Our Game

It is New Year's Eve, but Emma has her backache and is in no mood to celebrate. She has retired to her royal apartments, where she is stretched out on her bed board. Our sleeping arrangements would be a puzzle to anyone looking for the conventional lovers' bower. There is her side of the house and there is my side, which is how we agreed that it should be from the day she came to me: each would have his sovereignty, his territory, his right to aloneness. She demanded this and I granted it, never quite believing she would hold me to my promise. But she does. Even when I take her tea or broth or whatever I decide will cheer her up, I knock and wait until I hear her telling me I may approach. And tonight, because it is New Year's Eve, our first, I am allowed to lie on the floor beside her, holding her hand while we talk to the ceiling and her stereo plays lute music and the rest of England makes merry.

"He really is the end," she complains—with humour of a sort, it is true, but not enough to conceal her disappointment. "I mean even Larry knows when it's Christmas. He could at least have rung."

So I explain to her, not for the first time, that Christmas is an abomination to him; how every Christmas since I have known him he has threatened to convert to Islam; and how every Christmas he undertakes some crazy grudge-trip in order to escape the awfulness of English sub-Christian revelry. I paint a facetious picture of him trekking across inhospitable desert with a bunch of Bedouin Arabs. But I have the feeling she is barely listening.

"After all, there's nowhere in the world you can't ring from these days," she says severely.

For the fact is that Larry has by now become our worry bead, our errant genius. Almost nothing in our lives takes place without some sort of nod at him. Even our latest cuvee, though it will not be drinkable for a year, bears the in-house nickname Château Larry.

"We ring him often enough," she complains. "I mean he could at least let us know he's all right."

Actually it is she who rings him, though it would be an infringement of her sovereignty to point this out. She rings him to make sure he got home safely; to ask him whether it's really all right to buy South African grapes these days; to remind him that he's pledged to go to dinner with the dean, or present himself sober and correct at a meeting of the Senior Common Room.

"Perhaps he's picked up some beautiful girl," I suggest, more hopefully than she can possibly imagine.

"Then why doesn't he tell us? Bring her, if he must, the bitch. It's not as if we're going to disapprove, is it?"

"Far from it."

"I just hate thinking of him being alone."

"At Christmas."

"Any time. I just get the feeling, whenever he walks out of the door, he'll never come back. He's—I don't know—endangered somehow."

"I think you may find he's a bit less delicate than you suppose," I say, also to the ceiling.

I have noticed recently that we talk better without eye contact. Perhaps it is the only way we can talk at all. "Peaked early, that's Larry's trouble. Brilliant at university, fizzled in the real world. There were two or three like that in my generation. But they're survivors. Takers is a better word."

Call it cover, call it something shabbier: again and again over the last weeks I have heard myself play the long-suffering Good Samaritan while in my secret heart I am the worst Samaritan on earth.

But tonight God has had enough of my duplicity. For hardly have I spoken than I hear, not the crowing of a cock, but the sound of tapping at a ground-floor window. But so distinctly—so much in time with the rhythm of her lute music—that for a second I wonder whether it's a tap-tapping in my own head, until Emma's hand tears itself free of mine as if I'd stung her, and she rolls onto her side and sits up. And like Larry, she doesn't shout, she speaks. To him. As if Larry, not I, were lying alongside her. "Larry? Is that you? Larry?"

And from below us, after the tap-tapping, I hear the down-soft voice that defies gravity and three-foot-thick stone walls in its ability to find you wherever you are hiding. He hasn't heard her, of course. He can't have done. He has no earthly reason to know where we are or whether we're at home at all. True, a couple of downstairs lights are burning, but I do that anyway to discourage burglars. And my Sunbeam is locked safely in its garage, out of sight.

"Hey, Timbo. Emm. Darlings. Let down the drawbridge. I'm home. You remember Larry Pettifer the great educator? Pettifer the Petomane? Happy New Year. Happy, happy what-the-hell."

Emm is his name for her. She does not object to it. To the contrary, I am beginning to think she wears it like his favour.

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