Our Game

"Heard of him?" Emma protests that evening, offended that I should even have to ask. "Darling, I've sat at Lawrence Pettifer's feet since infancy. Well, not literally. But metaphorically he's a god."

So as quite often happens, I learn something new about her. A few years ago—it is Emma's nature, I would almost say her tradecraft, not to be precise—she decided that mere music was not enough for her and that she would therefore educate herself. So instead of doing the Alternative Music Festival in Devon—which honestly, Tim, is all tai chi and pot these days, she explains with a disdainful smile that does not convince me in the least—she plumped for a summer foundation course in politics and philosophy at Cambridge: "And I mean on the radical stuff, which was what I went for, naturally. Pettifer on practically anything was absolutely mandatory...." She is doing too much with her hands. "I mean his paper on 'Artists in Revolt' ... and 'The Materialist Desert' ..." She seems suddenly to run out, and since she has the titles right but doesn't go beyond them, I wonder rather unkindly whether she had read him or only heard about him.

After which the subject of Larry is by tacit agreement shelved. The next Sunday we clean The Sulky Hun and prepare him for battle. All the while we do this I am listening for Larry's beastly car, but it doesn't materialise. But the Sunday afterwards, surer than Fate and once more unanounced, Larry appears, arrayed this time in a French peasant blouson and his tattered Winchester straw boater, which we used to call a strat, and a spotted red neckerchief, with its ends flying away like wings.

"All right, fine. Very funny," I warn him with less than my customary grace. "But if you're picking grapes, you bloody pick them."

And of course he picks his heart out, which is Larry to the life. When you want him to zig, he zags. When you want him to zag, he casts a spell over your girl. Three weeks later fermentation is complete, and we rack the wine off the yeast as a prelude to rough filtering. And by then I am laying three places at table automatically: one for Cranmer, one for Emma, one for the metaphorical god at whose feet she has been sitting since infancy.

* * *

I ran down to the study and dug out my address book. Under Merriman nothing, but then I'm not looking for Merriman. I'm looking for Mary, which is my homophobe code name for him. Emma, I was certain, would never have dreamed of invading my address book. But if she had, she would have found, instead of Merriman, a woman called Mary who lived in Chiswick and had an office in London. Larry, on the other hand, made a point of reading my private correspondence and anybody else's without a qualm. And who should blame him? If you encourage a man to dissemble and steal hearts, you have only yourself to thank when he turns round and robs you of your secrets and whatever else you've got.

"Hullo?" A woman's voice.

"Is that six six nine six?" I asked. "This is Arthur."

It was not her telephone number I was quoting to her but my personal key code. There had been a time when I was impressed by such devices.

"Yes, Arthur, who do you want?" she asked in a minor-royal drawl.

It occurred to me that my key code had revealed me as an ex-member rather than a current one. Hence her unyielding tone, since ex-members are by definition trouble. I imagined her tall, horsy, and thirty-something, with a name like Sheena. There had been a time when I regarded Sheenas as the backbone of England.

"I'd like to speak to Sidney, please," I replied. "Sort of by yesterday, if it's possible."

Sidney for Jake Merriman. Arthur for Tim Cranmer, alias Timbo. Nobody who is anybody uses his own name. What good had it ever done us, this cloak-and-dagger rigmarole? What harm had it done us, this endless wrapping up and hiding of our identities? Squeak. Ping. A mysterious resonance as computer speaks to computer, then to God. The sound of water running out of a bath.

"Sidney will call you back in two minutes, Arthur. Wait where you are."

And with a click she vanished.

But where am I? How will Sidney know where to reach me? Then I remembered that all the stuff about tracing calls went out with bustles and the old building. My phone number was probably on her screen before she picked up the phone to me. She even knew which extension I was speaking from: Cranmer is in his study. . . . Cranmer is scratching his arse. . . . Cranmer is lovesick. . . . Cranmer is an anachronism. . . . Cranmer is thinking that as eternity is reckoned, there's a lifetime in a second, and wondering where he read it. . . . Cranmer is picking up the phone again. . . .