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:
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:
But Emma to Emma only sounded like a parody of Larry.
Emma to Tim:
Oh sure, I thought savagely; well, he wouldn't, would he? I mean stealing his best friend's girl isn't betrayal, any more than stealing thirty-seven million pounds and making you his accomplice is. That's altruism. That's nobility. That's sacrifice!
Six pages of Larry-inspired self-absorption went by before she braced herself to address me again, this time in patronising terms:
