"Yes my gosh—however did that go, by the way, with
Jamie?" I ask Larry, with the extra carelessness we spy-men use when removing a topic from its secret wrapping in the presence of an ordinary mortal. "Did he deliver the goods for your chum in Hull? Was he helpful? What happened?"
Larry glances at Emma, then at me, but I have ceased to wonder why he looks at Emma first, because everything that passes among the three of us is by now a matter of tacit consultation between the two of them.
"Pringle's an arsehole," Larry replies curtly. "Was. Is now. And ever shall be. Amen."
Then, while Emma stares demurely at her plate, he launches himself into a diatribe against what he calls the useless mouths of our Oxford generation, thus converting the subject of Jamie Pringle into another diatribe against the compassion fatigue of the West.
He's turned her, I'm thinking, in the jargon of our trade. She's gone. Defected. Crossed over. And doesn't even know it.
* * *
Through the arrow slits, grey streaks of morning were appearing behind the hills. An ungainly young barn owl flopped at grasstop height over the frosted hillside in search of breakfast. So many shared dawns, I thought: so much life lavished on one man. Larry is dead for me whether I killed him or not, and I am dead for him. The only question is: Who is dead for Emma?
I returned to my table, buried myself once more in my papers, and when I touched my face I felt to my surprise a thirty-six-hour stubble. I blinked round my secret sanctuary and counted the coffee cups. I consulted my watch and refused to believe it was three in the afternoon. But my watch was right, and the sun was entering the south-western arrow slit. I was not living some vicarious daylit night in Helsinki or pacing my hotel room, praying for Larry's safe return from Moscow or Havana or even Grozny. I was here in my priesthole, and I had pulled out strands but not yet made a thread of them.
Peering round, my eye fell upon a corner of my kingdom that was barred to me by my own decree. It was an alcove, screened by a makeshift blackout curtain that I had found in the attic and nailed across the entrance. I called it Emma's archive.
"Your lovely Emma's quite a gal," Merriman announces with relish, two weeks after I have been obliged to submit her name to him as my intended companion. "No risk to anyone, you'll be pleased to hear, except possibly to you. Would you like to take a tiny deniable peek at her biog before you plunge? I've made up a little doggy bag for you to take home."
"No."
"Her appalling parentage?"
"No."
The doggy bag, as he calls it, lies already between us on the desk, an anonymous buff A4 folder with half a dozen pages of anonymous white paper peeping out.
"Her missing years? Her exotic foreign ramblings? Her disgraceful love life, her absurd causes, her barefoot marches, picketings, her ever bleeding heart? Some of these young musicians these days, you wonder they have time to learn their scales."
"No."
How could he ever understand that Emma is my self-imposed security risk, my new openness, my one-girl glasnost? I wish for no stolen knowledge of her, nothing she does not tell me of her own accord. Nevertheless, to my shame, I take the file as he knows I will and jam it angrily beneath my arm. The pull of my old profession is simply too strong for me. Knowledge never kills, I have preached for twenty years to anybody who would listen to me: but ignorance can.
Setting everything in order for my next visit, I fed my weary body down the winding staircase to the cope cupboard. In the vestry I helped myself to overalls, a broom, a duster, and a floor polisher. Thus equipped, I proceeded to the main aisle, where I paused and faced the altar and, in the shifty manner of us agnostics, offered some clumsy acknowledgement or obeisance to the Maker I could not bring myself to believe in. This done, I went about my cleaning duties, for I was never a man to neglect my cover.
First I dusted the mediaeval pew ends, then I mopped the tiled floor and ran over it with the polisher, to the vexation of a family of bats. Half an hour later, still in my cleaner's overalls and bearing the broom as additional testimony to my labours, I ventured into the daylight. The sun had disappeared behind a blue-black cloud stack. Shadowy bands of rain pressed down on the bare hilltops. My heart stopped dead. I was staring at the hill we call the Beacon. It is the highest of the six. Its outline is pitted with shaped stones and hummocks said to be the remnants of an ancient burial ground. Among these stones, cut black against the seething skyline, stood the silhouette of a man in a long coat or raincoat that seemed to have no buttons down the front, for it flapped and billowed in the gusting wind, though his hands were plunged into its pockets.
His head was turned away from me, as if I had just hit him with a .38 revolver butt. His left foot was pointed outward in the quaintly Napoleonic pose that Larry liked to strike. He wore a flat cap, and though I did not remember ever seeing Larry in a cap, this meant nothing, for he was forever leaving his hats at people's houses and helping himself to others he preferred. I tried to call out, but no sound escaped me. I opened my mouth, wanting to shout "Larry!" but for once my tongue couldn't make the L. Come back, I mutely begged him, come down. Let's begin again; let's be friends, not rivals.
I took a step forward, then another. I think I was intending to charge at him as I had at Priddy, vaulting the stone walls, ignoring the gradient, yelling, "Larry, Larry! Larry, are you all right?" But as Larry was always telling me, I am not much good at spontaneity. So instead I set down my broom and cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted something shy, like "Hullo there, who is that, is it you?"
Or perhaps by then I had realised that for the second time in as many days I was addressing the unlovely person of Andreas Munslow, sometime member of my section and full-time keeper of my passport.
"What the devil do you think you're doing here?" I shouted at him. "How dare you come here snooping on me? Go away. Get out of here."
He was loping down the hill at me, glissading in spidery strides. I had not realised till now what an agile creature he must be.
"Afternoon to you, Tim," he said, with none of the previous day's deference. "Been cleaning up for God?" he asked, eyeing my broom, then me. "Don't you shave these days?"
"What are you doing here?"
"I'm keeping watch over you, Tim. For your safety and comfort. Orders of the Top Floor."
"I don't need keeping watch over. I can keep watch over myself. Get out."
"Jake Merriman thinks you do. He thinks you're messing him around. He's ordered me to tag you. Put a bell up your arse was how he put it. I'm at the Crown, day or night." He shoved a piece of paper at me. "That's my cell phone. Daniel Moore, room three." He stabbed his index finger into my chest. "And screw you, actually, Cranmer. Totally screw you. You gave me one and I owe you one. That's a warning."
Emma's ghost was waiting for me in the drawing room. She was seated at the Bechstein on her special stool, thinking her notes aloud with that strict posture she has that nips the waist and spreads the hips. She was wearing all her antique jewellery to please me.
"Have you been flirting with Larry again?" she asked above her music.
But I was in no mood to be laughed at, least of all by her.
Evening fell, but I had already entered the black light of my own soul. Broad daylight would not have saved me. I wandered the house, touching things, opening books and closing them. I cooked myself food and left it uneaten. I put on music and didn't listen to it. I slept and woke dreaming the same dream that had destroyed my sleep. I returned to the priesthole. What trail was I pursuing, what clues? I was picking through the rubble of my past, looking for the fragments of the bomb that had destroyed it. More than once I rose in despair from my trestle table and placed myself before the old rag of wartime curtain, and my hand braced itself to rip aside the self-imposed barrier to Emma's forbidden territory. But each time I restrained myself.
SIX
"OUR USUAL, WAS it, Mr. Cranmer?"
"If you please, Tom."
"Expect you're looking forward to your Senior Citizen's any day now."
"Thank you, Tom, I have a few years to wait, and I'm glad to do it."
Laughter in which I share, for this is our standing bad joke every other Friday when I buy my ticket to Paddington and take my place on the platform among the London suits. And if today had been an ordinary Friday, I am sure I would have fantasised a little, imagining I was still in harness. And Emma in the good days would have playfully straightened my tie for me, and smoothed the lapels of my jacket, and wished me a nice day at the office, darling, before treating me to a last, delicious, disgracefully suggestive kiss. And in the bad days, she would have watched my departure from the shadows of her upper window, unaware apparently that I was watching her also, in the wing mirror of my Sunbeam, knowing that I was leaving her alone all day to her typewriter and telephone, and Larry thirty miles down the road.
But this morning I was feeling, in place of Emma's amateurish eye, the prickle of professional surveillance on my back. Bartering trivia with a forlorn baronet known locally as poor Percy, who, having inherited a thriving engineering business and run it into the ground, now sold life insurance on commission, I had glimpsed Tom the ticket clerk's silhouette ease across the window of his office to the telephone and speak into it with his back to me. And as the train pulled out of the station I spotted a man in a country cap and raincoat standing in the car park, zealously waving at a woman a few seats behind me, who paid him not the least attention. He was the same man who had followed me in his Bedford van from the crossroads at the end of my lane.
Arbitrarily I awarded Tom to the police, and the cap and raincoat to Munslow. Good luck to them, I thought. Let all pursuing parties note that on this duty Friday, Tim Cranmer is once more going about his customary business.
I was wearing my blue pinstripe. I dress up to people; I can't help it. If I am calling on the vicar, I don a tweed suit; watching a cricket match, a blazer and a sporting tie. And if, after four days' nightmarish incarceration inside my own head, I am attending the bimonthly trustees' meeting of the Charles Lavender Urban and Rural Trust for Wales under the stewardship of Pringle Brothers PLC of Threadneedle Street, I cannot help but look a little like a banker myself as I board the train, study the financial pages of my newspaper, step into the chauffeur-driven car that awaits me among Brunel's splendid arches, give Pringle's uniformed doorman good morning, and see reflected in the glass-and-mahogany door the same unoccupied cab with its light off that had followed me all the way from Praed Street.
"Mr. Cranmer, hellao, reelly grite to see you," Jamie's supine secretary, Pandora, whined in her Roedean Cockney as I entered the leathery Edwardian antechamber of which she was the mistress.
"Hell's teeth, Tim!" cried Jamie Pringle, all sixteen stone of him, in his striped shirt and mulberry braces, as he forced me into touch with a crushing handshake. "Don't tell me it's Friday week already, what, what?"
Pringle's an arsehole, I heard Larry saying in my inner ear. Was. Is now And ever shall be. Amen.
Monty drifted in like his own shadow. He wore a hollowed black waistcoat and stank of the cigarettes he wasn't allowed to smoke on the partners' floor. Monty kept the books and paid our quarterly expenses with cheques that Jamie signed.
After him came Paul Lavender, still shaking from the hazardous voyage by Rolls-Royce from his house in Mount Street. Paul was feline and fair and seventy, and very slow-moving in patent moccasins with languid tassels. His father, our benefactor, had started life as a schoolmaster in Llandudno, before founding a hotel chain and selling it for a hundred million pounds.
After Paul came Dolly and Eunice, his two spinster sisters. Dolly wore a diamond racehorse. Years ago Dolly had won the Derby, or so she claimed, though Eunice swore Dolly had never owned anything larger than an overfed chihuahua.
And after them again came Henry, the Lavenders' family solicitor. It was thanks to Henry that we met so often. And at four hundred pounds an hour, who could blame him?
"Plonk still holding up?" he asked doubtfully as we shook hands.
"Oh, I think so, thank you. Rather well."
"Cheap Frog stuff not pricing you out of the market at all? I must have been reading the wrong newspapers."
"I'm afraid you must, Henry," I said.
We were seated round the famous Pringle boardroom table. Each of us had before him one copy of the minutes of the last meeting, one statement of the accounts, and one Wedgwood bone china teacup with a sugared shortbread biscuit on the saucer. Pandora poured. Paul rested his head on one bloodless hand and closed his eyes.
Jamie, our chairman, was about to speak. The fists that thirty years ago had clawed muddy rugger balls out of seething scrums converged upon a tiny pair of gold-framed half-lenses and pulled them on ear by ear. The market, Jamie said, was depressed. He held the foreigners to blame:
"What with your Germans refusing to cut their interest rates, your yen going through the roof, and your High Street takings going through the floor—" He peered about him in bemusement, as if he had forgotten where he was. "I'm afraid that U.K. gilts are weathering something of a trough." Then he gave a nod at Henry, who with a frightful clack opened the two levers of a fibreglass document case and read us an interminable report:
Discussion with the local authorities regarding the provision of sports facilities in the inner cities is proceeding at the pace one has to expect of local civil servants, Jamie....
The trust's offer of an extra children's ward at the Lavender Hospital for Mothers cannot be taken further until additional trust monies are set aside for staffing. None are presently available for such a purpose, Jamie....
Our proposal to supply a mobile library to meet the needs of children in illiterate areas has run up against political objections from the local council—one side arguing that the days of free libraries are dead and buried, another that the selection of books should be determined by the county's education authorities, Jamie....