Our Game

Which is perhaps a little heavy of me, but I am still at the geedy stage with Larry: he is my creation and I must have whichever strings I have to pull in order to keep him mine. It is only a few weeks since the reigning head resident at the Soviet Embassy in London, a man supposedly named after an endless fan dance, recruited him as his agent. Now every time Larry is with Brod I worry myself sick. I dare not think what seditious opinions are swaying his moody, impressionable nature, filling the vacuum of his constant boredom. When I send him out into the world, I intend that he should come back to me more mine than when he left me. And if this sounds like some possessioner's fantasy, it is also the way we young puppetmasters have been taught to run our joes: as our wards, as our other family, as the men and women we are there to lead, counsel, service, motivate, nurture, complete, and own.

So Larry listens to me, and I listen to me. And surely I am as persuasive and reassuring as it is possible to be. Which is perhaps why Larry falls asleep for a while, because suddenly his sweating, boy-genius head lurches into the vertical, as if he has just woken up.

"Got a serious problem, Timbo," he announces in a brave, confiding voice. "Top serious, actually. Ultra."

"Tell it to me," I say generously.

But my heart is already in my boots. A woman, I am thinking. Yet another. She's pregnant, she's cut her wrists, left home, her husband is looking for Larry with a horsewhip. A car, I am thinking: yet another. He has smashed one, stolen one, parked one and forgotten where. All of these problems have arisen at least once in our brief operational life together, and in low moments I have begun to ask myself whether Larry is worth the candle, which is what the Top Floor has been asking me almost from the start of our endeavour.

"It's my innocence," he explains.

"Your what?"

He reiterates, very precisely. "Our problem, Timbo, is my purblind, incurable, omnivorous innocence. I can't leave life alone. I love it. Its fictions and its facts. I love everybody, all the time. Best of all I love whoever I was speaking to last."

"And the corollary to that?"

"And the corollary to that is that you've got to be jolly careful what you ask of me. Because I'll do it. You're such an eloquent swine. Such a brick. Got to be sparing, follow me? Ration yourself. Don't take all of me all the time."

Then he turns and lifts his face to me, and I see the alcoholic tears running down it like rainwater, though they don't seem to affect his voice, which as always is self-consciously mellow: "I mean it's all right for you, selling your soul. You haven't got one. But what about mine?"

I ignore his appeal. "The Russians are recruiting left, right, and centre," I say in the voice of pure reason that he hates the most. "They're totally unscrupulous and very successful. If the Cold War ever turns hot, they'll have us over a barrel unless we can beat them at their own game."

And my tactic works, for the next day, contrary to everybody's expectation except mine, Larry makes the fallback rendezvous with his contact and, in his role of Secret Protector of the Righteous once more, goes through his paces like an angel. Because in the end—such was my younger man's conviction in those days—in the end, properly led, the parson's son always comes to heel, his purblind innocence notwithstanding.

* * *

My passport lay in the top right drawer of my desk. A blue-and-gold true British ninety-four-page foreigner-frightener of the old school, in the name of Timothy D'Abell Cranmer, accompanied by no children, profession not given, expires seven years hence, let's hope before its bearer.

Bring your passport, Merriman had said.

Why? Where does he want me to go? Or is he saying, in the spirit of old comradeship: You've got till three tomorrow afternoon to run for it?

My ears were singing. I heard screaming, then sobbing, then the groaning of the wind. A storm was getting up. God's anger. Yesterday a crazy autumn snowfall and tonight a veritable sea storm, slapping the shutters and whistling in the eaves and making the house crack. I stood at the study window, watching the raindrops slash across the glass. I peered into the blackness and saw Larry's pale face grinning at me, and Larry's pretty white hand tap-tapping on the windowpane.

* * *