Our Game (25 page)

How much I was behind Larry and Emma, how much ahead of them, is something I couldn't measure. I knew, I half knew. Then I knew nothing again. Or I had divined their actions but was mystified by their purpose. Or I knew their purpose but refused to countenance their motive: it was too mad, too far, too alien, too wantonly obscure, to be believed. Or suddenly I would discover myself sitting back in my chair and, against all reason, grinning beatifically at the ceiling: I was not the target, I was not the object of their deception; they were after bigger game than me; Cranmer was just a not very innocent bystander.

Sheets of figures, business letters, letters from banks, and copies of letters back to them. Literature from something called the Survival for Tribal People Association; literature from Munich; a brochure called "God as Detail" from somebody called P. Wook in Islington. The Esso diary, a marked calendar, the pop-up Russian address book, Larry's crazy scrawls. Bills for telephone, electricity, water, rent, groceries, and Larry's whisky. Bills decently kept, paid, receipted. Emma's kind of bill, not Larry's, addressed variously to S. Anderson or T. Altman or Free Prometheus Ltd., Cambridge Street. A child's exercise book, but the child was Emma. It was sandwiched inside a bunch of files and came loose when I started to sort through them. I opened it, then closed it again in a spontaneous act of self-censorship before opening it more cautiously. Amid household notes and musical jottings, I had stumbled on random messages to her former lover, Cranmer:

Tim, I try to understand what's happened to us so that I can explain to you, but then I think: why should I explain anything to you? and the next minute I think I’ll just say it straight out anyway, which is what I've decided to do. . . .

But this fine resolve was not matched by performance, for the signal ended. Damp batteries in the transmitter? Secret police banging on the door? I turned a couple of pages.

Emma to Emma: Everything in my life has prepared me for this. . . . Every wrong lover, wrong step, my bad side and my good side, all my sides, are marching in the same direction for as long as I march with Larry . . . When Larry says he doesn't believe words, I don't believe them either. Larry is action. Action is character. In music, in love, in life .. .

But Emma to Emma only sounded like a parody of Larry.

Emma to Tim: . . . what you left in me was a huge yawning gap where I had kept my love for you until I realised you weren't there. How much I guessed about you and how much you told me, or Larry did, doesn't matter, except that Larry never betrayed you in the way you think, and never in the way you . .

Oh sure, I thought savagely; well, he wouldn't, would he? I mean stealing his best friend's girl isn't betrayal, any more than stealing thirty-seven million pounds and making you his accomplice is. That's altruism. That's nobility. That's sacrifice!

Six pages of Larry-inspired self-absorption went by before she braced herself to address me again, this time in patronising terms:

You see, Tim, Larry is life continued. He will never let me down. He is life made real again, and just to be with him is to be travelling and taking part, because where Tim avoids, Larry engages. And where Tim .. .

Signal ends again. Where Tim what? What was left of me to destroy that she hadn't destroyed already? And if Larry was life continued, what was Tim in the gospel according to St. Larry, passed down to us by the disciple Emma? Life discontinued, I supposed. Better known as death. And death, when she found herself living with it, became a bit infectious, presumably—which is why she plucked up the courage to bolt that Sunday morning while I was at church.

But I am not guilty, I thought. I am the deceived, not the deceiver

"Make me one person, Tim," she implores me on our first night in Honeybrook. "I've been too many people for too long, Tim. Be my one-man convent, Tim, my Salvation Army. Never let me down."

Larry will never let you down, you simpleton! Larry's going to dump you in the deepest pit you ever saw! That's what he does! Don't preach to me about your love for him! Larry as life? Your sacred feelings? How many times can you be true to your feelings and have any feelings left to be true to? How many times can you consign yourself to the sweet blue sky of eternity, only to come slinking home in the small hours of the morning with your dress torn and two teeth missing?

Yet the protector in me was on full alert, even as the bonds of guilt and ignorance fell away. Every page and every word I read injected me with fresh urgency, spurring me forward in my desire to free her from her latest, greatest folly.

* * *

Emma as artist. Emma as mistress of the Freudian doodle. Emma as the echo of Larry's eternal outcry against a world he can neither join nor destroy. "For us," she has written. A lighthouse is the most charitable description of it. It rises proudly up the centre of the page. It has four slender, tapering walls with windows not unlike my arrow slits. It has a conical tip like a helmet and like other conical tips. On the ground floor she has drawn a soulful cow, on the first floor Larry and Emma are eating out of bowls, on the second they are embracing. And on the top floor, naked as in Paradise, they are keeping watch from opposite windows.

But for when? For what? Now it was Cranmer, her saviour, who scrambled after her, calling Stop! and Wait! and Come back!

An indignant Larry dissertation, all for Emma, on the origin of the word ingush, which turns out to be a Russian notion, imposed by the invader. Ingush, it seems, is simply the Ingush word for people, as chechen is the Chechen word for people (cf. the Boer colonialists' use of bantu for the black people of Africa). The Ingush word for the people of Ingushetia is evidently Galgai. Larry is incensed by such insensitivity on the part of the Russians, and naturally wishes Emma to share his anger ..

I was reading burned paper.

Sometimes I had to hold it to the light. Sometimes I was obliged to use a magnifying glass or complete a garbled sentence for myself. Paper burns badly, as every spy knows. Print survives, if only white on black. But Emma was no spy, and whatever security precautions she had imagined she was taking, they were not those recommended by the likes of Marjorie Pew. I was reading letters and numbers. Her italic handwriting was clear despite the flames.

25 x MKZ22. . . . . 200 appro

500 x ML7. . . . . . 900

1 x MQ18. . . . . . 50

Against each entry, a tick or cross. And along the bottom of the page the words: Order confirmed by AM, Sept 14, 10.30 a.m., his phone call.

I heard Jamie Pringle: Mathematics not up Larry's street . . . Brighter than Larry by a mile, when it came to numbers. I had a vision of her sitting at the desk in Cambridge Street, her black hair tucked sternly behind her ears and into the collar of her high-necked blouse, while she works out the arithmetic that her musician's brain is good at, and waits for Larry to hurry up the hill from Bristol Temple Meads station after another tiring day at the Lubyanka, darling.

Grand total 4 1/2 approx, I read at the foot of the following page. Her numbers were italic too.

Four and a half whats, damn you? I asked, angry with her at long last. Thousands? Millions? A few of the thirty-seven and rising? Then why did Larry have to sell your jewellery for you? Why did he have to give away his office gratuity?

I heard Diana again and felt my hackles rise: one perfect note.

The image was forming. Perhaps it had already formed. Perhaps the what was there, and only the why remained. But Cranmer in this mood was a desk officer. And deductions, if he made them at all, came after, not before and not during, his researches.

I was listening.

I had an urge to laugh, to wave, to answer back, "Emma! It's me. I love you. Actually, I still do! Incredibly, irrationally, I adore you, whether I'm life or death or just boring old Tim Cranmer!"

Outside my arrow slits the world was going to the devil. The chapel tower grumbled, shutters banged, lead downpipes hurled themselves against stone walls as the thunder struck. Gutters overflowed and gargoyles could not spew out the rushing water fast enough. The rain stopped and the uneasy truce of a country night returned. But all I was thinking was: "Emma, it's you," and all I was hearing was Emma speaking on the answering machine from Cambridge Street in a voice so lovely that I wanted to hold the machine against my face: a warm and patient voice as well as a musical one, made a little lazy by lovemaking, perhaps, and addressed to people who might not speak much English or be conversant with such Western mysteries as the answering machine.

"This is Free Prometheus of Bristol, and this is Sally speaking," she was saying. "Hullo, and thanks for calling. I'm afraid we can't talk to you just now, because we have had to go out. If you wish to leave a message, wait until you hear a short whistle, then begin speaking immediately. Are you ready ... ?"

After Emma, the same message again, read to us by Larry in Russian. And Larry when he spoke Russian slipped into another skin, because the Russian language had been his refuge from tyranny. It was where he had locked himself away from the father who had lectured him, and the school that had urged conformity on him, and the prefects who had flogged him to give the message force.

After he had spoken Russian he spoke again, in a language that I arbitrarily placed in the Caucasus—since I didn't understand a syllable. But I couldn't mistake the air of drama, the pulse of conspiracy, that he managed to squeeze into such a formal little message. I listened to him again in Russian. Then again in the unfamiliar language. So charged, so heroic, so full of moment. What did he remind me of? The book beside his bed in Cambridge Street? Memories of his hero Aubrey Herbert, who had fought to save Albania?

I had it—the Canning!

We are back at Oxford; it's nighttime and it's snowing. We are sitting in someone's rooms in Trinity; there are a dozen of us, and we are drinking mulled claret, and it's Larry's turn to read us a paper on whatever pretentious subject has caught his fancy. The Canning is just another self-regarding Oxford discussion group, except that it's a bit older than most and has some decent silver. Larry has chosen Byron and intends to shock us. Which he duly does, insisting that Byron's greatest loves were men, not women, and dwelling upon the poet's devotion while at Cambridge to a choirboy, and while in Greece to his page, Loukas.

But what I hear in my memory's ear as I recall the evening is not Larry's predictable relish for Byron's sexual exploits but his zeal for Byron the saviour of the Greeks, sending his own money to help prepare the Greek ships for battle, raising soldiers and paying them so that he himself can lead the attack on the Turks at Lepanto.

And what I see is Larry seated before the gas fire, clutching his goblet of hot wine to his breast, a Byron of his own imagining; the forelock, the flushed cheeks, the fervent eyes alight with wine and rhetoric. Did Byron sell his beloved's antique jewellery to fund the hopeless cause? Turn over his gratuity in cash?

And what I remember is Larry again, during yet another of his Honeybrook lectures, telling us that Byron is a Caucasus freak, on the grounds that he wrote a grammar on the Armenian language.

I switched to the incoming messages. I became a secondary addict, sharing the pipe dream and inhaling the fumes, bathing in the dangerous glow.

"Sally?" A guttural foreign voice, male, thick and urgent, speaking English. "Here is Issa. Our Chief Leader will visit to Nazran tomorrow. He will speak secretly to council. Tell this to Misha, please."

Click.

Misha, I thought. One of Checheyev's cover names for Larry. Nazran, temporary capital of Ingushetia, in the North Caucasus barrier.

A different voice, male and dead tired, speaking unguttural Russian in a drenched murmur. "Misha, I have news. The carpets have arrived on the mountain. The boys are happy. Greetings from Our Chief Leader."

Click.

A man is speaking breezy English with a slight Oriental accent: Mr. Dass's sound-alike from the redial call I had made in Cambridge Street.

"Hullo, Sally, this is Hardwear, calling from the car," it announced proudly, as if the telephone or the car were a brand-new acquisition. "Message just in from our suppliers saying stand by for next week. Time for some more money talk, I think. [Giggle] Cheers."

Click.

And after him again, Checheyev's voice, as I had heard him countless times in telephone and microphone intercepts. He is speaking English, but as I go on listening, his voice has the unnatural courtesy of a man under fire.

"Sally, good morning, this is CC. I need to get a message to Misha quickly, please. He must not go north. If he has started his journey, he should please discontinue it. This is an order from Our Chief Leader. Please, Sally."

Click.

Checheyev again, the calm if anything more pronounced, the pace slower:

"CC for Misha. Misha, take heed, please. The forest is watching us. Do you hear me, Misha? We are betrayed. The forest is on its way to the north, and in Moscow everything is known. Don't go north, Misha. Don't be foolhardy. The important thing is to get to safety and fight another day. Come to us and we shall take care of you. Sally, please tell this to Misha urgently. Tell him to use the preparations we have already agreed."

Click. End of message. End of all messages. The forest is northward bound and Birnam Wood has come to Dunsinane, and Larry has or hasn't got the message. And Emma? I wonder. What has she got?

I was counting money: bills, letters, cheque stubs. I was reading burned letters from banks.

"Dear Miss Stoner"—the top right corner of the page charred, writer's address incomplete, except for the letters SBANK and the words des Pays, Geneve. Miss Stoner's address 9A Cambridge Street, Bristol. "We note from the ... losed state ... tha ... have substan ... quid ... is in ... ur urrent acc ... Should you ... no immedi ... call upon ... may wish to ... ferring them to ..."

Left side and lower half of letter destroyed, Miss Stoner's response unknown. But Miss Stoner is by now no stranger to me. Or to Emma.