Our Game (29 page)

I drove without lights to the lane and still without lights for another mile to the crossroads. I took the old Mendip road, passed Priddy Pool without a glance, and kept driving till I came to Bristol airport, where I left the van in the longterm car park and bought myself a seat on the first flight of the day to Belfast, in the name of Cranmer. I took a shuttle coach to Bristol Temple Meads, and it was packed with exhausted Welsh football fans, singing quiet hymns in harmony. From the station forecourt, I allowed myself a last incredulous stare up the hill at Cambridge Street before boarding an early train to Paddington. I rode with it as far as Reading, where, as Bairstow, I booked myself into a garish commercial travellers' hotel. I tried to sleep, but the terror pulsed in me like another heart, and it was terror of the worst kind, the tenor of a guilt-obsessed spectator to a catastrophe he cannot prevent from overtaking people he cannot call to, and the people were my own. It was I who had consigned Larry to a life of fiction, who had taught him the arts of subterfuge and set loose in him the mechanism that had now run so disastrously amok. It was I who had thrown a noose around Emma, never guessing that when I appointed her the perfect mate she would turn out to be the perfect mate for Larry.

In my dismal hotel room I put on all the lights and made myself foul tea with a tea bag and artificial milk, then set myself to revisiting the bundles of paper I had stuffed into the briefcase on my departure from the priesthole. I wrote my bank a long letter of instruction, providing, among other things, for Mrs. Benbow, Ted Lanxon, and the Toiler girls. I sealed the envelope, addressed it, and posted it in the centre of the town. I did some telephoning from a public call box, then spent the afternoon in a cinema, though I remember nothing of the film. At five o'clock, in a red Ford hired in the name of Bairstow, I left Reading on the evening tide. Each golden field in its brown hedge was like another shard of my fragmented world.

"It's the sounds and smells of youth coming back to you," Larry had written to Emma. "It's the sky you used to look at when you were a child. You understand ideas again. Money has no power."

I wished I could share his lyricism.

ELEVEN

"OH, MARVELLOUS, TIM," Clare Dugdale had cried in her voice of late-Thatcherite thrill when I telephoned her from a call box, saying I just happened to be in the area. "Simon will be over the moon. He hasn't had any buddy-buddy talk for weeks. Come nice and early and we can have a drink and you can help me put the children to bed, just like the old days. You won't believe Petronella. She's enormous. Do you mind fish? Simon's got a new thing about his heart. Shall you be alone, Tim, or are you with?"

I crossed a bridge and saw below me our white hotel, now turned grey by the recession. The riverside lawns were overgrown. The bar where I had waited for her had DISCO scrawled in chalk across the door. Pinball machines winked in the once stately dining room, where we had eaten flambe steak while she probed my crotch with her stockinged foot and we waited till it was all right to go to bed—which we did as soon as decent, because by four in the morning she was perched in front of the mirror, repairing her makeup to go home.

"Mustn't let the children miss me, must I, darling?" she says. "And poor Simon might easily decide to give me a wake-up call from Washington. He never can sleep on short trips."

"Does he suspect?" I ask, more it now seemed to me out of human curiosity than any particular sense of guilt.

Pause while she completes a line of lipstick. "Shouldn't think so. Si's a Berkeleyan. He denies the existence of everything he can't perceive." Clare took a Cambridge degree in philosophy before shouldering the intellectual burdens of a Foreign Office wife. "And since we don't exist, we can do whatever we jolly well want, can't we? And we still won't have done it, will we?"

In Maidenhead I parked at the railway station and, armed with Bairstow's briefcase, took a taxi to the hideous fifties barracks where they lived. A disintegrating climbing frame adorned the overgrown front garden. Clare's bashed Renault stood abandoned at a dramatic angle in the weed-infested drive. A faded notice by the bell said CHIEN MECHANT. I presumed it was a relic of Simon's visits to Brussels as a NATO Moscow-watcher. The door opened, and the au pair eyed me with slothful curiosity.

"Anna Greta. Still here, my goodness. How splendid."

I stepped round her into the hall, picking my way between perambulators, children's bicycles, and a wigwam. As I did so Clare came charging down the stairs and flung her arms around me. She was wearing the amber brooch I had given her. Simon believed she had inherited it from a distant cousin. Or so she said.

"Anna Greta, darling, will you please go and dish up the vegetables and put them on the hotplate?" she ordered, taking my hand and leading me upstairs. "You're still terribly yummy, Tim. And Si says you've found an absolutely super, frightfully young girl. I think that's awfully clever of you. Petronella, look who's here!" She carried my hand round to my backside and pinched me. "It isn't fish; it's duck. I decided Si's heart could lump it for once. Let me look at you again."

Petronella emerged scowling from the bathroom, dressed in a towel and a mackintosh hat. She was now an ungrateful child of ten, with wire round her teeth and her father's hovering smile.

"Why are you kissing my mother?"

"Because we're very old friends, Pet, darling," Clare replied with hoots of laughter. "Don't be so silly. You'd like a hug from somebody as dishy as Tim, I'll bet."

"No, I wouldn't."

The twin boys wanted Rupert Bear. A visiting girl called Hubbie wanted Black Beauty. The conciliator in me chose Peter Rabbit, and I was coming to the bit about Peter's father having an accident in Mr. McGregor's garden when I heard Simon's footsteps ascending the stairs.

"Hullo, Tim, nice to see you," he said, all on one note, as he offered me a lifeless hand. "Hullo, Pet. Hullo, Clive. Hullo, Mark. Hullo, Hubbie."

"Hullo," they said.

"Hullo, Clare."

"Hullo," said Clare.

I went on reading, while Simon listened from the doorway. In my weightless state of mind I had hoped he might like me better now that I was a fellow cuckold. But he didn't seem to, so perhaps it didn't show.

The duck must have been frozen, because parts of it still were. As we hacked our way through the bleeding limbs, I remembered that this was how we had always eaten, when we ate our frightful meals together: potatoes boiled to a sludge and school cabbage floating in a green lake. Did their Catholic souls derive solace from such abstinence? Did they feel closer to God and further from the herd?

"Why are you here?" Simon asked in his dry, nasal voice. "Visiting a spinster aunt, actually," I replied.

"Not another filthy rich one, Tim?" said Clare.

"Where is she?" said Simon.

"No, this one's indigent," I told Clare. "Marlow," I told Simon.

"Which nursing home?" said Simon.

"Sunnymeades," I said, giving him a name I had plucked from the yellow pages and hoping it was still in business.

"Is she an aunt on your father's side?" Simon asked.

"Actually she's a cousin of my mother's," I said, forestalling the likelihood that Simon would telephone Sunnymeades nursing home and establish that she didn't exist.

"Are you growing many grapes, please?" sang Anna Greta, who had been elevated to guest for the evening.

"Well, not a bumper harvest, Anna Greta," I replied. "But fair. And first tastings extremely promising."

"Oh," Anna Greta exclaimed, as if astonished.

"I inherited a bit of a problem, quite honestly. My uncle Bob, who founded the business for love, put a lot of trust in his Maker and rather less in science."

Clare gave a hoot of laughter, but Anna Greta's jaw sagged in mystification. For some inexplicable reason, I forged on.

"He planted the wrong grapes in the wrong place, then he prayed for sun and got frost. Unfortunately, the life expectancy of a vine is twenty-five years. Which means we must either commit genocide or keep on fighting nature for another ten years."

I couldn't stop. Having derided my own efforts, I exulted in the success of my English and Welsh competitors and deplored the tax burdens imposed on them by an uncaring government. I painted a fulsome picture of England as one of the ancient wine-growing countries of the world, while Anna Greta gawped at me with her mouth open.

"Poor you," said Simon.

"So let's hear about this underaged girl you've shacked up with," Clare cut in recklessly; after two glasses of Romanian claret, she was capable of saying absolutely anything. "You're such an old dog, Tim. Simon's absolutely green with envy. Aren't you, Si?"

"Not in the least," said Simon.

"She's beautiful, she's musical, she can't cook, and I adore her," I proclaimed gaily, grateful to have an opportunity to extol Emma's virtues. "She's also warmhearted and brilliantly clever. What else do you want to know?"

The door opened, and Petronella stormed in, her blond hair brushed over her dressing gown, her blue gaze fixed on her mother in an expression of ethereal agony.

"You're making so much noise I can't sleep!" she protested, stamping her foot. "You're doing it on purpose."

Clare led Petronella back to bed. Anna Greta moodily cleared away the plates.

"Simon, I've got a bit of office shop I need to try out on you," I said. "Could we possibly have quarter of an hour alone?"

Simon washed while I dried. He wore a blue butcher's apron. There was no machine. We seemed to be washing up several meals at once.

"What do you want?" said Simon.

We had had these conversations before, in his joyless eyrie at the Foreign Office, with jaded Whitehall pigeons eyeing us through the filthy window.

"I've been approached by someone who wants to be paid a lot of money for some information," I said.

"I thought you'd retired."

"I have. It's an old case come alive."

"You don't have to bother with those; they'll dry by themselves," Simon said. "What's he trying to sell you?"

"A forthcoming armed uprising in the North Caucasus."

"Who's rising against who? Thanks," he said as I handed him a dirty saucepan. "They're rising all the time. It's what they do."

"The Ingush against the Russians and Ossetians. With a little help from the Chechen."

"Tried it in '92 and were trounced. No arms. Only what they'd pinched or bought at the back door. Whereas, thanks to Moscow, the Ossetians were armed to the teeth. Still are."

"What if the Ingush equipped themselves with a decent armoury?"

"They can't. They're scattered and dispirited, and whatever they get hold of, the Ossies will get more of. Weapons are the Ossies' thing. We had a story in last week that they've been buying up Red Army surplus in Estonia and running it down to the Serbs in Bosnia with the help of Russian intelligence."

"My source insists that this time the Ingush are going for broke."

"Well, he would, wouldn't he?"

"He says there's no stopping them. They've got a new leader. A man called Bashir Haji."

"Bashir's yesterday's hero," said Simon, vehemently scouring a very pitted saucepan. "Brave as a lion, great on a horse. Black-belt Sufist. But when it comes to fighting Russian rocketry and helicopter cavalry, he can't lead a brass hand."

We had had conversations like this before. In Simon Dugdale, the art of debunking secret intelligence had found its master. "If we believe my man, Bashir is promising to provide high-tech state-of-the-art Western weaponry and send the Russians and Ossetians back where they came from."

"Listen!"

Slamming down his saucepan, Simon splayed a wet hand in my face but managed to stop it a couple of inches short.

"In '92 the Ingush popped their garters and made an armed march on the Prigorodnyi raion. They had some tanks, a few APCs, a bit of artillery—Russian stuff, bought or plundered, not a lot. Drawn against them"—he grabbed his thumb with his spare hand—"they had North Ossetian Interior Forces"—he grabbed his index finger—"OMON Russian special forces; Republican guards; local Terek Cossacks"—he had reached his little finger—"and so-called volunteers from South Ossetia flown up by the Russians to cut throats for them and squat the Prigorodnyi raion. The only support the Ingush got was from the Chechen, who lent them so-called volunteers and a bit of weaponry. The Chechen are pals with the Ingush, but the Chechen have got their own agenda, which the Russians are aware of. So the Russians are using the Ingush to drive a wedge into the Chechen. If your man is seriously telling you that Bashir or anyone else is planning a full-scale organised attack on the enemies of Ingushetia, either he's making it up or Bashir's gone potty.",

His outburst over, he plunged his arms back into the suds.

I tried another tack. Perhaps I wanted to draw something out of him that I knew was there. Something I needed to hear again as an affirmation of Larry's emotional logic.

"So what about the justice of it?" I suggested.

"The what?"

I was making him angry. "Of the Ingush cause. Have they got right on their side?"

He slapped a colander facedown on the draining board. "Right?" he repeated indignantly. "You mean in absolute terms, as in right and wrong—how has history treated the Ingush?"

"Yes."

He seized a roasting tray and attacked it with a scourer. Simon Dugdale had never been able to resist the lecturer's temptation.

"Three hundred years of having the living shit beaten out of them by the tsars. Frequently returned the compliment. Enter the Corns. False interlude of serendipity, then business as usual. Deported by Stalin in '44 and declared a nation of criminals. Thirteen years in the wilderness. Rehabilitated by decree of Supreme Soviet and allowed to empty the dustbins. Tried peaceful protest. Didn't work. Rioted. Moscow sits on its arse." Pressing down on the roasting tray, he gave it a vengeful scrub. "Corns go down the tube; enter Yeltsin. Sweet-talks them. Russian Parliament passes fuzzy resolution restoring dispossessed peoples." He kept scrubbing. "Ingush buy it. Supreme Soviet adopts law favouring an Ingush republic within Russian Federation. Hooray. Five minutes later Yeltsin puts the knockers on it with a presidential decree forbidding border changes in the Caucasus. Not so hooray. Moscow's latest plan is to force the Ossetians to accept the Ingush back in agreed numbers and on terms. Some bloody hope. Morally, whatever that's supposed to mean, the Ingush case is unassailable, but in the world of conflicting compromises which it's my misfortune to inhabit, that means approximately bugger all. Legally, for whoever gives a toss about post-Sov legality, it's no contest. The Ossies are in breach of the law, the Ingush are blameless. When did that alter the price of fish?"