Our Game

SEVEN

BUT CRANMER WILL do more than take. He will go small, go country, go free. He will remove himself from the complexities of the big world, now that the Cold War is won and over. Having helped secure the victory, he will with dignity leave the field to the new generation that Merriman speaks of so warmly. He will literally harvest the peace to which he has himself contributed: in the fields, in the soil, in rustic simplicity. In decent, structured, overt human relationships he will finally savour the freedoms he has defended these twenty-something years. Not selfishly, not by any means. To the contrary, he will engage in many socially beneficial acts: but for the microcosm, the small community, and no longer for the so-called national interest, which these days is a mystery even to those best placed to cherish it.

And this amazing prospect, granted me from such an improbable quarter, goads me into an act of magnificent irresponsibility. I choose the Grill Room at the Connaught, my shrine for great occasions. If I had acted with more forethought I would have opted for somewhere humbler, for I recognise too late that I have overtaxed her wardrobe. Never mind. Enough of forethought. If she ever comes to me, I shall dress her from top to toe in gold!

She listens to me carefully, though carefully is not how I speak—except that on the matter of my secret past, naturally my lips are sealed.

I tell her that I love her and fear for her night and day. For her talent, her wit, her courage, but particularly her fragility and what I might even call—since she has alluded to it herself—her perilous availability.

The truth speaks out of me as never before. Perhaps more than the truth, perhaps a dream of it, as I am carried away by the joy of being untactical after a lifetime of subterfuge. I am free to feel at last. All thanks to her. I wish to be everything to her a man can be, I tell her: first to protect and shelter her, not least from herself; then to advance her art, to be her friend, companion, lover, and disciple; and to provide the roof under which the disparate parts of her may be reconciled in harmony. To which end I am proposing that here and now she join me in my yeoman's life: in the emptiest quarter of Somerset, at Honeybrook, to walk the hills, grow wine, make music and love, and cultivate a Rousseau-like world in microcosm, but jollier; to read the books we always meant to read.

Amazed by my recklessness, not to mention eloquence—excepting of course in the delicate matter of how I have spent the last twenty-five years of my life—I listen to myself firing off my complete arsenal in one huge salvo. My love life, I say, has till tonight been a comedy of misalliances, the clear consequence of never allowing my heart to leave its box.

Am I quoting Larry again? Sometimes to my dismay I discover too late that he has fed me my best lines.

But tonight, I say, my heart is out and running, and I look back with shame at the too many wrong turnings I have taken. And surely—unless I misunderstand her—this could even be something which, despite the gap in our ages, we have in common: for is she not constantly confessing to me that she too is sick to death of small loves, small talk, small minds? As to her career, she will continue to have London at her doorstep. She will have her friends, she need give up nothing she cares about, she will be a free soul, never my prisoner in the tower. And with reservations, I believe myself, every word, every effusion. For what is cover for, if not to enable us to shed one life and grow another?

For a long while she seems unable to speak. Perhaps I have subjected her to a more impetuous onslaught than was to be decently expected of a staid bureaucrat selecting a mate for his retirement. Indeed, as I wait for her reaction, I begin to wonder whether I have spoken at all or merely been listening to the freed Sirens of my years of clandestine incarceration.

She is looking at me. Observing is a better word. She is reading my lips, my expressions of fear, adoration, earnestness, desire—whatever is in my face as I unbare myself to her. The pewter eyes are steadfast but aroused. They are like the sea waiting for thunder. Finally she commands my silence, though I am no longer speaking. She does this by laying a finger on my lips and leaving it there.

"It's all right, Tim," she says. "You're a good man. Better than you know. All you have to do now is give me a kiss."

In the Connaught? She must have seen my astonishment in my face, for at once she bursts out laughing, stands up, comes round the table, and without the smallest sign of embarrassment plants a long, explicit kiss on my lips, to the approval of an elderly wine waiter whose eye I inadvertently catch as she releases me from the clinch.

"On one condition," she adds sternly, sitting down. "Name it."

"My piano."

"What about your piano?"

"Can I bring it? I can't arrange without a piano. That's how I do my tiddely-pom."

"I know how you do your tiddely-pom. Listen, bring six. Bring a fleet. Bring all the pianos in the world."

The same night we are lovers. The next morning, on winged feet, I race ahead to Honeybrook to call in the decorators. Do I once look back—do I pause to consider whether I have done the right thing? Whether I have paid too high a price for something that could have been more easily obtained? I do not. All my life I have ducked and weaved and peered round corners. From now on, with Emma as my precious ward, I intend to make my thoughts and actions one—in earnest of which, that very day I put through an urgent call to Mr. Appleby of Wells, purveyor of fine antique jewellery and furniture. And I commission him on the spot, expense no object, to comb the land for the sweetest, prettiest baby grand piano that was ever built of man: something of real age and quality, Mr. Appleby, and in a fine wood: I am thinking of satinwood; and while we're about it, do you still have that superb three-string pearl collar with the cameo clasp that I happened to spot in your window not a month ago?

* * *

Mr. Dass was too shy to ask you to undress. If you were a man you faced him standing in your stockinged feet, stripped to the waist and clutching at your trousers while your braces dangled round your thighs. Even when he had you lying on your stomach and was working the base of your spine, he exposed only the smallest margin of flesh necessary to his purpose.

And Mr. Dass talked. In his caressing Oriental lilt. To inspire confidence and forestall intimacy. And sometimes, to stop you dozing off, he asked you questions, though today, in the alertness of my new condition, I would have wished to ask them for myself: Have you seen them? Has she been here? Did he bring her? When?

"Have you been doing your exercises, Timothy?”

“Religiously," I lied in a drowsy voice.

"And how is the lady in Somerset?"

I was quick inside my seeming somnolence. He was speaking, as I well knew, of a professional colleague of his in Frome, whom he had recommended when I moved to Honeybrook. But I preferred a different interpretation.

"Oh, she's fine, thanks. Working too hard. Touring a lot. But fine. You've probably seen her more recently than I have. When did she last come to you?"

He was already laughing, explaining the misunderstanding. I laughed with him. My affair with Emma was no secret from Mr. Dass or anyone else. It had been my pleasure, in the early months of my new life, to declare her to whoever would listen to me: Emma, my live-in girl, my grand passion, my ward, nothing underhand.

"She's nowhere near as good as you are, Mr. Dass, I can tell you that," I said, belatedly answering his question—and promptly threw him into a flurry of embarrassment.

"Now, Timothy, that is not necessarily the case at all," he insisted as he flattened his scalding palms on my shoulders. "Do you go to her regularly? One session here and there and forget it for six months, that's no good at all."

"Try telling that to Emma," I said. "She promised me she'd come to you last week. I'll bet she never did."

But Mr. Dass for all my probing maintained an elliptical silence. I kept drawing him out, I expect clumsily, for I was too much on edge. Was she here yesterday? Today? Was he dodging my questions because he was embarrassed to tell me she had come with Larry? Whatever the cause, he would not be drawn. Perhaps he heard the tension in my voice, or felt it in my body. Since Mr. Dass was blind, there was no knowing what telltale messages might not come to him by way of his extrasensory ear or gently probing fingers.

"Next time I think you will give me more concentration, Timothy," he said sternly as I handed him my twenty pounds.

He unlocked his cash box, and my eye fell on the receptionist's appointments book lying beside the telephone. Steal it, I thought. Grab it and walk out. Then you can see for yourself whether she was here, who with, and when. But I could not have robbed blind Mr. Dass in order to spy on Emma if it had meant solving the mysteries of the cosmos.

* * *

Standing on the pavement outside the surgery, I breathed heavily, feeling the thick fog sting my eyes and nostrils. Ten yards away, a parked car lurked in the short arc of a street lamp. My watchers? I strode to the car, slammed my hands on the roof, and yelled, "Anyone there?" The echo of my voice sped away into the fog. I marched twenty paces and swung round. Not a shadow dared approach me. Not one close sound came back at me from the fog's grey wall.

My quarry has changed, I remembered. I am no longer searching fearfully for signs of Larry's life or death. I am looking for both of them alive. For their conspiracy. For the reason why.

I hastened in and out of light cones, down side streets, under spiky overhanging trees. The muffled shapes of refugees flitted past me. I pulled on my raincoat. I found a flat cap in the pocket and pulled that on too. I have changed my profile. I am invisible. Three dogs were padding round each other in a melancholy changing of the guard. I stopped again, listening to nothing. I walked back a distance. My watchers have departed.

* * *

After ten years, the house still scared me. Though I had escaped from it, I haunted it. Behind its grey walls, clad in the mauve half-mourning of wisteria, lay the remains of my dreams of lifelong happiness. When I had first removed myself to a humble flat further out of town, I would take detours on my journey to the Office rather than go past its door. And if necessity led me in its direction, I would fantasise about being hauled back inside to serve another sentence.

But after a time my revulsion gave way to a furtive curiosity, and the house attracted me despite myself. I would leave the tube a stop early and scurry across the Heath just to peer into its lighted windows. How do they live? What do they talk about, apart from me? Who was I when I lived there? That Diana had left the Office I knew only too well, for she had written Merriman one of her letters.

"Your darling ex has decided we're the Gestapo," he announces, seething with outrage. "And she's been bloody rude with it. Unconstitutional, incompetent, and unaccountable, that's us. Did you know you were nursing a viper to your breast?"

"That's just Diana. She lets fly."

"Well, what's she going to do about it? Wash her conscience in public, I suppose. Splash us all over the Guardian. Do you have any influence over her?"

"Do you?"

She's studying to become a psychotherapist, I hear on the grapevine. She's a marriage counsellor. She's lost weight. She attends yoga classes in Kentish Town. Edgar's an academic publisher.

I rang the bell. She opened the door at once.

"I thought you were Sebastian," she said.

It was on the tip of my tongue to apologise for being the wrong person.

* * *

We perched in the drawing room. I had forgotten how low the ceilings were. Perhaps Honeybrook had spoiled me. She was wearing jeans and a Cornish fisherman's top from our holidays at Padstow. It was faded blue and suited her. Her face was lighter than I remembered it and wider. Her complexion creamier. Her eyes less shaded. Edgar's books went from floor to ceiling. Most were on subjects I'd never heard of.

"He's on a seminar in Ravenna," she said.

"Oh, right. Great. Jolly nice." I had no natural voice in which to speak to her. No ease. I never had. "Ravenna," I repeated.

"I've got a patient coming in about half a minute, and I don't keep patients waiting," she said. "What do you want?”

“Larry's disappeared. They're looking for him."

"Who is?"

"Everyone. The Office, the police. Separately. The police can't be told of the Office connection."

Her face hardened, and I feared she was about to give me one of her diatribes on the need for us all to tell each other everything straight out, and how secrecy was not a symptom but a disease.

"Why?" she said.

"You mean why can't they be told or why's he disappeared?"

"Both."

Where did she get this power over me? Why do I stammer and placate her? Because she knows me too well—or never knew me at all?

"He's supposed to have stolen money," I said. "Scads of it. The police suspect me of being his accomplice. So does the Office."

"But you're not."

"Of course I'm not."

"So why've you come to me?"

She was sitting on the arm of a chair, back straight, hands folded on her lap. She had the professional listener's mirthless smile. There was drink on the sideboard, but she didn't offer me any.

"Because he's fond of you. You're one of the few women he admires and hasn't been to bed with."

"You know that, do you?"

"No. I assume it. It also happens to be the way he describes you."

She gave a superior smile. "Does it really? And you're prepared to take his word for it, are you? You're very trusting, Tim. Don't say you're getting soft in your old age."

I nearly flew at her. I was proposing to tell her I had always been soft, and she was the only one who hadn't noticed it; and I'd half a mind to add that I didn't give a brass farthing whether she slept with Larry or a two-toed sloth; and that the only reason Larry had taken the remotest interest in her was in order to get at me. Fortunately she came in ahead of me with another barb of her own:

"Who sent you, Tim?"

"No one. I'm flying solo."

"How did you come here?"

"Walked. Alone."

"I just have this picture of Jake Merriman waiting for you in a car down the road, you see."

"He isn't. If he knew I was here, he'd set the dogs on me. I'm practically on the run myself." The doorbell was ringing. "Diana. If you know anything about him—if he's been in touch—phoned, written, dropped by—if you know how to get hold of him—please tell me. I'm desperate."

"It's Sebastian," she said, and went to the hall.

I heard voices, and the sound of young feet going down the basement stairs. I realised in a fit of anachronistic indignation that she must have commandeered my old study and put her consulting room in it. She returned to her chair and sat on the arm exactly as before. I thought she was going to tell me to leave, for her face was firmly set. Then I realised she had reached one of her decisions and was about to communicate it.

"He's found what he was looking for. That's all I know.”

“So what's he looking for?"

"He didn't say. And if he had said, I probably wouldn't tell you. Don't interrogate me, Tim; I won't have it. You dragged me into the Office for seven years, and that was bad enough. I don't subscribe to the ethic, and I don't accept the imperatives."

"I'm not interrogating you, Diana. I am asking you a question: What is he looking for?"

"His perfect note. That was his dream always, he said. To play one perfect note. He was always graphic; that's his nature. He telephoned. He'd found it. The note."

"When?"

"A month ago. I had the impression he was leaving for somewhere and saying his goodbyes."

"Did he say where?"

"No."

"Did he suggest where?"

"No."

"Was it abroad? Was it Russia? Was it somewhere exciting? New?"

"He gave absolutely no clue. He was emotional.”

“You mean drunk?"

"I mean emotional, Tim. Just because you brought out the worst in Larry doesn't mean you have rights of ownership to him. He was emotional, it was late at night, and Edgar was here. 'Diana, I love you, I've found it. I've found the perfect note.' Everything was in place for him. He was together. He wished me to know that. I congratulated him."

"Did he tell you her name?"

"No, Tim, he wasn't talking about a woman. Larry's too mature to suppose we're the answer to everything. He was talking about self-discovery and being who he is. It's time you learned to live without him."

I had not expected to shout at her, and I had gone to some lengths till now to avoid doing so. But since she had appointed herself the high priestess of self-expression, there seemed no reason to restrain myself. "I'd adore to live without him, Diana! I'd give my entire bloody fortune to be rid of Larry and his works for the rest of my natural life. Unfortunately, we are inextricably involved with each other, and I have to find him for my own salvation and probably for his."

She had turned her smile to the floor, which I suspected was what she did when patients ranted at her. Her voice took on an extra sweetness.

"And how's Emma?" she enquired. "As young and beautiful as ever?"

"Thank you, she is well. Why do you ask? Did he talk about her too?"

"No. But you didn't either. I wondered why not."

* * *

I was climbing. In Hampstead if you are climbing you are exploring, and if you are descending you are going back to hell. Thinner air, thicker fog, pieces of brick mansion and Georgian façade. I entered a pub and drank a large Scotch and then another, then several more, remembering the night I returned to Honeybrook with the black light glowing in my head. If there were people in the pub I didn't see them. I walked again, feeling no different.

I entered an alley. To one side, a high brick wall. To the other, iron railings like spears. And at the further end a white wood church, its spire severed at the neck by fog.

I began cursing.

I cursed the goad of Englishness that had held me back and spurred me forward all my life.

I cursed Diana for stealing my childhood, and despising me while she did it.

I remembered all my agonising lurches for connection, the mismatches, and the return, time and again, to burning alone.

And after I had cursed the England that had made me, I cursed the Office for being its secret seminary, and Emma for luring me from my comfortable captivity.

And then I cursed Larry for shining a lamp into the cavernous emptiness of what he called my dull rectangular mind and dragging me beyond the limits of my precious self-mastery.

Above all I cursed myself.

I was suddenly desperate to sleep. The weight of my head was too great for me to carry. My legs were giving up on me. I thought of lying down on the pavement, but by good fortune a cab appeared, so instead I returned to my club, where Charlie the porter handed me a telephone message. It was from Detective Inspector Bryant, asking me to be so good as to call the following number at my earliest convenience.

* * *

No one sleeps in clubs. You smell the male sweat and cabbage, you listen to the snuffles of fellow inmates, and you remember school.

It is the night after Sixes Match, the annual festival of Winchester Football, a game so arcane that even experienced players may not know all the rules. The House has won. To be immodest, I have won, for it is Cranmer, the team captain and hero of the match, who has led the extraordinarily savage charge. Now, by tradition, the victorious six are feasting themselves in House Library while the New Boys stand on the table and regale them with songs and entertainment. Some New Boys sing badly and must have books buzzed at them to improve their voices. Others sing too well and must be cut down to size with gibes and flying bread. And one New Boy refuses to sing at all and must in the fullness of time be beaten; and that is Pettifer.

"Why didn't you sing?" I ask him later that night as he bends over the same table.

"It's against my religion. I'm a Jew."

"No you're not. Your father's in the Church."

"I've converted."

"I'll give you one chance," I say expansively. "What is the Notion for Winchester football?" It is the easiest test I can think of in the entire school vernacular, a gift.

"Jew baiting," he replies.

So I have no alternative but to beat him, when all he needed to say was Our Game.