Our Game

"She's a fully paid-up woman, you idiot!" he chokes at me. "Not some late developer's bed toy!"

Maddened, I draw the .38—across the body, from the waistband, the way both of us were taught—and I point it, from about a foot away, at the bridge of his nose.

"Ever seen one of these, Larry?" I ask him.

But pointing it at him only seems to make him stupid. He squints at it, then raises his eyebrows at me in an admiring smile.

"Well, you have got a big one," he says.

At this I lose my temper and, using both hands, smash the butt into the side of his face.

Or I think I do.

And perhaps that was when I killed him.

Or perhaps I am remembering the seeming, not the being.

Perhaps the rest of my blows, if I ever struck them at all, were wasted on a dead or dying body. Neither in my dreams nor waking did I any longer know. The days and nights between have brought me no enlightenment, only terrible variations of the same scene. I drag him to the Pool, I bump and roll him into it, he scarcely makes a splash, just a kind of sucking noise, as if he has been drawn right down. I can't tell whether it is panic or remorse that has the upper hand as I perform this final act. Perhaps self-preservation has it, for even as I cart him feet first over the tufts of grass, as I watch his nodding, moon-white head grin up at me and then go under—I seriously debate whether to put a bullet through him or drive him at breakneck speed to Bristol Infirmary.

But I don't do either of these things. Not in the seeming and not in the being. He slides into the water headfirst, and -best friend drives home alone, stopping only to change cars and clothes along the way. Am I exhilarated? Am I in despair? I am both, one minute lighter of heart than I have been for years, the next in murderer's remorse.

But have I murdered him?

I have fired no bullet. None is missing from the revolver.

There is no blood on the butt of my revolver.

He was breathing. I saw bubbles. And dead men, unless they are Larry and drunk, don't breathe even if they grin. So perhaps I only killed myself.

Larry is my shadow, I think in some far outstation of my mind, as I drive in dream-like detachment between the sandstone gateposts of Honeybrook. The only way to catch him is to fall on him. Then I remember something he once said to me, a quotation from one of his literary icons: "To kill without being killed is an illusion."

Safely back in my study, hands shaking at last, I pour myself a huge whisky and gulp it down; then another and another and another. I have not drunk like this since one Guy Fawkes night at Oxford, when Larry and I poisoned each other nearly to death by drinking glass for glass in competition. It's the black light, I am thinking as I shove aside the empty bottle and, stubbornly sober, embark upon a second: the black light that the boxer sees as he goes down for the count; the black light that lures decent folk across the moor with revolvers in their belts to murder their best friends; the black light that will shine from this night on, inside my head, over everything that did or didn't happen at Priddy Pool.

* * *

I woke myself. I was sitting head in hands at the trestle table in my priesthole, my files and keepsakes heaped around me.

But Larry a thief as well as my dead nemesis? I asked myself. An embezzler, a conspirator, a lover of secret wealth as well as women?

Everything I knew about myself and Larry revolted against the idea. He had no use for money: How many times did I have to scream this at the empty air before someone believed me? Greed makes you stupid.

Never once, on all the occasions we had prodded him towards this or that step in his agent's career, had he asked me: How much will you pay me?

Never once had he demanded an increase in his Judas money, complained about our niggardly approach to his expenses, threatened to fling down his cloak and dagger unless he was promised more.

Never once, when he received from his Soviet case officer the monthly briefcase stuffed with cash to pay the salaries of his notional subagents—we are talking here of tens of thousands of pounds—had he raised any objection when Office rules obliged him to hand the whole lot over to me.

And now a thief, suddenly? Checheyev's bagman and accomplice? Thirty-seven million pounds and rising, squirrelled away in foreign bank accounts, by Larry? And Checheyev? With the connivance of Zorin? All three common swindlers together?

* * *

"Hey, Timbo!"

It is evening in Twickenham, where neither of us lives, which is why we have come here. We are sitting in the saloon bar of a pub called The Cabbage Patch, or perhaps it is The Moon Under Water. Larry selects his pubs solely for their names.