"I am called Dee," the woman said, as if accepting that I was unlikely to offer much in the way of conversation. "I am Emma's friend. Well, you know that."
"Yes."
"And Emma is upstairs. You hear that."
"Yes."
Her accent was more German than French. But the lines in her face were of universal suffering. She had sat herself stiffly in a tall chair and was holding its arms like a dowager. I sat opposite her on a wooden stool. The floorboards were bare and ran directly from her feet to mine. There were no carpets, no pictures on the walls. In a room not far off, a telephone was ringing, but she paid it no attention and it stopped. But soon it began ringing again, as I suspected it rang most of the time, like a doctor's.
"And you are in love with her. And that is the reason why you are here."
A diminutive Asian girl in jeans had appeared in the doorway to listen to us. Dee said something sharp to her, and she pattered off.
"Yes," I said.
"To tell her that you love her? She knows it already.”
“To warn her."
"She is warned. She knows she is in danger. She is content. She is in love, though not with you. She is in danger, but his danger is greater than hers, therefore she is not in danger. It is all quite logical. Do you understand?"
"Of course."
"She has ceased to find excuses for loving him. You must not ask for them, please. It would be degrading for her to apologise any more. Please do not require it of her."
"I don't. I won't. That isn't why I came."
"Then we must ask again: why did you come? Please—it is honourable not to know! But if you should discover your motives when you see her, kindly consider her feelings first. Before she met you, she was a shipwreck. She had no centre, no stability. She could have been anyone. Like you, perhaps. All she wished was to climb into a shell and live the life inside it. But now it is over. You were the last of her shells. Now she is real. She is defined. She is one person. Or feels she is. If she is not, then at least the different people in her are going in the same direction. Thanks to Larry. Perhaps it is also thanks to you. You look sad. Is that because I mention Larry?"
"I didn't come for her thanks."
"Then for what? For an obligatory scene? I hope not. Perhaps one day you also will be real. Perhaps you and Emma were very similar people. Too similar. Each wished the other to be real. She is expecting you. She has been expecting you for some days now. Are you safe to go alone to her?"
"Why should I not be?"
"I was thinking of Emma's safety, Mr. Timothy, not yours."
She returned me to the staircase. The piano playing had stopped. The little girl was watching us from the shadows. "You gave her a lot of jewellery, I believe," Dee said. "I don't remember that it did her any harm."
"Is that why you gave it to her—to save her from harm?”
“I gave it to her because she was beautiful and I loved her."
"You are rich?"
"Rich enough."
"Perhaps you gave it to her because you didn't love her. Perhaps love is a threat to you, something to be paid off. Perhaps it is in competition with your other ambitions."
I had faced Pew-Merriman. I had faced Inspector Bryant and Sergeant Luck. Facing Dee was worse than any of them.
"You have one more flight to climb," she said. "Have you decided what you came for?"
"I'm looking for my friend. Her lover."
"So that you may forgive him?"
"Something like that."
"Perhaps he must forgive you?"
"What for?"
"We human beings are dangerous weapons, Mr. Timothy. And most dangerous where we are weak. We know so much about the power of others. So little about our own. You have a strong will. Perhaps you did not know your own strength with him." She laughed. "Such an inconstant man you are. One minute you are looking for Emma, the next you are looking for your friend. You know what? I don't think you wish to find your friend, only to become him. Be careful with her. She will be nervous."
* * *
She was. So was I.
She stood at the end of the long room, and it was a room so like her side of the house at Honeybrook that my first thought was to wonder why she had ever bothered to change it. It had the attic look she liked, with a high-timbered ceiling rising to an apex, and the views she liked, down to the river at either end. An old rosewood upright piano occupied one corner, and I supposed it was the sort of piano she had coveted in the Portobello Road at the time I had bought her the Bechstein. In another corner she had a desk—not a kneehole but more in the style of her prosaic desk in Cambridge Street. And on the desk stood a typewriter, and over it and on the floor lay a re-creation of the papers I had plundered. So that there was a look of proud resurgence about them, as if they had valiantly regrouped after a frightful pounding. If a tattered flag had flown from them, it would not have been surprising.
She had her hands at her sides. Black half-gloves as on the day we had first met. She was wearing a crushed linen smock, and it had the appearance of a habit: of a deliberate renunciation of the flesh; and of me. Her black hair was bound in a ponytail. And the improbable effect of this was that I desired her more urgently than ever before.
"I'm sorry about the jewellery," she began in a sort of lurch.
Which hurt me, because I didn't want her thinking, after everything that I had been through on her account—the anguish and the battering and the deprival—that I had any concern left for something as trivial as jewellery.
"So Larry's all right," I said.
Her head flung round eagerly, eyes wide with anticipation. "All right? What do you mean? What have you heard?"
"I'm sorry. I just meant in general. After Priddy."
Belatedly she understood my point. "Of course. You tried to kill him, didn't you? He said he hoped all his deaths would be so comfortable. I hate him talking like that, actually. Even joking. I don't think he should. Then of course I tell him, so he does it again, just because he's been told not to." She shook her head. "He's incurable."
"Where is he now?"
"Out there."
"Out where?" Silence. "Moscow? Back to Grozny?" More silence. "I suppose that's up to Checheyev."
"I don't think anyone moves Larry around like dry goods. Not even CC."
"I suppose not. How do you get hold of him, actually? Write? Call? What's the drill?"
"I don't. Nor do you."
"Why not?"
"He said that."
"Said what?"
"If you came after him, asking for him, not to tell you even if I knew. He said it wasn't that he didn't trust you. He was just worried that you might love the Office more. He won't phone. He says it's not safe. Not for him, not for me. I get messages. 'He's all right....' `He sends love....' `No change....' `Soon....' Oh, and 'Miss your beautiful eyes,' of course. That's practically standard."
"Of course." Then I thought I'd better tell her in case she didn't know. "Aitken May's dead. His two helpers were killed with him."
Her face turned abruptly from me as if I had slapped it. Then her whole back turned on me.
"The Forest killed them," I said. "I'm afraid your warning came too late. I'm sorry."
"Then CC will have to find a substitute," she said at last. "Larry will know somebody. He always does."
She had her back to me still, and I remembered that she had always found it easier to talk that way. She was staring out of the window, and the light of the window showed me the shape of her body through her smock, and I was desiring her so strongly that I hardly dared speak, which I supposed was something to do with the sexual chemistry between us: that by the nature of our misalliance we had made love as strangers, thus ensuring that the erotic charge between us was always extraordinarily strong. And I wondered whether her desire matched my own the way it had always seemed to in the good times, and whether she was half expecting me to take her here and now, just turn her into me and topple her to the floor, while Dee sat downstairs, listening for fair play. And I remembered the kiss she had given me at the Connaught, which had woken me from my hundred-year sleep, and how her instinctive ingenuity as a lover had taken me to regions I had not known existed.