"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.
"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?"
"I'm afraid I didn't. No."
"Perhaps he had a crush on you. His shining older knight. His role model."
"Are you being sarcastic?"
"He says you were a big influence on him. His straight man. Even after school."
Call it tradecraft, call it lover's frenzy: I am ice cold. Operational cold. Has Larry broken omerta—Larry, after twenty years before the secret mast, has made a Come-to-Jesus confession to my girl? Using the self-same specious formulations that he once flung in the face of his long-suffering case officer? Cranmer perverted the humanity in me, Emma, Cranmer seduced me, exploited my purblind innocence, Made me a liar and dissembler.
"What else did he tell you?" I ask with a smile.
"Why? Is there more?" She is still naked, but now her nakedness no longer pleases her, so she takes up a wrap and covers herself before returning to her vigil.
"I just wondered what form my evil influence is supposed to have taken."
"He didn't say evil. You did." Now it was her turn to force a laugh. "I can wonder whether I'm caught between the two of you, can't I? You've probably been to prison together. That would explain why the Treasury chucked you out at forty-seven."
I have to believe for her sake that she means this as a joke; as an escape from a subject that is threatening to get out of hand. She is probably waiting for me to laugh. But suddenly the gap between us is unbridgeable and we are both afraid. We have never been this far apart or stood so consciously before the unsayable.
"Will you go to his lecture?" she asks, in a mistaken effort to change the subject.
"What lecture? I'd have thought a lecture every Sunday was enough."
I know perfectly well what lecture. It's called "The Squandered Victory: Western Foreign Policy since 1988," and it is yet another Pettifer diatribe on the moral bankruptcy of Western foreign policy.
"Larry has invited us to his memorial lecture at the university," she replies, wishing me to know by her voice that she is exercising supernatural patience. "He's given us two tickets and wants to take us on to a curry afterwards."
But I am too threatened, too alert, too angry to be agreeable. "I don't think I'm a curry man these days, thank you, Emma. And as to your being caught between us—"
"Yes?"
I stop myself in time, but only just. Unlike Larry, I detest large talk; all life has taught me to leave dangerous things unsaid. What use to tell her it isn't Emma who is caught between myself and Larry, but Cranmer who is caught between his two creations? I want to shout at her that if she is seeking examples of undue influence, she need look no further than Larry's manipulation of herself; at his remorseless moulding and seduction of her by weekly and now daily appeals to her infinitely approachable conscience; at his unscrupulous recruitment of her as his helpmeet and body servant under the guise of the so-called Hopeless Causes he continues to espouse; and that if deception is her enemy, let her look for it in her newfound friend.
But I say none of it. Unlike Larry, I am not a confrontation man. Not yet.
"... I only want you to be free," I say. "I don't want you to be trapped by anyone."
But in my head the helpless scream is like a bandsaw: He's playing you! It's what he does! Why can't you see beyond your nose? He'll raise you higher and higher, and when he's bored with you he'll leave you up there, tottering on the brink without him. He's all the things you wanted to escape, rolled into one by me.
* * *
It's my Dark Age. It's the rest of my life before Emma. I'm listening to Larry at his posturing worst, boasting to me about his conquests. Seventeen years have passed since Cranmer's pep talk to his tearful young agent on the Brighton hilltop. Today Larry is rated the best gun in the Office's arsenal of joes. Where are we? In Paris? Stockholm? In one of our London pubs, never the same twice running? We are in the safe flat in the Tottenham Court Road, before they pulled it down to make way for another chunk of modern nowhere, and Larry is pacing, drinking Scotch, scowling his Great Conductor scowl, and I am watching him.