Our Game полностью

"Anna Greta, darling, will you please go and dish up the vegetables and put them on the hotplate?" she ordered, taking my hand and leading me upstairs. "You're still terribly yummy, Tim. And Si says you've found an absolutely super, frightfully young girl. I think that's awfully clever of you. Petronella, look who's here!" She carried my hand round to my backside and pinched me. "It isn't fish; it's duck. I decided Si's heart could lump it for once. Let me look at you again."

Petronella emerged scowling from the bathroom, dressed in a towel and a mackintosh hat. She was now an ungrateful child of ten, with wire round her teeth and her father's hovering smile.

"Why are you kissing my mother?"

"Because we're very old friends, Pet, darling," Clare replied with hoots of laughter. "Don't be so silly. You'd like a hug from somebody as dishy as Tim, I'll bet."

"No, I wouldn't."

The twin boys wanted Rupert Bear. A visiting girl called Hubbie wanted Black Beauty. The conciliator in me chose Peter Rabbit, and I was coming to the bit about Peter's father having an accident in Mr. McGregor's garden when I heard Simon's footsteps ascending the stairs.

"Hullo, Tim, nice to see you," he said, all on one note, as he offered me a lifeless hand. "Hullo, Pet. Hullo, Clive. Hullo, Mark. Hullo, Hubbie."

"Hullo," they said.

"Hullo, Clare."

"Hullo," said Clare.

I went on reading, while Simon listened from the doorway. In my weightless state of mind I had hoped he might like me better now that I was a fellow cuckold. But he didn't seem to, so perhaps it didn't show.

* * *

The duck must have been frozen, because parts of it still were. As we hacked our way through the bleeding limbs, I remembered that this was how we had always eaten, when we ate our frightful meals together: potatoes boiled to a sludge and school cabbage floating in a green lake. Did their Catholic souls derive solace from such abstinence? Did they feel closer to God and further from the herd?

"Why are you here?" Simon asked in his dry, nasal voice. "Visiting a spinster aunt, actually," I replied.

"Not another filthy rich one, Tim?" said Clare.

"Where is she?" said Simon.

"No, this one's indigent," I told Clare. "Marlow," I told Simon.

"Which nursing home?" said Simon.

"Sunnymeades," I said, giving him a name I had plucked from the yellow pages and hoping it was still in business.

"Is she an aunt on your father's side?" Simon asked.

"Actually she's a cousin of my mother's," I said, forestalling the likelihood that Simon would telephone Sunnymeades nursing home and establish that she didn't exist.

"Are you growing many grapes, please?" sang Anna Greta, who had been elevated to guest for the evening.

"Well, not a bumper harvest, Anna Greta," I replied. "But fair. And first tastings extremely promising."

"Oh," Anna Greta exclaimed, as if astonished.

"I inherited a bit of a problem, quite honestly. My uncle Bob, who founded the business for love, put a lot of trust in his Maker and rather less in science."

Clare gave a hoot of laughter, but Anna Greta's jaw sagged in mystification. For some inexplicable reason, I forged on.

"He planted the wrong grapes in the wrong place, then he prayed for sun and got frost. Unfortunately, the life expectancy of a vine is twenty-five years. Which means we must either commit genocide or keep on fighting nature for another ten years."

I couldn't stop. Having derided my own efforts, I exulted in the success of my English and Welsh competitors and deplored the tax burdens imposed on them by an uncaring government. I painted a fulsome picture of England as one of the ancient wine-growing countries of the world, while Anna Greta gawped at me with her mouth open.

"Poor you," said Simon.

"So let's hear about this underaged girl you've shacked up with," Clare cut in recklessly; after two glasses of Romanian claret, she was capable of saying absolutely anything. "You're such an old dog, Tim. Simon's absolutely green with envy. Aren't you, Si?"

"Not in the least," said Simon.

"She's beautiful, she's musical, she can't cook, and I adore her," I proclaimed gaily, grateful to have an opportunity to extol Emma's virtues. "She's also warmhearted and brilliantly clever. What else do you want to know?"

The door opened, and Petronella stormed in, her blond hair brushed over her dressing gown, her blue gaze fixed on her mother in an expression of ethereal agony.

"You're making so much noise I can't sleep!" she protested, stamping her foot. "You're doing it on purpose."

Clare led Petronella back to bed. Anna Greta moodily cleared away the plates.

"Simon, I've got a bit of office shop I need to try out on you," I said. "Could we possibly have quarter of an hour alone?"

* * *

Simon washed while I dried. He wore a blue butcher's apron. There was no machine. We seemed to be washing up several meals at once.

"What do you want?" said Simon.