Our Game

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

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

"Perhaps you should have been."

Sometimes I resent her tolerance. "Why?"

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

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

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

"Are you being sarcastic?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes?"

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

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

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

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

* * *

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