Our Game

I could think of nothing to add, and for a while neither apparently could she, for she remained on the threshold, tilting her head and screwing up her eyes as if to get me into focus, until I realised she was measuring me minutely, first my face, then my hands and shoes, and then my face again. and if what she saw in me was an uncomfortable mystery to both of us, what I saw in her was an intelligence and a humanity that were almost too powerful for the rumpled little frame that was obliged to accommodate them. And what I heard, faintly from upstairs, was the sound of a piano playing, whether live or recorded was anybody's guess but mine.

"Kindly follow me," she said in English, so I walked behind her up two flights of stone steps, and with each step the sounds of the piano grew a little louder, and I began to feel a sickness of recognition that was like a giddiness from altitude, so that the views of the Seine through the windows at each half-landing were like views of several different rivers at once, this one fast-flowing, another calm, and a third strict as a canal. Brown-skinned children watched me from a doorway. A young girl in the bright cottons of Arabia flitted past me on her way downstairs. We reached a high room, and here through the long window the rivers joined together and became the Seine again, with appropriate anglers in berets, and lovers arm in arm. In this room the music was much fainter, though my recognition of it was no less, for it was some obscure Scandinavian piece that Emma used for her finger exercises at Honeybrook before the Hopeless Causes took her over. And this morning she was still sticking on the same little phrases, replaying them over and over till she had them to her satisfaction. And I remembered how, where others might have tired of this constant repetition, I had always been deeply taken by it, empathising with her, trying almost physically to help her over every hurdle, however many shots it took, because that was basically how I had seen my role in her life: as her conductor and devoted audience, as the fellow who was ready to pick her up each time she fell.

"I am called Dee," the woman said, as if accepting that I was unlikely to offer much in the way of conversation. "I am Emma's friend. Well, you know that."

"Yes."

"And Emma is upstairs. You hear that."

"Yes."

Her accent was more German than French. But the lines in her face were of universal suffering. She had sat herself stiffly in a tall chair and was holding its arms like a dowager. I sat opposite her on a wooden stool. The floorboards were bare and ran directly from her feet to mine. There were no carpets, no pictures on the walls. In a room not far off, a telephone was ringing, but she paid it no attention and it stopped. But soon it began ringing again, as I suspected it rang most of the time, like a doctor's.

"And you are in love with her. And that is the reason why you are here."

A diminutive Asian girl in jeans had appeared in the doorway to listen to us. Dee said something sharp to her, and she pattered off.

"Yes," I said.

"To tell her that you love her? She knows it already.”

“To warn her."

"She is warned. She knows she is in danger. She is content. She is in love, though not with you. She is in danger, but his danger is greater than hers, therefore she is not in danger. It is all quite logical. Do you understand?"

"Of course."

"She has ceased to find excuses for loving him. You must not ask for them, please. It would be degrading for her to apologise any more. Please do not require it of her."

"I don't. I won't. That isn't why I came."

"Then we must ask again: why did you come? Please—it is honourable not to know! But if you should discover your motives when you see her, kindly consider her feelings first. Before she met you, she was a shipwreck. She had no centre, no stability. She could have been anyone. Like you, perhaps. All she wished was to climb into a shell and live the life inside it. But now it is over. You were the last of her shells. Now she is real. She is defined. She is one person. Or feels she is. If she is not, then at least the different people in her are going in the same direction. Thanks to Larry. Perhaps it is also thanks to you. You look sad. Is that because I mention Larry?"

"I didn't come for her thanks."

"Then for what? For an obligatory scene? I hope not. Perhaps one day you also will be real. Perhaps you and Emma were very similar people. Too similar. Each wished the other to be real. She is expecting you. She has been expecting you for some days now. Are you safe to go alone to her?"

"Why should I not be?"

"I was thinking of Emma's safety, Mr. Timothy, not yours."

She returned me to the staircase. The piano playing had stopped. The little girl was watching us from the shadows. "You gave her a lot of jewellery, I believe," Dee said. "I don't remember that it did her any harm."

"Is that why you gave it to her—to save her from harm?”

“I gave it to her because she was beautiful and I loved her."