Our Game

I AM NOT given to panic, but that night I came as near to it as I had ever come. Which of us were they pursuing—Larry or me? Or both of us? How much did they know of Emma? Why had Checheyev visited Larry in Bath and when, when, when? Those policemen weren't looking for some fringe academic who had gone walkabout for a few days. They were on a trail, smelling blood, hunting someone who appealed to their most aggressive instincts.

Yet who did they think he was—Larry, my Larry, our Larry? What had he done? This talk of money, Russians, deals, Checheyev, me, socialism, me again ... How could Larry be anything except what we had made him: a directionless English middle-class revolutionary, a permanent dissident, a dabbler, a dreamer, a habitual rejecter; a ruthless, shiftless, philandering, wasted, semicreative failure, too clever not to demolish an argument, too mulish to settle for a flawed one?

And who did they think I was—this solitary retired civil servant, speaking his foreign languages to himself, making wine, and playing the Good Samaritan in his desirable Somerset vineyard? You should keep a dog indeed! Why should they assume, just because I was alone, that I was incomplete? Why pursue me, merely because they couldn't get their hands on Larry or Checheyev? And Emma—my fragile, or not so fragile, departed mistress of Honeybrook: how long before she too is in their sights? I went upstairs. No, I didn't. I ran. The telephone was by my bed, but as I lifted the receiver I humbled myself by forgetting the number I meant to dial, a thing that in the tightest operational situations had never happened to me through my entire secret life.

Yet why had I come upstairs at all? There was a perfectly good phone in the drawing room, another in the study. Why had I rushed upstairs? I remembered some gung-ho lecturer at training school boring us on the arts of siege-breaking. When people panic, he said, they panic upward. They make for lifts, escalators, stairs, any way to go up, not down. By the time the boys go in, anyone who is not too petrified to move is in the attic.

I sat on the bed. I dropped my shoulders to relax them. I rolled my head around on the advice of some colour-supplement guru I had read on the subject of do-it-yourself massage. I felt no relief. I crossed the gallery to Emma's side of the house, stood outside her door, and listened—for what, I didn't know. The tap-tap of her typewriter as it promiscuously embraced each Hopeless Cause in turn? Her doting murmurs on the telephone until I cut them off? Her tribal music from remotest Africa—Guinea, Timbuktu? I tried the door handle. It was locked. By me. I listened again but did not enter. Was I afraid of her ghost? Her straight, accusing, over-innocent stare that said: Keep out, I'm dangerous, I've scared myself and now I'm scaring you? About to return to my own side, I paused at the long landing window and gazed at the far outlines of the walled garden glowing in the pale light of the greenhouses.

* * *

It is a warm, late-summer Sunday at Honeybrook. We have been together six months. First thing this morning we have stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the bottling room, while Cranmer the great viniculturalist breathlessly measures the sugar content of our Madeleine Angevine grapes, yet another of Uncle Bob's questionable selections. The Madeleine is as capricious as any other woman, a visiting French expert assured me, with much winking and nodding: ripe and ready me day, over the hill the next. Prudently, I do not relay this sexist analogy to Emma. I am praying for seventeen percent but sixteen percent will promise a harvest. In the fabled annee of 1976, Uncle Bob touched an amazing twenty percent before the English wasps had their share and the English rain the rest. Emma watches as I nervously hold the refractometer to the light. "Pushing eighteen percent," I intone at last, in a voice better suited to a great general on the eve of battle. "We pick in two weeks."

Now we are lounging in the walled garden among our vines, telling ourselves that by our presence we are nurturing them to the last stage of their fruition. Emma has the swing chair and is wearing the Watteau look that I encourage in her: wide hat, long skirt, her blouse unbuttoned to the sun, while she sips Pimm's and reads sheets of music and I watch her, which is all I want to do for the rest of my life. Last night we made love. This morning after our sugar-measuring ceremony we made more love, as I pretend to myself that I can tell by the polish of her skin and the lazy pleasure in her eyes.

"I reckon if we got a sensible crew in, we could clear this lot in one day," I declare boldly.

She turns a page, smiling.

"Uncle Bob made the mistake of inviting friends. Hopeless. Total waste of time. Real villagers will pick you six tons in a day. Five anyway. Not that we've got more than three here, at the outside."