Our Game (35 page)

Dee gave me back to life, she is saying, between earnest discussions of how we can be most useful for Larry. How to make music, love, how to say no . . . Without Dee I would have died. . . .

Until bit by bit my agent-runner's pride takes exception to this other controller of her life. I wish Dee forgotten and discourage further talk of her—this Dee of the fabulous empty castle in Paris, nothing in it except a bed and a piano—this Dee whose aristocratic name and address are lovingly illuminated in Emma's pop-up book: alias the Contessa Ann-Marie von Diderich, with an address on the Ile St.-Louis.

THIRTEEN

WET CHESTNUT LEAVES Snick to the cobbled pavement. This

is the house, I thought, staring up at the same high grey walls and shuttered windows that I had pictured in my dreams. Up there in the tower is where Penelope sits, weaving her shroud, and remains faithful to her Larry in his wanderings, accepting no substitutes.

I had watched my back for hours. I had sat in cafes, observed cars, fishermen, and cyclists. I had ridden on the metro and in buses. I had walked through classical gardens and perched on benches. I had done everything that Operational Man could think of to protect his unfaithful mistress from Merriman and Pew, Bryant and Luck, and The Forest. And my back was clean. I knew it was. Though the experts say you never know for sure, I knew.

A wrinkled old woman opened the door to me. She wore grey hair knotted behind her and the coarse blue-black tunic of a menial. And wooden therapeutic sandals over lisle stockings.

"I would like to see the Contessa, please," I said severely in French. "My name is Timothy. I am a friend of Mademoiselle Emma."

I could think of nothing to add, and for a while neither apparently could she, for she remained on the threshold, tilting her head and screwing up her eyes as if to get me into focus, until I realised she was measuring me minutely, first my face, then my hands and shoes, and then my face again. and if what she saw in me was an uncomfortable mystery to both of us, what I saw in her was an intelligence and a humanity that were almost too powerful for the rumpled little frame that was obliged to accommodate them. And what I heard, faintly from upstairs, was the sound of a piano playing, whether live or recorded was anybody's guess but mine.

"Kindly follow me," she said in English, so I walked behind her up two flights of stone steps, and with each step the sounds of the piano grew a little louder, and I began to feel a sickness of recognition that was like a giddiness from altitude, so that the views of the Seine through the windows at each half-landing were like views of several different rivers at once, this one fast-flowing, another calm, and a third strict as a canal. Brown-skinned children watched me from a doorway. A young girl in the bright cottons of Arabia flitted past me on her way downstairs. We reached a high room, and here through the long window the rivers joined together and became the Seine again, with appropriate anglers in berets, and lovers arm in arm. In this room the music was much fainter, though my recognition of it was no less, for it was some obscure Scandinavian piece that Emma used for her finger exercises at Honeybrook before the Hopeless Causes took her over. And this morning she was still sticking on the same little phrases, replaying them over and over till she had them to her satisfaction. And I remembered how, where others might have tired of this constant repetition, I had always been deeply taken by it, empathising with her, trying almost physically to help her over every hurdle, however many shots it took, because that was basically how I had seen my role in her life: as her conductor and devoted audience, as the fellow who was ready to pick her up each time she fell.

"I am called Dee," the woman said, as if accepting that I was unlikely to offer much in the way of conversation. "I am Emma's friend. Well, you know that."

"Yes."

"And Emma is upstairs. You hear that."

"Yes."

Her accent was more German than French. But the lines in her face were of universal suffering. She had sat herself stiffly in a tall chair and was holding its arms like a dowager.

I sat opposite her on a wooden stool. The floorboards were bare and ran directly from her feet to mine. There were no carpets, no pictures on the walls. In a room not far off, a telephone was ringing, but she paid it no attention and it stopped. But soon it began ringing again, as I suspected it rang most of the time, like a doctor's.

"And you are in love with her. And that is the reason why you are here."

A diminutive Asian girl in jeans had appeared in the doorway to listen to us. Dee said something sharp to her, and she pattered off.

"Yes," I said.

"To tell her that you love her? She knows it already.”

“To warn her."

"She is warned. She knows she is in danger. She is content. She is in love, though not with you. She is in danger, but his danger is greater than hers, therefore she is not in danger. It is all quite logical. Do you understand?"

"Of course."

"She has ceased to find excuses for loving him. You must not ask for them, please. It would be degrading for her to apologise any more. Please do not require it of her."

"I don't. I won't. That isn't why I came."

"Then we must ask again: why did you come? Please—it is honourable not to know! But if you should discover your motives when you see her, kindly consider her feelings first. Before she met you, she was a shipwreck. She had no centre, no stability. She could have been anyone. Like you, perhaps. All she wished was to climb into a shell and live the life inside it. But now it is over. You were the last of her shells. Now she is real. She is defined. She is one person. Or feels she is. If she is not, then at least the different people in her are going in the same direction. Thanks to Larry. Perhaps it is also thanks to you. You look sad. Is that because I mention Larry?"

"I didn't come for her thanks."

"Then for what? For an obligatory scene? I hope not. Perhaps one day you also will be real. Perhaps you and Emma were very similar people. Too similar. Each wished the other to be real. She is expecting you. She has been expecting you for some days now. Are you safe to go alone to her?"

"Why should I not be?"

"I was thinking of Emma's safety, Mr. Timothy, not yours."

She returned me to the staircase. The piano playing had stopped. The little girl was watching us from the shadows. "You gave her a lot of jewellery, I believe," Dee said. "I don't remember that it did her any harm."

"Is that why you gave it to her—to save her from harm?”

“I gave it to her because she was beautiful and I loved her."

"You are rich?"

"Rich enough."

"Perhaps you gave it to her because you didn't love her. Perhaps love is a threat to you, something to be paid off. Perhaps it is in competition with your other ambitions."

I had faced Pew-Merriman. I had faced Inspector Bryant and Sergeant Luck. Facing Dee was worse than any of them.

"You have one more flight to climb," she said. "Have you decided what you came for?"

"I'm looking for my friend. Her lover."

"So that you may forgive him?"

"Something like that."

"Perhaps he must forgive you?"

"What for?"

"We human beings are dangerous weapons, Mr. Timothy. And most dangerous where we are weak. We know so much about the power of others. So little about our own. You have a strong will. Perhaps you did not know your own strength with him." She laughed. "Such an inconstant man you are. One minute you are looking for Emma, the next you are looking for your friend. You know what? I don't think you wish to find your friend, only to become him. Be careful with her. She will be nervous."

* * *

She was. So was I.

She stood at the end of the long room, and it was a room so like her side of the house at Honeybrook that my first thought was to wonder why she had ever bothered to change it. It had the attic look she liked, with a high-timbered ceiling rising to an apex, and the views she liked, down to the river at either end. An old rosewood upright piano occupied one corner, and I supposed it was the sort of piano she had coveted in the Portobello Road at the time I had bought her the Bechstein. In another corner she had a desk—not a kneehole but more in the style of her prosaic desk in Cambridge Street. And on the desk stood a typewriter, and over it and on the floor lay a re-creation of the papers I had plundered. So that there was a look of proud resurgence about them, as if they had valiantly regrouped after a frightful pounding. If a tattered flag had flown from them, it would not have been surprising.

She had her hands at her sides. Black half-gloves as on the day we had first met. She was wearing a crushed linen smock, and it had the appearance of a habit: of a deliberate renunciation of the flesh; and of me. Her black hair was bound in a ponytail. And the improbable effect of this was that I desired her more urgently than ever before.

"I'm sorry about the jewellery," she began in a sort of lurch.

Which hurt me, because I didn't want her thinking, after everything that I had been through on her account—the anguish and the battering and the deprival—that I had any concern left for something as trivial as jewellery.

"So Larry's all right," I said.

Her head flung round eagerly, eyes wide with anticipation. "All right? What do you mean? What have you heard?"

"I'm sorry. I just meant in general. After Priddy."

Belatedly she understood my point. "Of course. You tried to kill him, didn't you? He said he hoped all his deaths would be so comfortable. I hate him talking like that, actually. Even joking. I don't think he should. Then of course I tell him, so he does it again, just because he's been told not to." She shook her head. "He's incurable."

"Where is he now'

"Out there."

"Out where?" Silence. "Moscow? Back to Grozny?" More silence. "I suppose that's up to Checheyev."

"I don't think anyone moves Larry around like dry goods. Not even CC."

"I suppose not. How do you get hold of him, actually? Write? Call? What's the drill?"

"I don't. Nor do you."

"Why not?"

"He said that."

"Said what?"

"If you came after him, asking for him, not to tell you even if I knew. He said it wasn't that he didn't trust you. He was just worried that you might love the Office more. He won't phone. He says it's not safe. Not for him, not for me. I get messages. 'He's all right....' `He sends love....' `No change....' `Soon....' Oh, and 'Miss your beautiful eyes,' of course. That's practically standard."

"Of course." Then I thought I'd better tell her in case she didn't know. "Aitken May's dead. His two helpers were killed with him."

Her face turned abruptly from me as if I had slapped it. Then her whole back turned on me.

"The Forest killed them," I said. "I'm afraid your warning came too late. I'm sorry."

"Then CC will have to find a substitute," she said at last. "Larry will know somebody. He always does."

She had her back to me still, and I remembered that she had always found it easier to talk that way. She was staring out of the window, and the light of the window showed me the shape of her body through her smock, and I was desiring her so strongly that I hardly dared speak, which I supposed was something to do with the sexual chemistry between us: that by the nature of our misalliance we had made love as strangers, thus ensuring that the erotic charge between us was always extraordinarily strong. And I wondered whether her desire matched my own the way it had always seemed to in the good times, and whether she was half expecting me to take her here and now, just turn her into me and topple her to the floor, while Dee sat downstairs, listening for fair play. And I remembered the kiss she had given me at the Connaught, which had woken me from my hundred-year sleep, and how her instinctive ingenuity as a lover had taken me to regions I had not known existed.

"So how's everybody at Honeybrook?" she said, as if vaguely remembering the place.

"Oh, fine, actually. Yes, great. And the wine looks better and better...."

And because partly I was thinking of her as somebody being brave in hospital—too much emotional matter could be harmful—I made up some stuff about the Toiler girls, saying they were bouncier than ever and sent lots of love; and some other stuff about Mrs. Benbow respectfully wishing to be remembered; and about Ted Lanxon's cough sounding a lot better, although his wife was still convinced it was cancer, never mind the doctor insisted it was just a light bronchitis. And she received all this as the welcome news it was intended to be, nodding out of the window and saying artificial things like "Oh, great" and "That's really nice of them."

Then she asked me brightly what plans I had, and whether I had thought of travelling for the winter. So I made up some plans for the winter. And I couldn't remember a time when small talk came so readily to me, or to her, so I supposed we were both enjoying the relief that comes over people when they discover that, after the awful things they have done to each other, they are both upright and healthy and functioning and, best of all, free of one another. Which might, in other circumstances, have been grounds for making love.

"What will you do when he comes back, both of you?" I asked. "Make a home or something? I never really thought of you with children."

"That's because you thought I was a child," she replied.

After the small talk we had graduated to big talk, and the atmosphere had tautened in consequence.

"Anyway, he may not come back," she added in a proprietorial voice. "I may go out there. It's God's last good acre, he says. It won't all be fighting. It'll be riding and walks and wonderful people and new music and all sorts of things. The trouble is, it's the anniversary of the great repression. Things are frightfully tense. I'd be a drag on him. Specially with the way they treat women down there. I mean they wouldn't know what to do with me. It isn't that I mind everything being frightfully primitive and basic, but Larry would mind for me. And that would distract him, which is the absolute last thing he needs. Just at the moment."