Our kind of traitor

2

It was unclear to Gail why she was doing the lion's share of the talking. While she spoke, she listened to her voice rattling back at her from the brick walls of the basement room, the way she did in the divorce courts where she currently had her professional being: now I'm doing righteous indignation, now I'm doing scathingly incredulous, now I sound like my absent bloody mother after the second gin and tonic.

And tonight, for all her best efforts to conceal it, she occasionally caught herself out in an unscripted quaver of fear. If her audience across the table couldn't hear it, she could. And if she wasn't mistaken, so could Perry beside her, because now and then his head would tilt towards her for no reason except to peer at her with anxious tenderness despite the three-thousand-mile gulf between them. And now and then he would go so far as to give her hand a cursory squeeze under the table before taking up the tale himself in the mistaken but pardonable belief that he was giving her feelings a rest, whereas all her feelings did was go underground, regroup, and come out fighting even harder the moment they got a chance.

*

If Perry and Gail didn't actually saunter into the centre court, they agreed, they took their time. There was the stroll down the flowered walkway with the bodyguards acting as guards of honour and Gail holding on to the brim of her broad sunhat and making her flimsy skirts swirl:

'I flounced around a bit,' she admitted.

'And how,' Perry agreed, to contained smiles from across the table.

There was shuffle at the entrance to the court when Perry appeared to have second thoughts, until it turned out that he was stepping back to let Gail go ahead of him, which she did with enough ladylike deliberation to suggest that, while the planned offence might not have taken place, neither had it gone away. And after Perry sloped Mark.

Dima stood centre court facing them, arms stretched wide in welcome. He was wearing a fluffy blue crew-neck top with full-length sleeves, and long black shorts that reached below his knees. A sunshade like a green beak stuck out from his bald head, which was already glistening in the early sun. Perry said he wondered whether Dima had oiled it. To complement his bejewelled Rolex, a gold trinket chain of vaguely mystical connotation adorned his huge neck: another glint, another distraction.

But Dima, to Gail's surprise, was not, at the moment of her entry, the main event, she said. Arranged on the spectators' stand behind him was a mixed – and to her eye weird – assembly of children and adults.

'Like a bunch of gloomy waxworks,' she protested. 'It wasn't just their overdressed presence at the ungodly hour of seven in the morning. It was their total silence and their sullenness. I took a seat on the empty bottom row and thought, Christ, what is this? A people's tribunal, or a church parade, or what?'

Even the children seemed estranged from each other. They caught her eye at once. Children did. She counted four of them.

'Two mopy-looking little girls of around five and seven in dark frocks and sunhats squeezed together beside a buxom black woman who was apparently some sort of minder,' she said, determined not to let her feelings run ahead of her before time. 'And two flaxen-haired teenaged boys in freckles and tennis gear. And all looking so down in the mouth you'd think they'd been kicked out of bed and dragged there as a punishment.'

As to the adults, they were just so alien, so oversized and so other, that they could have stepped out of a Charles Addams cartoon, she went on. And it wasn't only their town clothes or 1970s hairstyles. Or the fact that the women despite the heat were dressed for darkest winter. It was their shared gloom.

'Why's nobody talking?' she whispered to Mark, who had materialized uninvited in the seat beside her.

Mark shrugged. 'Russian.'

'But Russians talk all the time!'

Not these Russians, Mark said. Most of them had flown in over the last few days and still had to get used to being in the Caribbean.

'Something's happened up there,' he said, nodding across the bay. 'According to the buzz, they've got some big family powwow going on, not all of it friendly. Don't know what they do for their personal hygiene. Half the water system's shot.'

She picked out two fat men, one wearing a brown Homburg hat who was murmuring into a mobile, the other a tartan tam-o'-shanter with a red bobble on the top.

'Dima's cousins,' said Mark. 'Everybody's somebody's cousin round here. Perm they come from.'

'Perm?'

'Perm, Russia. Not the hairdo, darling. The town.'

Go up a level and there were the flaxen-haired boys, chewing gum as if they hated it. Dima's sons, twins, said Mark. And yes, now that Gail looked at them again, she saw a likeness: burly chests, straight backs, and droopy brown bedroom eyes that were already turning covetously towards her.

She took a quick, silent breath and released it. She was approaching what in legal discourse would have been her golden-bullet question, the one that was supposed to reduce the witness to instant rubble. So was she now going to reduce herself to rubble? But when she resumed speaking, she was gratified to hear no quaver in the voice coming back to her from the brick wall, no faltering or other telltale variation:

'And sitting demurely apart from everybody – demonstratively apart, one would almost have thought – there was this really rather stunning girl of fifteen or sixteen, with jet-black hair down to her shoulders and a school blouse and a navy blue school skirt over her knees, and she didn't seem to belong to anyone. So I asked Mark who she was. Naturally.'

Very naturally, she decided with relief, having listened to herself. Not a raised eyebrow round the table. Bravo, Gail.

'"Her name is Natasha," Mark informed me. "A flower waiting to be plucked," if I'd pardon his French. "Dima's daughter but not Tamara's. Apple of her father's eye."'

And what was the beautiful Natasha, daughter to Dima but not Tamara, doing at seven in the morning when she was supposed to be watching her father playing tennis? Gail asked her audience. Reading a leatherbound tome that she clutched like a shield of virtue on her lap.

'But absolutely drop-dead gorgeous,' Gail insisted. And as a throwaway: 'I mean, seriously beautiful.' And then she thought: Oh Christ, I'm beginning to sound like a dyke when all I want is to sound unconcerned.

But once again, neither Perry nor her inquisitors seemed to have noticed anything out of tune.

'So where do I find Tamara who isn't Natasha's mother?' she asked Mark, severely, taking the opportunity to edge away from him.

'Two rows up on your left. Very pious lady. Known locally as Mrs Nun.'

She did a careless swing round and homed in on a spectral woman draped from head to toe in black. Her hair, also black, was shot with white and bound in a bun. Her mouth, locked in a downward curve, seemed never to have smiled. She wore a mauve chiffon scarf.

'And on her bosom, this bishop-grade Orthodox gold cross with an extra bar,' Gail exclaimed. 'Hence the Mrs Nun, presumably.' And as an afterthought: 'But wow, did she have presence. A real scene-stealer' – shades of her acting parents – 'you really felt the willpower. Even Perry did.'

'Later,' Perry warned, avoiding her eye. 'They don't want us to be wise after the event.'

Well, I'm not allowed to be wise before it either, am I? she had half a mind to shoot back at him, but in her relief at having successfully negotiated the hurdle of Natasha, let it go.

Something about the immaculate little Luke was seriously distracting her: the way she kept catching his eye without meaning to; the way he caught hers. She'd wondered at first whether he was gay, until she spotted him eyeing the gap in her blouse where a button had opened. It's the loser's gallantry in him, she decided. It's his air of fighting to the last man, when the last man is himself. In the years when she was waiting for Perry, she'd slept with quite a few men, and there'd been one or two she'd said yes to out of kindness, simply to prove to them that they were better than they thought. Luke reminded her of them.

*

Limbering up for the match with Dima, Perry by contrast had scarcely bothered with the spectators at all, he claimed, talking intently to his big hands set flat on the table before him. He knew they were up there, he'd given them a wave of his racquet and got nothing back. Mainly, he was too busy putting in his contact lenses, tightening his shoelaces, smearing on sun cream, worrying about Mark giving Gail a hard time, and generally wondering how quickly he could win and get out. He was also being interrogated by his opponent, standing three feet away:

'They bother you?' Dima inquired in an earnest undertone. 'My supporters' club? You want I tell them go home?'

'Of course not,' Perry replied, still smarting from his encounter with the bodyguards. 'They're your friends, presumably.'

'You British?'

'I am.'

'English British? Welsh? Scottish?'

'Just plain English, actually.'

Selecting a bench, Perry dumped his tennis bag on it, the one he hadn't let the bodyguards look inside, and yanked the zip. He fished a couple of sweatbands from his bag, one for his head, one for his wrist.

'You a priest?' Dima asked, with the same earnestness.

'Why? D'you need one?'

'Doctor? Some kinda medic?'

'Not a doctor either, I'm afraid.'

'Lawyer?'

'I just play tennis.'

'Banker?'

'God forbid,' Perry replied irritably, and fiddled with a battered sunhat before slinging it back into the bag.

But actually he felt more than irritable. He'd been rolled and didn't care for being rolled. Rolled by the pro and rolled by the bodyguards, if he'd let them. And all right he hadn't let them, but their presence on the court – they'd established themselves like line judges at either end – was quite enough to keep his anger going. More pertinently he had been rolled by Dima himself, and the fact that Dima had press-ganged a bunch of strays into turning out at seven in the morning to watch him win only added to the offence.

Dima had shoved a hand into the pocket of his long black tennis shorts and hauled out a John F. Kennedy silver half-dollar.

'Know something? My kids tell me I had some crook spike it for me so I win,' he confided, indicating with a nod of his bald head the two freckled boys in the stands. 'I win the toss, my own kids think I spike the goddam coin. You got kids?'

'No.'

'Want some?'

'Eventually.' Mind your own bloody business, in other words.

'Wanna call?'

Spike, Perry repeated to himself. Where did a man who spoke mangled English with a semi-Bronx accent get a word like spike from? He called tails, lost, and heard a honk of derision, the first sign of interest anybody on the spectators' stand had deigned to show. His tutorial eye fixed on Dima's two sons, smirking behind their hands. Dima glanced at the sun and chose the shaded end.

'What racquet you got there?' he asked, with a twinkle of his soulful brown eyes. 'Looks illegal. Never mind, I beat you anyway.' And as he set off down the court: 'That's some girl you got. Worth a lot of camels. You better marry her quick.'

And how in hell's name does the man know we're not married? Perry fumed.

*

Perry has served four aces in a row, just as he did against the Indian couple, but he's overhitting, knows it, doesn't give a damn. Replying to Dima's service, he does what he wouldn't dream of doing unless he was at the top of his game and playing a far weaker opponent: he stands forward, toes practically on the service line, taking the ball on the half-volley, angling it across court or flipping it just inside the tramlines to where the baby-faced bodyguard stands with his arms folded. But only for the first couple of serves, because Dima quickly gets wise to him and drives him back to the baseline where he belongs.

'So then I suppose I began to cool down a bit,' Perry conceded, grinning ruefully at his interlocutors and rubbing the back of his wrist across his mouth at the same time.

'Perry was a total bully,' Gail corrected him. 'And Dima was a natural. For his weight, height and age, amazing. Wasn't he, Perry? You said so yourself. You said he defied the laws of gravity. And really sporting with it. Sweet.'

'Didn't jump for the ball. Levitated,' Perry conceded. 'And yes, he was a good sport, couldn't ask for more. I thought we were going to be in for tantrums and line disputes. We didn't do any of that stuff. He was really good to play with. And cunning as a box of monkeys. Withheld his shots till the absolute last minute and beyond.'

'And he had a limp,' Gail put in excitedly. 'He played on the skew and he favoured his right leg, didn't he, Perry? And he was stiff as a ramrod. And he had a knee bandage. And he still levitated!'

'Yeah, well, I had to hold off a bit,' Perry admitted, clawing awkwardly at his brow. 'His grunts got a bit heavy on the ear as the game went by, frankly.'

But for all his grunting, Dima's inquisition of Perry between games continued unabated:

'You some big scientist? Blow the goddam world up, same way you serve?' he asked, helping himself to a gulp of iced water.

'Absolutely not.'

'Apparatchik?'

The guessing game had gone on long enough: 'Actually, I teach,' Perry said, peeling a banana.

'Teach like you teach students? Like a professor, you teach?'

'Correct. I teach students. But I'm not a professor.'

'Where?'

'Currently at Oxford.'

'Oxford University?'

'Got it.'

'What you teach?'

'English literature,' Perry replied, not particularly wishing, at that moment, to explain to a total stranger that his future was up for grabs.

But Dima's pleasure knew no bounds:

'Listen. You know Jack London? Number-one English writer?'

'Not personally.' It was a joke, but Dima didn't share it.

'You like the guy?'

'Admire him.'

'Charlotte Bronte? You like her too?'

'Very much.'

'Somerset Maugham?'

'Less, I'm afraid.'

'I got books by all those guys! Like hundreds! In Russian! Big bookshelves!'

'Great.'

'You read Dostoevsky? Lermontov? Tolstoy?'

'Of course.'

'I got them all. All the number-one guys. I got Pasternak. Know something? Pasternak wrote about my home town. Called it Yuriatin. That's Perm. Crazy fucker called it Yuriatin. I dunno why. Writers do that. All crazy. See my daughter up there? That's Natasha, don't give a shit about tennis, love books. Hey, Natasha! Say hello to the Professor here!'

After a delay to show that she is being intruded upon, Natasha distractedly raises her head and draws aside her hair long enough to allow Perry to be astonished by her beauty before she returns to her leatherbound tome.

'Embarrassed,' Dima explained. 'Don't wanna hear me yelling at her. See that book she reading? Turgenev. Number-one Russian guy. I buy it. She wanna book, I buy. OK, Professor. You serve.'

'From that moment on, I was Professor. I told him again and again I wasn't one, he wouldn't listen, so I gave up. Within a couple of days, half the hotel was calling me Professor. Which is pretty bloody odd when you've decided you're not even a don any more.'

Changing ends at 2-5 in Perry's favour, Perry is consoled to notice that Gail has parted company from the importunate Mark and is installed on the top bench between two little girls.

*

The game was settling to a decent rhythm, said Perry. Not the greatest match ever but – for as long as he lowered his play – fun and entertaining to watch, assuming anybody wanted to be entertained, which remained in question since, other than the twin boys, the spectators might have been attending a revivalist meeting. By lowering his play, he meant slowing it down a bit and taking the odd ball that was on its way to the tramlines, or returning a drive without looking too hard at where it had landed. But given that the gap between them – in age and skill and mobility, if Perry was honest – was by now obvious, his only concern was to make a game of it, leave Dima with his dignity, and enjoy a late breakfast with Gail on the Captain's Deck: or so he believed until, as they were again changing ends, Dima locked a hand on his arm and addressed him in an angry growl:

'You goddam pussied me, Professor.'

'I did what?'

'That long ball was out. You see it out, you play it in. You think I'm some kinda fat old bastard gonna drop dead you don't be sweet to him?'

'It was borderline.'

'I play retail, Professor. I want something, I goddam take it. Nobody pussy me, hear me? Wanna play for a thousand bucks? Make the game interesting?'

'No thanks.'

'Five thousand?'

Perry laughed and shook his head.

'You're chicken, right? You chicken, so you don't bet me.'

'I suppose that must be it,' Perry agreed, still feeling the imprint of Dima's hand on his upper left arm.

*

'Advantage Great Britain!'

The cry resonates over the court and dies. The twins break out in nervous laughter, waiting for the aftershock. Until now Dima has tolerated their occasional bursts of high spirits. No longer. Laying his racquet on the bench, he pads up the steps of the spectators' stand and, reaching the two boys, presses a forefinger to the tip of each of their noses.

'You want I take my belt and beat the shit outta you?' he inquires in English, presumably for the benefit of Perry and Gail, for why else would he not address them in Russian?

To which one of the boys replies in better English than his father's: 'You're not wearing a belt, Papa.'

That does it. Dima smacks the nearer son so hard across the face that he spins halfway round on the bench before his legs stop him. The first smack is followed by a second just as loud, delivered to the other son with the same hand, reminding Gail of walking with her socially ambitious elder brother when he's out pheasant shooting with his rich friends, an activity she abhors, and the brother scores what he calls a left and a right, meaning one dead pheasant to each gun barrel.

'What got me was that they didn't even turn their heads away. They just sat there and took it,' said Perry, the schoolteachers' son.

But the strangest thing, Gail insisted, was how amicably the conversation was resumed:

'You wanna tennis lesson with Mark after? Or you wanna go home get religion from your mother?'

'Lesson, please, Papa,' says one of the two boys.

'Then don't you make any more ra-ra, or you don't get no Kobe beef tonight. You wanna eat Kobe beef tonight?'

'Sure, Papa.'

'You, Viktor?'

'Sure, Papa.'

'You wanna clap, you clap the Professor there, not your no-good bum father. Come here.'

A fervent bear-hug for each boy, and the match proceeds without further episode to its inevitable end.

*

In defeat, Dima's bearing is embarrassingly fulsome. He's not merely gracious, he's moved to tears of admiration and gratitude. First he must press Perry into his great chest, which Perry swears is made of horn, for the three-times Russian embrace. The tears meanwhile are rolling down his cheeks, and consequently Perry's neck.

'You're a goddam fair-play English, hear me, Professor? You're a goddam English gentleman like in books. I love you, hear me? Gail, come over here.' For Gail the embrace is even more reverent – and cautious, for which she is grateful. 'You take care this stupid fuck, hear me? He can't play tennis no good, but I swear to God he's some kinda goddam gentleman. He's the Professor of fair play, hear me?' – repeating the mantra as if he has just invented it.

He swings away to bark irritably into a mobile that the baby-faced bodyguard is holding out to him.

*

The spectators file slowly out of the court. The little girls need hugs from Gail. Gail is happy to oblige. One of Dima's sons drawls 'cool play, man' in American English as he stalks past Perry on his way to his lesson, his cheek still scarlet from the slap. The beautiful Natasha attaches herself to the procession, leatherbound tome in hand. Her thumb marks the place where her reading was disturbed. Bringing up the rear comes Tamara on Dima's arm, her bishop-grade Orthodox cross glinting in the risen sunshine. In the aftermath of the game, Dima's limp is more pronounced. As he walks, he leans back, chin thrust forward, shoulders squared to the enemy. The bodyguards shepherd the group down the winding stone path. Three black-windowed people carriers wait behind the hotel to take them home. Mark the pro is last to leave.

'Great play, sir!' – clapping Perry on the shoulder. 'Fine court craft. A little ragged on the backhands there, if I may make so bold. Maybe we should do a little work on them?'

Side by side, Gail and Perry watch speechless as the cortege bumps its way along the potholed spine road and vanishes into the cedar trees that shelter the house called Three Chimneys from prying eyes.

*

Luke looks up from the notes he has been taking. As if to order, Yvonne does the same. Both are smiling. Gail is trying to avoid Luke's eye, but Luke is staring straight at her so she can't.

'So, Gail,' he says briskly. 'Your turn again, if we may. Mark was a pest. All the same, he does seem to have been quite a mine of information. What extra nuggets can you offer us about the Dima household?' – then gives a flick of both little hands at once, as if urging his horse on to greater things.

Gail glances at Perry, she is not sure what for. Perry does not return her glance.

'He was just so snaky,' she complains, using Mark, rather than Luke, as the object of her disfavour, and wrinkles up her face to show how the bad taste lingers.

*

Mark had barely sat beside her on the bottom bench, she began, before he started banging on about what an important millionaire his Russian friend Dima was. According to Mark, Three Chimneys was only one of his several properties. He'd got another in Madeira, another in Sochi on the Black Sea.

'And a house outside Berne,' she went on, 'where his business is based. But he's peripatetic. Part of the year he's in Paris, part Rome, part Moscow, according to Mark' – and watched as Yvonne made another note. 'But home, as far as the kids are concerned, is Switzerland and school is some millionaire internat establishment in the mountains. 'He talks about the company. Mark assumes he owns it. There's a company registered in Cyprus. And banks. Several banks. Banking's the big one. That was what brought him to the island in the first place. Antigua currently boasts four Russian banks, by Mark's count, plus one Ukrainian. They're just brass plates in shopping malls and a phone on some lawyer's desk. Dima's one of the brass plates. When he bought Three Chimneys, that was for cash too. Not suitcases of it but laundry baskets, somewhat ominously, lent to him by the hotel, according to Mark. And twenty-dollar bills, not fifties. Fifties are too dicey. He bought the house, and a run-down sugar mill, and the peninsula they stand on.'

'Did Mark mention a figure?' – Luke is back.

'Six million US. And the tennis wasn't pure pleasure either. Or not to begin with,' she continued, surprised by how much she remembered of the awful Mark's monologue. 'Tennis in Russia is a major status symbol. If a Russian tells you he plays tennis, he's telling you he's stinking rich. Thanks to Mark's brilliant tuition, Dima went back to Moscow and won a cup and everybody gasped. But Mark isn't allowed to tell that story, because Dima prides himself on being self-made. It was only because Mark trusted me so completely that he felt able to make an exception. And if I'd like to pop round to his shop some time, he had a dandy little room upstairs where we could continue our conversation.'

Luke and Yvonne offered sympathetic smiles. Perry offered no smile at all.

'And Tamara?' Luke asked.

'God-smacked he called her. And barking mad with it, according to the islanders. Doesn't swim, doesn't go down to the beach, doesn't play tennis, doesn't talk to her own children except about God, ignores Natasha completely, barely talks to the natives except for Elspeth, wife of Ambrose, front-of-house manager. Elspeth works in a travel agency, but if the family's around she drops everything and helps out. Apparently one of the maids borrowed some of Tamara's jewellery for a dance not long ago. Tamara caught her before she could put it back and bit her hand so hard she had to have twelve stitches in it. Mark said if it had been him he'd have had an injection for rabies as well.'

'So now tell us about the little girls who came and sat beside you, please, Gail,' Luke suggested.

*

Yvonne was leading the case for the prosecution, Luke was playing her junior, and Gail was in the box trying to keep her temper, which was what she told her witnesses to do on pain of excommunication.

'So were the girls already ensconced up there, Gail, or did they come skipping up to you the moment they saw the pretty lady all on her own?' Yvonne asked, putting her pencil to her mouth while she studied her notes.

'They walked up the steps and sat one either side of me. And they didn't skip. They walked.'

'Smiling? Laughing? Being scamps?'

'Not a smile between them. Not a half of one.'

'Had the girls, in your opinion, been dispatched to you by whoever was looking after them?'

'They came strictly of their own accord. In my opinion.'

'You're sure of that?' – becoming more Scottish and persistent.

'I saw the whole thing happen. Mark had made a pass at me that I didn't need, so I stomped up to the top bench to get as far away from him as I could. Nobody on the top bench except me.'

'So where were the wee girls located at this point? Below you? Along the row from you? Where, please?'

Gail took a breath to control herself, then spoke with deliberation:

'The wee girls were sitting on the second tier, with Elspeth. The older one turned round and looked up at me, then she spoke to Elspeth. And no, I didn't hear what she said. Elspeth turned and looked at me, and nodded yes to the older girl. The two girls had a consultation, stood up, and came walking up the steps. Slowly.'

'Don't push her around,' said Perry.

*

Gail's testimony has become evasive. Or so it sounds to her lawyer's ear, and no doubt to Yvonne's also. Yes, the girls arrived in front of her. The elder girl dropped a bob that she must have learned at dancing lessons, and asked in very serious English with only a slight foreign accent: 'May we sit with you, please, miss?' So Gail laughed and said, 'You may indeed, miss,' and they sat down either side of her, still without smiling.

'I asked the elder girl her name. I whispered, because everybody was being so quiet. She said, "Katya," and I said, "What's your sister's name?" and she said, "Irina." And Irina turned and stared at me as if I was – well, intruding really – I just couldn't understand the hostility. I said, "Are your mummy and daddy here?" To both of them. Katya gave a really vehement shake of her head. Irina didn't say anything at all. We sat still for a while. A long while, for children. And I was thinking: maybe they've been told they mustn't speak at tennis matches. Or they mustn't talk to strangers. Or maybe that's all the English they know, or maybe they're autistic, or handicapped in some way.'

She pauses, hoping for encouragement or a question, but sees only four waiting eyes and Perry at her side with his head tipped towards the brick walls that smell of her late father's drinking habits. She takes a mental deep breath and plunges:

'There was a game change. So I tried again: where do you go to school, Katya? Katya shakes her head, Irina shakes hers. No school? Or just none at the moment? None at the moment, apparently. They'd been going to a British International School in Rome, but they don't go there any more. No reason given, none asked for. I didn't want to be pushy, but I had a bad feeling I couldn't pin down. So do they live in Rome? Not any more. Katya again. So Rome's where you learned your excellent English? Yes. At International School they could choose English or Italian. English was better. I point to Dima's two boys. Are those your brothers? More shakes. Cousins? Yes, sort of cousins. Only sort of? Yes. Do they go to International School too? Yes, but in Switzerland, not Rome. And the beautiful girl who lives inside a book, I say, is she a cousin? Answer from Katya, squeezed out of her like a confession: Natasha is our cousin but only sort of – again. And still no smile from either of them. But Katya is stroking my silk outfit. As if she's never felt silk before.'

Gail takes a breath. This is nothing, she is telling herself. This is the hors d'oeuvre. Wait till next day for the full five-course horror story. Wait till I'm allowed to be wise after the event.

'And when she's stroked the silk enough, she puts her head against my arm and leaves it there and shuts her eyes. And that's the end of our social exchange for maybe five minutes, except that Irina on the other side of me has taken her cue from Katya and commandeered my hand. She's got these sharp, crabby little claws, and she's really fastening on to me. Then she presses my hand against her forehead and rolls her face round it as if she wants me to know she's got a temperature, except that her cheeks are wet and I realize she's been crying. Then she gives me my hand back, and Katya says, "She cries sometimes. It is normal." Which is when the game ends and Elspeth comes scuttling up the steps to fetch them, by which time I want to wrap Irina up in my sarong and take her home with me, preferably with her sister as well, but since I can't do any of that, and have no idea why she's upset, and don't know either of them from Adam – well, Eve – end of story.'

*

But it isn't the end of the story. Not in Antigua. The story is running beautifully. Perry Makepiece and Gail Perkins are still having the happiest holiday of their lifetimes, just as they had promised themselves back in November. To remind herself of their happiness, Gail plays the uncensored version to herself:

Ten a.m. approx., tennis over, return to cabin for Perry to shower.

Make love, beautifully as ever, we can still do that. Perry can never do anything by halves. All his powers of concentration must be focused on one thing at a time.

Midday or later. Miss breakfast buffet for operational reasons (above), swim in sea, lunch by pool, return to beach because Perry needs to beat me at shuffle-board.

Four p.m. approx. Return to cabin with Perry victorious – why doesn't he let a girl win even once? – doze, read, more love, doze again, lose sense of time. Polish off Chardonnay from minibar while reclining on balcony in bathrobes.

Eight p.m. approx. Decide we're too lazy to dress, order supper in cabin.

Still on our once-in-a-lifetime holiday. Still in Eden, munching the bloody apple.

Nine p.m. approx. Supper arrives, wheeled in not by any old room-service waiter but the venerable Ambrose himself who, in addition to the bottle of Californian plonk we have ordered, brings us a frosted bottle of vintage Krug champagne in a silver ice bucket, priced on the wine list at $380 plus tax, which he proceeds to set out for us, together with two frosted glasses, a plate of very yummy-looking canapes, two damask napkins and a prepared speech, which he intones at full volume with his chest out and his hands pressed to his sides like a court copper.

'This very fine bottle of champagne comes to you folk courtesy of the one and only Mr Dima himself. Mr Dima, he says to thank you for' – plucking a note from his shirt pocket together with a pair of reading spectacles – 'he says, and I quote: "Professor, I thanks you very heartily for a fine lesson in the great art of fair-play tennis and being an English gentleman. I also thanks you for saving me five thousand dollars of gamble." Plus his compliments to the highly beautiful Miss Gail, and that's his message.'

We drink a couple of glasses of the Krug and agree to finish the rest in bed.

*

'What's Kobe beef?' Perry asks me, sometime during an eventful night.

'Ever rubbed a girl's tummy?' I ask him.

'Wouldn't dream of it,' Perry says, doing just that.

'Virgin cows,' I tell him. 'Reared on sake and best beer. Kobe cattle have their tummies massaged every night till they're ready for the chop. Plus they're prime intellectual property,' I add, which is also true, but I'm not sure he's listening any more. 'Our Chambers fought a lawsuit for them and won hooves down.'

Falling asleep, I have a prophetic dream that I am in Russia, and bad things are happening to small children in wartime black and white.