Our Game

A vacuum, followed by more electronic matter. I had prepared my speech. I had prepared my tone. Detached. No unseemly emotion, which Merriman deplores. No suggestion that yet another ex-member might be trying to talk himself back into the fold, a thing for which ex-members are notorious. I heard Merriman and started to apologise for ringing late on Sunday night, but he wasn't interested.

"Have you been playing silly buggers with your telephone?"

"No. Why?"

"I've been trying to get hold of you since Friday evening. You've changed your number. Why the devil didn't you tell us?"

"I rather imagined you'd have your ways of finding out.”

“At the weekend? You're joking."

I closed my eyes. British Intelligence has to wait till Monday morning to get hold of an unlisted number. Try telling that to the latest useless watchdog committee charged with making us cost-effective, or accountable, or—joke of jokes—open.

Merriman was asking me whether I had had a visit from the police.

"An Inspector Percy Bryant and a Sergeant Oliver Luck," I replied. "They said they came from Bath. I thought they came from Central Casting."

Silence while he consulted his diary, or a colleague, or for all I knew his mother. Was he in the Office? Or his desirable Chiswick gent's res, just a poodle's pee-walk from the Thames? "The earliest I can manage is tomorrow at three," he said, in the voice my dentist uses when he is being asked to fit a worthless pain case into a lucrative schedule: Well, does it really hurt? "You know where we are these days, I suppose? You can get here all right?"

"I can always ask a policeman," I said.

He didn't find that funny. "Come to the main door and bring your passport."

"My what?"

He had gone. I took a grip on myself: Calm down. That wasn't Zeus talking, that was Jake Merriman, lightest of the Top Floor lightweights. Any lighter he'd blow off the roof, we used to say. Jake's idea of a crisis was a bad olive in his dry martini. Besides, what was so sensational about Larry going missing? It was only because the police had got into the act. What about some of the other times when Larry had gone missing? At Oxford, when he decides to bicycle to Delphi rather than sit his Prelims? In Brighton, on the day he is supposed to make his first clandestine rendezvous with a Russian courier but prefers instead to get drunk with a circle of congenial fellow souls he has picked up in the bar of the Metropole?

* * *

It is three in the morning. As my agent, Larry is still cutting his milk-teeth. We are parked on another of our remote hilltops, this time on the Sussex Downs. The lights of Brighton are below us. Beyond them lies the sea. Stars and a half-moon make a nursery window of the sky.

"Don't see the goal, Timbo, old horse," Larry is protesting as he peers myopically through the windscreen. He is a boy still, in silhouette a Pan child—long eyelashes and full lips. His air of reckless daring and highborn purpose greatly endears him to his Communist suitors. They do not understand—and how should they?—that their newest conquest can turn full circle in an instant if his perpetual craving for action is not answered; that Larry Pettifer would rather see the world hurtling towards catastrophe than standing still. "You've got the wrong man, Timbo. Need a lesser sort of chap. Bigger sort of shit."

Here, eat something, Larry, I say, giving him a piece of pork pie. Here, have another swig of lime juice. For this is the crime I commit each time he starts to weaken: I talk down the resistance in him; I wave the awful flag of duty. I do my head prefect number, the way I used to speak to him at school when Larry was a parson's son in revolt and I was king of Babylon.

"Can you hear me?"

"Hearing you."

"It's called service, remember? You're cleaning the political drains. It's the dirtiest job democracy has on offer. If you want to leave it to someone else, we'll all understand."

Long silence. Larry drunk is never stupid. Sometimes he is a lot more perspicacious drunk than sober. And I have flattered him. I have offered him the high, hard road.

"You don't think, democratically speaking, Timbo, that we might actually be better off with dirty drains, do you?" he asks, now playing the custodian of our libertarian democracy.

"No, I don't. But if that's your view, you'd better say so and go home."