Our Game

His waistband at half-mast round his slender hips. The ash of his beastly cigarette spilling over the unbuttoned black waistcoat that he has recently decided is his hallmark. His fine fingers pointed upward as he milks the air to the rhythm of his half-wisdoms. The famous Pettifer forelock, now shot with grey but still swinging across his brow in immature revolt. Tomorrow he leaves for Russia again, officially for a month's academic powwow at Moscow State University, in reality for his annual spell of rest and recreation at the hands of his latest KGB controller, the unlikely assistant cultural attache Konstantin Abramovich Checheyev.

There is something majestic as well as anachronistic about the way Moscow handles Larry these days: VIP treatment at Sheremetyevo Airport, a Zil with blackened windows to whisk him to his apartment, the best tables, the best tickets, the best girls. And Checheyev flown over from London to play majordomo in the background. Step through the looking glass, you could imagine they were paying him the departing honours due to a long-standing agent of the British secret service.

"Loyalty to women is a load of junk," Larry declares as he pokes out his coated tongue and studies its reflection. "How can I be responsible for a woman's feelings when I'm not responsible for my own?" He flops into an armchair. Why does even his clumsiest movement have such a careless grace? "With women, the only way to find out what's enough is to do too much," he announces, and practically tells me to write that down for posterity.

I try not to think critically of Larry at times like this. My job is to cosy him along, accommodate his moods, talk up his courage, ride his insults, and come up smiling every time.

* * *

"Tim?"

"Yes, Emma."

"I need to know."

"Whatever you like," I say generously, and close my book. One of her women's novels, and I am finding it hard going.

We are in the breakfast room, a circular pepper pot stuck onto the southeast corner of the house by Uncle Bob. The morning sun makes it a pleasant place to sit. Emma is standing in the doorway. Ever since she went alone to Larry's lecture, I have scarcely seen her.

"It's a lie, isn't it?" she says.

Drawing her gently into the room, I close the door so that Mrs. Benbow cannot overhear us. "What's a lie?"

"You are. You don't exist. You made me go to bed with someone who wasn't there."

"You mean Larry?"

"I mean you! Not Larry. You! Why should you think I've been to bed with Larry? You!"

Because you have, I think. But by now, in order to hide her face from me, she is embracing me. I look down and am surprised to see my right hand operating on its own initiative, patting her back and bestowing comfort on her because I have misunderstood her cover story. And it occurs to me that when there's nothing useful left for you to do on the whole of God's earth, patting someone's back is as good a way to pass the time as any. She is choking and sobbing against me, she is blurting Larry, Tim, and accusing me in preference to accusing herself, though much of what she is saying is mercifully lost in my shirtfront. I catch the word façade, or perhaps it is charade. And the word fiction, but it could have been friction.

Meanwhile I am doing a good deal of thinking about who is ultimately to blame for this scene and others like it. For in the world where Larry and I did our growing up, it would be quite wrong to suppose that merely because the right hand is bestowing consolation, the left is not considering covert action of its own.

* * *

And still she can't leave me. Sometimes in the depth of night she creeps into my room like a thief and makes love to me without saying a word. Then creeps away, leaving her tears on my pillow before the daylight finds her out. A week goes by with scarcely a nod passing between us while each inhabits his separate space. The only sound from her side of the house is the tap-tapping of her typewriter: Dear Friend, Dear Supporter, Dear God, get me out of here, but how? She telephones, but I have no idea who she speaks to, though I guess. Occasionally Larry telephones, and if I take the call I am all sweetness and so is he, as befits two spies at war.

"Hi, Timbo. How's tricks?"

There is only one trick I can think of, and he has played it. But who cares when we are such good friends?

"Very chirpy, thanks. Just fine. It's for you, darling. From Mission Control," I say, passing the call through to her on the internal exchange.

Next day I instruct the exchange to disconnect my telephone, but still she neither runs nor stays.

"Just for information, how will I know when you've left me?" I ask her one night when we meet like ghosts on the landing between our two sides.

"I'll have taken my piano stool with me," she replies.

She means the fold-up stool for her back that she brought to the house on the day she moved in with me. A friendly Swedish osteopath made it for her; how friendly I may only guess.