Our Game

"Have you told the Office?"

"Didn't think I'd bother, actually. Christmas trip. Nice mountains. Fresh air. What's it to them? Does Emm do shoog in her tea?"

He is halfway to the kitchen door, a fresh teacup in his hand.

"Here. Give that to me," I say sharply, taking it from him. "I'm going upstairs anyway."

Grozny? I repeat to myself, over and over. According to recent press reports from the region, Grozny today is one of the most inhospitable cities on earth. Not even Larry, I would have wagered, would risk immolation by bloodthirsty Chechens as an antidote to English Christmas. So is he lying? Or trying to shock me? What does he mean by old friends, friends of friends, neighbours? Grozny and then where? Has the Office re-recruited him without telling me? I refuse to be drawn. I behave as if the entire conversation never happened. And so does Larry—except for his damned smile and his superior glow of far away.

* * *

"Emm's agreed to do a spot of dogsbodying for me," Larry is saying as we saunter on the upper terrace one sunlit Sunday evening. "Help out with a few of my Hopeless Causes. That all right by you?"

It is no longer just Sunday lunch by now. Sometimes the three of us are so happy together that Larry feels obliged to stay for supper too. In the eight weeks since he has been coming to us, the tenor of his visits has changed entirely. Gone the dreary stories of academic lowlife. Instead we have Larry redux, Larry the world-dreamer and Sunday sermoniser. one moment raging against the shameful Western inertia, the next painting treacly visions of altruistic wars conducted by a United Nations strike force empowered to put on its Batman uniform and head off tyranny, pestilence, and famine at a moment's notice. And since I happen to regard such fantasies as dangerous hogwash, it is my luckless role to act the family skeptic.

"So who will she be saving?" I enquire with too much sarcasm. "The Marsh Arabs? The ozone layer? Or the dear old common whale?"

Larry laughs and claps a hand on my shoulder, which at puts me on my guard. "All of 'em, blast you, Timbo, just to spite you. Single-handed."

But as his hand stays on my shoulder and I return his overbright smile, I am bothered by something more substantial than his nickname for her. What I see on the surface of his smile is the promise of a mischievous but harmless rivalry. But what I read behind it is the warning of an imminent reckoning: "You started me running, Timbo, remember?" he is saying, with his mocking eyes. "That doesn't mean you can switch me off."

But I have a dilemma, and that is provided by my conscience—or, as Larry would have it, my guilt. I am Larry's friend as well as his inventor. And as his friend, I know that the so-called Hopeless Causes with which he beats the fetid air of Bath—Stop the Outrage in Rwanda, Don't Let Bosnia Bleed to Death, Action for Molucca Now—are the only means he has to fill the void the Office left behind when it dumped him and continued on its way.

"Well, I hope she's of some help to you," I say handsomely. "You can always use the stables, you know, if you need more office space."

But when I catch his expression a second time, I like it no better than the first. And when a day or two later I pick my moment to find out what exactly Larry has roped her into, I bump up against, of all things, a wall of secrecy.

"It's sort of Amnesty stuff," she says, without looking up from her typewriter.

"Sounds marvellous. So what does that involve—getting people out of political prison and so forth?"

"It's all of it really." She types something.

"Quite a canvas, then," I suggest awkwardly, for it is a strain to keep the conversation going across the length of her attic studio.

* * *

It is a lot of Sundays later, but all Sundays have become one. They are Larry day, then they are Larry-and-Emma day, then they are hell, which for all its variations has a suffocating sameness. More accurately it is early Monday morning, and first light is breaking over the Mendips. Larry left us a full half hour ago, yet the clatter of his dreadful car clanking and farting down the drive rings in my ears, and his sweetly modulated "Sleep well, darlings" is an order my head stubbornly refuses to obey—as Emma's does too, apparently, for she is standing at the window of my bedroom, a naked sentry, marking how the black puffs of cloud break and regroup against the fiery sunrise. I never in my life saw anything so unreachable or beautiful as Emma with her long black hair falling down her back, naked, gazing at the dawn.

"That's exactly what I want to be," she says in the chatty, over-enthusiastic tone I am beginning to suspect in her. "I want to be broken up and put together again."

"That's what you came here for, darling," I remind her. But she no longer likes me sharing her dreams.

"What is it about you both?" she says.

"Which both?"

She ignores this. She knows, and I know, that there is only one other partner in our lives.