“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.
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 cuvée, 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 infringe-ment 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.
And I? Have I no lines in this cabaret? Is it not my role, my duty, to humour him? To rush to my bedroom window, throw up the sash, lean out, yell at him: “Larry, it’s you, you made it—are you alone? Listen, Emma’s back is playing her up
. I’ll be down!” To be delighted, welcome him, my oldest friend, alone on New Year’s Eve? Timbo, his rock, the one that crushed him, as he likes to say? To rush downstairs, put on the outside lights, and peer at him through the fish-eye as I unbolt the locks, his Byronic frame rocking in the darkness? Fling my arms round him in accordance with our new habit of embracing—round his beloved green Austrian raincoat that he calls his moleskin—though he is soaked to the bone, having driven most of the way from London by car until the blasted thing developed a will of its own and rolled into a ditch, obliging him to hitch a lift from a bunch of drunk spinsters? His designer stubble tonight is not one day old but six, and there is a superior glow about him that is more than drink: some sheen, some sparkle of distant places. I was right, I think: he has been on one of his heroic voyages, and now he’s going to boast about it.
“Bad back?” he is saying. “Emm? Bollocks. Can’t have a bad back, not tonight, not Emm!”
He’s right.
Already with Larry’s arrival Emma has undergone a magical cure. At midnight she is about to begin her day again, as if she has never had a backache in her life. Chasing round my dressing room as I run Larry’s bath—rooting out fresh socks for him, slacks, shirt, a pullover, and a pair of bedroom slippers to replace his dreadful buckskin boots—I listen to her scamper back and forth across her bedroom in joyous indecision. My designer jeans or my long fireside skirt that Tim bought me for my birthday? Her cupboard door shrieks; the skirt has it. My high white blouse or the low black? High white; Tim doesn’t like me tarty. And with the high white I can wear the intaglio necklace that Tim insisted on giving me for Christmas.
We dance.
Dancing embarrasses me, but Emma, if she remembers this, chooses to disregard it. Larry is a natural: now a stately Colonial British fox-trotter, now a crazy Cossack or whatever he thinks he is, hands on hips, strutting round her in imperious rings, slapping the polished wood floor with my bedroom slippers. We sing, though I am no singer and in church have long learned to mouth the hymns rather than incant them. First we stand in a tight triangle, listening to the clock strike twelve. Then we link arms, one soft white arm apiece, and belt out “Auld Lang Syne” while Larry camps a Winchester choirboy’s descant and the intaglios glint and bob at Emma’s throat. And though her eyes and smiles are for me, I do not need to take lessons in the school of love to know that every contour and inlet of her body, from the pitch of her dark head to the chaste arrangement of her skirt, is referred to him. And when at half past three it is our second bedtime of the night, and Larry is flopped in the wing chair, dead bored again and watching us, and I stand behind her and work her shoulders for her, I know it is his hands, not mine, that she is feeling on her body.
“So anyway, you’ve been on one of your trips,” I say to him next morning, finding him in the kitchen ahead of me, making himself tea and baked beans on toast. He has not slept. All through the small hours I have listened to him prowling my study, rummaging among my books, pulling open drawers, stretching out, getting up again. All through the night I have endured the rank stink of his beastly Russian cigarettes: Prima for when he wants to feel like a cloth-cap intellectual; Belomorkanal when he’s needing a little soothing lung cancer, he likes to say.
“So anyway, yes, I have,” he agrees at last. For he has been untypically reticent about his absence, reviving in me the hope that he has found a woman of his own.
“Middle East?” I suggest.
“Not really.”
“Asia?”
“Not really. Strictly European, in fact. Bulwark of European civilisation.”
I don’t know whether he is trying to shut me up or provoke me into trying harder, but either way I deny him the pleasure. I am not his keeper anymore. Resettled joes—though when did Larry ever settle in the first place?—are the responsibility of Welfare Section, unless other arrangements are made in writing.
“Anyway, it was somewhere nice and pagan,” I suggest, about to turn to other subjects.
“Oh, it was nice and pagan, all right. For the full Christmas experience, try tasteful Grozny in December. Pitch dark, stinks of oil, dogs are all drunk, teenagers wear gold and carry Kalashnikovs.”
I stare at him. “Grozny in Russia?”
“Chechenia, actually. North Caucasus. It’s gone independent. Unilaterally. Moscow’s a bit miffed.”
“How did you get there?”
“Thumbed a lift. Flew to Ankara. Flew to Baku. Sneaked up the coast a bit. Turned left. Piece of cake.”
“What were you doing?”
“Seeing old friends. Friends of friends.”
“Chechens?”
“One or two. And some of their neighbours.”
“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 once 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 over-bright 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.
“What sort of friends were you?” she asks.
“We weren’t boyfriends, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Perhaps you should have been.”
Sometimes I resent her tolerance. “Why?”
“You’d have got it out of your systems. Most of the public school Englishmen I know had boyhood love affairs with other boys. Didn’t you even have a crush on him?”