Our Game полностью

After that, while the coal fire in the smoking room burned lazily in the grate, I fell to wondering whether Larry, by some occult means I had yet to understand, had almost engineered his murder. And whether, if I had succeeded in delivering the fatal blow instead of pulling back from it, I would have been doing him a favour.

* * *

The pink fog that I had observed through the windows of my club thickened as my cab began its ascent of Haverstock Hill. We were entering Emma's badland. It began, so far as I had ever been able to establish, around Belsize Village and extended to Whitestone Pond in the north, Kentish Town to the east, and Finchley Road to the west. Whatever lay between was enemy territory.

What Hampstead was supposed to have done to her she never told me, and I, out of respect for the sovereignty that mattered so deeply to us both, never asked. From things she let slip, I had a picture of her being passed from hand to hand by intellectual princelings older and less ethereal than herself. Quality journalists loomed large in her bestiary. Shrinks of whatever sex were the pits. There was a time when I had imagined my poor beauty wading repeatedly out of her depth and too often nearly drowning as she lashed back to shore.

The surgery was a former Baptist church. A brass plate on the gatepost celebrated Arthur Medawi Dass and his many learned qualifications. A notice board in the waiting room offered aromatherapy, Zen, and vegetarian bed-and-breakfast. The receptionist had gone home. A fraught-faced woman in green sat in Emma's chair. I suppose I kept looking at her, because she blushed. But what I saw was not a woman in green but Emma in her guise of tragic heroine on the evening we first met.

* * *

Dressed to snare. Not decently dressed, as for Pringle's bank. Not swinging her legs at me, though I do recognise that, even hunched in pain, she is a tall girl, and a very pretty one, and that her legs are remarkably good. A demure skullcap pulls her black hair free of her forehead. Her eyes are stoically averted. Her clothes part Salvation Army, part Edith Piaf on the stomp. A long jute skirt, black, a waif's black boots. A tabby woollen waistcoat vaguely of the outback. And to protect her pianist's hands, fingerless knitted gloves, black and slightly frayed.

My back is really acting up. Hot snakes from head to toe. Yet as I covertly examine her, her plight matters more to me than my own. Her pain is too old for her, too ugly. It makes her too much the governess and not enough the rascal. I want to find the best doctors for her, the warmest beds. I catch her eyes again. Her pain makes her faster to relate, I realise: more attaching than a beautiful young woman would normally permit herself to be. The old tactician in me urgently considers his options. Offer sympathy? It is already implicit, since we are fellow sufferers. Play the veteran—ask her whether this is her first time here? Better not to patronise her. With girls being what they are these days, she may be more of a veteran at twenty-something than you are at forty-seven. I plump for droll humour.

"You look really awful," I say.

The eyes still far away. The gloved hands linked in mutual consolation.

But oh, glory, suddenly she is smiling!

A raffish, twenty-two-carat smile is shining full-beam at me across the room, triumphing over vinyl seats, white striplights, and two bad backs. And I notice that her eyes are smoky blue, like pewter.

"Well, thanks a lot," she says in the fashionably discoloured English of the modern young. "That's just what I wanted someone to tell me."

And we have not exchanged a dozen more lines before it is clear to me that hers is the most gallant smile in London. For imagine: this very night, while she waits to be released from her agony, she is missing the first professional engagement of her musical career! If it weren't for her back, she would even now be seated in a concert hall in Wimbledon, listening to her own arrangement of folk and tribal music from around the world!

"Is it a recurrent thing," I ask, "or have you just ricked it or sprained it or something? It can't be my sort of thing at your age."

"The police did it."

"Which police? Good Lord."

"Some mates of mine were going to be evicted from a squat. A bunch of us went round to picket the building. A great big copper tried to pick me up and put me in a van, and my back just went."

My customary respect for authority evaporated. "But that's awful. You should sue him."

"Well, he should sue me really. I bit him."

And I fall right in, eyes wide shut. I swallow every beguiling word. I cast her as one of the world's rare untarnished souls. I do everything that is expected of a five-star sucker. Right down to promising her the best dinner in London as soon as she is mended, in trivial recompense for her misfortune.

"Do we get seconds?" she asks.

"As many as you like."

To my amazement she is not even a vegetarian.

* * *