"Do we get seconds?" she asks.
"As many as you like."
To my amazement she is not even a vegetarian.
* * *
Ours is scarcely a whirlwind romance—why should it be? From my very first sighting of her, I know that she is of neither the age nor the category from which my usual conquests are selected: the compliant female colleague or senior secretary; the sporting adulteress of the English country round. She is young. She is intelligent. She is uncharted waters. She is risk. And it is years, if ever, since Cranmer has stepped outside the limits of his self-confinement, played the brave game, waited impatiently for evening, lain awake till dawn.
Does she have a stable of us? I wonder: older men who collect her from her flat, drive her to some makeshift concert hall in London's outer reaches—one night a disused theatre in Finchley, next week a gymnasium in Ruislip or someone's private drawing room in Ladbroke Grove—then perch in the back row, listening to her peculiar music in loyal rapture before taking her to dinner? And over dinner talk her up if she is low, and down if she is high, finally to leave her on her doorstep with no more than a brotherly peck on the cheek and a promise to do the same next week?
"I'm such a tart, Tim," she confides to me over our splendid dinner at Wilton's. "I walk into a crowded room, people look at me, and I start flirting with the entire field. The next thing is, I'm stuck with someone who looked okay in the window but is an absolute pill when you get him home!"
Is she deliberately provoking me? Is she romancing? Is she urging me to try my luck? Surely I can't be a worse bet than some wet-jawed Hampstead banker of thirty with a Porsche? Yet how do I know it's not a bluff—and if I declare myself and she rejects me, what will become of our relationship? Is she mad? Certainly her erratic path through life has a flavour of madness, even if it's one I envy: a wild dash from London to Khartoum on the off chance of bumping into this amazingly dishy Italian she spoke to once for thirty seconds in Camden Lock; submerging herself for six months in some ashram in Central India; walking across the Darien Gap from Panama to Colombia in her search for the music of the Somebodies; biting an officer of the law—unless of course the bitten policeman is another instance of her romancing. As to her heedless espousal of causes, it's a caricature of every Sunday columnist who arrogates to himself the conscience of the chattering classes. Yet why should I mock her for refusing to eat Turkish figs because look what they're doing to the Kurds? Or Japanese fish because look what they're doing to the whales? What was so risible—so un-English—about conducting your life according to principles, even if, in my jaded judgment, such principles were ineffectual?
Meanwhile I stalk her, imagine her, try to second-guess her, and I wait: for her encouragement, for the spark that never quite flies, unless you count the moments when, in the midst of one of our brother-sister evenings, she reaches out her hand and lays it along my cheek, or rubs her knuckles up and down my fellow sufferer's back. Only once does she ask me what I do for a living. And when I say Treasury:
"Whose side are you on, then?" she enquires, her dimpled jaw stuck forward in challenge.
"None. I'm a civil servant."
This won't do for her at all.
"You can't be no side, Tim. That's like not existing. We have to have an object of faith. Otherwise we're not defined."
One day she asks me about Diana: what went wrong?
"Nothing. It was wrong before we married and it stayed wrong afterwards."
"So why did you get married?"
I suppress my irritation. Past mistakes in love, I want to tell her, can no more be explained than rectified. But she is young and still believes, I suppose, that everything has an explanation if you look hard enough for it.
"I was just bloody stupid," I reply with what I hope is disarming frankness. "Come on, Emma. Don't tell me you haven't made a fool of yourself a few times. You keep telling me you have."
To which in a rather lofty way she smiles, and I, in a fit of secret anger, find myself comparing her with Larry. You beautiful people are exempt from life's difficult tests, aren't you? I want to tell her. You don't have to try so hard, do you? You can sit there and judge life instead of being judged by it.
But my bitterness, or whatever it is, has got through to her. She takes my hand in both of hers and presses it thoughtfully to her lips while she studies me. Is she wise? Is she plain dumb? Emma defies these categories. Her beauty, like Larry's, is its own morality.
And the next week we are the same old friends again, which is how things continue until the day Merriman calls me to his office and tells me that Cold Warriors cannot be recycled and that I may with immediate effect put myself out to pasture in Honeybrook. But instead of the conventional despondency that should overcome me on hearing my sentence, I am conscious only of a heedless vigour. Merriman, you've got it right for once! Cranmer is free! Cranmer has paid his dues! From today and for the rest of his life, Cranmer, against all previous principle, will follow Larry's advice. He will leap before he looks. Instead of giving he will take.
SEVEN
BUT CRANMER WILL do more than take. He will go small, go country, go free. He will remove himself from the complexities of the big world, now that the Cold War is won and over. Having helped secure the victory, he will with dignity leave the field to the new generation that Merriman speaks of so warmly. He will literally harvest the peace to which he has himself contributed: in the fields, in the soil, in rustic simplicity. In decent, structured, overt human relationships he will finally savour the freedoms he has defended these twenty-something years. Not selfishly, not by any means. To the contrary, he will engage in many socially beneficial acts: but for the microcosm, the small community, and no longer for the so-called national interest, which these days is a mystery even to those best placed to cherish it.
And this amazing prospect, granted me from such an improbable quarter, goads me into an act of magnificent irresponsibility. I choose the Grill Room at the Connaught, my shrine for great occasions. If I had acted with more forethought I would have opted for somewhere humbler, for I recognise too late that I have overtaxed her wardrobe. Never mind. Enough of forethought. If she ever comes to me, I shall dress her from top to toe in gold!
She listens to me carefully, though carefully is not how I speak—except that on the matter of my secret past, naturally my lips are sealed.
I tell her that I love her and fear for her night and day. For her talent, her wit, her courage, but particularly her fragility and what I might even call—since she has alluded to it herself—her perilous availability.
The truth speaks out of me as never before. Perhaps more than the truth, perhaps a dream of it, as I am carried away by the joy of being untactical after a lifetime of subterfuge. I am free to feel at last. All thanks to her. I wish to be everything to her a man can be, I tell her: first to protect and shelter her, not least from herself; then to advance her art, to be her friend, companion, lover, and disciple; and to provide the roof under which the disparate parts of her may be reconciled in harmony. To which end I am proposing that here and now she join me in my yeoman's life: in the emptiest quarter of Somerset, at Honeybrook, to walk the hills, grow wine, make music and love, and cultivate a Rousseau-like world in microcosm, but jollier; to read the books we always meant to read.
Amazed by my recklessness, not to mention eloquence—excepting of course in the delicate matter of how I have spent the last twenty-five years of my life—I listen to myself firing off my complete arsenal in one huge salvo. My love life, I say, has till tonight been a comedy of misalliances, the clear consequence of never allowing my heart to leave its box.