Grand total 4½ approx, I read at the foot of the following page.
Her numbers were italic too.
Four and a half whats, damn you? I asked, angry with her at long last. Thousands? Millions? A few of the thirty-seven and rising? Then why did Larry have to sell your jewellery for you? Why did he have to give away his Office gratuity?
I heard Diana again and felt my hackles rise: one perfect note. The image was forming. Perhaps it had already formed. Perhaps the what was there, and only the why remained. But Cranmer in this mood was a desk officer. And deductions, if he made them at all, came after, not before and not during, his researches.
I was listening.
I had an urge to laugh, to wave, to answer back, “Emma! It’s me. I love you. Actually, I still do! Incredibly, irrationally, I adore you, whether I’m life or death or just boring old Tim Cranmer!”
Outside my arrow slits the world was going to the devil. The chapel tower grumbled, shutters banged, lead downpipes hurled themselves against stone walls as the thunder struck. Gutters over-flowed and gargoyles could not spew out the rushing water fast enough. The rain stopped and the uneasy truce of a country night returned. But all I was thinking was: “Emma, it’s you,” and all I was hearing was Emma speaking on the answering machine from Cambridge Street in a voice so lovely that I wanted to hold the machine against my face: a warm and patient voice as well as a musical one, made a little lazy by lovemaking, perhaps, and addressed to people who might not speak much English or be conversant with such Western mysteries as the answering machine.
“This is Free Prometheus of Bristol, and this is Sally speaking,” she was saying. “Hullo, and thanks for calling. I’m afraid we can’t talk to you just now, because we have had to go out. If you wish to leave a message, wait until you hear a short whistle, then begin speaking immediately. Are you ready . . . ?”
After Emma, the same message again, read to us by Larry in Russian. And Larry when he spoke Russian slipped into another skin, because the Russian language had been his refuge from tyranny. It was where he had locked himself away from the father who had lectured him, and the school that had urged con-formity on him, and the prefects who had flogged him to give the message force.
After he had spoken Russian he spoke again, in a language that I arbitrarily placed in the Caucasus—since I didn’t understand a syllable. But I couldn’t mistake the air of drama, the pulse of conspiracy, that he managed to squeeze into such a formal little message. I listened to him again in Russian. Then again in the unfamiliar language. So charged, so heroic, so full of moment. What did he remind me of? The book beside his bed in Cambridge Street? Memories of his hero Aubrey Herbert, who had fought to save Albania?
I had it—the Canning!
We are back at Oxford; it’s nighttime and it’s snowing. We are sitting in someone’s rooms in Trinity; there are a dozen of us, and we are drinking mulled claret, and it’s Larry’s turn to read us a paper on whatever pretentious subject has caught his fancy. The Canning is just another self-regarding Oxford discussion group, except that it’s a bit older than most and has some decent silver. Larry has chosen Byron and intends to shock us. Which he duly does, insisting that Byron’s greatest loves were men, not women, and dwelling upon the poet’s devotion while at Cambridge to a choirboy, and while in Greece to his page, Loukas.
But what I hear in my memory’s ear as I recall the evening is not Larry’s predictable relish for Byron’s sexual exploits but his zeal for Byron the saviour of the Greeks, sending his own money to help prepare the Greek ships for battle, raising soldiers and paying them so that he himself can lead the attack on the Turks at Lepanto.
And what I see is Larry seated before the gas fire, clutching his goblet of hot wine to his breast, a Byron of his own imagining; the forelock, the flushed cheeks, the fervent eyes alight with wine and rhetoric. Did Byron sell his beloved’s antique jewellery to fund the hopeless cause? Turn over his gratuity in cash?
And what I remember is Larry again, during yet another of his Honeybrook lectures, telling us that Byron is a Caucasus freak, on the grounds that he wrote a grammar on the Armenian language.
I switched to the incoming messages. I became a secondary addict, sharing the pipe dream and inhaling the fumes, bathing in the dangerous glow.
“Sally?” A guttural foreign voice, male, thick and urgent, speaking English. “Here is Issa. Our Chief Leader will visit to Nazran tomorrow. He will speak secretly to council. Tell this to Misha, please.”
Click.
Misha, I thought. One of Checheyev’s cover names for Larry. Nazran, temporary capital of Ingushetia, in the North Caucasus barrier.
A different voice, male and dead tired, speaking unguttural Russian in a drenched murmur. “Misha, I have news. The carpets have arrived on the mountain. The boys are happy. Greetings from Our Chief Leader.”
Click.
A man is speaking breezy English with a slight Oriental accent: Mr. Dass’s sound-alike from the redial call I had made in Cambridge Street.
“Hullo, Sally, this is Hardwear, calling from the car,” it announced proudly, as if the telephone or the car were a brand-new acquisition. “Message just in from our suppliers saying stand by for next week. Time for some more money talk, I think. [Giggle] Cheers.”
Click.
And after him again, Checheyev’s voice, as I had heard him count-less times in telephone and microphone intercepts. He is speaking English, but as I go on listening, his voice has the unnatural courtesy of a man under fire.
“Sally, good morning, this is CC. I need to get a message to Misha quickly, please. He must not go north. If he has started his journey, he should please discontinue it. This is an order from Our Chief Leader. Please, Sally.”
Click.
Checheyev again, the calm if anything more pronounced, the
pace slower:
“CC for Misha. Misha, take heed, please. The forest is watching us. Do you hear me, Misha? We are betrayed. The forest is on its way to the north, and in Moscow everything is known. Don’t go north, Misha. Don’t be foolhardy. The important thing is to get to safety and fight another day. Come to us and we shall take care of you. Sally, please tell this to Misha urgently. Tell him to use the preparations we have already agreed.”
Click. End of message. End of all messages. The forest is north-ward bound and Birnam Wood has come to Dunsinane, and Larry has or hasn’t got the message. And Emma? I wonder. What has she got?
I was counting money: bills, letters, cheque stubs. I was reading burned letters from banks.
“Dear Miss Stoner”—the top right corner of the page charred, writer’s address incomplete, except for the letters SBANK and the words des Pays, Genève. Miss Stoner’s address 9A Cambridge Street, Bristol. “We note from the . . . losed state . . . tha . . . have substan . . . quid . . . ts in . . . ur . . . urrent acc . . . Should you . . . no immedi . . . call upon . . . may wish to . . . ferring them to . . .”
Left side and lower half of letter destroyed, Miss Stoner’s response unknown. But Miss Stoner is by now no stranger to me. Or to Emma.
“Dear Miss Roylott.”
Quite right: Miss Roylott is Miss Stoner’s natural companion. It’s Christmas evening before the big fire in the drawing room at Honeybrook. Emma wears her intaglio necklace and a long skirt and sits in the Queen Anne wing chair while I read aloud Conan Doyle’s “Speckled Band,” in which Sherlock Holmes rescues the beautiful Miss Stoner from the murderous designs of Dr. Grimesby Roylott. Drunk with happiness, I affect to continue reading from the text, while I ingeniously depart from it:
“And if I may be permitted, madam,” I intone, in my most Holmesian voice, “to confess a humble interest in your immaculate person, then permit me also to propose that in a few moments we repair upstairs and put to the test those desires and appetites which, with the impetuosity of my sex, I am scarcely able to contain—”
But by now Emma’s fingertips close my lips, so that she may kiss the
m with her own. . . .
“Dear Miss Watson.”
The writer is in Edinburgh and signs himself “Overseas Portfolio Exe . . .” And Watson should have been braving the wild beasts of Dr. Grimesby Roylott’s private zoo with an Eley’s Nº 2 revolver in his pocket, not masquerading as a woman named Sally with an address in Cambridge Street, Bristol.
“We take pleasure in . . . osing . . . short-term . . . combi . . . high yie . . . wit . . . condi . . . withdraw . . . fshore.”
I’ll bet you take pleasure, I thought. With thirty-seven million to play with, who wouldn’t?
“Dear Miss Holmes.”
And more of the same unction from the banker’s greasy bottle. I was collecting carpets.
Kilims, Hamadans, Balouchis, Kolyais, and Azerbaijans, Gebbehs, Bakhtiaris, Basmackis, and Dosemealtis. Notes about carpets, scribbled memos about carpets, phone messages, letters typed on spotty grey paper posted by our good friend So-and-so who is travelling to Stockholm: Have the Kilims arrived? Are they on their way? Last week you said next week. Our Chief Leader is distraught, so much anxious talk of carpets. Issa is also distraught, because Magomed has no carpets to sit on.
CC rang. Hopes to be here next month. Didn’t say where from. Still no carpets. . . .
CC rang. OCL ecstatic. Carpets being unpacked this moment. Excellent storage found at high altitude, everything intact. When can he expect more?
Carpets from AM. To Our Chief Leader or, as the Winchester Notion has it, OCL.
“Dear Prometheus.” Badly burned letter on plain white paper, electronic type. “We are . . . posi . . . to arra . . . ear . . . livery of 300 Qashqais as discussed, an . . . shall be happy to take mat . . . to next agreed stage on receipt you . . .” The signature a jagged hieroglyph resembling three pyramids side by side, sender’s address The Hardwear Company, Box (number illegible) . . . sfield.
Petersfield?
Maresfield?
Some other English field?
It was Macclesfield, I hear Jamie Pringle say in port-fed tones. Used to screw a girl there.
And below the signature an internal office memo, Larry to Emma in his impatient scrawl:
Emm! Vital! Can we scrape this together while we wait for CC to lay his egg? L.
Exit her jewellery, I thought. Exit his gratuity. And at long last a precious date, scribbled in Larry’s restless hand: 18/7—July 18, just a few days before Larry drew his Judas money.
And yes, they scraped it together—witness the uncharred, perfectly preserved half page of carpet purchases in Emma’s precise italic:
Kilims . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60,000
Dosemealtis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10,000
Hamadans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,500
Kolyais . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 × 1,000
And at the bottom of the page, also in her handwriting:
Total payment to Macclesfield
so far . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . £14,976,000
Lubyanka
Between parades
Emm, listen up!
Last night I put my head on your tummy and distinctly heard the sea. Had I been drinking? Had you? Answer: no, just dreaming on my solitary pallet. You cannot imagine the soothing effect of a friendly navel in one’s ear, and the sound of distant water at the same time. Do you know—have you the wit to imagine—what it is like to be alert in every whisker for sheer unadulterated, frustrated love of Emm? Probably not. Too thick. But work on it and I’ll be back tonight, which come to think of it is twelve hours before this letter will arrive, but that’s just another symptom of my ludicrous, divine, insane love for you.
Please make an extra
effort to love and worship
your
Larry
and accept no substitutes.
PS. Seminar in half an hour. Marcia will weep if I insult her and weep if I don’t. Talbot—who on earth christens these wretched children?—will mount his infant throne and I shall vomit.
PPS. Post boring-’em tristis. I very nearly strangled Talbot. Sometimes I think it’s the entire middle English mind-set of Thatcher’s children that I’m at war with.
PPPPPPPS. Marcia brought me a ccccake!
The letter, being Larry’s, is undated.
Emm! Concerning Timbo.
Timbo is the box I came in. Timbo is reinsurance made perfect. He’s the only man I know who can go forwards and backwards at the same time and make it look like progress or retrenchment, depending where your fancy lies.
Timbo is also fireproof, since the man who believes in nothing, and therefore has space for everything, has a terrible advantage over us. What passes for a kindly tolerance in him is in reality a craven acceptance of the world’s worst crimes. He’s an immobilist, an apathist, and a militant passivist with a big V. And of course he’s a dear sweet man. Unfortunately, it’s dear sweet men who screw up the earth. Timbo’s a spectator. We’re doers. And wow do we do!
L.
PS. I am deep inside you and propose to remain there until we meet—when I shall be deep inside you. . . .
Emm,
Nietzsche said something frightfully stern about humour being an escape from serious thought, so I’ll bow to N and give you serious thought. I love you. The heart, the laughs, the shoulder-to-shoulder, the pluck, the silences, every dimple and inlet, tuft, mole, freckle, nipple, and peerless plane. I love you until it comes out of my eyes. In the trees, the sky, the grass, and in Vladikavkaz on the river Terek, where the Caucasus takes us into its sanctuary and shields us from Moscow and the Christian maw. Or should do, if the bloody Ossetians weren’t sitting in it.
One day you’ll taste it, then you’ll understand. I have Negley Farson on my knee as I write. Listen to his comfortable words. “Strange as it may seem for they are among the wildest mountains on earth, the one thing you feel about the lonely places of the Caucasus is a deep personal tenderness, a brotherhood: and the aching wish, vain as you know it to be, that you could guard their rare beauty. They possess you. Once you have felt the spell of the Caucasus you will never get over it.” Confirmed and reconfirmed by my trip last Christmas. God, I love you. The Arts Subcommittee meets in one hour. How typical of the Lubyanka that even the Arts Committee should be sub. You are my Caucasus. Ich bin ein Ingush.
Yours in Allah,
L.
Emm, Question from Thatcherchild Talbot, who has decided to grow a beard: Please, Larry, why did the West fall for Shevardnadze?
Answer, dear Talbot, because Shevers has a sad, bungey face and looks like everybody’s daddy, when actually he’s a KGB dinosaur with a background of deals with the CIA and a disgraceful record of repressing dissidents.
Question from Thatcherchild Marcia: Why did the West refuse recognition to Gamsakhurdia after he was fairly elected? Then, as soon as Shevardnadze was put in as Moscow’s puppet, not only recognise the little twerp but turn a blind eye to his genocide of the Abkhaz, the Mingrelians, the you-name-them?
Answer, dear Thatcherchild Marcia, thank you for your ccccake and please come to bbbbed with me, it’s the Good Old Boys getting together on both sides of the Atlantic and agreeing that minority rights can seriously threaten world health. . . .
I love you to despair and back. When you hear me coming up the hill, please be lying pensively on one elbow, naked and dreaming of the hills.
L.
My fingers had gone black.
Snakes were tickling my ankles.
I was standing arms outstretched in crucifixion, drawing the iter tape from its cassette, passing it across the light and letting it pile up round my feet. At first I could understand nothing. Then I realised I had broken in upon Larry the letter writer again, this time in his more familiar guise of academic terrorist:
Your article entitled “Forcing Reason on the Caucasus” is an abomination. Its greatest offence is its attempt to justify t
he prolonged perse-cution of proud and fiercely independent peoples. For three hundred years Imperial and Soviet Russians have pillaged, murdered, and dispersed the mountaineers of N. Caucasus in an effort to destroy their culture, religion, and way of life. Where confiscation, slavery, enforced conversion, and the creation of deliberately divisive land borders failed to do the trick, the Russian oppressors resorted to wholesale deporta-tion, torture, and genocide. Had the West taken the smallest interest in understanding the Caucasus during the dying days of Soviet power, instead of listening openmouthed to those with vested interests—of whom your writer is a flagrant example—the awful conflicts that have recently disfigured the region would have been avoided. So might those that are shortly to engulf us.
L. Pettifer
A broadside directed against yet another of Larry’s enemies was incomplete:
. . . which is why the Ossetians today are Moscow’s dependable henchmen as they were under the Communists and before them the Tsars. In the south, it is true, the Ossetians have lost out to those other ethnic cleansers, the Georgians. But in the north, in their war of attrition against the Ingush, in which they have been shamelessly assisted by regular units of highly equipped Russian troops, they emerge the absolute winners. . . .
Typed by Emma three days before I nearly killed the author. For which his unnamed enemy was no doubt duly grateful.
“My darling.”
Larry in his steady hand: the one he used for writing his State of the Universe letters to me. I already loathed his sonorous, elder-brother tone of structured egocentricity.
There is something I have to say to you as we get deeper into this, so see this as my ur-letter at the crossroads, offering you a last chance to turn back.