Our Game

"Gave 'em grouse," he continued. "Ma Peters did. Oriel man. Old times. Hadn't seen him for twenty-five years. Put out the red carpet. Duty. Last week of September, last grouse o' the season, far as this house was concerned. Bloody Arabs overshot 'em. Worse than Eyeties. Come mid-September, hardly a bird left. Self-discipline essential. Family hold back, whatever the foreigners do. Can't say wogs these days. Not PC."

My mouth was numb. I had had a dental injection. My upper gums were frozen, and my tongue had disappeared down my throat.

"So the end of September," I managed, as if addressing the very old or deaf. "Right? Right, Jamie? They came to you in the last week of September? Jolly generous of you to give them grouse. I hope they were duly grateful. Considering you might just as well have shown them the door. I mean I would have been grateful. So would you. End of September. Yes?"

I fumbled on, but I don't know that Jamie ever answered me: not beyond a show of shrugging and grimacing and backbench burbling of sounds like "Naa" and "Quarright." I know the clock struck. I remember the bun face of Pandora appearing round the door, announcing Cinderella's coach. I remember thinking, as the thousand-voiced choir of angels struck up inside my head, that if you're celebrating your emergence from the black light, a bottle of '55 Cheval Blanc and a large dose of Graham's '27 port make an appropriately celestial accompaniment.

Jamie Pringle had risen heavily to his feet and was displaying a passion I had not seen in him outside the rugby field.

"Pandora. Just the girl. Look here. Bloody outrage. Get on to Mrs. Peters now, will you, darling? Broken set of teaspoons. Could ruin the whole service. Find out why and find out where and find out who."

But I had found out when.

* * *

My euphoria, if it survived in certain areas of my head, was short-lived in the rest of them. The white light to which I had been restored enabled me to see more clearly than ever the monstrosity of their shared betrayal. All right, I had taken a gun. I had conspired, plotted, hired a car, and driven into the night determined to slaughter my friend and agent of a lifetime. But he had deserved it! And so had she!

* * *

I walked.

Emma.

I was drunk. Not wine drunk. Or not consciously. After twenty years in the Office, I have a head like an ox. But drunk all the same: blind, humiliated drunk.

Emma.

Who are you being or seeming, with your hair up, swinging your legs at Jamie Pringle? What other lies have you been living while you laughed at me behind my back, the two of you—at Timbo, stuffy old Timbo, the late developer with his rent-a-drool smile?

Playing the angel. Toiling at your Hopeless Causes till late into the night. Telephoning, tap-tapping, looking grave, looking high-minded, preoccupied, aloof, borrowing the Sunbeam to slip down to the post, to the railway station, to Bristol. For the oppressed of the earth. For Larry.

* * *

I walked. I fumed. I rejoiced. I fumed again.

Yet furious as I was, I still noticed how the nondescript couple across the street abandoned their study of a shop window and set off along the far pavement at the same speed and in the same direction as myself. And I knew there would be a team of three pedestrians behind me, and a tame car or van or taxicab to service them. And therefore I knew, for all my anger and relief and new purpose and altered status as a creature of the common daylight, that I must attend to the seeming. I must make no gesture that suggested I was anything but a well-lunched trustee and former spy going about his legitimate pursuits. And I was grateful, to Larry, to Emma, and to my watchers, for imposing this responsibility on me. Because the seeming had always been an activity with rules, a discipline to keep the anarchy at bay, and the anarchy inside me was at this moment in full cry:

Emma! How in God's name did he spirit you this far down the road?

Larry

! You manipulative, vengeful, thieving bastard.

Both of you! What the hell are you up to, and why?

Cranmer! You're not a murderer! You can walk tall! You're clean!

* * *

I was a fool.

A raging, furious, overcontrolled fool, even if I was a fool set free. I had imagined myself terribly in love, and admitted a viper to my life.

Adopted, spoiled, served, anointed her, doted on her idiosyncrasies. Lavished jewels and freedom on her, made her my clotheshorse and my love object, my woman to end all women, icon, goddess, daughter, and, as Larry would say, slave. Loved her for her love of me, for her spells of gravitas and laughter; for her frailty and promiscuity and for the trust she placed in my protection. And all this on the strength of what? On what impulse, beyond the dewy longings of a late developer?