One-On-One

by Philip Spires

  I did already know, of course, that they had seen one another almost every day throughout that summer. In fact, Christine had adopted the phrase ‘a bit bowling green’ whenever she wanted to indicate something was close to mal-practice or deception, likening it thus to her own truancy. But Cartwright’s specific reference to his ‘right’ hand baffled me, especially since I had noted early on that he was left-handed. How could he be so sure? I began to wonder whether this was a ruse, a deliberate diversion to be picked up by whoever was listening in to their interview, because surely Cartwright was aware that the whole process was being recorded. Could this have been his first real attempt at diversion, a deliberate and false detail?

  Now it may appear that I reacted immediately, and thus unprofessionally, out of pique more than judgment, but I place on record here that I feared for the mission and felt that remedial action was required as soon as possible. I took the required action and stand by my decision. In the event, Cartwright’s memory was proved to be perfect, both accurate and vivid. They had both lost limbs: we should never forget that. At the time both of them were not only wearing false limbs, but also uncomfortable temporary fittings, since the scarring on their stumps was still tender and in need of regular attention. It was a mere fact of physical necessity, so that they could keep their vulnerable wounds well apart. If Christine lay on her back, then Cartwright had to be on her right, so his left leg touched her right. His right hand and her left therefore became the sexual weapons of both choice and necessity.

  Now it may come as a surprise to readers of this account that all of this was complete news to me. Christine and I had read all the supplied papers. We had, both independently and together, researched and even conducted interviews with Cartwright’s family, acquaintances and colleagues - with almost anyone who agreed to talk to us. We had listened together to almost every word of briefing on his background and status delivered by our august and meticulous researchers. But also, for over thirty years Christine Gardiner had been my wife, and still I had not an inkling that there was more to know about their bowling green summer. And yes, she had married the Green. A joke, possibly.

  The reader of an account such as this perhaps expects me - none less than the author of the piece - to possess the knowledge, the detail, even the gossip on the subject under discussion. Sometimes, I am even expected to know what the person is thinking, when even the subject himself is rarely convinced of his own mind. Well, the truth is that human beings are simply not that easy to deconstruct. There are always parts that remain private, sometimes unknown, even to the individual concerned.

  And here I now am forced to admit that I panicked, and broke our operating rules by seeking to confirm the details above with my wife via direct email. I remain fully aware, as indeed I was at the time, that direct contact with an operative in the field is absolutely forbidden, except via official, encoded channels, and also I remain fully aware of why this restriction is necessary.

  But in this case I had visions of the entire project collapsing if Cartwright were to exploit the opportunities that this new revelation made available, if indeed it was a revelation at all. It might have been no more than a random outburst from him, a piece of nonsense designed simply to disrupt the interview. If so, it would have no further bearing on our plans. If, however, this was indeed a revelation of circumstances previously unknown to us, then we clearly had to rethink our tactics. I had to know, and I was not willing to wait the twenty-four hours it would have taken to make contact via encoded channels from the office.

  On reflection, of course, I see my folly, since Cartwright knew these details all the time and, if they were true, he had retained complete control over their possible exploitation. And of course, again if they were true, Christine was also fully aware of them - at least we hope she was! The people who did not know were ourselves, the rest of us involved. Christine knew, but her husband did not.

  I have decided not to include in this document the text of the email I sent that night, since this is an account of what Christine did, and not what I contributed, however wrongly. No doubt you all have access to my communications, so you may read it if you wish to examine its content. Christine’s reply, however, is relevant to this account. I sent my message just ten minutes after the interview broke down. Christine did not reply until mid-morning the following day.

  Tony: Got your email. Why you sent it only you know. There’ll be hell to pay. Yes, Tom Cartwright and I played around in that shed. Big deal. We were eighteen years old at the time. Life was new to us, and we were mutually convinced it was being denied us. Given our shared status as first cancerous and then cancerous amputees, no-one from the opposite sex had been near either of us in over two years. Not even a touch. Our peers feared the two of us more than they feared a dose of clap. No matter how polite they seemed, they were all scared shitless. They wouldn’t touch us with a barge pole. Of course we weren’t infectious, but try convincing fear and bigotry of that. But human contact was something Tom and I both wanted, something we could share. Sorry, we didn’t want it, we bloody well yearned it - we NEEDED it! So he gave me a few orgasms, and a lot of cuddles. So what? I gave him several of his own, to keep, if you like. It was my left hand, by the way. I never used my lips on him, if that’s what’s worrying you. His right, my left... how can we be so sure? Tony, for God’s sake, how many legs have you got? Might you have forgotten? Take a look at us. Tom and I have one each. The others went out with the trash forty-two years ago. Tom and I have two legs between us. And, at that time, Tom Cartwright and Christine Gardiner both had red, tender, scarred stumps that needed both care and attention, and certainly didn’t need knocks or bumps. We had one each, if I remember. So we had exactly two legs between us, literally, when we lay side by side on the floor of the bowling green hut, with our good legs in contact. That kept our tender stumps well clear of one another, and kept at bay the potentially disastrous mechanical entanglement of our temporary false limbs that, if effected, would have required us to do a three-legged race for the rest of the day. We couldn’t have risked any of that, Tony, could we? And that’s how I can be sure to this day which hand did what and to whom. There was no intercourse, just petting. It made us feel good. It made us feel wanted, if nothing else by one another. I never mentioned it before, because we were young, it was a single summer, and decades ago. It wasn’t and still isn’t relevant to what we are doing now, any more than your adolescent wanking is responsible for your current propensity to over-react. If you, or anyone else for that matter, thinks it may be, then I wonder whether your recent outings with a certain person in a flat in Camberwell, in fact most Tuesday afternoons over the last eighteen months, if I am not mistaken, might also have a bearing on the current project, since it might just call into question whether you and I can possibly continue to cooperate. You should not have sent that message to me. And I shouldn’t have replied. But by now the damage is done, isn’t it? I hope this message brings an end to it. We’ll see how things play out. Now get on with your job and shut up. Chris

  For the sake of a consistency we all now seem to have lost, I simply have to volunteer the background relating to Christine’s comments about a ‘flat in Camberwell’.

  The property in question is in Priory Grove and belongs to Elaine Winson-Prescott[1]. To my knowledge she has no direct involvement with the current project. She has never met Cartwright, nor my wife, of course. She does, however, work in the City for a brokerage. We met by chance. It began during one of Christine’s regular and extended trips into the field in search of ‘subjects’. Eighteen months ago Chris was making a mini-series on an athlete preparing for the Olympic games. He was in training, following a coaching and training regime based in the Middle East. There was something special about the regime, something apparently ground-breaking about the techniques used. Christine was there filming and interviewing. She had also arranged a couple of other activities on the side, hoping that somethin
g of interest might emerge. The primary idea was that when the athlete in question had completed the task of winning a medal at the games, she would inter-cut sequences from the games and its aftermath with material shot during the training period. In the event the entire project had to shelved and re-thought, because an injury put the athlete out of the games altogether.

  I was, however, left at home as usual. I was already preparing a dossier as part of our preliminary work on Cartwright. His phenomenal trading success had already attracted attention, not least from the tax authorities, who needed more information to prepare their own position. At the time, however, my work on the subject was no more than exploratory, and quite routine.

  During these periods on my own, I tend not to stay at home too much when I am not working. I find the emptiness rather lonely, a constant reminder that Christine is away. I like to mix as much as I can, even with anonymous crowds. I mainly go to the cinema and theatre, especially the latter. In fact, I’ve been seen in some places so many times over the years that I was once told by a box office employee that they suspected I was a theatre critic wanting to keep a low profile. I find it engaging to perpetuate this idea, and derive regular entertainment in their efforts to try and uncover the true identity of this clandestine reviewer, whose nom de plume is obviously a source of continued speculation. Let’s say that my face is now much known around theatre land. Perhaps we ought to have been more careful.

  It was at one performance on a dark winter night a year and a half ago that I met Elaine. Our interval drinks orders happened to be placed next to one another in the bar, our first contact being one of those smiled, insincere apologies offered to assert distance, as I discovered she was scrutinising the ticket next to the gin and tonic, which clearly displayed my number and not hers! In any case, her drink turned out to be a red wine. And so we began to discuss the first act. Details of the particular performance, date and time are still in my head: it was the modern-dress version of a Comedy Of Errors, and it was specifically the staging that interested the two of us. We discovered that we were both ‘traditionalists’, but that we could still appreciate the production’s time shift. I have put full details of time and place on file, and copies exist in my office diary. By the time the interval bell sounded we had already arranged to meet at the end for a drink to discuss the play as a whole which is precisely what we did. Stupidly, we stood outside the Lamb And Flag and Elaine got very cold. I took her home in a taxi and we slept together.

  We exchanged contact details, but I fully expected not to meet her again. But then she phoned a couple of days later, direct to my mobile while I was in a meeting, and I had to play-act a little to try and convince others present I was talking to my wife. I called her back and we arranged to meet at the South Bank again to see a new play at the National. We slept together again. The next time, we never actually bothered with the preamble of going to the theatre and, by the time Christine got back some three weeks later, my relationship with Elaine had begun to feel almost institutionalised. It seemed normal to establish a regular time and place so that we could keep unnecessary communication to a minimum. Her place was obviously the most convenient venue and somehow Tuesday afternoons seemed to work well for both of us. I knew she was ‘something in the City’, as we are wont to say, but I had no idea at that point that she worked for one of the companies that hosted several of Cartwright’s internet accounts. Neither, at the time, had I even the slightest suspicion that her interest in me might have something to do with this fact. As I stated earlier, at the time my work on Cartwright was merely preparatory.

  But I do admit to the oversight that followed. Some time later, perhaps six months after that initial meeting, when the Cartwright issue began to morph into the current One-On-One project, I carried out some rather cursory checks and thus discovered some rather stronger links between Elaine Winson-Prescott’s professional responsibilities and the content of the Cartwright case.

  Now this presented me with something of a dilemma. Did I come clean, divulge everything about my affair with her and risk the entire Cartwright project, as we were currently planning it? Or should I attempt a solution of my own? And should that solution involve finishing the relationship immediately, which might have alerted whoever was running her, or should I carry on seeing her and possibly exploit the opportunity to deliver the occasional diversion?

  I remember analysing our contact prior to that point, and concluding that I had not divulged anything substantive or even in the slightest measure useful to those whom she might represent. And from that moment, I was completely careful with my comments, if ever conversation slipped towards our professional lives, and away from the inevitable subject that usually detained us, which itself demanded few words. I can state categorically that at no point was she party to any of our discussions elsewhere and, as I have stated, certainly never met my wife. Christine’s reference to Elaine in her email was thus a purely personal jibe, and indicated no suspicion of professional shortcomings on my part. Of this I remain confident, though how Christine found out about Elaine does mystify me, since I thought I had been more careful this time. I hope this sets the record straight, but whatever the judgment on this issue, I must now return to the task in hand.

  After the interview broke down, there followed a period of prolonged hiatus on Cartwright’s island. He and Christine hardly communicated. He disappeared into his office, obviously in a complete sulk and Christine packed her gear away, before returning to her habitual balcony chair, where she fell asleep. Assuming that there would no activity for some time, I took the opportunity to have a couple of hours of rest.

  Christine woke up late the following morning, well over an hour after I had returned to my station. I had reviewed the intervening time to discover nothing, as expected, before she stirred, stiff and bitten to death by sand flies. The former wore off after a stretch or two, but she spent most of the following day scratching and pulling at the bloody wheals left by these minute carnivores. The rest of the previous day, after the debacle of the disintegrated interview, had proved a complete write-off. The two of them had not communicated again, had not eaten, and had merely slept.

  She brought her laptop to life immediately she woke up, performing nothing less than theatrical contortions as she bent arms, leg, body and neck to negotiate the dexterity demanded of her touch-pad mouse when combined with a desperate need to address simultaneous itches on the shoulder blade, ankle, upper thigh and hand. When she checked her email, she of course found my unsolicited message, her comment of “Shit bag” being quite audible to the sensitive microphones above the constant sound of lapping waves.

  As stated above, she immediately drafted a reply, a process that took only a few minutes, but then she paused and, as I now know, deleted what she had written without sending it. She then logged off and went inside the house, where she lay down on the cushions of the wide sofa and immediately slept. I think that the climate was starting to have its effect. A thirty Celsius minimum combined with permanent ninety-per-cent-plus humidity was taking its toll, even on my widely-travelled wife, whose habit in heat was always to head for air conditioning and do her level best to stay in it.

  Throughout her morning inactivity, she had not been aware that Cartwright had risen quietly at dawn and left, again taking the boat out without its engine running until he was well clear of the house. It is remarkable how quietly he managed to hop around his balcony. That morning even Christine’s fitful light sleep had suffered no interruption as he passed by within a metre of her. I have preserved the moment when he paused, naked, in front of her, to stare for a full minute before clambering down his pole ladder, shorts in hand. At the base, he tossed the shorts into the boat before dropping under the surface for his morning rinse. Then, with what looked like superhuman strength of the upper body, he raised himself with apparent ease from the water over the gunwale. This time, he cast off the boat by loosening the ropes at stern and
bow from their cleats on the boat, thus leaving them hanging from their balcony knots. For the fist time I had the impression that this was in fact his normal practice, meaning that the repeated climbing up and down, followed by rope casting and catching of that first morning was nothing less than a show, a diversion perhaps, a means of establishing and asserting Christine’s necessarily subordinate status while she remained his guest.

  I have run through that sequence of Cartwright’s naked confrontation of Christine’s sleeping frame many times. I have two angles on that balcony, from either corner, plus a part-shot from the very limit of the camera placed above to look out over the sea, a perspective so foreshortened that it presented in effect a giant, god-like head dominating Christine’s slumped pose. I later watched all three angles repeatedly, while Christine was asleep inside the house and Cartwright was away somewhere in the distance. I continued to rue the fact that none of us had considered placing a camera on his boat, as that minute of pose appeared and reappeared on my screen.

  From every angle, it had the feel of an old master painting, a scene frozen from myth, illustrating some long-forgotten story no longer told, the flatness of the early morning light washing the colour from the distance, but differently in each view. In the shot from Christine’s left, there was a dull grey sky and sea, setting the whole scene surreally afloat in a void. The other side bore the hint of a rising sun, so the grey was tinged pink here and there, violent sky-strokes contrasting with the darkness of the horizon beyond a wave-driven sea that offered only flat calm to the scene. From above, the even colour of the floor’s bamboo strips contradicted the obvious undulation of their surface that separated the two bodies. Cartwright’s giant head occupied the majority of the space, thus forming the transition between Christine’s placidity and the foaming waves as they broke gently beneath the house. His frame, erect, gently supported by flat palm against the pillar, was motionless atop a muscled left leg, the stump of the right curiously appearing both complete and agitated as he stared. Christine’s blonde hair, artificially coloured these days, but not yet in need of retouching, was bunched up into loops beside a tranquil face that had, unfortunately, an open mouth that imparted a sense of the tragic rather than poetic.