Our Game (12 page)

I went upstairs. Smoke again. Mrs. Benbow does not smoke. Her husband doesn't. I don't, and I detest the habit and the smell. If I have returned from somewhere and have woke in my clothing, I require a complete change, a bath, and a hairwash. When Larry has been visiting, I have to fling open all the doors and windows that the weather permits. But the landing I again smelled stale cigarette smoke. In my dressing room and bedroom, more stale smoke. I crossed the gallery to Emma's side of the house: her side, my side, and the gallery a sword between us. Larry's sword.

Key in hand, I stood before her door, as I had done last mew again uncertain whether I should enter. It was oak and studded, a front door that had somehow made it up the stairs. I turned the key and stepped inside. Then quickly closed and locked the door behind me, against whom I didn't know. I hadn't trespassed here since the day I tidied up after her departure. I breathed in slowly, mouth and nose together. A whiff of scented talc mingled with the musk of disuse. So they sent in a woman, I thought. A powdered woman. Or two. Or six. But women certainly: some asinine piece of Office decorum insists on it. Married men cannot be allowed to rootle among young women's clothing. I stood in her bedroom. To my left, the bathroom. Ahead, her studio. On her bedside table, no dust. I lifted her pillow. Beneath it lay the exquisite silk nightdress from the White House in Bond Street that I had put into her Christmas stocking but never seen her wear. On the day she left me, I had found it still wrapped in its tissue paper, pushed to the back of a drawer. In my role of Operational Man I had unfolded it, shaken it out, and placed it under her pillow for cover. Miss Emma has gone up north to listen to her music being played, Mrs. Benbow. . . . Miss Emma will be back in a few days, Mrs. Benbow. . Miss Emma's mother is desperately ill, Mrs. Benbow. . Miss Emma is still in bloody limbo, Mrs. Benbow. .. .

I pulled open her wardrobe. All the clothes I had ever bought for her hung neatly from their gibbets, exactly as I had found them on the day of her disappearance: long silk jersey dresses, tailored suits, a sable cape she resolutely refused even to try on, shoes by someone grand, belts and handbags by someone grander. Staring at them, I wondered who I had been when I bought them, and what woman I had thought I was dressing.

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.

Yet destiny had decreed that I become a keeper of the faith, for when I inherited Honeybrook from blessed Uncle Bob and decided to appoint it my Cold Warrior's rest, I acquired also the title of squire, and with it the advowson to the benefice of the Church of St. James the Less, an early-Gothic cathedral in miniature, perched at the eastern boundary of my land, complete with antechapel, wagon roof, miniature hexagonal bell tower, and a superb pair of giant ravens—but because of its remoteness and the decline in religious interest, fallen into disuse.

Fresh from London, and flushed with dutiful enthusiasm for my new bucolic life, I had determined, with the full consent of the diocesan authority, to revive my church as a working place of worship, not realising, any more than did the bishop, that by doing this I would be imperilling the already diminished congregation of the parish church a mile away. At my own expense I repaired the roof and saved the timbers in the splendid little porch. With the personal encouragement of the bishop's wife, I had the altar cloth repaired, organised a cleaning rota of willing spirits and, when all was ready, obtained the services of a pallid curate from Wells, who, for informal reward, gave bread and wine to a mixed bag of farmers, weekenders, and us retired types, all doing our best to look pious for him.

But after a month of this, both the diocese and I were forced to recognise that my efforts were misplaced. First, my willing spirits ceased to be so willing, ostensibly on account of Emma. They did not take kindly, they said, to arriving in their Land-Rovers with their mops and pails, only to find her perched in the organ loft, playing Peter Maxwell-Davies to a congregation of one. They implied ungraciously that if the cradle-snatching Londoner and his fancy girl wanted to use the church as their private concert hall, they could do their cleaning for themselves. Next, an unprepossessing man in a blazer and a pair of Larry's buckskin boots presented himself, claiming to speak for some unheard-of ecclesiastical body and requiring information of me: the numbers of our congregation, for instance, the sums and destination of our offertories, and the names of our visiting preachers. In another life I would have suspected his credentials, for he also asked me whether I was a Freemason, but by the time he left I had decided that my days as the saviour of St. James the Less were over. The bishop gladly agreed.

But I did not desert my charge. There is a natural butler in me somewhere, and in no time I discovered the soothing satisfactions of mopping down flagstones, dusting pews, and buffing brass candlesticks in the stillness of my seven-hundred-year-old private church. But by then I had other reasons to persist: in addition to spiritual solace, St. James was providing me with the best safe house I could ever hope to find.

I am not speaking of the lady chapel, with its worm-eaten panelling so adrift you could stuff a complete archive behind it and it wouldn't show; or of the capacious vaults where the crumbling tombstones of the abbot-farmers offer any number of natural dead-letter boxes. I am speaking of the tower itself: of a secret, windowless hexagonal priesthole reached by way of a cope cupboard in the vestry, and thence by a tiny curling staircase to a second door, and, as I truly believe, not entered for centuries by a living soul until I happened on it by accident after puzzling over the discrepancy between the tower's external and internal measurements.

I say windowless, but whatever genius designed my secret chamber—whether for refuge or for venery had had the further ingenuity to provide one slender horizontal arrow slit high in the wall at each point where the main joists support the wooden canopy that skirts the outside of the tower. So that by standing my full height and moving from one arrow slit to another, I commanded a perfect all-round view of the enemy's approach.

As to light, I had made the test a dozen times. Having rigged up a crude electric lighting system, I had undertaken elaborate tours of the church, now at a distance, now close to. It was only when I pressed myself against the wall of the tower and craned my head upward that I detected the palest glow, reflected on the inside of the wood canopy.

I have described my priesthole in detail because of its importance to my inner life. Nobody who has not lived in secrecy can appreciate its addictive powers. Nobody who has renounced the secret world, or been renounced by it, recovers from his deprivation. His longing for the inner life is at times unendurable, whether of the religious or clandestine kind. At any hour he will dream of the secret hush reclaiming him in its embrace.

And so it was for me each time I entered the priesthole and revisited my little treasure hoard of keepsakes: the diaries I should not have kept but, having done so, kept still; old encounter sheets, unsanitised operational logs, jottings dashed off in the cool of conspiracy, uncensored debriefing tapes, and here and there whole files ordered for destruction by the Top Floor and so certified—only to be spirited into my private archive, partly for the enlightenment of posterity, but partly as a piece of personal insurance against the rainy day I had always feared might come and now had: when some misperception on the part of my employers, or some foolish act of my own, would cast a crooked backward light on things that I had said and done in honour.

And finally, as well as my papers, I had my personal escape kit for the event that nothing, not even the record, could protect me: my reserve identity in the name of Bairstow, comprising passport, credit card, and driving licence, all legitimately acquired for some aborted operation, then kept back and artificially extended by myself, to be tested and retested until I was confident that the Office quartermaster had ceased to be aware they still existed. And serviceable, you understand. We are talking of the Office functioning on home soil, not some cheapjack forger taking a one-time risk. Each of them fed into the right computers, credit rated and proofed against outside enquiry, so that, provided a man had his tradecraft about him, and I had—and his money, and I had that too he could live a whole other life more safely than he could live his own.

A sinuous cloud of freezing mist curled at me out of the brook as I crossed the footbridge. Reaching the wicket gate, I disengaged the latch and lowered it to its housing. Then I rammed the gate back as fast as I could, causing an indignant shriek to add itself briefly to the night sounds. I stole up the path and through the old cemetery that was Uncle Bob's last resting place, to the porch, where I groped for the keyhole. In total blackness I guided the key into the lock, gave it a sharp twist, shoved the door, and stepped inside.

Church air is like no other. It is the air the dead breathe, humid, old, and frightening. It echoes even when there is no sound. Feeling my way to the vestry as quickly as I dared, I located the cope cupboard, opened it, and, with my palms flat on the ancient stones, wriggled up the spiral staircase to my sanctuary and put on the light.

I was safe. I could think the unthinkable at last. A whole internal life that I dared not acknowledge, let alone explore, until I was secure inside the confines of my priesthole, was once more open to my scrutiny.

Mr. Timothy D'Abell Cranmer: How do you say? Did you or did you not, on or about the night of September 18, at Priddy Pool in the County of Somerset, murder by battery and drowning one Lawrence Pettifer, formerly your friend and secret agent?

We are fighting, as only brothers can. All my gentling and cossetting of him, all the careless insults I have swallowed whole—beginning with his sneering asides about Diana, my first wife; continuing for twenty more years with gibes about my emotional inadequacy, about what he calls my rent-a-drool smile, and my good manners that do duty for a heart; and culminating in his wanton theft of Emma—all my cancer-giving forbearance, has turned outward in a pent-up, furious revolt.