Our Game полностью

I drove without lights to the lane and still without lights for another mile to the crossroads. I took the old Mendip road, passed Priddy Pool without a glance, and kept driving till I came to Bristol airport, where I left the van in the longterm car park and bought myself a seat on the first flight of the day to Belfast, in the name of Cranmer. I took a shuttle coach to Bristol Temple Meads, and it was packed with exhausted Welsh football fans, singing quiet hymns in harmony. From the station forecourt, I allowed myself a last incredulous stare up the hill at Cambridge Street before boarding an early train to Paddington. I rode with it as far as Reading, where, as Bairstow, I booked myself into a garish commercial travellers' hotel. I tried to sleep, but the terror pulsed in me like another heart, and it was terror of the worst kind, the tenor of a guilt-obsessed spectator to a catastrophe he cannot prevent from overtaking people he cannot call to, and the people were my own. It was I who had consigned Larry to a life of fiction, who had taught him the arts of subterfuge and set loose in him the mechanism that had now run so disastrously amok. It was I who had thrown a noose around Emma, never guessing that when I appointed her the perfect mate she would turn out to be the perfect mate for Larry.

In my dismal hotel room I put on all the lights and made myself foul tea with a tea bag and artificial milk, then set myself to revisiting the bundles of paper I had stuffed into the briefcase on my departure from the priesthole. I wrote my bank a long letter of instruction, providing, among other things, for Mrs. Benbow, Ted Lanxon, and the Toiler girls. I sealed the envelope, addressed it, and posted it in the centre of the town. I did some telephoning from a public call box, then spent the afternoon in a cinema, though I remember nothing of the film. At five o'clock, in a red Ford hired in the name of Bairstow, I left Reading on the evening tide. Each golden field in its brown hedge was like another shard of my fragmented world.

"It's the sounds and smells of youth coming back to you," Larry had written to Emma. "It's the sky you used to look at when you were a child. You understand ideas again. Money has no power."

I wished I could share his lyricism.

 "OH, MARVELLOUS, TIM," Clare Dugdale had cried in her voice of late-Thatcherite thrill when I telephoned her from a call box, saying I just happened to be in the area. "Simon will be over the moon. He hasn't had any buddy-buddy talk for weeks. Come nice and early and we can have a drink and you can help me put the children to bed, just like the old days. You won't believe Petronella. She's enormous. Do you mind fish? Simon's got a new thing about his heart. Shall you be alone, Tim, or are you with?"

I crossed a bridge and saw below me our white hotel, now turned grey by the recession. The riverside lawns were overgrown. The bar where I had waited for her had DISCO scrawled in chalk across the door. Pinball machines winked in the once stately dining room, where we had eaten flambe steak while she probed my crotch with her stockinged foot and we waited till it was all right to go to bed—which we did as soon as decent, because by four in the morning she was perched in front of the mirror, repairing her makeup to go home.

"Mustn't let the children miss me, must I, darling?" she says. "And poor Simon might easily decide to give me a wake-up call from Washington. He never can sleep on short trips."

"Does he suspect?" I ask, more it now seemed to me out of human curiosity than any particular sense of guilt.

Pause while she completes a line of lipstick. "Shouldn't think so. Si's a Berkeleyan. He denies the existence of everything he can't perceive." Clare took a Cambridge degree in philosophy before shouldering the intellectual burdens of a Foreign Office wife. "And since we don't exist, we can do whatever we jolly well want, can't we? And we still won't have done it, will we?"

In Maidenhead I parked at the railway station and, armed with Bairstow's briefcase, took a taxi to the hideous fifties barracks where they lived. A disintegrating climbing frame adorned the overgrown front garden. Clare's bashed Renault stood abandoned at a dramatic angle in the weed-infested drive. A faded notice by the bell said CHIEN MECHANT. I presumed it was a relic of Simon's visits to Brussels as a NATO Moscow-watcher. The door opened, and the au pair eyed me with slothful curiosity.

"Anna Greta. Still here, my goodness. How splendid."

I stepped round her into the hall, picking my way between perambulators, children's bicycles, and a wigwam. As I did so Clare came charging down the stairs and flung her arms around me. She was wearing the amber brooch I had given her. Simon believed she had inherited it from a distant cousin. Or so she said.