Our Game

It was a dream, I thought. Yet why should any man need to dream who has Emma for his reality? I heard her voice in the darkness: I'm not bad, Tim. I don't need changing and disguising all the time. I'm fine as I am. Honest. I heard Larry's voice jeering at me from the darkness of the Mendip night. You don't love people, Timbo. You invent them. That's God's job, not yours. I heard Emma again: It's not me who needs to change, Tim, it's you. Ever since Larry walked into our walled garden, you've been behaving like someone on the run. I heard Larry again: You stole my life. I stole your woman.

I closed the cupboard, stepped into her studio, switched on the lights, and managed a skimming glance of the kind that is ready to take evasive action the moment something unseeable presents itself. But my eyes detected nothing they needed to avoid. Everything was as I had left it when I had re-created the seeming after her departure. The Queen Anne kneehole desk I had given her for her birthday was, thanks to my labours, a model of organisation. Its drawers, all tidied, were stocked with fresh stationery. The grate, now sparkling bright, was laid with newspaper and kindling. Emma loved a fire. Like a cat, she would stretch herself before it, one hip raised, one crooked arm cradling her head.

My investigations allowed me a momentary easing of my burden. If the entire break-in team had crowded in here with cameras, rubber gloves, and headsets, what would they have seen apart from what they were supposed to see? Cranmer's woman is of no operational significance. She plays the piano, wears long silk dresses, and writes of country matters at a lady's kneehole desk.

Of her files of correspondence, of her rekindled determination to cure the entire world of its maladies, of the tap-tapping and wheezing of her electric typewriter at all hours of the day and night, they knew nothing.

* * *

I was suddenly ravenous. Raiding the fridge, Larry style, I polished off the rest of a pheasant left over from an excruciating dinner party I had given for a bunch of village worthies. There was half a bottle of Pauillac waiting to be finished too, but I had work to do. I forced myself to switch on the television news, but of missing professors and female composers on the run not one dangling participle or split infinitive. At midnight I went back upstairs, turned on the light in my dressing room, and, behind drawn curtains, slipped on a dark zip-up pullover, grey flannels, and black plimsolls. I switched on the bathroom light so that it would be visible from outside and after ten minutes turned it off again. I did the same in my bedroom, then stole downstairs and, still in darkness, put on a country cap and wound a black scarf round my face before tiptoeing down the servants' staircase to the kitchens, where by the glow of the pilot light from the gas burner I removed an ancient ten-inch key from its hook in the butler's pantry and dropped it into my trousers pocket.

I opened the back door, closed it behind me, and stood motionless in the freezing night, waiting for my eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. At first it seemed they never would, for the night was pitch black, without a star. The cold hung like a cloak of ice around my shivering body. I heard bird cries and the whimpering of a small animal.

Gradually I made out the stone path. It went by way of four flights of sandstone steps down the terraces to the brook that gives the house its name. Across the brook ran a footbridge, and beyond it stood a wicket gate leading to a treeless hillock on which by degrees I discerned the familiar silhouette of a small and sturdy church, so solid against the sky that it was like an imprint embossed on the darkness.

I crept forward. I was going to church. But not to pray.

* * *

I am not a God man, though I believe society is the better for Him than without Him. I do not reject Him, as Larry does, and then go scurrying after Him to apologise. But I do not accept Him either.

If deep down I believe in some central meaning, some Urgeist, as Larry would call it, my route to it is more likely to be the aesthetic one—the autumnal beauty of the Mendips, say, or Emma playing Liszt for me—than the path of prayer.