Our Game

John Le Carré - Our Game

He who thinks of the consequences

cannot be brave.

Ingush proverb

Who gathers knowledge

gathers pain.

Ecclesiastes 1:18

If I were living in the Causcasus,

I would be writing fairy tales there.

Chekhov, 1888

ONE

LARRY WENT OFFICIALLY missing from the world on the second Monday of October, at ten minutes past eleven, when he failed to deliver his opening lecture of the new academic year.

I am able to set the scene exactly because it was not so very long ago, in the same dreary Bath weather, that I had dragged Larry down to see the wretched place for the first time. To this day I have the most accusing memory of the brutalist slab barracks closing in on him like the walls of his new confinement. And of Larry's ever youthful back walking reproachfully away from me down the concrete canyon like a man going to his nemesis. If I had had a son, I thought as I stared after him, this was how it would feel to be dumping him at his first boarding school.

"Hey, Timbo," he whispers over his shoulder, the way Larry can speak to you from miles away.

"Yes, Larry."

"This is it, is it?"

"This is what?"

"The future. Where it all ends. Leftover life."

"It's a new beginning," I say loyally.

But loyal to whom? To him? To me? To the Office?

"We have to scale down," I say. "Both of us do."

The day of his disappearance was by all accounts equally depressing. A cloying mist envelops the hideous grey university campus and breathes a sticky pall over the alloy-framed windows of Larry's grimy lecture room. Twenty students sit at desks facing the empty lectern, which is of a particularly violent yellow pitch pine, very scratched. The subject of his lecture has been chalked on the blackboard by a mysterious hand, probably a doting pupil's. Karl Marx in the Supermarket: Revolution and Modern Materialism. There is a bit of laughter. Students are the same everywhere. On the first day of term they will laugh at anything. But gradually they fall quiet and content themselves with smirking at each other, peering at the door, and listening for Larry's footsteps. Until, having allowed him the full ten minutes' grace, they self-consciously put away their pens and notebooks and clank along the rocking concrete pavement to the canteen.

Over coffee, the freshers are duly appalled by this first experience of Larry's unpredictability. This never happened to us at school! How will we catch up? Will we be given notes? Oh, God! But the hardened ones, Larry's fans, only laugh. That's Larry for you, they explain happily; next time round he'll bat on for three hours and you'll be so hooked you'll forget lunch. They speculate about what might have kept him: a bumper hangover, or an outrageous love affair, of which they ascribe any number to him, for in his mid-forties Larry is still a lover just to look at: he has the lost-boy appeal of a poet who never grew up.

The university authorities took an equally relaxed view of Larry's reluctance to appear. Common Room colleagues, not all from the friendliest of motives, had reported the offence within the hour. Nonetheless the administrators waited for another Monday, and another no-show, before mustering the energy to telephone his landlady and, on receiving no satisfaction from her, the Bath police. It was a further six days before the police called on me: a Sunday, if you can believe it, ten o'clock at night. I had spent a wearisome afternoon escorting a coachload of our village elderlies on a trip to Longleat, and a frustrating evening in the winery wrestling with a German grape press, which my late uncle Bob had christened The Sulky Hun. Nevertheless, when I heard their ring my heart leapt while I pretended to myself that it was Larry, hovering on my doorstep with his accusing brown eyes and dependent smile: "Come on, Timbo, fix us a bloody big Scotch, and who gives a damn about women anyway?"

* * *

Two men.

It was pelting rain, so they had huddled themselves into the porch while they waited for me to open up. Plain clothes of the deliberately recognisable kind. Parked their car in my drive, a Peugeot 306 diesel, very shiny under the downpour, marked POLICE and fitted out with the usual array of mirrors and aerials. As I peered through the fish-eye, their hatless faces stared back at me like bloated corpses: the elder man coarse and moustached, the younger goatish, with a long, sloped head like a coffin and small, round eyes like bullet holes shot through it.