Our kind of traitor

5

'See you to the front door, at all, Gail?' Ollie inquired, swivelling in his seat to quiz her through the partition of his cab.

'I'm fine, thank you.'

'You don't look fine, Gail. Not from where I sit. You look bothered. Want I come in for a cup tea with you?'

Cup tea? Cuppa? Cup of?

'No thanks. I'm fine. I just need to get some sleep.'

'Nothing like a nice kip to see you right, eh?'

'No. There isn't. Goodnight, Ollie. Thanks for the ride.'

She crossed the street, waiting for him to drive off, but he didn't.

'Forgotten our handbag, darling!'

She had. And she was furious with herself. And furious with Ollie for waiting till she was on her own doorstep before charging after her. She mumbled more thanks, said she was an idiot.

'Oh, don't apologize, Gail, I'm completely worse. If it was loose, I'd forget my own head. Are we utterly sure, darling?'

Not utterly sure of anything, actually, darling. Not just now. Not utterly sure whether you're a master-spy or an underling. Not sure why you wear spectacles with thick lenses for driving to Bloomsbury in broad daylight, and no spectacles on the journey back when it's pitch dark. Or might it be that you spies can only see in the dark?

*

The flat she had jointly inherited from her late father wasn't a flat but a maisonette on the two top floors of a pretty white Victorian terrace house of the sort that gives Primrose Hill its charm. Her upwardly mobile brother, who killed pheasants with rich friends, owned the other half of it, and in about fifty years, if he hadn't died of drink by then, and Perry and Gail were still together, which she presently doubted, they will have paid him off.

The entrance hall stank of number 2's Bourguignonne and resounded to other tenants' bickerings and television sets. The mountain bike Perry kept for his weekend visits was in its usual inconvenient place, chained to the downpipe. One day, she had warned him, some enterprising thief was going to steal the downpipe too. His pleasure was to ride it up to Hampstead Heath at six o'clock in the morning and speed-cycle down the paths marked NO CYCLING.

The carpet on the four narrow flights of stairs leading to her front door was in its last stages of decay, but the ground-floor tenant didn't see why he should pay anything and the other two wouldn't pay till he did and Gail as the unpaid in-house lawyer was supposed to come up with a compromise, but since none of the parties would budge from their entrenched positions, where the hell was compromise?

But tonight she was grateful for all of it: let them bicker and play their bloody music to their hearts' content, let them give her all the normality they've got, because, oh mother, did she need normality. Just get her out of surgery and into the recovery room. Just tell her the nightmare's over, Gail dear, there are no more softly spoken Scottish blue-stockings or undersized espiocrats with Etonian accents, no more orphaned children, drop-dead-gorgeous Natashas, gun-slinging uncles, Dimas and Tamaras, and Perry Makepiece my Heaven-sent lover and purblind innocent is not about to wrap himself in the sacrificial flag for his Orwellian love of lost England, his admirable quest for Connection with a capital C – connection with what? for Christ's sake – or his homebrewed brand of inverted, puritanical vanity.

Climbing the stairs, her knees began trembling.

At the first poky half-landing they trembled more.

At the second they trembled so wildly she had to prop herself against the wall till they steadied down.

And when she reached the last flight, she had to haul herself up by the handrail to get to the front door before the time-switch cut.

Standing in the tiny hall with her back to the closed door, she listened, sniffing the air for booze, body odour or stale cigarette smoke, or all three, which was how a couple of months back she knew she'd been burgled before she ever walked up the spiral staircase to find her bed pissed on and the pillows slashed and foul lipstick messages smeared across her mirror.

Only when she had relived that moment to the full did she open the kitchen door, hang up her coat, check the bathroom, pee, pour herself a king-sized tumbler of Rioja, swig a mouthful, replenish the tumbler to the brim and carry it precariously to the living room.

*

Standing, not sitting. She'd done enough passive sitting for a lifetime, thank you.

Standing in front of the non-functioning all-pine, do-it-yourself reproduction Georgian fireplace installed by a previous owner, and staring at the same long sash window where Perry had stood six hours ago: Perry on the slant, birdlike and eight foot tall, peering down into the street, waiting for an ordinary black cab with its 'For Hire' light out, last numbers on its licence plate 73, and your driver's name will be Ollie.

No curtains to our sash windows. Shutters only. Perry who likes sheer but will pay his half for curtains if she really wants them. Perry who disapproves of central heating but worries that she's not warm enough. Perry who one minute says we can only have one child for fear of world overpopulation, then wants six by return of post. Perry who, the moment they touch down in England after the fucked-up holiday of a lifetime, hightails it to Oxford, buries himself in his digs, and for fifty-six hours communicates in cryptic text messages from the front: document nearly complete… have made contact with necessary people… arriving London midday-ish… please leave key under doormat…

'He said they're a team apart, not run-of-the-mill,' he tells her, as he watches the wrong taxis go by.

'He?'

'Adam.'

'The man who called you back. That Adam?'

'Yes.'

'Surname or Christian name?'

'I didn't ask, he didn't tell me. He says they've got their own set-up for cases like this. A special house. He wouldn't say where over the telephone. The cab driver would know.'

'Ollie.'

'Yes.'

'Cases like what, actually?'

'Ours. That's all I know.'

A black cab goes past but it has its light on. Not a spy cab then. A normal cab. Driven by a man who isn't Ollie. Disappointed again, Perry rounds on her:

'Look. What else do you expect me to do? If you've got a better suggestion, let's hear it. You've done nothing but snipe since we got back to England.'

'And you've done nothing but keep me at arm's length. Oh, and treat me like a child. Of the weaker sex. I forgot that bit.'

He has gone back to looking out of the window.

'Is Adam the only person to have read your letter-document-report-cum-witness statement?' she asks.

'I can't imagine so. I wouldn't bank on his name being Adam either. He just said Adam like a password.'

'Really? I wonder how he did that.'

She tries saying Adam as a password in several different ways, but Perry is not drawn.

'You're sure Adam's a man, are you? Not just a woman with a deep voice?'

No answer. None expected.

Yet another taxi passes. Still not ours. Whatever does one wear for spies, darling? as her mother would have said. Cursing herself for even wondering, she has changed out of her office clothes into a skirt and high-necked blouse. And sensible shoes, nothing to stir the juices – well, except Luke's, but how could she have known?

'Perhaps he's stuck in traffic,' she suggests, and again gets no answer, which serves her right. 'Anyway, to resume. You gave the letter to an Adam. And an Adam received it. Otherwise he wouldn't have rung you, presumably.' She's being irritating and knows it. So does he. 'How many pages? Of our secret document? Yours.'

'Twenty-eight,' he replies.

'Handwritten or typed?'

'Handwritten.'

'Why not typed?'

'I decided handwritten was safer.'

'Really? On whose advice?'

'I hadn't had advice by then. Dima and Tamara were convinced they were bugged at every turn, so I decided to respect their anxieties and not do anything – electronic. Interceptible.'

'Wasn't that rather paranoid?'

'I'm sure it was. We're both paranoid. So are Dima and Tamara. We're all paranoid.'

'Then let's admit it. Let's be paranoid together.'

No answer. Silly little Gail tries yet another tack:

'Do you want to tell me how you got on to Mr Adam in the first place?'

'Anyone can do it. It's not a problem these days. You can do it on the Web.'

'Did you do it on the Web?'

'No.'

'Didn't trust the Web?'

'No.'

'Do you trust me?'

'Of course I do.'

'I hear the most amazing confidences every day of my life. You know that, don't you?'

'Yes.'

'And you don't exactly hear me regaling our friends at dinner parties with my clients' secrets, do you?'

'No.'

Reload:

'You also know that as a young barrister who is self-employed without a paddle and terrified of where the next job is or is not coming from, I am professionally disposed against mystery briefs that offer no prospect of prestige or reward.'

'Nobody's offering you a brief, Gail. Nobody's asking you to do anything except talk.'

'Which is what I call a brief.'

Another wrong taxi. Another silence, a bad one.

'Well, at least Mr Adam invited both of us,' she says, going for cheerful. 'I thought you'd airbrushed me out of your document completely.'

Which is when Perry becomes Perry again, and the dagger in her hand turns against herself as he gazes at her with so much hurt love that she is more alarmed for Perry than for herself.

'I tried to airbrush you out, Gail. I did my absolute damnedest to airbrush you out. I believed I could protect you from being involved. It didn't work. They've got to have us both. Initially anyway. He was – well – adamant.' Lame laugh. 'The way you would be about witnesses. "If the two of you were present, then two of you must obviously come." I'm really sorry.'

And he was. She knew he was. The day Perry learned to fake his feelings would be the day he wasn't Perry any more.

And she was as sorry as he was. Sorrier. She was in his arms telling him this when a black taxi with its flag down appeared in the street outside, last two numbers 73, and a nearly cockney male voice informed them over the house entryphone that he was Ollie and he had two passengers to pick up for Adam.

*

And now she was excluded again. Debarred, debriefed, discarded.

The obedient little woman, waiting for her man to come home, and having another man-sized glass of Rioja to help her do it.

All right, it was in the whole ridiculous contract from the start. She should never have let him get away with it. But that didn't mean she had to sit and twiddle her thumbs, and she hadn't.

That very morning, although he didn't know it, while Perry had been sitting here waiting obediently for the Voice of Adam, she had been busy in her Chambers tapping away at her computer, and not, for once, on the matter of Samson v. Samson.

That she had waited until she got to her office rather than use her own laptop from home – that she had waited at all – was still a puzzle to her, if not a cause for outright self-reproach. Put it down to the Perry-generated prevailing atmosphere of conspiracy.

That she still possessed Dima's deckle-edged business card was a hanging offence since Perry had told her to destroy it.

That she had gone electronic – and therefore interceptible – was as it now turned out also a hanging offence. But since he had not informed her in advance of this particular branch of his paranoia, he could hardly complain.

The Arena Multi Global Trading Conglomerate of Nicosia, Cyprus, its website informed her in bad, blotchy English, was a consulting company specializing in providing help for active traders. Its head office was in Moscow. It had representatives in Toronto, Rome, Berne, Karachi, Frankfurt, Budapest, Prague, Tel Aviv and Nicosia. None, however, in Antigua. And no brass-plate bank. Or none mentioned.

'Arena Multi Global prides itself on confidentiality and entreprenurial [with an 'e' missing] flare [misspelled] at all levels. It offers top-class oportunities [with one 'p'] and private banking facilities' [spelled correctly]. Note: this web page is currently under reconstruction. Further information available on application to Moscow office.'

Ted was an American bachelor who sold futures for Morgan Stanley. From her desk in Chambers she rang Ted:

'Gail, sweetheart.'

'An outfit calling itself the Arena Multi Global Trading Conglomerate. Can you dig up the dirt on them for me?'

Dirt? Ted could dig dirt like nobody else. Ten minutes later he was back.

'Those Russki friends of yours.'

'Russki?'

'They're like me. Hot as hell and rich as figgy pudding.'

'How rich is rich?'

'Anybody's guess, but looks mega. Fifty-something subsidiaries, all with great trading records. You into money-laundering, Gail?'

'How did you know?'

'These Russki mothers pass the money around between them so fast nobody knows who owns it for how long. That's all I got for you but I paid blood. Will you love me for ever?'

'I'll think about it, Ted.'

Her next step was Ernie, the Chambers' resourceful, sixty-something clerk. She waited till lunchtime when the coast was clearest.

'Ernie. A favour. Rumour has it that there's a disgraceful chat site you visit when you want to check out the companies of our highly reputable clients. I'm deeply shocked and I need you to consult it for me.'

Thirty minutes on, and Ernie had presented her with an edited printout of disgraceful exchanges on the subject of the Arena Multi Global Trading Conglomerate. Any asshole got an idea who runs this junk shop? The guys change MDs like socks. P. BROSNAN Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the wise words of Maynard Keynes: Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Asshole yourself. R. CROW What the f***'s happened to MG's website. It's curdled. B. PITT MG's website is down but not out. B-s rises to the surface. Assholes all beware. M. MUNROE But I'm really really curious. These guys come on at me like they have the hots, then they leave me panting and unfulfilled. P.B. Hey guys, listen to this! I just heard MGTC opened an office in Toronto. R.C. Office? You're shitting me! It's a f***ing Russian nightclub, man. Pole dancers, Stolly and bortsch. M.M. Hey, asshole, me again. Is the office they opened in Toronto the same one they closed in Equatorial Guinea? If so, run for cover man. Run now. R.C. Arena Multi f***ing Global has absolutely zero hits on Google. I repeat zero. The whole outfit is so uber-amateurish I get palpitations. P.B. Do you by any chance believe in the afterlife? If not, start believing now. You are treading on the Biggest Bananaskinski in the laundering arena. Official. M.M. They were just so enthusiastic about me. Now this. P.B. Stay away. Stay far, far away. R.C.

*

She is in Antigua, wafted there by another tumbler of Rioja from the kitchen.

She's listening to the pianist in the mauve bow tie crooning Simon and Garfunkel to an elderly American couple in ducks pirouetting all alone on the dance deck.

She's fending off the glances of beautiful waiters who have nothing to do but undress her with their eyes. She is overhearing the seventy-year-old Texan widow-woman of a thousand facelifts telling Ambrose to bring her red wine as long as it isn't French.

She's standing on the tennis court, demurely shaking hands for the first time with a bald fighting bull who calls himself Dima. She's remembering his reproachful brown eyes and rock jaw and the rigid, Erich von Stroheim backward lean of his upper body.

She's in the Bloomsbury basement, one moment Perry's life companion, the next his surplus baggage, not wanted on voyage. She's sitting with three people who, thanks to our document and whatever else Perry has managed to bubble to them in the meantime, know a whole lot she doesn't.

She's sitting alone in the drawing room of her desirable residence in Primrose Hill at half past midnight with Samson v. Samson on her lap and an empty wineglass beside her.

Springing to her feet – whoops – she climbs the spiral staircase to her bedroom, makes the bed, follows the trail of Perry's dirty clothes across the floor to the bathroom and stuffs them into the laundry basket. Five days since he made love to me. Will we establish a record?

She returns downstairs, one step at a time, one hand for the boat. She's back at the window, staring into the street, praying for her man to come home in a black cab with the last two numbers 73. She's riding buttock to buttock under the midnight stars with Perry in the bumpy people carrier with blackened windows as Baby Face, the short-haired blond bodyguard with the linked gold bracelet, drives them to their hotel at the end of the birthday revels at Three Chimneys.

'You had good night, Gail?'

This is your driver speaking. Until now, Baby Face hasn't let on that he speaks English. When Perry challenged him outside the tennis court, he didn't speak a word of it. So why's he letting on now? she wonders, alert as never in her life.

'Fabulous night, thank you,' she declares in her father's voice, filling in for Perry, who appears to have gone deaf. 'Simply wonderful. I'm so happy for those magnificent boys.'

'My name is Niki, OK?'

'OK. Great. Hello, Niki,' says Gail. 'Where are you from?'

'Perm, Russia. Nice place. Perry, please? You had good night too?'

Gail is about to jab Perry with her elbow when he comes to life by himself. 'Great, thanks, Niki. Fantastic food. Really nice people. Super. Best evening of our holiday so far.'

Not bad for a beginner, thinks Gail.

'What time you arrive Three Chimneys?' Niki asks.

'We nearly didn't arrive at all, Niki,' Gail exclaims, giggling to cover for Perry's hesitation. 'Did we, Perry? We took the Nature Path and had to hack our way through the undergrowth! Where did you learn your wonderful English, Niki?'

'Boston, Massachusetts. You got knife?'

'Knife?'

'To cut undergrowth, you got to have big knife.'

Those dead eyes in the mirror, what have they seen? What are they seeing now?

'I wish we had, Niki,' Gail cries, still in her father's skin. 'I'm afraid we English don't carry knives.' What gibberish am I talking? Never mind. Talk it. 'Well, some of us do, to be truthful, but not people like us. We're the wrong social class. You've heard about our class system? Well, in England you only carry a knife if you're lower-middle or below!' And more hoots of laughter to see them round the roundabout and into the drive to the front entrance.

Dazed, they pick their way like strangers between the lighted hibiscus to their cabin. Perry closes the door behind them, locks it, but doesn't switch the light on. They stand facing each other across the bed in the darkness. For an age, there's no soundtrack. Which should not imply that Perry hasn't made up his mind what he's about to say:

'I need paper to write on. So do you.' His I'm-in-charge-here voice, normally reserved, she assumes, for errant undergraduates who have failed to turn in their weekly essay.

He draws the blinds. He switches on the inadequate reading light on my side of the bed, leaving the rest of the room in darkness.

He yanks open the drawer of my bedside locker and fishes out a yellow legal pad: also mine. Emblazoned on it, my brilliant reflections on Samson v. Samson: my first case as a top silk's junior, my quantum leap to instant fame and fortune.

Or not.

Ripping off the pages on which I have recorded my pearls of legal wisdom, he stuffs them back in the drawer, snaps what's left of my yellow pad in two, and hands me my half.

'I'm going in there' – pointing to the bathroom. 'You stay here. Sit at the desk and write down everything you remember. Everything that happened. I'll do the same. All right by you?'

'What's wrong with both of us being in this room? Jesus, Perry. I'm fucking scared. Aren't you?'

Setting aside any pardonable desire for his companionship, my question is entirely reasonable. Our cabin contains, in addition to a much-used bed the size of a rugger field, one desk, two armchairs and a table. Perry may have had his heart-to-heart with Dima, but what about me, banged up with bonkers Tamara and her bearded saints?

'Separate witnesses rate separate statements,' Perry decrees, heading for the bathroom.

'Perry! Stop! Come back! Stay here! I'm the fucking lawyer here, not you. What's Dima been telling you?'

Nothing, to judge by his face. It has slammed shut.

'Perry.'

'What?'

'For fuck's sake. It's me. Gail. Remember? So just sit yourself down and tell Auntie what Dima has told you that's turned you into a zombie. All right, don't sit down. Tell me standing up. Is the world ending? Is he a girl? What the fuck is going on between you two that I can't know?'

A flinch. A palpable flinch. Enough flinch to give grounds for optimism. Misplaced.

'I can't.'

'Can't what?'

'Involve you in this.'

'Bollocks.'

A second flinch. No more productive than the first.

'You listening, Gail?'

What the fuck d'you think I'm doing? Singing 'The Mikado'?

'You're a good lawyer and you've got a splendid career in front of you.'

'Thank you.'

'Your big case is coming up in two weeks' time. Is that a fair summary?'

Yes, Perry, that is a fair summary. I have a splendid career in front of me, unless we decide to have six children instead, and the case of Samson v. Samson is set to be heard fifteen days from now, but if I know anything about our leading silk, I'm unlikely to get a word in edgeways.

'You're the shining star of a prestigious law Chambers. You're worked off your feet. You've told me so often enough.'

Yes indeed, it's true, I'm appallingly overworked. A young barrister should be so lucky, we have just endured the worst night of our lives by several lengths, and what the fuck are you trying to tell me through the orange in your mouth? Perry, you can't do this! Come back! But she only thinks it. The words have run out.

'We draw a line. A line in the sand. Whatever Dima told me is private to me. What Tamara told you is private to you. We don't cross over. We exercise client confidentiality.'

Her power of speech returns. 'Are you telling me Dima is your client now? You're as loony as they are.'

'I'm using a legal metaphor. Taken from your world, not mine. I'm saying, Dima's my client and Tamara's yours. Conceptually.'

'Tamara didn't speak, Perry. Not one solitary, fucking word. She thinks the birds round here are bugged. Periodically, she was moved to offer up a prayer in Russian to one of her bearded protectors, at which point she signed at me to kneel down beside her, and I obliged. I'm not an Anglican atheist any more, I'm a Russian Orthodox atheist. There is otherwise absolutely fuck-all that passed between Tamara and myself that I'm not prepared to share with you in the finest detail, and I've just shared it. My principal anxiety was that I might get my hand bitten off. I didn't. Both my hands are intact. Now it's your turn.'

'Sorry, Gail. I can't.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'I'm not telling. I refuse to drag you any deeper into this affair than you are already. I want you kept clean. Safe.'

'You want?'

'No. I don't want. I insist. I'm not to be wooed.'

Wooed? Is this Perry talking? Or the firebrand preacher from Huddersfield that he was named after?

'I'm deadly serious,' he adds, in case she doubted it.

Then a different Perry transmogrifies out of the first one. Out of my beloved, striving Jekyll comes an infinitely less appetizing Mr Hyde of the British Secret Service:

'You also talked to Natasha, I noticed. For quite some time.'

'Yes.'

'Alone.'

'Not alone, actually. We had two small girls with us but they were asleep.'

'Then effectively alone.'

'Is that a crime?'

'She's a source.'

'She's a what?'

'Did she talk to you about her father?'

'Come again?'

'I said: did she talk to you about her father?'

'Pass.'

'I'm serious, Gail.'

'So am I. Deadly. Pass, and either mind your own fucking business, or tell me what Dima said to you.'

'Did she talk to you about what Dima does for a living? Who he plays with, who he trusts, who they're so afraid of? Anything of that sort that you know, you should write it down too. It could be vitally important.'

On which note, he retires to the bathroom and – to his mortal shame – turns the lock.

For half an hour Gail sits huddled on the balcony with the bedspread over her shoulders because she's too drained to undress. She remembers the rum bottle, hangover guaranteed, pours herself a tot regardless, and dozes. She wakes to find the bathroom door open and Ace Operator Perry framed crookedly in the doorway, not sure whether to come out. He is clutching half her legal pad in both hands behind his back. She can see a corner of it poking out and it's covered in his handwriting.

'Have a drink,' she suggests, indicating the rum bottle.

He ignores her.

'I'm sorry,' he says. Then he clears his throat and says it again: 'I'm really very sorry, Gail.'

Chucking pride and reason to the winds, she impulsively jumps up, runs to him and embraces him. In the interests of security, he keeps his arms behind him. She has never seen Perry frightened before, but he's frightened now. Not for himself. For her.

*

She peers blearily at her watch. Two-thirty. She stands up, intending to give herself another glass of Rioja, thinks better of it, sits in Perry's favourite chair and discovers she is under the blanket with Natasha.

'So what does he do, your Max?' she asks.

'He completely loves me,' Natasha replies. 'Also physically.'

'I meant, apart from that, what does he do for a living?' Gail explains, careful not to smile.

It's approaching midnight. To escape the cold winds and amuse two very tired little orphan girls, Gail has made a tent out of blankets and cushions in the lee of the protective wall that borders the garden. Out of nowhere, Natasha has appeared without a book. First Gail identifies her Grecian sandals through a gap in the blankets, waiting to come on stage. For minutes on end they remain there. Is she listening? Is she plucking up her courage? For what? Is she contemplating a surprise assault to amuse the children? Since Gail has not so far exchanged a single word with Natasha, she has no picture of her possible motivations.

The flap parts, a Grecian sandal cautiously enters, followed by a knee and Natasha's averted head, curtained by her long black hair. Then a second sandal and the rest of her. The little girls, fast asleep, have not stirred. For more minutes on end Gail and Natasha lie head to head, mutely watching through the open flap as salvos of rockets are detonated with uncomfortable proficiency by Niki and his comrades-in-arms. Natasha is shivering. Gail pulls a blanket over both of them.

'It appears that I am recently pregnant,' Natasha observes, in groomed Jane Austen English, addressing not Gail but a display of fluorescent peacock feathers dripping down the night sky.

If you are lucky enough to receive the confessions of the young, it is wise to keep your eyes fixed on a common object in the far distance, rather than on one another: Gail Perkins, ipsissima verba. In the days before she began reading for the Bar, she taught at a school for children with learning difficulties, and this was one of the things she learned. And if a beautiful girl who is just sixteen confides in you out of the blue that she believes she may be pregnant, the lesson becomes doubly important.

*

'At present time, Max is ski instructor,' Natasha replies to Gail's casually pitched inquiry as to the possible parentage of her expected child. 'But this is temporary. He will be architect and build houses for poor people with no money. Max is very creative, also very sensitive.'

There is no humour in her voice. True love is too serious for that.

'And his parents, what do they do, I wonder?' Gail asks.

'They have hotel. It is for tourists. It is inferior, but Max is completely philosophical regarding material matters.'

'A hotel in the mountains?'

'In Kandersteg. This is village in the mountains, very touristic.'

Gail says she has never been to Kandersteg but Perry has taken part in a ski race there.

'The mother of Max is without culture but she is sympathetic and spiritual like her son. The father is completely negative. An idiot.'

Keep it banal. 'So does Max belong to the official ski school,' Gail asks, 'or is he what they call private?'

'Max is completely private. He skis only with those he respects. He loves best off-piste, which is aesthetic. Also glacier skiing.'

It was in a remote hut high above Kandersteg, Natasha says, that they astonished themselves with their passion:

'I was virgin. Also incompetent. Max is completely considerate. It is his nature to be considerate to all people. Even in passion, he is completely considerate.'

Determinedly in pursuit of the commonplace, Gail asks Natasha where she is with her studies, what subjects she is best at, and what examinations she has fixed her sights on. Since coming to live with Dima and Tamara, Natasha replies, she has been attending Roman Catholic convent school in the Canton of Fribourg as a weekly boarder:

'Unfortunately, I do not believe in God, but this is irrelevant. In life it is frequently necessary to simulate religious conviction. I like best art. Max also is very artistic. Maybe we shall both study art together at St Petersburg or Cambridge. It will be decided.'

'Is he Catholic?'

'In his practices Max is compliant with his family religion. This is because he is dutiful. But in his soul he believes in all gods.'

And in bed? Gail wonders, but does not ask: is he still compliant with his family religion?

'So who else knows about you and Max?' she asks in the same comfortable, light-hearted tone that she has so far managed to maintain. 'Apart from his parents, obviously. Or don't they know either, perhaps?'

'The situation is complicated. Max has sworn extremely strong oath that he will tell no one of our love. On this I have insisted.'

'Not even his mother?'

'The mother of Max is not reliable. She is inhibited by bourgeois instincts, also loquacious. If it is convenient for her, she will tell her husband, also many other bourgeois persons.'

'Is that so very bad?'

'If Dima knows that Max is my lover, it is possible Dima will kill him. Dima is not stranger to physicality. It is his nature.'

'And Tamara?'

'Tamara is not my mother,' she snaps, with a flash of her father's physicality.

'So what will you do if you discover you really are having the baby?' Gail asks lightly, as a battery of Roman candles ignites the landscape.

'At moment of confirmation, we shall immediately escape to distant place, perhaps Finland. Max will arrange this. At present time it is not convenient because he is also summer guide. We shall wait one more month. Maybe it will be possible to study in Helsinki. Maybe we shall kill ourselves. We shall see.'

Gail leaves the worst question till last, perhaps because her bourgeois instincts have warned her of the answer:

'And your Max is how old, Natasha?'

'Thirty-one. But in his heart he is child.'

As you are, Natasha. So is this a fairy tale you're spinning me under the Caribbean stars, a fantasy of the dream lover you will one day meet? Or have you really been to bed with a little shit of a thirty-one-year-old ski bum who doesn't tell his mother? Because if you have, you've come to the right address: me

Gail had been a bit older, not much. The boy in the case wasn't a ski bum but a penniless mixed-race reject from a local grammar school with divorced parents in South Africa. Her mother had departed the family nest three years ago, leaving no forwarding address. Her alcoholic father, far from being a physical threat, was in hospital with terminal liver failure. With money borrowed from friends, Gail had the baby clumsily aborted, and never told the boy.

And as of tonight, she hasn't got around to telling Perry either. On present form she wonders whether she ever will.

*

From the handbag she nearly left in Ollie's cab, Gail fishes out her mobile and checks it for new messages. Finding none, she scrolls back. Natasha's are in capitals for extra drama. Four of them are spread over a single week: