Our Kind of Traitor (8 page)

‘But Dima knew. You were his professor of fair play.’

*

‘So in the afternoon, instead of going to the beach, we walked into town to do the shopping,’ Gail resumed, speaking past Perry’s averted head to Yvonne while referring her story to Perry. ‘For the birthday boys, the obvious thing was a cricket set. That was
your
department. You enjoyed looking for a cricket set. You loved the sports shop. You loved the old man. You loved the photographs of great West Indian players. Learie Constantine? Who else was there?’

‘Martindale.’

‘And Sobers. Gary Sobers was there. You pointed him out to me.’

He nodded. Yes, Sobers.

‘And we loved the secrecy bit. Because of the children. Ambrose’s notion of having me jump out of the cake wasn’t so far off the mark, was it? And I did presents for the girls. With a bit of help from you. Scarves for the little ones, and a rather nice shell necklace for Natasha with alternating semi-precious stones.’ Done it. She had let Natasha back in, and got away with it. ‘You wanted to buy one for me too, but I wouldn’t let you.’

‘On what grounds, please Gail?’ – Yvonne, with her self-effacing, intelligent smile, looking for light relief.

‘Exclusivity. It was sweet of Perry, but I didn’t want to be paired off with Natasha,’ Gail replied, as much to Perry as to Yvonne. ‘And I’m sure Natasha wouldn’t have wanted to be paired off with
me
.
Thanks, it’s a lovely thought, but save it for another time, I told you. Right? And I mean
honestly
, try buying decent wrapping paper in St John’s, Antigua!’

She plunged on:

‘Then there was the business of smuggling us in, wasn’t there? Because we were the big surprise.
That
was going to be a blast too. We thought of going as Caribbean pirates – you did – but we decided it might be a bit over the top, specially with people still in mourning, even if we didn’t officially know they were. So we went as we were, plus a bit. Perry, you had your old blazer and the grey bags you’d travelled in. Your Brideshead look. Perry isn’t exactly what you’d call a fashion freak, but you did your best. And your swimming trunks, of course. And I put a cotton dress over my swimsuit plus a cardigan in case it got nippy because we knew that Three Chimneys had a private beach and there was a chance we might be expected to swim.’

Yvonne writing a meticulous memorandum. Who to? Luke, chin in hand, drinking in her every word, a little too deeply for Gail’s taste. Perry gloomily studying a patch of brickwork on the darkened wall. All of them giving her their undivided attention for her swansong.

*

When Ambrose told them to be on parade at the hotel entrance at six, Gail continued in a more measured tone, they assumed they were going to be spirited up to Three Chimneys in one of the people carriers with blackened windows, and let in through a side door. They assumed wrong.

Taking a back route to the car park as instructed, they found Ambrose waiting at the wheel of a 4x4. The plan, he explained in conspiratorial excitement, was to infiltrate the surprise guests by way of the old Nature Path that ran along the spine of the peninsula right up to the rear entrance of the house, where Mr Dima himself would be waiting for them.

She did her Ambrose voice again:

‘“Man, they got fairy lights up in that garden, they got a steel band,
a marquee, they got a shipment of the tenderest Kobe beef ever came out of a cow. I don’t know what they haven’t got up there. And Mr Dima, he has it all fixed and prepared down to a fine pin. He has packed off my Elspeth and that whole knockabout family of his to a major crab-racing event over the other side of St John’s, just so’s we can smuggle you in by the back door, and that’s how secret you folks are tonight!”’

If they had been looking for adventure, the Nature Path alone would have provided it. They must have been the first people to use it for simply years. A couple of times Perry actually had to beat a passage through the undergrowth:

‘Which of course he loved. Actually, he should have been a peasant, shouldn’t you? Then we came out in this long green tunnel with Dima standing at the end of it looking like a happy Minotaur. If there is such a thing.’

Perry’s bony index finger jerked upward in admonition:

‘Which was our first sighting of Dima
alone
,’ he warned gravely. ‘No bodyguards, no family. No children. No one to watch over us. Or none visible. We were a three, standing at the edge of a wood. I think we were both very much aware of that. The sudden exclusivity.’

But whatever significance Perry attached to this remark was lost in the insistent rush of Gail’s narrative:

‘He
hugged
us, Yvonne!
Really
hugged us. First Perry, then shoved him aside, then me, then Perry again. Not sexy hugs. Great big family hugs. As if he hadn’t seen us for ages. Or wasn’t going to see us again.’

‘Or else he was desperate,’ Perry suggested, on the same earnest, reflective note. ‘A bit of that got through to me. Maybe not to you. What we meant to him at that moment. How important we were.’

‘He really
loved
us,’ Gail swept on determinedly. ‘He stood there, declaring his love. Tamara loved us too, he was positive. She just found it difficult to say because she was a bit crazy since her problem. No explanation of what the problem might have been, and who were we to ask? Natasha loved us, but she doesn’t say anything to anyone these days, she just reads books. The whole family loved the English
for our humanity and fair play. Except he didn’t say
humanity
, what did he say?’

‘Heart.’

‘We’re standing there at the end of the tunnel, having this great hug-fest, and he’s orating all this stuff about our hearts. I mean, how much love can you profess to somebody you’ve only ever exchanged six words with?’

‘Perry?’ Luke prompted.

‘I thought he was
heroic
,’ Perry replied, his long hand now flying to his brow to form a classic gesture of worry. ‘I just didn’t know why. Didn’t I put that in our document somewhere?
Heroic?
I thought he was’ – with a shrug dismissing his own feelings as valueless – ‘I thought
dignity under fire
. I just didn’t know who was firing at him. Or why. I didn’t know anything, except –’

‘You were on the rock face with him,’ Gail suggested, not unkindly.

‘Yes. I was. And he was in a bad place. He
needed
us.’

‘
You
,’ she corrected him.

‘All right. Me. That’s all I’m trying to say.’

‘Then
you
tell it.’

*

‘He walked us out of the tunnel, round to what we realized was going to be the back of the house,’ Perry began, and then broke off. ‘I take it that you do want an
exact description
of the place?’ he demanded sternly of Yvonne.

‘We do indeed, Perry,’ Yvonne replied, equally efficiently. ‘Every last dreary detail, please,
if
you don’t mind.’ And went back to her meticulous note-taking.

‘From where we’d emerged from the woods, there’s an old bit of service track covered in some sort of red cinder, probably made by the original builders as an access road. We had to pick our way uphill over the potholes.’

‘Carting our presents,’ Gail blurted from the wings. ‘You with your cricket set, me with the gift-wrapped presents for the kids in the fanciest bag I could find, which isn’t saying a lot.’

Is anybody listening out there? she wondered. Not to me. Perry is the horse’s mouth. I’m its arse.

‘The house as we approached it from the back was a pile of old bones,’ he continued. ‘We’d been warned not to expect a palace, we knew the house was up for demolition. But we hadn’t expected a wreck.’ The outward-bound Oxford don had turned field reporter: ‘There was a tumbledown brick building with barred windows, I deduced the old slave quarters. There was a high perimeter whitewashed wall, about twelve foot high and capped with razor wire, which was new and vile. There were white security lights stuck up on pylons round it like a football stadium, blazing down on whoever passed. We’d seen the glow from the balcony of our cabin. Fairy lights rigged between them, presumably in preparation for the night’s birthday festivities. Security cameras, but pointed away from us because we were the wrong side of them. I assume that was the intention. A shining new aerial dish, twenty foot high, directed northish, as far as I could read it on our way back. Pointed at Miami. Or Houston perhaps. Anyone’s guess.’ He thought about this. ‘Well, not yours, obviously. You people are supposed to know that stuff.’

Is this a challenge or a joke? It’s neither. It’s Perry showing them how brilliant he is at doing their job, in case they haven’t noticed. It’s Perry the climber of north-facing overhangs, telling them he never forgets a route. It’s the Perry who can’t resist a challenge provided the odds are stacked against him.

‘Then downhill again through more forest to a bit of grass meadow with the headland sticking up at the end of it. In reality, the house hasn’t
got
a back. Or it’s
all
back, take your choice. It’s a pseudo-Elizabethan hotchpotch of a bungalow built out of clapboard and asbestos, facing three ways. Grey stucco walls. Poky leaded windows. Plywood pretending to be half-timber and a rear porch with a lantern dangling in it. Are you with me, Gail?’

Would I be here if I wasn’t?
‘You’re doing fine,’ she said. Which wasn’t quite what he’d asked.

‘Add-on bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and offices with front
doors on them, suggesting that the place had been some sort of commune or settlement at one time. So I mean, overall a shambles. It wasn’t Dima’s fault. We knew that, thanks to Mark. The Dimas had never lived there till now. Never touched it apart from a crash job on the security. The idea didn’t bother us. To the contrary. It had a much-needed touch of reality about it.’

The ever-inquisitive Dr Yvonne is peering up from her medical notes. ‘But were there no
chimneys
after all that, Perry?’

‘Two attached to the remnants of a sugar mill on the western edge of the peninsula, the third at the edge of the woods. I thought I put that in our document as well.’

Our
bloody document? How many times have you said that now?
Our
document that
you
wrote and
I
haven’t been allowed to see, but
they
have? It’s
your
bloody document! It’s
their
bloody document!
Her cheeks were scorching, and she hoped he’d noticed.

‘Then as we started down towards the house, about twenty metres from it, I suppose, Dima slowed us down,’ Perry was saying, his voice gathering intensity. ‘With his hands.
Slow down
.’

‘And would it be here also that he put his finger to his lips in a gesture of complicity?’ Yvonne asked, popping her head up at him while she wrote.

‘
Yes it was!
’ Gail leaped in. ‘
Exactly
here.
Huge
complicity. First slow down, then shut up. We assumed the finger to the lips was all part of surprising the children, so we played along with it. Ambrose had said they’d been packed off to the crab races, so it seemed a bit odd they were still in the house. But we just assumed something had changed and they hadn’t gone after all. Or I did.’

‘Thank you, Gail.’

For what, for Christ’s sake? For upstaging Perry? Don’t mention it, Yvonne, it’s a pleasure.
She raced on:

‘Dima had us on tiptoe by now. Literally holding our breath. We didn’t
doubt
him – I think it’s a point to make. We were
obeying
him, which isn’t like either of us, but we were. He led us to a door, a house door, but a side one. It wasn’t locked, he just pushed it and went in ahead, then immediately swung round, with one hand up
in the air and the other one to his lips like’ –
like Daddy playing Boots in a Christmas pantomime, but sober
, she was going to say, but didn’t – ‘well, and this really intense stare,
urging
silence on us. Right, Perry? Your turn.’

‘Then, when he knew he had us, he beckoned us to follow. I went first.’ Perry’s tone by contrast minimal in deliberate counterpoint to hers – his voice for when he’s truly excited and pretending he isn’t. ‘We crept into an empty hall. Well,
hall
! It was about ten by twelve feet, with a cracked, west-facing window with diamond panes made out of masking tape and the evening sun pouring through them. Dima still had his finger to his lips. I stepped inside and he grabbed hold of my arm, the way he’d grabbed it on the court. Strength in a league of its own. I couldn’t have competed with it.’

‘Did you think you
might have
to compete with it?’ Luke inquired, with male sympathy.

‘I didn’t know what to think. I was worried about Gail and my concern was to get myself between them. For a few seconds, only.’

‘And long enough for you to realize it wasn’t a children’s game any more,’ Yvonne suggested.

‘Well, it was beginning to dawn,’ Perry confessed, and paused, his voice drowned out by the wail of a passing ambulance in the street above them. ‘You have to understand the amount of unexpected
din
inside the place,’ he insisted, as if the one sound had set off the other. ‘We were only in this tiny hall, but we could hear the wind bumping the whole rickety house around. And the light was – well,
phantasmagoric
, to use a word my students love. It was coming at us in layers through the west window. You had this powdery light from the low cloud rolling in from the sea, and then a layer of brilliant sunlight riding in over the top of it. And pitch-black shadows where it didn’t reach.’

‘And cold,’ Gail complained, hugging herself theatrically. ‘Like only empty houses are. And that chilly graveyard smell they have. But all
I
was thinking was: where are the girls? Why no sight or sound of them? Why no sound of
anybody
or
anything
except the wind? And if nobody’s around,
who were we doing all this secrecy stuff for? Who were we fooling except ourselves? And Perry, you were thinking the same, weren’t you, you told me so afterwards.’