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.
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.
Am I quoting Larry again? Sometimes to my dismay I discover too late that he has fed me my best lines.
But tonight, I say, my heart is out and running, and I look back with shame at the too many wrong turnings I have taken. And surely—unless I misunderstand her—this could even be something which, despite the gap in our ages, we have in common: for is she not constantly confessing to me that she too is sick to death of small loves, small talk, small minds? As to her career, she will continue to have London at her doorstep. She will have her friends, she need give up nothing she cares about, she will be a free soul, never my prisoner in the tower. And with reservations, I believe myself, every word, every effusion. For what is cover for, if not to enable us to shed one life and grow another?
For a long while she seems unable to speak. Perhaps I have subjected her to a more impetuous onslaught than was to be decently expected of a staid bureaucrat selecting a mate for his retirement. Indeed, as I wait for her reaction, I begin to wonder whether I have spoken at all or merely been listening to the freed Sirens of my years of clandestine incarceration.
She is looking at me. Observing is a better word. She is reading my lips, my expressions of fear, adoration, earnestness, desire—whatever is in my face as I unbare myself to her. The pewter eyes are steadfast but aroused. They are like the sea waiting for thunder. Finally she commands my silence, though I am no longer speaking. She does this by laying a finger on my lips and leaving it there.
