Our kind of traitor

12

Settling at Perry's side in the twelfth row of the western stand of the Roland Garros Stadium, Gail stares incredulously at the band of Napoleon's Garde Republicaine in their brass helmets, red cockades, skin-tight white breeches and thigh-length boots as they roll out their kettledrums and give their bugles a final blow before their conductor mounts his wooden rostrum, suspends his white-gloved hands above his head, spreads his fingers and flutters them like a dress designer. Perry is talking to her but has to repeat himself. She turns her head to him, then leans it on his shoulder to calm herself, because she's trembling. And so in his own way is Perry, because she can hear the pulse of his body – boom boom.

'Is this the Men's Singles Finals or the Battle of Borodino?' he shouts gaily, pointing at Napoleon's troops. She makes him say it again, lets out a hoot of laughter and gives his hand a squeeze to bring them both down to earth.

'It's all right!' she yells into his ear. 'You did fine! You were a star! Super seats too! Well done!'

'You too! Dima looked great.'

'Great. But the children are already in Berne!'

'What?'

'Tamara and the little girls are already in Berne! Natasha too! I'd have thought they'd all be together!'

'Me too.'

But his disappointment is of a lesser order than hers.

Napoleon's band is very loud. Whole regiments could march to it and never return.

'He's very keen to play tennis with you again, poor man!' Doolittle shouts.

'I've noticed!' Big nods and smiles from Milton.

'Have you got time tomorrow?'

'Absolutely not. Too many dates,' Milton replies, with an adamant shake of his head.

'That's what I feared. Tricky.'

'Very,' Milton agrees.

Are they just being children, or has the fear of God crept into them? Carrying his hand to her lips, Gail kisses it then keeps it against her cheek because, quite unconsciously, he has moved her nearly to tears:

Of all the days in his life that he should be free to enjoy, and isn't! To watch Federer in the Final of the French Open is for Perry like watching Nijinsky in L'Apres-midi d'un Faune! How many Perry-lectures has she not happily listened to, curled up with him in front of the television set in Primrose Hill, on the subject of Federer, the perfected athlete Perry would love to be? – Federer as formed man, Federer the runner as dancer, shortening and lengthening his stride to tame the flying ball into providing him with the tiny, hanging extra split second that he needs to find the pace and angle – the steadiness of his upper body whether it's moving backwards, forwards, sideways – his supernatural powers of anticipation that aren't supernatural at all, Gail, but the summit of eye-body-brain coordination.

'I really want you to enjoy today!' she shouts into his ear like a final message. 'Just put everything else out of your mind. I love you: I said I love you, idiot!'

*

She conducts an innocent survey of the spectators next to them. Whose are they? Dima's? Dima's enemies? Hector's? We're going in barefoot.

To her left, an iron-jawed blonde woman with a Swiss national cross on her paper hat and another on her ample blouse.

To her right, a middle-aged pessimist in a rainproof hat and cape, sheltering from the rain everybody else is pretending not to notice.

In the row behind them, a Frenchwoman leads her children in a lusty singing of 'La Marseillaise', perhaps under the mistaken impression that Federer is French.

With the same insouciance Gail scans the crowd on the open terraces opposite them.

'See anyone special?' Perry yells into her ear.

'Not really. I thought Barry might be here.'

'Barry?'

'One of our silks!'

She is talking nonsense. There is a silk called Barry in her Chambers but he loathes tennis and loathes the French. She's hungry. Not only did they leave their coffees behind in the Rodin Museum. They actually forgot lunch. The realization prompts memories of a Beryl Bainbridge novel in which the hostess of a difficult dinner party forgets where she has put the pudding. She shouts to Perry, needing to share the joke:

'How long is it since you and I actually lost the lunch?'

But for once Perry doesn't get the literary reference. He's staring at a row of picture windows halfway up the stands on the other side of the court. White tablecloths and hovering waiters are discernible through the smoked glass, and he's wondering which window belongs to Dima's hospitality box. She feels the pressure of Dima's arms round her again, and his crotch pressing against her thigh with childlike unawareness. Were the fumes of vodka last night's, or this morning's? She asks Perry.

'He was just getting himself up to par,' Perry replies.

'What?'

'Par!'

*

Napoleon's troops have fled the battlefield. A prickly quiet descends. An overhead camera glides on cables across an ugly black sky. Natasha. Is she or isn't she? Why hasn't she answered my text? Does Tamara know? Is that why she's whisked her back to Berne? No. Natasha takes her own decisions. Natasha is not Tamara's child. And Tamara, God knows, is nobody's idea of a mother. Text Natasha? Just bumped into yr Dad. Watching Federer. RU pregnant? xox, Gail

Don't.

The stadium is erupting. First Robin Soderling, then Roger Federer looking as becomingly modest and self-assured as only God can. Perry is craning forward, lips pressed tensely together. He's in the presence.

Warm-up time. Federer mis-hits a couple of backhands; Soderling's forehand returns are a little too waspish for a friendly exchange. Federer practises a couple of serves, alone. Soderling does the same, alone. Practice over. Their jackets fall off them like sheaths from swords. In the pale blue corner, Federer, with a flash of red inside his collar and a matching red tick on his headband. In the white corner, Soderling, with phosphorescent yellow flashes on his sleeves and shorts.

Perry's gaze strays back to the smoked windows, so Gail's does too. Is that a cream-coloured blazer she sees with a gold anchor on the pocket, floating in the brown mist behind the glass? If ever there was a man not to get into the back of a taxi with, it's Signor Emilio dell Oro, she wants to tell Perry.

But quiet: the match has begun and to the joy of the crowd, but too suddenly for Gail, Federer has broken Soderling's serve and won his own. Now it's Soderling to serve again. A pretty blonde ballgirl with a ponytail hands him a ball, drops a bob, and canters off again. The linesman howls as if he's been stung. The rain's coming on again. Soderling has double-faulted; Federer's triumphal march to victory has begun. Perry's face is lit with simple awe and Gail discovers she is loving him all over again from scratch: his unaffected courage, his determination to do the right thing even if it's wrong, his need to be loyal and his refusal to be sorry for himself. She's his sister, friend, protector.

A similar feeling must have overtaken Perry, for he grasps her hand and keeps it. Soderling is going for the French Open. Federer is going for history, and Perry is going with him. Federer has won the first set 6-1. It took him just under half an hour.

*

The manners of the French crowd are truly beautiful, Gail decides. Federer is their hero as well as Perry's. But they are meticulous in awarding praise to Soderling wherever praise is due. And Soderling is grateful, and shows it. He's taking risks, which means he is also forcing errors and Federer has just committed one. To make up for it he delivers a lethal drop shot from ten feet behind the baseline.

When Perry watches great tennis, he enters a higher, purer register. After a couple of strokes he can tell you where a rally is heading and who's controlling it. Gail isn't like that. She's a ground-shot girl: wallop and see what happens, is her motto. At the level she plays, it works a treat.

But suddenly Perry isn't watching the game any more. He isn't watching the smoked windows either. He has leaped to his feet and barged in front of her, apparently to shield her, and he's yelling: 'What the hell!' with no hope of an answer.

Rising with him, which isn't easy because now everyone is standing too and yelling 'what the hell' in French, Swiss German, English or whatever language comes naturally to them, her first expectation is that she is about to see a brace of dead pheasant at Roger Federer's feet: a left and a right. This is because she confuses the clatter of everybody leaping up with the din of panicked birds clambering into the air like out-of-date aeroplanes, to be shot down by her brother and his rich friends. Her second equally wild thought is that it is Dima who has been shot, probably by Niki, and tossed out of the smoked-glass windows.

But the spindly man who has appeared like a ragged red bird at Federer's end of the tennis court is not Dima, and he is anything but dead. He wears the red hat favoured by Madame Guillotine and long, blood-red socks. He has a blood-red robe draped over his shoulders and he's standing chatting to Federer just behind the baseline that Federer has been serving from.

Federer is a bit perplexed about what to say – they clearly haven't met before – but he preserves his on-court nice manners, although he looks a tad irritated in a grouchy, Swiss sort of way that reminds us that his celebrated armour has its chinks. After all, he's here to make history, not waste the time of day with a spindly man in a red dress who's burst on to the court and introduced himself.

But whatever has passed between them is over, and the man in the red dress is scampering for the net, skirts and elbows flying. A bunch of tardy, black-suited gentlemen are in comic pursuit, and the crowd isn't uttering a word any more: it's a sporting crowd, and this is sport, if not of a high order. The man in the red dress vaults the net, but not cleanly: a bit of net-cord there. The dress is no longer a dress. It never was. It's a flag. Two more black-suits have appeared on the other side of the net. The flag is the flag of Spain – L'Espagne – but that's only according to the woman who sang 'La Marseillaise', and her opinion is contested by a hoarse-voiced man several rows up from her who insists it belongs to le Club Football de Barcelona.

A black-suit has finally brought the man with the flag down with a rugger tackle. Two more pounce on him and drag him into the darkness of a tunnel. Gail is staring into Perry's face, which is paler than she has ever seen it before.

'Christ that was close,' she whispers.

Close to what? What does she mean? Perry agrees. Yes, close.

*

God does not sweat. Federer's pale blue shirt is unstained except for a single skid-mark between the shoulder blades. His movements seem a trifle less fluid, but whether that's the rain or the clotting clay or the nervous impact of the flag-man is anybody's guess. The sun has gone in, umbrellas are opening round the court, somehow it's 3-4 in the second set, Soderling is rallying and Federer looks a bit depressed. He just wants to make history and go home to his beloved Switzerland. And, oh dear, it's a tie-break – except it hardly is, because Federer's first serves are flying in one after the other, the way Perry's do sometimes, but twice as fast. It's the third set and Federer has broken Soderling's serve, he's back in perfect rhythm and the flag-man has lost after all.

Is Federer weeping even before he's won?

Never mind. He's won now. It's as simple and uneventful as that. Federer has won and he can weep his heart out, and Perry too is blinking away a manly tear. His idol has made the history that he came to make, and the crowd is on its feet for the history-maker, and Niki the baby-faced bodyguard is edging his way towards them along the row of happy people; the handclapping has become a coordinated drumbeat.

'I'm the guy drove you back to your hotel in Antigua, remember?' he says, not quite smiling.

'Hello, Niki,' Perry says.

'Enjoy the match?'

'Very much,' says Perry.

'Pretty good, eh? Federer?'

'Superb.'

'You wanna come visit Dima?'

Perry looks doubtfully at Gail: your turn.

'We're a bit pressed for time, actually, Niki. We've just got so many people in Paris who need to see us -'

'You know something, Gail?' Niki inquires sadly. 'You don't come have a drink with Dima, I think he'll cut my balls off.'

Gail lets Perry hear this instead of her:

'Up to you,' says Perry, still to Gail.

'Well how about just one drink?' Gail suggests, doing reluctant surrender.

Niki shoos them ahead and follows, which she supposes is what bodyguards learn to do. But Perry and Gail are not planning to run away. In the main concourse, Swiss alphorns are booming out a heart-rending dirge to a swarm of umbrellas. With Niki leading from the back, they climb a bare stone staircase and enter a jazzy corridor with each door painted a different colour, like the lockers in Gail's school gymnasium, except that instead of girls' names they bear the names of corporations: blue door for MEYER-AMBROSINI GMBH, pink for SEGURA-HELLENIKA amp; CIE, yellow for EROS VACANCIA PLC. And crimson for FIRST ARENA CYPRUS, which is where Niki pops open the cover of a black box mounted on the doorpost, and taps a number into it, and waits for the door to be opened from the inside by friendly hands.

*

After the orgy: that was Gail's irreverent impression as she stepped into the long, low hospitality box with its sloped glass wall, and the red clay court so near and bright the other side that, if dell Oro would only get out of the way, she could reach her hand through and touch it.

A dozen tables were ranged before her with four or six diners apiece. In total disregard of the stadium's rules, the men had lit up their post-coital cigarettes and were reflecting on their prowess or lack of it, and a few of them were looking her over, wondering if she'd have been a better lay. And the pretty girls with them, who weren't quite so pretty after the amount they'd been made to drink – well, they'd faked it, probably. In their line of work, that was what you did.

The table nearest to her was the largest, but also the youngest, and it was raised above the others to give Dima's Armani kids more status than the humbler tables round it – a fact acknowledged by dell Oro as he shuffled Gail and Perry forward for the pleasure of its seven dull-faced, hard-eyed, hard-bodied managers with their bottles and girls and forbidden cigarettes.

'Professor. Gail. Say hello, please, to our hosts, the gentlemen of the board and their ladies,' dell Oro is proposing with courtly charm, and repeats the suggestion in Russian.

From along the table a few sullen nods and hellos. The girls smile their air-hostess smiles.

'You! My friend!'

Who's yelling? Who to? It's the thick-necked one with the crew-cut and a cigar, and he's yelling at Perry.

'You are Professor?'

'That's what Dima calls me, yes.'

'You like this game today?'

'Very much. A great match. I felt privileged.'

'You play good too, huh? Better than Federer!' the thick-necked one yells, parading his English.

'Well, not quite.'

'Have a nice day. OK? Enjoy!'

Dell Oro shoos them on down the aisle. On the other side of the sloped glass wall, Swedish dignitaries in straw hats and blue hatbands are making their way down the rainswept steps from the Presidential enclosure to brave the closing ceremony. Perry has taken hold of Gail's hand. It takes a bit of barging to follow Emilio dell Oro between the tables, squeeze past heads and say 'so sorry, whoops, hello there, yes wonderful game!' to a succession of mostly male faces, now Arab, now Indian, now all white again.

Now it's a table of Brit males of the chattering classes who need to bounce up, all at once: 'I'm Bunny, how simply lovely you are' – 'I'm Giles, hello indeed! – you lucky Professor!' – all too much to take in, actually, but a girl does her best.

Now it's two men in Swiss paper hats, one fat and content, the other skinny, needing to shake hands: Peter and the Wolf, she thinks absurdly, but the memory sticks.

'Spotted him yet?' Gail calls to Perry – and in the same moment spots him for herself: Dima, hunched at the furthest end of the room, brooding all alone at a table for four, with a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka in front of him; and looming behind him a cadaverous philosopher, with long wrists and high cheekbones, ostensibly guarding the entrance to the kitchen. Emilio dell Oro is murmuring in her ear as if he has known her all his life:

'Our friend Dima is actually a bit depressed, Gail. You know about the tragedy, of course, the double funeral in Moscow – his dear friends slaughtered by maniacs – there has been a price. You will see.'

She did indeed see. And wondered how much of what she saw was real: a Dima not smiling and barely welcoming, a Dima sunk in vodka-stoked melancholy, not bothering to get up as they approach, but glowering at them from the corner to which he has been relegated with his two minders. For now blond Niki has mounted guard at the cadaverous philosopher's side, and there is something chilling in the way the two men ignore one another, while bestowing their attention on their prisoner.

*

'You come sit here, Professor! Don't trust that goddam Emilio! Gail. I love you. Siddown. Garcon! Champagne. Kobe beef. Ici.'

Outside on the court, Napoleon's Republican Guard are back at their post. Federer and Soderling are mounting a saluting stand, attended by Andre Agassi in a city suit.

'You talk to the Armani kids at the table up there?' Dima demanded sulkily. 'You wanna meet some goddam bankers, lawyers, accountants? All the guys that fuck up the world? French we got, German, Swiss.' He lifted his head and shouted down the room: 'Hey everybody, say hello to the Professor! This guy pussy me at tennis! She's Gail. He gonna marry this girl. He don't marry her, she marry Roger Federer. That right, Gail?'

'I think I'll just settle for Perry,' said Gail.

Was anybody listening out there? Certainly not the hard-eyed young men at the big table and their girls, who demonstratively huddled closer together as Dima's voice rose. At the tables nearer at hand too, indifference prevailed.

'English too, we got! Fair-play guys. Hey, Bunny! Aubrey! Bunny, come over here! Bunny!' No response. 'Know what Bunny means? Rabbit. Fuck him.'

Turning brightly to share the fun, Gail was in time to identify a chubby, bearded gentleman with side-whiskers, and if his nickname wasn't Bunny it ought to be. But for an Aubrey she looked in vain, unless he was the tall, balding, intelligent-looking man with rimless spectacles and a stoop who was heading briskly down the aisle towards the door with his raincoat over his arm, like a man who suddenly remembers he has a train to catch.

Sleek Emilio dell Oro with his gorgeous silver-grey hair had taken the spare seat at Dima's other side. Was his hair real or a piece? she wondered. They make them so well these days.

*

Dima is proposing tennis tomorrow. Perry is making his excuses, pleading with Dima like an old friend, which is what he has somehow become in the three weeks since they have seen him.

'Dima, I truly don't see how I can,' Perry protests. 'We've got a flock of people in town we're pledged to see. I've no kit. And I've promised Gail faithfully this time round that we'll take in the Monet water lilies. Truly.'

Dima takes a pull of vodka, wipes his mouth. 'We play,' he says, stating a proven fact. 'Club des Rois. Tomorrow twelve o'clock. I book already. Get a fucking massage after.'

'A massage in the rain, Dima?' Gail asks facetiously. 'Don't tell me you've discovered a new vice.'

Dima ignores her:

'I gotta meeting at a fucking bank, nine o'clock, sign a bunch fucking papers for the Armani kids. Twelve o'clock I get my re-match, hear me? You gonna chicken?' Perry starts to protest again. Dima overrides him. 'Number 6 court. The best. Play an hour, get a massage, lunch after. I pay.'

Suavely interposing himself at last, dell Oro opts for distraction:

'So where are you staying in Paris, if I may inquire, Professor? The Ritz? I do hope not. They have marvellous niche hotels here, if one knows where to look. If I'd known, I could have named you half a dozen.'

If they ask you, don't screw around, tell them straight out, Hector had said. It's an innocent question, it gets an innocent answer. Perry had evidently taken the advice to heart, for he was already laughing:

'A place so lousy you wouldn't believe,' he exclaimed.

But Emilio did believe, and liked the name so much that he wrote it down in a crocodile notebook that nestled in the royal blue lining of his crested cream blazer. And having done so, addressed Dima with the full force of his persuasive charm:

'If it's tennis tomorrow that you're proposing, Dima, I think Gail is quite right. You have completely forgotten the rain. Not even our friend the Professor here can give you satisfaction in a downpour. The forecasts for tomorrow were even worse than for today.'

'Don't fuck with me!'

*

Dima had smashed his fist on the table so hard that glasses went skittling across it, and a bottle of red burgundy tried to pour itself on to the carpet until Perry deftly fielded it and set it upright. All along the length of the sloped glass wall it was as if everybody had gone deaf from shell-shock.

Perry's gentle plea restored a semblance of calm:

'Dima, give me a break. I haven't even got a racquet with me, for pity's sake.'

'Dell Oro got twenty goddam racquets.'

'Thirty,' dell Oro corrected him icily.

'OK!'

OK what? OK Dima will smash the table again? His sweated face is rigid, the jaw rammed forward as he climbs unsteadily to his feet, tilts his upper body backwards, grabs Perry's wrist, and hauls him to his feet beside him.

'OK, everybody!' he yells. 'The Professor and me, tomorrow, we're gonna play a re-match and I'm gonna beat the shit outta him. Twelve o'clock, Club des Rois. Anyone wanna come watch, bring a goddam umbrella, get lunch after. Winner gonna pay. That's Dima. Hear me?'

Some hear him. One or two even smile, and a couple clap. From the Top Table at first nothing, then a single low comment in Russian, followed by unfriendly laughter.

Gail and Perry look at each other, smile, shrug. In the face of such an irresistible force, and at such an embarrassing moment, how can they say no? Anticipating their surrender, dell Oro seeks to forestall it:

'Dima. I think you are being a little hard on your friends. Maybe fix a game for later in the year, OK?'

But he's too late, and Gail and Perry are too merciful.

'Honestly, Emilio,' says Gail. 'If Dima's dying to play and Perry's willing, why don't we let the boys have their fun? I'm game, if you are. Darling?'

The darlings are new, more for Milton and Doolittle than themselves.

'OK then. But on one condition' – dell Oro again, fighting for the upper hand now – 'tonight, you come to my party. I have a superb house in Neuilly, you will love it. Dima loves it, he is our house guest. We have our honoured colleagues from Moscow with us. My wife at this very moment, poor woman, is supervising the preparations. How about I send a car to your hotel at eight o'clock? Please dress exactly how you like. We are very informal people.'

But dell Oro's invitation has already fallen on dead ground. Perry is laughing – saying it really is completely impossible, Emilio. Gail is protesting that her Paris friends would never forgive her, and no, she can't possibly bring them too, they're having their own party and Gail and Perry are the guests of honour.

They settle instead for Emilio's car to pick them up at their hotel at eleven o'clock tomorrow for tennis in the rain, and if looks could kill, dell Oro's would be killing Dima, but according to Hector he won't be able to do that till after Berne.

*

'You two make absolutely stunning casting,' Hector cried. 'Don't they, Luke? Gail, with your lovely intuition. You, Perry, with your fucking marvellous Brain-of-Britain. Not that Gail's exactly thick either. Thanks hugely for coming this far. For being so plucky in the lion's den. Do I sound like a scoutmaster?'

'I'll say you do,' said Perry, stretched out luxuriously on a chaise longue beneath the great arched window overlooking the Seine.

'Good,' said Hector complacently to jolly laughter.

Only Gail, seated on a stool at Perry's head, and running her hand meditatively through his hair, seemed a little distant from the celebration.

It was after supper on the Ile St-Louis. The splendid apartment on the top floor of the ancient fortress belonged to Luke's artistic aunt. Her work, which she had never stooped to selling, was stacked against the walls. She was a beautiful, amused woman in her seventies. Having fought the Germans as a young girl in the Resistance, she was at ease with her appointed role in Luke's little intrigue:

'I understand we are old friends from long ago,' she had told Perry a couple of hours ago, delicately touching his hand in greeting, then letting it go. 'We met at the salon of a dear friend of mine when you were a student with an insatiable desire to paint. Her name, if you wish for one, was Michelle de la Tour, now dead, alas. I allowed you to sit in my shadow. You were too young to be my lover. Will that do for you, or do you require more?'

'It will do very well, thank you!' said Perry, laughing.

'For me it does not do well. Nobody is too young to be my lover. Luke will provide you with confit of duck and a Camembert. I wish you a pleasant evening. And you, my dear, are exquisite' – to Gail – 'and far too good for this failed artist of yours. I'm joking. Luke, don't forget Sheeba.'

Sheeba, her Siamese cat, now sitting in Gail's lap.

At the dinner table, Perry – still over-bright – had been the soul of the party, whether breathlessly extolling Federer or reliving the contrived encounter with Dima, or Dima's tour de force in the hospitality room. For Gail, it was like listening to him winding down after a perilous rock climb or a neck-and-neck cross-country run. And Luke and Hector were the perfect audience: Hector, rapt and uncharacteristically silent, interrupting only to squeeze another morsel of description out of them – the possible Aubrey, what sort of height would they say? Bunny, was he tight? – Luke darting back and forth to the enormous kitchen or topping up their glasses with special attention to Gail's, or taking a couple of calls from Ollie, but still very much a member of the team.

It was only now, when the dinner and the wine had worked their therapy, and Perry's mood of high adventure had given way to a sober quiet, that Hector returned to the precise wording of Dima's invitation to tennis at the Club des Rois.

'So we're assuming that the message is in the massage,' he said. 'Anyone want to add to that?'

'The massage was practically part of the challenge,' Perry agreed.

'Luke?'

'Sticks out a mile to me. How many times?'

'Three,' said Perry.

'Gail?' Hector asked.

Waking from her distractions, Gail was less confident than the men:

'I just wonder whether it might have stuck out a mile for Emilio and the Armani kids too,' she said, avoiding Luke's eye.

Hector had wondered it too:

'Yes, well, I guess the truth is, that if dell Oro is smelling a rat, he'll cancel the tennis forthwith, and we're fucked. Game over. However, according to Ollie's latest reports, the signs point the other way, right, Luke?'

'Ollie's been attending an informal meeting of chauffeurs outside the dell Oro chateau,' Luke explained, with his burnished smile. 'Tomorrow's tennis match is being billed by Emilio as a knees-up after the signing. His gentlemen from Moscow have seen the Eiffel Tower and aren't interested in the Louvre, so they're weighing a bit heavy on Emilio's hands.'

'And the message about the massage?' Hector prompted.

'Is that Dima has booked two parallel sessions for Perry and himself for immediately after the match. Ollie has also established that, although the Club des Rois provides tennis for some of the world's most desirable targets, it prides itself on being a safe haven. Bodyguards are not encouraged to traipse after their wards into changing rooms, saunas or massage rooms. They're invited to sit out in the club foyer or in their bulletproof limos.'

'And the club's resident masseurs?' Gail asked. 'What do they do while you boys have your powwow?'

Luke had the answer, and his special smile. 'Mondays are their day off, Gail. They only come in by appointment. Not even Emilio's going to know they're not coming in tomorrow.'

*

In the Hotel des Quinze Anges, it was one o'clock in the morning and Perry was finally asleep. Tiptoeing down the corridor to the lavatory, Gail locked the door, and by the sickly glow of the lowest-wattage light bulb in the world reread the text message she had received at seven that evening, just before they left for dinner on the Ile. My father says you are in Paris. A Swiss doctor informs I am nine weeks pregnant. Max is climbing in the mountains and does not respond. Gail

Gail? Natasha signed it with my name? She's so demented she's forgotten her own? Or does she mean 'Gail, please, I implore you'? – that kind of Gail?

Half asleep in one part of her head, she brought up the number and, before she knew what she had done, pressed green and got a Swiss answering service. In a panic, she rang off and, wide awake now, texted instead: Do absolutely nothing until we have spoken. We need to meet and talk. Much love, Gail

She returned to the bedroom and climbed back under the horsehair duvet. Perry was sleeping like the dead. To tell him or not to tell him? Too much on his plate already? His big day tomorrow? Or my oath of secrecy to Natasha?