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
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
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
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.
