I heard Diana again and felt my hackles rise:
The image was forming. Perhaps it had already formed. Perhaps the
I was listening.
I had an urge to laugh, to wave, to answer back, "Emma! It's me. I love you. Actually, I still do! Incredibly, irrationally, I adore you, whether I'm life or death or just boring old Tim Cranmer!"
Outside my arrow slits the world was going to the devil. The chapel tower grumbled, shutters banged, lead downpipes hurled themselves against stone walls as the thunder struck. Gutters overflowed and gargoyles could not spew out the rushing water fast enough. The rain stopped and the uneasy truce of a country night returned. But all I was thinking was: "Emma, it's you," and all I was hearing was Emma speaking on the answering machine from Cambridge Street in a voice so lovely that I wanted to hold the machine against my face: a warm and patient voice as well as a musical one, made a little lazy by lovemaking, perhaps, and addressed to people who might not speak much English or be conversant with such Western mysteries as the answering machine.
"This is Free Prometheus of Bristol, and this is Sally speaking," she was saying. "Hullo, and thanks for calling. I'm afraid we can't talk to you just now, because we have had to go out. If you wish to leave a message, wait until you hear a short whistle, then begin speaking immediately. Are you ready ... ?"
After Emma, the same message again, read to us by Larry in Russian. And Larry when he spoke Russian slipped into another skin, because the Russian language had been his refuge from tyranny. It was where he had locked himself away from the father who had lectured him, and the school that had urged conformity on him, and the prefects who had flogged him to give the message force.
After he had spoken Russian he spoke again, in a language that I arbitrarily placed in the Caucasus—since I didn't understand a syllable. But I couldn't mistake the air of drama, the pulse of conspiracy, that he managed to squeeze into such a formal little message. I listened to him again in Russian. Then again in the unfamiliar language. So charged, so heroic, so full of moment. What did he remind me of? The book beside his bed in Cambridge Street? Memories of his hero Aubrey Herbert, who had fought to save Albania?
I had it—the Canning!
We are back at Oxford; it's nighttime and it's snowing. We are sitting in someone's rooms in Trinity; there are a dozen of us, and we are drinking mulled claret, and it's Larry's turn to read us a paper on whatever pretentious subject has caught his fancy. The Canning is just another self-regarding Oxford discussion group, except that it's a bit older than most and has some decent silver. Larry has chosen Byron and intends to shock us. Which he duly does, insisting that Byron's greatest loves were men, not women, and dwelling upon the poet's devotion while at Cambridge to a choirboy, and while in Greece to his page, Loukas.
But what I hear in my memory's ear as I recall the evening is not Larry's predictable relish for Byron's sexual exploits but his zeal for Byron the saviour of the Greeks,
And what I see is Larry seated before the gas fire, clutching his goblet of hot wine to his breast, a Byron of his own imagining; the forelock, the flushed cheeks, the fervent eyes alight with wine and rhetoric. Did Byron sell his beloved's antique jewellery to fund the hopeless cause? Turn over his gratuity in cash?
And what I remember is Larry again, during yet another of his Honeybrook lectures, telling us that Byron is a Caucasus freak, on the grounds that he wrote a grammar on the Armenian language.
I switched to the incoming messages. I became a secondary addict, sharing the pipe dream and inhaling the fumes, bathing in the dangerous glow.
"Sally?" A guttural foreign voice, male, thick and urgent, speaking English. "Here is Issa. Our Chief Leader will visit to Nazran tomorrow. He will speak secretly to council. Tell this to Misha, please."
Click.
Misha, I thought. One of Checheyev's cover names for Larry. Nazran, temporary capital of Ingushetia, in the North Caucasus barrier.
A different voice, male and dead tired, speaking unguttural Russian in a drenched murmur. "Misha, I have news. The carpets have arrived on the mountain. The boys are happy. Greetings from Our Chief Leader."
Click.
A man is speaking breezy English with a slight Oriental accent: Mr. Dass's sound-alike from the redial call I had made in Cambridge Street.
