One Good Turn

They didn’t have coffee. They had a bowl of borscht, followed by hot chocolate, thick and sweet, served in tall mugs, alongside some kind of custard pastry. She ordered it and wouldn’t let him pay, waving her hand at the thin plastic carrier bag that contained his newspaper-wrapped dolls, snugly inside of one another now, so he wondered if this was his reward for having forked out way over the odds for his purchase. Maybe this was how business was transacted in Russia, maybe if you gave someone enough money to live off for a week they took you into warm, steamy cafes and blew their cigarette smoke all over you. On holiday in Crete once (“Discover the Ancient Wonders of”), he found that every time he bought something in a shop, the shopkeeper insisted on giving him something else for free, as if they wanted to soften the harsh edges of capitalism. These gifts usually took the form of a crocheted doily so that Martin had quite a pile of them in his suit-case by the time he returned home. He gave them to an Oxfam shop.

“Irina,” she said, sticking out her hand and shaking his. When she unwrapped her scarf, her hair fell down her back.

“Martin,” Martin said.

“Marty,” she said, smiling at him. He didn’t correct her mistake. No one had ever called him “Marty” before. He liked the way “Marty” seemed a more entertaining man than he knew himself to be.

He tried to explain to Irina that he was a writer, but he couldn’t tell whether she understood him or not. “Dostoyevsky,” he said, “Pushkin.”

“Idyot!” she exclaimed, her pretty doll face suddenly animated. “Here is Idyot.” It was only later that he realized the cafe they were in was called the Idiot.

He wanted to impress her a little with his success. He never talked about his professional good fortune with anyone. Melanie, his agent, thought it was never good enough and he could do better, the few friends he had weren’t in the least successful and he didn’t want them to think he was boasting in any way, his mother was indifferent and his brother was jealous, so he had found it best to keep his small triumphs to himself. But he would have liked Irina to know that he was a person of a little consequence in his native country (“His sales build with every book”), but she just smiled and licked the crumbs of pastry from her fingers. “Sure,” she said.

When she had finished eating, she stood up suddenly and, without looking at her watch, said, “I go.” She drained her cup while shrugging into her coat, there was a kind of greed in the gesture that Martin admired.

“Tonight?” she said, as if they had already made an arrange-ment. “Caviar Bar in Grand Hotel, seven o’clock. Okay, Marty?”

“Yes, okay,” Martin said hastily because she was already dashing for the door, raising her hand in farewell without looking back.

When he left the cafe he found it was snowing thickly. It seemed very romantic, the snow, the girl with blond hair wrapped in a scarf, like Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago.

He stared at his reflection in the slightly foxed mirror of the Four Clans’ bathroom. Maybe he felt so nauseous because he was starving, he couldn’t remember when he last had anything proper to eat. A shiver went through his body, and the next moment he was on his knees, holding on to the toilet bowl, being violently sick. He flushed the toilet, and as he stared into the vortex of vomit swirling with some nasty blue chemical that must be in the cistern, he was hit by a sudden thought:

Robbed? Of course!

He hurried out of the bathroom and searched for his wallet in his jacket pocket. Gone. He sighed heavily at the thought of all those tedious phone calls he was going to have to make to his bank and credit card companies. His driver’s license and a hundred pounds in cash had also been in the wallet, and then-nightmare-he remembered the little lilac Memory Stick, the sliver of plastic that contained Death on the Black Isle. Gone. A cold wave of panic passed through his body, followed by a hot one of relief- the novel was backed up on a CD in his “office.” Martin had saved Paul Bradley’s life, and in return he had stolen from him. Martin was so hurt by this betrayal that he actually felt tears pricking his eyes.

In the fug of bacon and tartan in the reception area, there was a sense of Marie Celeste-like abandonment. He rang the brass bell, and after a long wait, a youth dressed in a kitchen-staff uni-form appeared. With fantastic sluggishness he ran his finger down the register and confirmed that Paul Bradley had checked out.

“Nothing to pay,” he said, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “You’re free to go,” he said as if he were letting Martin out of jail.

Martin didn’t mention to the boy that he had been robbed, he didn’t seem like someone who would care. And why should he? Martin couldn’t help feeling that somehow he had got what he deserved.

22

Gloria woke early and padded quietly downstairs as if there were someone else in the house whom she might wake, although she was wonderfully alone. When Graham was here the house crashed and boomed with noise, even when he was still asleep in bed. Without him, the day fell into its own quiet pattern, soft col-ors and slants of light that Gloria never saw otherwise.

She felt the lamblike nub of the oatmealy Berber stair-carpet between her bare toes and the smooth glide of the red Oregon pine of the banister beneath her palm. She spared a thought for the hundred and fifty years or so of polishing that had gone into creating this satin, some by her own hand, not with Mr. Sheen but with a hard block of beeswax. Gloria had schooled herself to appreciate small joys, of which there were many in the house, a house that would be standing long after Gloria herself was in the ground.

Every day was a gift, she told herself, that was why it was called “the present.” They were going to lose this house. It would be dragged into the whole sorry mess Graham had created, it would come under the Proceeds of Crime Act (she had been reading up about it online) and be taken and sold to make some reparation for all Graham had done over the years. A house of cards, that’s what he had created, an illusion. His death or the Fraud Unit, whichever came soonest, would reveal everything, throw open the curtains and the shutters and let the light in on every filthy corner.

Gloria opened the French windows in the living room and stood for a few minutes, breathing in the early morning air, watching a sparrow hopping delicately along the fence. An ounce of brown feather and black bib. It would be nice to think that God’s eye was on it, but failing that, both Gloria and the CCTV cameras would notice its fall. A magpie came swooping and chattering, and Gloria chased it off.

The house in the Grange (“Providence,” named long before Gloria and Graham took ownership of it) had nothing in common with the jerry-built, overpriced rubbish that had made Graham rich. The houses Graham built had badly hung cabinet doors, imitation-stone cement fireplaces, and cheap contract carpeting. They were houses that smelled as if they were made from plastics and chemicals. Last year, Graham had talked about moving from their house in the Grange, he said they were “too rich” for it and he “had an eye” on an estate up north, acres of land where he could fish for trout and surprise unsuspecting birds by shooting them from the sky. Over the years, the Grange house had molded itself comfortably around Gloria, and it seemed cruel suddenly to shuck it off in favor of some cavernous pile in the middle of nowhere.

Gloria said she didn’t see how you could be too rich. If you were too rich, you could just give some of your money away until you were just rich. Or give it all away and be poor. And they weren’t really rich anyway, it had all been just smoke and mirrors, their lives predicated on dirty money.

She moved into the kitchen and made the first pot of coffee of the day, inhaling the aroma of the beans before putting them in the grinder. The Italian marble tiles on the kitchen floor were cold and inert, it was like walking on tombstones. They were incredi-bly expensive, but Graham had acquired them incredibly cheaply (naturally). Last year the house had been renovated, using the more qualified members of Graham’s workforce. Among other things, they had knocked through and installed a vast American kitchen. “Nothing’s too good for my wife,” Graham said expan-sively to his architect. “How about it, Gloria-a larder fridge, a Gaggenau hob, one of the ones with an integral deep-fat fryer?” So she said she would like a pink sink because she’d seen one on a home show program on television, and Graham said, “Pink sink? Over my dead body.” So there you go.

Gloria liked to visit any new Hatter Homes development. The farther afield the estates, the more of an outing these visits were, she might pack a picnic or find out where the local tearooms were. She liked to look round the