Peter
I continued staring at the letter. Peter for Volodya Zorin. Peter for talking on the telephone and arranging to meet him in Shepherd Market. Peter for deniable initiatives of friendship. Peter the victim of an unjust hell, under house arrest and waiting to be shot at dawn, welcome to the club.
It was a Sunday, and on Sundays, even without Larry to cook for, there was a lot of seeming to attend to. Eleven o'clock found me in the village church, kneeling on Uncle Bob's embroidered hassock in my lovat suit and mouthing the middle notes of Sung Eucharist, which I heartily dislike. Mr. Guppy took the collection, and the poor old man couldn't bring himself to raise his eyes as he passed me the bag. After church it was the turn of the Misses Bethel in the Dower House to give us bad sherry and alarm us with the latest rumours of the bypass. But today they weren't interested in the bypass, so we talked about nothing while they shot sideways glances at me whenever they thought I wasn't looking. But by the time I crept down to my priesthole under cover of darkness, my booty loaded onto Ted Lanxon's handcart, I was beginning to feel less the master of my house than the burglar who was breaking into it.
* * *
I stood before the strip of old blackout curtain that I had tacked across the alcove. Even tonight, Emma's privacy was as dear to me as it had ever been to her. To spy on her was to sin against the convictions I had never held until I met her. If she had received a phone call and I happened to take it, I passed it to her without comment or enquiry. If a letter, it lay intacta on the hall table till she chose to notice it. I would make nothing of the postmark, the gender of the handwriting, the quality of the stationery. If the temptation became unbearable—I had recognised Larry's handwriting, or another male pen was becoming too familiar to me—then I would stomp cheerily upstairs, flapping the envelope at my side, yelling "Letter for Emma! Letter for Emma! Emma, letter for you!" and with pious relief ease it under the door of her studio, and goodbye to it.
Until now.
Until, with the very reverse of triumph, I tugged aside the curtain and peered down at the eight wine boxes I had blindly filled with the contents of her kneehole desk that Sunday when she left me; and at the anonymous buff folder that Merriman had gaily dubbed my doggy bag, lying askew across the top of them.
I opened it quickly, the way I had always imagined I might swallow poison. Five unheaded A4 pages, compiled by his Sheenas. Without even granting myself time to sit, I read them at one gulp, then again more slowly, waiting for the epiphany that would have me clutching at my throat and crying, "Cranmer, Cranmer, how could you have been so blind?"
None came.
For instead of some cheap textbook solution to Emma's mystery, I found only the affecting confirmation of things that I had assumed or known already: transient lovers, the repeated involvements and escapes, the quest for absolutes in a world of botch and falsehood. I recognised her readiness to be unprincipled in pursuit of principle; and the ease with which she shrugged off her responsibilities when they conflicted with what she perceived as her life's quest. Her parentage, though not as lurid as she would have me think, was quite as ill-starred. Brought up by her mother to believe she was the love child of a great musician, she had visited his home town in Sardinia, to discover that he had been a bricklayer. It was from her mother, if anyone, that her musical talent was derived. But Emma had hated her, and so, as I read the file, did I.
Setting the folder gently aside, I found time to wonder what Merriman had imagined he was achieving by pressing it upon me. All it had done was rekindle the anguish that I felt for her and my determination to save her from the consequences of whatever madness Larry had drawn her into.
I seized the nearest box, overturned it, and seized the next, till all eight of them were empty. The four bin bags from Cambridge Street, their throats bound with ligatures of paper wire, stared at me like masked inquisitors. I ripped off their nooses and shook their contents to the floor. Only the bag of charred paper remained. Gingerly I tipped it out and with my fingertips stroked the unburned fragments into separate piles. On my hands and knees before the detritus of Emma's unscripted disappearance, I launched myself upon the task of entering the secret world of my mistress and her lover.
TEN
I WAS READING as I had never read before. What my eye missed, my hands found and my head construed. I was flattening sheets of paper, piecing together others carelessly torn up, setting them in piles, and filing them in my memory at the same time. I was doing in hours what once I would have done in weeks, because hours, unless I was mistaken, were all I had. If there was blind logic to my frenzy, there was also the dawning of a mad relief. Here is the explanation! Here at least is how, and why, and when, and where—if only I can decode them! Here amid these papers—and not in some paranoid corner of Cranmer's overactive fantasy—are buried answers to questions that have been haunting me night and day for weeks on end: Was I framed, set up, the target of a devilish conspiracy? Or am I merely the fool of love and of my own menopausal imaginings?
How much I was behind Larry and Emma, how much ahead of them, is something I couldn't measure. I knew, I half knew. Then I knew nothing again. Or I had divined their actions but was mystified by their purpose. Or I knew their purpose but refused to countenance their motive: it was too mad, too far, too alien, too wantonly obscure, to be believed. Or suddenly I would discover myself sitting back in my chair and, against all reason, grinning beatifically at the ceiling: I was not the target, I was not the object of their deception; they were after bigger game than me; Cranmer was just a not very innocent bystander.
Sheets of figures, business letters, letters from banks, and copies of letters back to them. Literature from something called the Survival for Tribal People Association; literature from Munich; a brochure called "God as Detail" from somebody called P. Wook in Islington. The Esso diary, a marked calendar, the pop-up Russian address book, Larry's crazy scrawls. Bills for telephone, electricity, water, rent, groceries, and Larry's whisky. Bills decently kept, paid, receipted. Emma's kind of bill, not Larry's, addressed variously to S. Anderson or T. Altman or Free Prometheus Ltd., Cambridge Street. A child's exercise book, but the child was Emma. It was sandwiched inside a bunch of files and came loose when I started to sort through them. I opened it, then closed it again in a spontaneous act of self-censorship before opening it more cautiously. Amid household notes and musical jottings, I had stumbled on random messages to her former lover, Cranmer:
Tim, I try to understand what's happened to us so that I can explain to you, but then I think: why should I explain anything to you? and the next minute I think I’ll just say it straight out anyway, which is what I've decided to do. . . .
But this fine resolve was not matched by performance, for the signal ended. Damp batteries in the transmitter? Secret police banging on the door? I turned a couple of pages.
Emma to Emma: Everything in my life has prepared me for this. ... Every wrong lover, wrong step, my bad side and my good side, all my sides, are marching in the same direction for as long as I march with Larry . . . When Larry says he doesn't believe words, I don't believe them either. Larry is action. Action is character. In music, in love, in life .. .
But Emma to Emma only sounded like a parody of Larry.
Emma to Tim: . . . what you left in me was a huge yawning gap where I had kept my love for you until I realised you weren't there. How much I guessed about you and how much you told me, or Larry did, doesn't matter, except that Larry never betrayed you in the way you think, and never in the way you ...