixed itself once more on his company's Roll of Honour. "You still working for whoever you used to be working for?"

I hesitated. Jamie had once applied to join us, but without success. Since then he had tossed me the odd snippet from time to time, usually after we had had the same information better and earlier from other sources. Did he relish our mystique or resent it? Would he tell me more if I answered yes? I chose the middle path.

"Just the odd bit of this and that, Jamie. Nothing onerous. Listen, you're killing me with curiosity. What on earth was Larry up to?"

A delay for more port and grimacing.

"I'm sorry?"

"Two cracks of the whip. Phoned me a couple of years ago, talked a lot of crap about wanting to put a nice piece of business in my way, was I game, matter of several millions, old-pals act, come and see me next time he was in town, bugger all happened. Went off the air."

"And the second bout? When was that?"

I scarcely knew which to press harder: the what or the when. But Jamie took the decision for me.

"Larry Pettifer was up to the following," he announced in an alarming boom. "Larry Pettifer claimed that he had been authorised, by a certain ex-Soviet state agency, name not supplied—correction, by persons in that agency, their names also not supplied—to conduct a dialogue with this house, concerning the possibility of opening an account with this house—series of accounts: offshore, naturally—whereby this house would receive substantial sums of hard currency from sources not accurately defined—would in effect hold said monies on a no-name basis—and make certain disbursements in accordance with such instructions as would from time to time be received by this house from persons entrusted with a certain code word or letter reference, which would be matched by a similar code word or letter reference held by this house. The disbursements would be substantial, but they would never exceed assets, and we would never be asked for credit."

Jamie's monologue had slowed to fifteen revolutions per minute, and there were only nine minutes left to go by the ship's clock.

"Were they big sums? I mean, banking big? How much money was Larry talking about?"

Jamie again consulted the board behind my head. "If you were to think of a figure in the order of the figure that certain trustees and their advisors were deliberating this morning—I would not think you far wrong."

"Thirty million sterling? What on earth would they be buying? Where did they get it from? I mean that's money, isn't it? Even for you? It certainly is for me! Whatever was he up to? I'm absolutely entranced."

"Laundering, what it came down to. Acting under instructions, my feeling, and hadn't got the hang of 'ern. Had some associate or partner we'd be dealing with up north. He'd be some sort of co-signatory up to certain sums. Stank."

My time was running out. So was Jamie.

"Did he say where up north?"

"What's that?"

"You said he had some pal up north."

"Macclesfield. An associate in Macclesfield. Could have been Manchester. No, it wasn't. It was Macclesfield. Used to screw a girl there. Cindy. Worked in the silk trade. Silky Cindy."

"But where in God's name does Larry Pettifer get thirty million pounds from? All right, they're not his—but they must be somebody's!"

Wait. Count. Pray. Smile.

"Mafias," Jamie growled. "Isn't that what they call 'em over there? Competing mafias? Papers are full of 'em." He shook his head and muttered something like His business.

"So what did you do?" I asked, trying desperately to preserve a tone of amused mystification. "Call in your partners? Send him packing?"

The ship's clock was ticking like a bomb, but to my despair Jamie still said nothing. Until suddenly he gave a violent start of impatience, as if it were I who had kept him waiting.

"One doesn't send people packing in these situations, thank you. One gives 'em lunch. One talks old times. Says one will think about it, discuss it with the board. I did tell 'em there were a couple of problems, some practical, some ethical. I suggested it would be nice if they told me who their client actually was, what he was proposing to trade in, and what the tax status would be. A little authentication would help. I suggested they organise an approach through the Foreign Office—at a high level, of course. They did have some letter with them from the embassy in London. Signed by some official. Not the ambassador. Could have been forged. Could have been kosher. One simply doesn't know."

He was examining the assay marks on the back of his coffee spoon, comparing them with the spoon from the empty place next to him. "Broken set," he muttered. "Extraordinary thing." He was crestfallen. "Hell did that happen? Ask Ma Peters. Bloody careless."

"You said they, Jamie," I said.

"What's that, old boy?"

I put a hand on his sleeve. "I'm sorry, Jamie—I may have misheard. I thought you said they. Do you mean Larry didn't come alone? I don't think I quite got that bit."

" 'They' is correct." He was still studying the spoons.

My head was racing. Checheyev? The associate in Macclesfield? Or Larry's chum from Hull University?

"So who came too?" I asked.

To my surprise, Jamie gave a superior and very salacious smile. "Pettifer brought an assistant. Dolly girl is what I would have called her. Assistant was going to be his intermediary, he said. Do the brainwork. Mathematics not up Larry's street, but this girl—mustard. Brighter than Larry by a mile, when it came to numbers."

I was greatly amused. I must have been, for I gave a jolly laugh, though the inside of me was frozen in alarm. "All right, Jamie. Don't hold out on me. She was Russian. She had snow on her boots."

His superior smile would not let go of him. He put down the offending spoons. "Wrong. Decent English girl, far as you could tell. Decently dressed. Spoke the Queen's English well as you and me. Wouldn't be surprised if she was the moving force. Given her a job here any day.”

“Pretty?"

"No. Not pretty. She was beautiful. Word I use very seldom, matter o' fact. Hell she was doing mixed up with a shit like Pettifer, God knows." He had entered the territory he loved best. "Figure to kill for. Lovely little bottom. Legs all the way up. Sat right there in front of me, swingin' 'em at me." He struck a philosophical note. "One of the most extraordinary things in life, Tim, and I've observed it over and over. Pretty girl, have anyone she wants, who does she go for? A shit. Pound to a penny Pettifer beats her up. She probably likes it. Masochist. Same as m' sister-in-law, Angie. Money to burn, looks to kill, Angie goes from one shit to another. Lucky to have any teeth left, way they treat her."

"Did she have a name?" I asked.

"Sally. Sally someone." One side of his mouth slipped down in a terrible smirk. "Jet-black hair, all pinned up on the top of her head, waiting for you to let it down. Absolute fatal weakness of mine. Love a black bush. Whole of womanhood there. Gorgeous."

I was hearing nothing, seeing nothing, feeling nothing. I was behaving and collecting and recording. That was all I was doing in the world, while Jamie looked sad and old and nodded at me and slurped his port.

"Have you heard from him since?"

"Not a peep. Neither of 'em. Rather think they got the message. Not the first time we've shown a con man the door. Or his moil."

I had five minutes left by the ship's clock.

"Did you pass him on to someone? Suggest where he might go?"

A frightful grimace, a last charge. "We're not very clued up on that type of business at Pringle Brothers, thank you. Used to be a little outfit up the road called B.C.C.I. that handled stuff like that once upon a time. One gathers they're under a bit of a cloud."

I had a penultimate question. I sent my rent-a-drool smile with it, and a lot of good fellowship and grateful savouring of the port.

"And you didn't think, Jamie, when he'd gone--or they had—to pick up the phone to whoever it was I used to work for and tip them the wink about Larry? Now that I'm no longer at that desk? Larry and his girl?"

Jamie Pringle fixed me in a bull-like glare of outrage.

"Rat on Larry? Hell are you talking about? I'm a banker. If he'd strangled his dear mother and bunged her in a bucket of acid, I suppose it's just conceivable I'd pick up the phone to somebody. But when a fellow Oriel man comes in here to discuss a banking proposition with me—which, all right, I happen to think stinks to high heaven—I am sworn to absolute and total secrecy. You want to tell 'em, that's your business. Help yourself."

It was achieved. Only the terrible hurdle remained. Perhaps it was the self-torturer in me who had decreed that, after forcing the question too hard upon the police and Pew-Merriman, I should this time hold it back until the very end. Or perhaps it was simply the field man, telling me to gather in everything else first, before going for the crown jewels.

"So when, Jamie?"

"'S'at, old boy?"

He was half asleep.

"When? When did they descend on you? Larry and his girl? They came by appointment, presumably, or you wouldn't have given them lunch," I suggested, hoping by this means to encourage him to look in his diary or pick up the house phone to Pandora.

"Grouse," he announced loudly, and at first I thought he was telling me that he or Larry—or even Emma—had lodged some sort of complaint.

"Gave 'em grouse," he continued. "Ma Peters did. Oriel man. Old times. Hadn't seen him for twenty-five years. Put out the red carpet. Duty. Last week of September, last grouse o' the season, far as this house was concerned. Bloody Arabs overshot 'em. Worse than Eyeties. Come mid-September, hardly a bird left. Self-discipline essential. Family hold back, whatever the foreigners do. Can't say wogs these days. Not PC."

My mouth was numb. I had had a dental injection. My upper gums were frozen, and my tongue had disappeared down my throat.

"So the end of September," I managed, as if addressing the very old or deaf. "Right? Right, Jamie? They came to you in the last week of September? Jolly generous of you to give them grouse. I hope they were duly grateful. Considering you might just as well have shown them the door. I mean I would have been grateful. So would you. End of September. Yes?"

I fumbled on, but I don't know that Jamie ever answered me: not beyond a show of shrugging and grimacing and backbench burbling of sounds like "Naa" and "Quarright." I know the clock struck. I remember the bun face of Pandora appearing round the door, announcing Cinderella's coach. I remember thinking, as the thousand-voiced choir of angels struck up inside my head, that if you're celebrating your emergence from the black light, a bottle of '55 Cheval Blanc and a large dose of Graham's '27 port make an appropriately celestial accompaniment.

Jamie Pringle had risen heavily to his feet and was displaying a passion I had not seen in him outside the rugby field.

"Pandora. Just the girl. Look here. Bloody outrage. Get on to Mrs. Peters now, will you, darling? Broken set of teaspoons. Could ruin the whole service. Find out why and find out where and find out who."

But I had found out when.

* * *

My euphoria, if it survived in certain areas of my head, was short-lived in the rest of them. The white light to which I had been restored enabled me to see more clearly than ever the monstrosity of their shared betrayal. All right, I had taken a gun. I had conspired, plotted, hired a car, and driven into the night determined to slaughter my friend and agent of a lifetime. But he had deserved it! And so had she!

* * *

I walked.

Emma.

I was drunk. Not wine drunk. Or not consciously. After twenty years in the Office, I have a head like an ox. But drunk all the same: blind, humiliated drunk.

Emma.

Who are you being or seeming, with your hair up, swinging your legs at Jamie Pringle? What other lies have you been living while you laughed at me behind my back, the two of you—at Timbo, stuffy old Timbo, the late developer with his rent-a-drool smile?

Playing the angel. Toiling at your Hopeless Causes till late into the night. Telephoning, tap-tapping, looking grave, looking high-minded, preoccupied, aloof, borrowing the Sunbeam to slip down to the post, to the railway station, to Bristol. For the oppressed of the earth. For Larry.

* * *

I walked. I fumed. I rejoiced. I fumed again.

Yet furious as I was, I still noticed how the nondescript couple across the street abandoned their study of a shop window and set off along the far pavement at the same speed and in the same direction as myself. And I knew there would be a team of three pedestrians behind me, and a tame car or van or taxicab to service them. And therefore I knew, for all my anger and relief and new purpose and altered status as a creature of the common daylight, that I must attend to the seeming. I must make no gesture that suggested I was anything but a well-lunched trustee and former spy going about his legitimate pursuits. And I was grateful, to Larry, to Emma, and to my watchers, for imposing this responsibility on me. Because the seeming had always been an activity with rules, a discipline to keep the anarchy at bay, and the anarchy inside me was at this moment in full cry:

Emma! How in God's name did he spirit you this far down the road?

Larry! You manipulative, vengeful, thieving bastard.

Both of you! What the hell are you up to, and why?

Cranmer! You're not a murderer! You can walk tall! You're clean!

* * *

I was a fool.

A raging, furious, overcontrolled fool, even if I was a fool set free. I had imagined myself terribly in love, and admitted a viper to my life.

Adopted, spoiled, served, anointed her, doted on her idiosyncrasies. Lavished jewels and freedom on her, made her my clotheshorse and my love object, my woman to end all women, icon, goddess, daughter, and, as Larry would say, slave. Loved her for her love of me, for her spells of gravitas and laughter; for her frailty and promiscuity and for the trust she placed in my protection. And all this on the strength of what? On what impulse, beyond the dewy longings of a late developer?

In my new, unfettered fury, a veritable windstorm of unreason took possession of me: she was a trap, a honey trap, foisted on me by a conspiracy of my enemies! I, Cranmer, evader, closet romantic, veteran of a raft of futile love affairs, had fallen cloak-over-dagger for the oldest trick in the book!

She was a setup from the first day! By Larry. By Checheyev. By Zorin. By the two of them, the three of them together, the four of them!

But why? To what end? To use me as cover? Honeybrook as cover? It was too absurd.

Ashamed of falling prey to such wayward, unprofessional imaginings, I drew back from them and looked for other ways to stoke my burgeoning paranoia.

What did I know of her? On my own insistence, nothing, except what she had cared to tell me or, on Sundays, tell Larry in my hearing. Merriman's doggy bag still lay behind its curtain in my priesthole, unread, gathering dust, a symbol of my lover's integrity.

An Italian name.

A dead father.

An Irish mother.

A drifting, dilettante childhood.

An English boarding school.

Studied music in Vienna.

Gone east, gone mystic, espoused every softheaded cause known to the hippie trail, gone to the devil.

Come home, drifted again, studied more music, composed it, arranged it; cofounded something called the Alternative Chamber Group, introducing the traditional instruments of the new world to the classical music of the old—or was it the other way round?

Got bored, attended a summer course at Cambridge, read or didn't read the comfortable words of Lawrence Pettifer on the degeneracy of the West. Returned to London, gave herself to anyone who asked nicely. Scared herself, met Cranmer, appointed him her willing, doting, blinded protector.

Met Larry. Vanished. Reappeared with hair up, calling herself Sally and swinging her legs at Jamie Pringle.

My Emma. My false dawn.

* * *

We are naked, playing. She is arranging her black hair round my shoulders.

"Shall I call you Timbo?"

"No."

"Because Larry does?"

"Yes."

"I love you, you see. So naturally I'll call you anything you want. I'll call you Hey You, if you want. I'm completely flexible."

"Tim will do nicely. Just Tim. And yes, you are completely flexible."

* * *

We are lying in front of the fire in her bedroom. She has hidden her head in my neck.

"You're a spy, aren't you?"

"Of course. How did you guess?"

"This morning. Watching you read your mail."

"You mean you saw the secret ink?"

"You don't put things in wastepaper baskets. Anything to be thrown away gets put in a plastic bag and taken to the incinerator. By you."

"I'm a very young wine grower. I was born six months ago when I met you."

But a germ of suspicion has been planted. Why was she watching me? Why was she thinking about me that way? What has Larry put into her head that causes her to put her protector under close surveillance?

* * *

I had reached my club. In the hall, old men were reading stock prices. Someone greeted me, Gordon someone: Gordon, marvellous, how's Prunella? Settling into a leather armchair in the smoking room, I stared into an unreadable newspaper while I listened to the murmurs of men who thought their murmurs mattered. The seasonal fog lapped at the long sash windows. Charlie, the Nigerian porter, came round to switch on the reading lamps. Outside in Pall Mall my gallant band of watchers were stamping their feet in doorways and envying the Friday commuters going home for the weekend. I could see them clearly in my other mind. I sat in the smoking room till dusk, not reading but seeming. The grandfather clock chimed six. Not a retired admiral stirred.

* * *

"Larry really believes, doesn't he?" she is saying.

A Sunday evening. We are in the drawing room. Larry left ten minutes ago. I have poured myself a large Scotch and am slumped in my armchair like a boxer between rounds.

"What in?" I asked.

Ignored.

"I never met an Englishman who believes before. Most of them just say 'on the one hand and on the other hand' and don't do anything. It's as if the middle bits of his engine had been taken out."

still don't get it. What does he believe?"

I have annoyed her.

"Never mind. You obviously weren't listening."

I take another pull of Scotch. "Perhaps we hear different things," I say.

What did I mean by that? I wondered as I gazed through the lace-curtained windows of the smoking room at the smouldering pink night. What did I hear that Emma didn't, when Larry did his material for her, sang his political arias, excited her, drew her out, shamed her and forgave her, drew her out a little more? I was listening to Larry the great seducer, I decided, replying to my own question. I was thinking that my prejudices were leading me astray, that Larry was far smarter than I had ever been at stealing hearts. And that for twenty years I had harboured a very one-sided delusion about who, in the great Cranmer-Pettifer standoff, was running whom.

After that, while the coal fire in the smoking room burned lazily in the grate, I fell to wondering whether Larry, by some occult means I had yet to understand, had almost engineered his murder. And whether, if I had succeeded in delivering the fatal blow instead of pulling back from it, I would have been doing him a favour.

* * *

The pink fog that I had observed through the windows of my club thickened as my cab began its ascent of Haverstock Hill. We were entering Emma's badland. It began, so far as I had ever been able to establish, around Belsize Village and extended to Whitestone Pond in the north, Kentish Town to the east, and Finchley Road to the west. Whatever lay between was enemy territory.

What Hampstead was supposed to have done to her she never told me, and I, out of respect for the sovereignty that mattered so deeply to us both, never asked. From things she let slip, I had a picture of her being passed from hand to hand by intellectual princelings older and less ethereal than herself. Quality journalists loomed large in her bestiary. Shrinks of whatever sex were the pits. There was a time when I had imagined my poor beauty wading repeatedly out of her depth and too often nearly drowning as she lashed back to shore.

The surgery was a former Baptist church. A brass plate on the gatepost celebrated Arthur Medawi Dass and his many learned qualifications. A notice board in the waiting room offered aromatherapy, Zen, and vegetarian bed-and-breakfast. The receptionist had gone home. A fraught-faced woman in green sat in Emma's chair. I suppose I kept looking at her, because she blushed. But what I saw was not a woman in green but Emma in her guise of tragic heroine on the evening we first met.

* * *

Dressed to snare. Not decently dressed, as for Pringle's bank. Not swinging her legs at me, though I do recognise that, even hunched in pain, she is a tall girl, and a very pretty one, and that her legs are remarkably good. A demure skullcap pulls her black hair free of her forehead. Her eyes are stoically averted. Her clothes part Salvation Army, part Edith Piaf on the stomp. A long jute skirt, black, a waif's black boots. A tabby woollen waistcoat vaguely of the outback. And to protect her pianist's hands, fingerless knitted gloves, black and slightly frayed.

My back is really acting up. Hot snakes from head to toe. Yet as I covertly examine her, her plight matters more to me than my own. Her pain is too old for her, too ugly. It makes her too much the governess and not enough the rascal. I want to find the best doctors for her, the warmest beds. I catch her eyes again. Her pain makes her faster to relate, I realise: more attaching than a beautiful young woman would normally permit herself to be. The old tactician in me urgently considers his options. Offer sympathy? It is already implicit, since we are fellow sufferers. Play the veteran—ask her whether this is her first time here? Better not to patronise her. With girls being what they are these days, she may be more of a veteran at twenty-something than you are at forty-seven. I plump for droll humour.

"You look really awful," I say.

The eyes still far away. The gloved hands linked in mutual consolation.

But oh, glory, suddenly she is smiling!

A raffish, twenty-two-carat smile is shining full-beam at me across the room, triumphing over vinyl seats, white striplights, and two bad backs. And I notice that her eyes are smoky blue, like pewter.

"Well, thanks a lot," she says in the fashionably discoloured English of the modern young. "That's just what I wanted someone to tell me."

And we have not exchanged a dozen more lines before it is clear to me that hers is the most gallant smile in London. For imagine: this very night, while she waits to be released from her agony, she is missing the first professional engagement of her musical career! If it weren't for her back, she would even now be seated in a concert hall in Wimbledon, listening to her own arrangement of folk and tribal music from around the world!

"Is it a recurrent thing," I ask, "or have you just ricked it or sprained it or something? It can't be my sort of thing at your age."

"The police did it."

"Which police? Good Lord."

"Some mates of mine were going to be evicted from a squat. A bunch of us went round to picket the building. A great big copper tried to pick me up and put me in a van, and my back just went."

My customary respect for authority evaporated. "But that's awful. You should sue him."

"Well, he should sue me really. I bit him."

And I fall right in, eyes wide shut. I swallow every beguiling word. I cast her as one of the world's rare untarnished souls. I do everything that is expected of a five-star sucker. Right down to promising her the best dinner in London as soon as she is mended, in trivial recompense for her misfortune.

"Do we get seconds?" she asks.

"As many as you like."

To my amazement she is not even a vegetarian.

* * *

Ours is scarcely a whirlwind romance—why should it be? From my very first sighting of her, I know that she is of neither the age nor the category from which my usual conquests are selected: the compliant female colleague or senior secretary; the sporting adulteress of the English country round. She is young. She is intelligent. She is uncharted waters. She is risk. And it is years, if ever, since Cranmer has stepped outside the limits of his self-confinement, played the brave game, waited impatiently for evening, lain awake till dawn.

Does she have a stable of us? I wonder: older men who collect her from her flat, drive her to some makeshift concert hall in London's outer reaches—one night a disused theatre in Finchley, next week a gymnasium in Ruislip or someone's private drawing room in Ladbroke Grove—then perch in the back row, listening to her peculiar music in loyal rapture before taking her to dinner? And over dinner talk her up if she is low, and down if she is high, finally to leave her on her doorstep with no more than a brotherly peck on the cheek and a promise to do the same next week?

"I'm such a tart, Tim," she confides to me over our splendid dinner at Wilton's. "I walk into a crowded room, people look at me, and I start flirting with the entire field. The next thing is, I'm stuck with someone who looked okay in the window but is an absolute pill when you get him home!"

Is she deliberately provoking me? Is she romancing? Is she urging me to try my luck? Surely I can't be a worse bet than some wet-jawed Hampstead banker of thirty with a Porsche? Yet how do I know it's not a bluff—and if I declare myself and she rejects me, what will become of our relationship? Is she mad? Certainly her erratic path through life has a flavour of madness, even if it's one I envy: a wild dash from London to Khartoum on the off chance of bumping into this amazingly dishy Italian she spoke to once for thirty seconds in Camden Lock; submerging herself for six months in some ashram in Central India; walking across the Darien Gap from Panama to Colombia in her search for the music of the Somebodies; biting an officer of the law—unless of course the bitten policeman is another instance of her romancing. As to her heedless espousal of causes, it's a caricature of every Sunday columnist who arrogates to himself the conscience of the chattering classes. Yet why should I mock her for refusing to eat Turkish figs because look what they're doing to the Kurds? Or Japanese fish because look what they're doing to the whales? What was so risible—so un-English—about conducting your life according to principles, even if, in my jaded judgment, such principles were ineffectual?

Meanwhile I stalk her, imagine her, try to second-guess her, and I wait: for her encouragement, for the spark that never quite flies, unless you count the moments when, in the midst of one of our brother-sister evenings, she reaches out her hand and lays it along my cheek, or rubs her knuckles up and down my fellow sufferer's back. Only once does she ask me what I do for a living. And when I say Treasury:

"Whose side are you on, then?" she enquires, her dimpled jaw stuck forward in challenge.

"None. I'm a civil servant."

This won't do for her at all.

"You can't be no side, Tim. That's like not existing. We have to have an object of faith. Otherwise we're not defined."

One day she asks me about Diana: what went wrong?

"Nothing. It was wrong before we married and it stayed wrong afterwards."

"So why did you get married?"

I suppress my irritation. Past mistakes in love, I want to tell her, can no more be explained than rectified. But she is young and still believes, I suppose, that everything has an explanation if you look hard enough for it.

"I was just bloody stupid," I reply with what I hope is disarming frankness. "Come on, Emma. Don't tell me you haven't made a fool of yourself a few times. You keep telling me you have."

To which in a rather lofty way she smiles, and I, in a fit of secret anger, find myself comparing her with Larry. You beautiful people are exempt from life's difficult tests, aren't you? I want to tell her. You don't have to try so hard, do you? You can sit there and judge life instead of being judged by it.

But my bitterness, or whatever it is, has got through to her. She takes my hand in both of hers and presses it thoughtfully to her lips while she studies me. Is she wise? Is she plain dumb? Emma defies these categories. Her beauty, like Larry's, is its own morality.

And the next week we are the same old friends again, which is how things continue until the day Merriman calls me to his office and tells me that Cold Warriors cannot be recycled and that I may with immediate effect put myself out to pasture in Honeybrook. But instead of the conventional despondency that should overcome me on hearing my sentence, I am conscious only of a heedless vigour. Merriman, you've got it right for once! Cranmer is free! Cranmer has paid his dues! From today and for the rest of his life, Cranmer, against all previous principle, will follow Larry's advice. He will leap before he looks. Instead of giving he will take.