Our Game by John le Carré Read Free Book Online Page B

tonight is not one day old but six, and there is a superior glow about him that is more than drink: some sheen, some sparkle of distant places. I was right, I think: he has been on one of his heroic voyages, and now he's going to boast about it.
    "Bad back?" he is saying. "Emm? Bollocks. Can't have a bad back, not tonight, not Emm!"
    He's right.
    Already with Larry's arrival Emma has undergone a magical cure. At midnight she is about to begin her day again, as if she has never had a backache in her life. Chasing round my dressing room as I run Larry's bath—rooting out fresh socks for him, slacks, shirt, a pullover, and a pair of bedroom slippers to replace his dreadful buckskin boots—I listen to her scamper back and forth across her bedroom in joyous indecision. My designer jeans or my long fireside skirt that Tim bought me for my birthday? Her cupboard door shrieks; the skirt has it. My high white blouse or the low black? High white; Tim doesn't like me tarty. And with the high white I can wear the intaglio necklace that Tim insisted on giving me for Christmas.
    We dance.
    Dancing embarrasses me, but Emma, if she remembers this, chooses to disregard it. Larry is a natural: now a stately Colonial British fox-trotter, now a crazy Cossack or whatever he thinks he is, hands on hips, strutting round her in imperious rings, slapping the polished wood floor with my bedroom slippers. We sing, though I am no singer and in church have long learned to mouth the hymns rather than incant them. First we stand in a tight triangle, listening to the clock strike twelve. Then we link arms, one soft white arm apiece, and belt out "Auld Lang Syne" while Larry camps a Winchester choirboy's descant and the intaglios glint and bob at Emma's throat. And though her eyes and smiles are for me, I do not need to take lessons in the school of love to know that every contour and inlet of her body, from the pitch of her dark head to the chaste arrangement of her skirt, is referred to him. And when at half past three it is our second bedtime of the night, and Larry is flopped in the wing chair, dead bored again and watching us, and I stand behind her and work her shoulders for her, I know it is his hands, not mine, that she is feeling on her body.
    "So anyway, you've been on one of your trips," I say to him next morning, finding him in the kitchen ahead of me, making himself tea and baked beans on toast. He has not slept. All through the small hours I have listened to him prowling my study, rummaging among my books, pulling open drawers, stretching out, getting up again. All through the night I have endured the rank stink of his beastly Russian cigarettes: Prima for when he wants to feel like a cloth-cap intellectual; Belomorkanal when he's needing a little soothing lung cancer, he likes to say.
    "So anyway, yes, I have," he agrees at last. For he has been untypically reticent about his absence, reviving in me the hope that he has found a woman of his own.
    "Middle East?" I suggest.
    "Not really."
    "Asia?"
    "Not really. Strictly European, in fact. Bulwark of European civilisation."
    I don't know whether he is trying to shut me up or provoke me into trying harder, but either way I deny him the pleasure. I am not his keeper anymore. Resettled joes though when did Larry ever settle in the first place?—are the responsibility of Welfare Section, unless other arrangements are made in writing.
    "Anyway, it was somewhere nice and pagan," I suggest, about to turn to other subjects.
    "Oh, it was nice and pagan, all right. For the full Christmas experience, try tasteful Grozny in December. Pitch dark, stinks of oil, dogs are all drunk, teenagers wear gold and carry Kalashnikovs."
    I stare at him. "Grozny in Russia?"
    "Chechenia, actually. North Caucasus. It's gone independent. Unilaterally. Moscow's a bit miffed."
    "How did you get there?"
    "Thumbed a lift. Flew to Ankara. Flew to Baku. Sneaked up the coast a bit. Turned left. Piece of cake."
    "What were you