She smiled tolerantly, acknowledging the homosexual undertone but too shrewd to articulate it. "Protect him how, exactly, Tim?"
"Help him curb his tongue. Stop him making himself so damned unpopular. It worked for a few halves, then he got caught smoking, then he got caught drinking. Then he got caught at St. Swithin's girls' school doing the other thing, which excited the envy of less brave souls—"
"Such as yourself?"
"—and cut him off from the homosexual mainstream," I went on, with a nice smile for Merriman. "When flogging didn't have the desired effect, the school expelled him. His father, who was canon of some big cathedral, washed his hands of him; his mother was dead. A distant relative stumped up the money to send him to school in Switzerland, but after one term the Swiss said no thanks and sent him back to England. How he got his scholarship to Oxford is a mystery, but he did, and Oxford duly fell in love with him. He was very good-looking; the girls rolled over for him in droves. He was a beautiful, lawless"—I felt suddenly embarrassed—"extrovert," I said, using a word I thought would please her.
Jake Merriman chimed in. "And he was a Marxist, bless him."
"And a Trotskyist and an atheist and a pacifist and an anarchist and anything else so long as it scared the rich," I retorted. "For a while he favoured a conjunction of Marx and Christ, but it fell apart for him when he decided he couldn't believe in Christ. And he was a voluptuary." I threw this out carelessly and was pleased to observe a tautening of Marjorie Pew's undecorated lips. "By the end of his second year the university had to decide whether to send him down or give him a fellowship to All Souls. They sent him down."
"For what, precisely?" Pew said, in an effort to limit my fusion.
"Being too much. Too much drink, too much politics, too little work, too many women. He was too free. He was excessive. He must go. The next time I saw him was in Venice."
"By which time you were married, of course," she said, contriving to insinuate that my marriage was somehow a betrayal of my friendship with Larry. And I saw Merriman's head go back once more and his eyes resume their watch on the ceiling.
"Yes, and in the Office," I agreed. "Diana was in the Office too. We were on our honeymoon. And suddenly there Larry was, in St. Mark's Square, dressed in a Union Jack and holding up his Winchester straw hat on the point of a rolled umbrella." No smiles anywhere, except from me. "He was playing tour guide to a group of American matrons, and as usual every one of them in love with him. And so they should have been. He knew everything there was to know about Venice, he was inexhaustibly enthusiastic, he had good Italian and talked English like a lord, and he couldn't make up his mind whether to convert to Catholicism or light a bomb under the Vatican. I yelled, 'Larry!' He saw me, flung his hat and brolly in the air, and embraced me. Then I introduced him to Diana."
I said this, but my mind was on the subtext: the aching monotony and unhappy lovemaking of our honeymoon, by then in its second week, the sheer relief—to Diana too, as she later told me—of having a third person in our lives, one as wild as Larry into the bargain, even if he made fun of her conventional ways. I saw Larry in his red-white-and-blue T-shirt kneeling dramatically at Diana's feet, one hand clutched to his heart, the other holding out his hat, the hat, his Wykehamist strat, the same miraculous survivor that he had worn for our grape harvest at Honeybrook just a year ago. Its lid taped down, varnished, and enamelled, then, as now, its basket life long over. And around its crown, tattered but victorious, our sacred House hatband. I heard his mellow voice with its bogus Italian accent ripping theatrically through the Venice sunlight as he yells his crazy salutation: It's a-Timbo! The Boy-a Bishop himself! And you're his a-lovely bride-a!
"We took him to restaurants, visited his awful digs—he was living with a Pomeranian countess, naturally—and one morning I woke up and had this inspiration: He's exactly what we're looking for, the one we've been talking about at the Friday seminars. We'll sign him up and take him all the way through."
"And it didn't bother you that he was your friend?" she suggested.
At the word friend, a different pain swept over me. Friend? I never came near him, I thought. Familiar maybe, but friend never. He was the risk I would never take.
"It would have bothered me a lot more if he had been my enemy, Marjorie," I heard myself replying silkily. "We're talking the depths of the Cold War. We were fighting for our survival. We believed in what we were doing." I could not resist the gibe: "I imagine these days that comes a little harder."
And then, in case the New Era had blurred her memory of the old one, I explained what it meant to take someone all the way through: how the agent-running section was constantly under pressure to find a young man—in those days it had to be a man—to trail his coat at the busy-bee Russian recruiters who were working the Oxbridge circuit from the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. And how Larry fitted in almost every possible way the profile we had drawn of the man we dreamed of finding, or they did—we could even send him back to Oxford to do a third year and sit his Finals.
"Blast the fellow, he landed an outright First against my rather shaky Second," I said with a sporting laugh, which no one shared: not Merriman, who was continuing his examination of the ceiling, or Waldon, who had set his jaw in such grim lock that you could have wondered whether he would ever speak again.
And how we would give the Russian recruiters precisely what they were looking for and had found for themselves in the past to such effect, I went on: a classy Englishman on the slide, an intellectual explorer, a Golden Boy Going Wrong, a God-seeker sympathetic to the Party but not compromised by formally belonging to it, unanchored, immature, unstable, politically omnivorous, crafty in a vague way, and, when he died to be, larcenous—
"So you propositioned him," Marjorie Pew interrupted, managing to make it sound as if I had picked Larry up in a public lavatory.
I laughed. My laughter was annoying her, so I was doing quite a lot of it.
"Oh my goodness, not for months, Marjorie. We had to fight it through the system first. A lot of people on the Top Floor said he'd never accept the discipline. His school reports were awful, university reports worse. Everyone said he was brilliant, but for what? Can I make a point here?"
"Please do."
"The recruitment of Larry was a group operation. When he agreed to take the veil, my section head decided I should have the handling of him. But only on the understanding that I report to him before and after every meeting with Larry."
"So why did he take the veil, as you call it?" she asked.
Her question filled me with a deep tiredness. If you don't know now, you never will, I wanted to tell her. Because he was footloose. Because he was a soldier. Because God told him to and he didn't believe in God. Because he had a hangover. Or hadn't. Because the dark side of him liked an airing too. Because he was Larry and I was Tim and it was there.
"He relished the challenge of it, I suppose," I said. "To be what you are, but more so. He liked the idea of being a free servant. It answered his sense of duty."