Our Game (26 page)

"Dear Miss Roylott."

Quite right: Miss Roylott is Miss Stoner's natural companion. It's Christmas evening before the big fire in the drawing room at Honeybrook. Emma wears her intaglio necklace and a long skirt and sits in the Queen Anne wing chair while I read aloud Conan Doyle's "Speckled Band," in which Sherlock Holmes rescues the beautiful Miss Stoner from the murderous designs of Dr. Grimesby Roylott. Drunk with happiness, I affect to continue reading from the text, while I ingeniously depart from it:

"And if I may be permitted, madam," I intone, in my most Holmesian voice, "to confess a humble interest in your immaculate person, then permit me also to propose that in a few moments we repair upstairs and put to the test those desires and appetites which, with the impetuosity of my sex, I am scarcely able to contain—"

But by now Emma's fingertips close my lips, so that she may kiss them with her own....

"Dear Miss Watson."

The writer is in Edinburgh and signs himself "Overseas Portfolio Exe ." And Watson should have been braving the wild beasts of Dr. Grimesby Roylott's private zoo with an Eley's No. 2 revolver in his pocket, not masquerading as a woman named Sally with an address in Cambridge Street, Bristol.

"We take pleasure in ... osing ... short-term ... combi ... high yie ... wit ... condi ... withdraw ... fshore."

I'll bet you take pleasure, I thought. With thirty-seven million to play with, who wouldn't?

"Dear Miss Holmes."

And more of the same unction from the banker's greasy bottle.

* * *

I was collecting carpets.

Kilims, Hamadans, Balouchis, Kolyais, and Azerbaijans, Gebbehs, Bakhtiaris, Basmackis, and Dosemealtis. Notes about carpets, scribbled memos about carpets, phone messages, letters typed on spotty grey paper posted by our good friend So-and-so who is travelling to Stockholm: Have the Kilims arrived? Are they on their way? Last week you said next week. Our Chief Leader is distraught, so much anxious talk of carpets. Issa is also distraught, because Magomed has no carpets to sit on.

CC rang. Hopes to be here next month. Didn't say where from. Still no carpets. . . .

CC rang. OCL ecstatic. Carpets being unpacked this moment. Excellent storage found at high altitude, everything intact. When can he expect more?

Carpets from AM. To Our Chief Leader or, as the Winchester Notion has it, OCL.

"Dear Prometheus." Badly burned letter on plain white paper, electronic type. "We are ... posi ... to arra . . . ear ... livery of 300 Qashqais as discussed, an ... shall be happy to take mat . . . to next agreed stage on receipt you ..." The signature a jagged hieroglyph resembling three pyramids side by side, sender's address The Hardwear Company, Box (number illegible) ... sfield.

Petersfield?

Maresfield?

Some other English field?

It was Macclesfield, I hear Jamie Pringle say in port-fed tones. Used to screw a girl there.

And below the signature an internal office memo, Larry to Emma in his impatient scrawl:

Emm! Vital! Can we scrape this together while we wait for CC to lay his egg? L

Exit her jewellery, I thought. Exit his gratuity. And at long last a precious date, scribbled in Larry's restless hand: 18/7—July 18, just a few days before Larry drew his Judas money.

And yes, they scraped it together—witness the uncharred, perfectly preserved half page of carpet purchases in Emma's precise italic:

Kilims . . . . . . 60,000

Dosemealtis . . . . 10,000

Hamadans . . . . . 1,500

Kolyais . . . . . .10 x 1,000

And at the bottom of the page, also in her handwriting:

Total payment to Macclesfield

so far . . . . . . £14,976,000

Lubyanka

Between parades

Emm, listen up!

Last night I put my head on your tummy and distinctly heard the sea. Had I been drinking? Had you? Answer: no, just dreaming on my solitary pallet. You cannot imagine the soothing effect of a friendly navel in one's ear, and the sound of distant water at the same time. Do you know—have you the wit to imagine—what it is like to be alert in every whisker for sheer unadulterated, frustrated love of Emm? Probably not. Too thick. But work on it and I'll be back tonight, which come to think of it is twelve hours before this letter will arrive, but that's just another symptom of my ludicrous, divine, insane love for you.

Please make an extra

effort to love and worship

your

Larry

and accept no substitutes.

PS. Seminar in half an hour. Marcia will weep if I insult her and weep if I don't. Talbot—who on earth christens these wretched children?—will mount his infant throne and I shall vomit.

PPS. Post boring-'em tristis. I very nearly strangled Talbot. Sometimes I think it's the entire middle English mindset of Thatcher's children that I'm at war with. PPPPPPPS. Marcia brought me a ccccake!

The letter, being Larry's, is undated.

Emm! Concerning Timbo.

Timbo is the box I came in. Timbo is reinsurance made perfect. He's the only man I know who can go forwards and backwards at the same time and make it look like progress or retrenchment, depending where your fancy lies.

Timbo is also fireproof, since the man who believes in nothing, and therefore has space for everything, has a terrible advantage over us. What passes for a kindly tolerance in him is in reality a craven acceptance of the world's worst crimes. He's an immobilist, an apathist, and a militant passivist with a big V. And of course he's a dear sweet man. Unfortunately, it's dear sweet men who screw up the earth. Timbo's a spectator. We're doers. And wow do we do!

L.

PS. I am deep inside you and propose to remain there until we meet—when I shall be deep inside you...

Emm,

Nietzsche said something frightfully stern about humour being an escape from serious thought, so I'll bow to N and give you serious thought. I love you. The heart, the laughs, the shoulder-to-shoulder, the pluck, the silences, every dimple and inlet, tuft, mole, freckle, nipple, and peerless plane. I love you until it comes out of my eyes. In the trees, the sky, the grass, and in Vladikavkaz on the river Terek, where the Caucasus takes us into its sanctuary and shields us from Moscow and the Christian maw. Or should do, if the bloody Ossetians weren't sitting in it.

One day you'll taste it, then you'll understand. I have Negley Farson on my knee as I write. Listen to his comfortable words. "Strange as it may seem for they are among the wildest mountains on earth, the one thing you feel about the lonely places of the Caucasus is a deep personal tenderness, a brotherhood: and the aching wish, vain as you know it to be, that you could guard their rare beauty. They possess you. Once you have felt the spell of the Caucasus you will never get over it." Confirmed and reconfirmed by my trip last Christmas. God, I love you. The Arts Subcommittee meets in one hour. How typical of the Lubyanka that even the Arts Committee should be sub. You are my Caucasus. Ich bin ein Ingush.

Yours in Allah,

L.

Emm,

Question from Thatcherchild Talbot, who has decided to grow a beard: Please, Larry, why did the West fall for Shevardnadze?

Answer, dear Talbot, because Shevers has a sad, bungey face and looks like everybody's daddy, when actually he's a KGB dinosaur with a background of deals with the CIA and a disgraceful record of repressing dissidents.

Question from Thatcherchild Marcia: Why did the West refuse recognition to Gamsakhurdia after he was fairly elected? Then, as soon as Shevardnadze was put in as Moscow's puppet, not only recognise the little twerp but turn a blind eye to his genocide of the Abkhaz, the Mingrelians, the you-name-them?

Answer, dear Thatcherchild Marcia, thank you for your ccccake and please come to bbbbed with me, it's the Good Old Boys getting together on both sides of the Atlantic and agreeing that minority rights can seriously threaten world health... .

I love you to despair and back. When you hear me coming up the hill, please be lying pensively on one elbow, naked and dreaming of the hills

L.

My fingers had gone black.

Snakes were tickling my ankles.

I was standing arms outstretched in crucifixion, drawing the typewriter tape from its cassette, passing it across the light and letting it pile up round my feet. At first I could understand nothing. Then I realised I had broken in upon Larry the letter writer again, this time in his more familiar guise of academic terrorist:

Your article entitled "Forcing Reason on the Caucasus" is an abomination. Its greatest offence is its attempt to justify the prolonged persecution of proud and fiercely independent peoples. For three hundred years Imperial and Soviet Russians have pillaged, murdered, and dispersed the mountaineers of N. Caucasus in an effort to destroy their culture, religion, and way of life. Where confiscation, slavery, enforced conversion, and the creation of deliberately divisive land borders failed to do the trick, the Russian oppressors resorted to wholesale deportation, torture, and genocide. Had the West taken the smallest interest in understanding the Caucasus during the dying days of Soviet power, instead of listening openmouthed to those with vested interests—of whom your writer is a flagrant example—the awful conflicts that have recently disfigured the region would have been avoided. So might those that are shortly to engulf us.

L. Pettifer

A broadside directed against yet another of Larry's enemies was incomplete:

... which is why the Ossetians today are Moscow's dependable henchmen as they were under the Communists and before them the Tsars. In the south, it is true, the Ossetians have lost out to those other ethnic cleansers, the Georgians. But in the north, in their war of attrition against the Ingush, in which they have been shamelessly assisted by regular units of highly equipped Russian troops, they emerge the absolute winners....

Typed by Emma three days before I nearly killed the author. For which his unnamed enemy was no doubt duly grateful.

"My darling."

Larry in his steady hand: the one he used for writing his State of the Universe letters to me. I already loathed his sonorous, elder-brother tone of structured egocentricity.

There is something I have to say to you as we get deeper into this, so see this as my ur-letter at the crossroads, offering you a last chance to turn back.

It happens to be the Ingush, and I needn't tell you that I incline to people who have no voice in the world and not a prayer about how to operate in the media marketplace.... The Ingush right to survive is my right and your right and the right of any good, free soul not to conform with the vile forces of uniformisation: whether imposed by Corns, Market Pigs, or the emetic Partyspeak of Political Correctitude. It happens to be the Ingush because I love their love of freedom, because they never had a feudal system or an aristocracy, no serfs, no slaves, no social superiors or inferiors; because they love forests and climb mountains and do a lot of things with their lives that the rest of us should do in preference to studying Global Security and listening to Pettifer talk platitudes.

It happens to be the Ingush because the sins committed against the Ingush and the Chechens are so incontestably awful that there's no earthly point in casting round for a bigger injustice committed against someone else. That would just be another way of turning your back on the little bugger bleeding on the floor....

Now I was terrified. But for Emma, not myself. My stomach churned; the hand that held the letter was damp with sweat.

It happens to be the Ingush (and not the Marsh Arabs or the Common Whale, as Tim kindly suggested) because I've seen them, in their little valley towns and in their mountains, and like Negley Farson I saw a kind of Paradise and must take it in my care. In life, as we both know, it's the luck of the draw, who you meet and when and how much you have left to give, and the point at which you say, To hell with everything, this is where I go the distance, this is where I stick. You know those photos of old fellows in their great big mountain capes, their bourkas? Well, in an uneven fight, when a North Caucasus warrior is surrounded by enemies, he will throw his bourka to the ground and stand on it to show he will not retreat one step from the surface covered by his bourka. Me, I throw down my bourka somewhere on the road to Vladikavkaz, on a perfect winter's day, when the whole of creation is sitting up ahead of you, inviting you to come in, whatever the risk and whatever the cost.

Outside the tower, bats squeaked, owls hooted. But the sounds I was listening to were within my head: the drumbeat of revolt, the cry to arms.

It happens to be the Ingush because they exemplify everything most shabby about our post-Cold War world. All through the Cold War it was our Western boast that we defended the underdog against the bully. The boast was a bloody lie. Again and again during the Cold War and after it the West made common cause with the bully in favour of what we call stability, to the despair of the very people we claimed to be protecting. That's what we're up to now.

How many times had I been forced to listen to these turgid expositions? And closed my ears to them: my mind as well? So many, I supposed, that I had forgotten their effect upon ears as wide open as Emma's.

The Ingush refuse to be rationalised out of existence, they refuse to be ignored, devalued, or dismissed. And what they are fighting against, whether they know it or not, is a whorehouse alliance between a rotten Russian Empire marching to its old tunes and a Western leadership that in its dealings with the rest of the world has proclaimed moral indifference to be its decent Christian right.

That's what I'll be fighting against too.

Dozing off in my tutorial this afternoon, I woke with a jerk three hundred years later. Helmut Kohl was Chancellor of all the Russias, Brezhnev was marching the Bosnian Serbs into Berlin, and Margaret Thatcher was at the checkout counter, taking the cash.

Which is all to say, I love you, but look out for me, because where I'm heading, there isn't a lot of turning back. Amen and out.

L.