‘Green Peugeot and a taxi.’
‘Let’s go,’ he said, and grinned straight into my heart.
We drew up at the automatic barrier and there were queues at all the barriers on either side. Finn put the parking card into the machine and the barrier rose. Before he accelerated through, he slid a thin metal card into the machine’s slot. We drove under the barrier, I saw him watch it fall in the mirror behind us, and then he grinned. The blue BMW couldn’t get the machine to accept its own parking card and was trying to reverse out, but there were at least four cars behind it. We drove out to the sound of angry horns.
‘There’ll be at least one ahead,’ Finn said. ‘They’re watching you, not me.’
‘There,’ I said.
A green Peugeot was pulled over on to the grass fifty yards away and as we passed, it slipped on to the road behind us.
‘Look out for others,’ Finn said.
We turned westwards out on to the motorway. I watched in the side mirror for what was behind us, the green Peugeot and whatever else might be following. Finn drove fast so that when, some twenty minutes after we’d left the airport behind us, he suddenly pulled up on the hard shoulder, I was jolted forwards.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered, looking in the mirror.
The green Peugeot overshot by forty yards or so and swerved on to the hard shoulder also.
‘There they are,’ Finn said.
I saw the passenger talking into a phone.
Traffic passed us, but no one else stopped. I was watching the green Peugeot ahead of us further down the hard shoulder when Finn slammed his foot on to the accelerator and we surged backwards for thirty yards and then he slammed the gear lever into first and swung the wheel down to the left and on to a motorway works entrance that was so concealed I hadn’t seen it.
We left the motorway in a squeal of tyres and crashed on to a dusty track that led to a quarry-like bowl full of road-making machinery.
Finn drove through this apparent dead end and out of the other side on to another dust track that led back in the direction we’d come from. I looked behind and saw the green Peugeot racing backwards along the hard shoulder.
Finn drove at breakneck speed for about a mile. I looked behind and saw dust kicking up far away as the green Peugeot finally found its way out of the quarry behind us.
The track we were on led back under the motorway and joined a small country road. Finn turned on to it and headed back again in the direction we’d been travelling on the motorway.
There was a distance of half a mile to the car behind and its occupants couldn’t have seen which way we’d turned on to the country road. Finn accelerated and drove so fast I hardly noticed what we were passing. We turned off again twice, on to two more single-track country roads like the first one. When he was finally satisfied he had lost our tail, he slowed and turned off on to another dust road that led out southwards over a great expanse of dead, flat, bleak saltpans that stretched for miles in either direction.
There was no other traffic, not even the occasional slow farm vehicle we’d overtaken on the side roads. Finn drove the car out of sight into a gully and we waited, not speaking.
When we came back up on to the track he drove very slowly and on the grass edges, so that the dust didn’t kick up. We must have driven for another twenty minutes on this winding track across the old, disused saltpans. And then I felt rather than saw the sea. We were so low that the dunes ahead obscured the view.
We seemed to be heading nowhere in a salt-and-sand desert. But when we finally reached the dunes and Finn pulled up behind them, I saw there was a dilapidated wooden shack, obscured from the road. It was a campers’ restaurant, open only in the summer, which contained a few drifting adolescents sitting at rickety tables. Beyond the wooden structure of the restaurant were two more rickety wooden buildings, small shacks erected in a chaotic, haphazard fashion and constructed from what looked like bleached driftwood. Finn cut the engine and looked at me.
‘Fancy a swim?’ he said and grinned again. We got out of the car. ‘And I think it’s about time I carried your case,’ he said.
We walked across hot sand–I’d kicked off my shoes–past the restaurant and up to the second of the two shacks built at an angle to the sea. We still haven’t touched each other, I thought. The door to the shack was unlocked and Finn pushed it open with his foot and threw the case down. Then he took off his jacket and his jeans to reveal a pair of faded blue floral swimming shorts. He ran down the beach and into the sea, not stopping until the water became too deep and he fell forwards into it.
He looked round when he’d come up from under the surface and shouted.
‘Come on, it’s beautiful.’
I changed and joined him.
That was how it was, our first meeting in over a year. Finn never said hello. He didn’t kiss me. He never asked me how the flight was, if I was tired, what my departure from the Forest had been like. It was as if I’d just come back from a visit to the shops, rather than that we hadn’t seen each other for over a year.
And all this suited me, I realised. Everything I’d half prepared in my mind before our meeting, and that was so inadequate, faded away, and with it went all my awkward anxiety.
We drink beers sitting in the sand, swim again, and then go to bed in an extremely uncomfortable wooden structure that Finn tells me is the bed. Later we eat out at a table in the sand in front of what Finn insists is the restaurant as the sun starts to sink into the sea.
There is only fish, Finn informs me. The owner of the shacks is a Hungarian who came over in 1956 after the uprising against the Russians there failed. He’d taught himself to be a fisherman. Back then, when these things were still possible, he’d built the shacks illegally, constructed from driftwood in this isolated place where few people wanted to come and which he’d never left.
He is now seventy-odd years old, Finn tells me, and whatever there is for lunch every day depends on what he’s caught that morning.
‘I didn’t tell him you were Russian, by the way,’ Finn says. Finn has a curious, self-deprecating and ultimately deceitful habit of apologising for who he is and expecting others to as well. In Moscow, when anyone asked him if he was English, he would always say, ‘I’m afraid I am.’ It was a peculiarly English deceit, I thought.
‘This is just about the only spot for nearly fifty miles that hasn’t been developed at all,’ Finn says. ‘They can’t build on the saltpans. There’s nothing at all in either direction for several miles. To the left you eventually come to Marseilles’ industrial wasteland.’
I can see the ugly belching smokestacks in the distance.
‘To the right there’s a tourist beach, empty of buildings, three miles along from here. Sometimes you see someone who’s walked it but not often and they don’t do it a second time. It isn’t a pretty place except when you look out to sea.’
‘Fast work to find it in three days,’ I say.
‘Yes, you didn’t give me much warning, Rabbit.’
But of course Finn has known the place for years. I find later that the Hungarian, whom Finn introduces as Willy, has some connection to the Service. At any rate Finn persuaded Willy to throw out some hippies from our shack when he received my message that I was coming.
‘We’ll be fine here for a while,’ Finn says later. ‘And this place is always here when we need to get away.’ And then, on our first night for fourteen months, he finally falls asleep with his arm around my stomach. I lie and watch the stars and listen to the thin-lipped waves that slip quietly on to the edge of the sand. Some gypsy music is playing from a hippy tent further down the beach. It is as if we’ve never been apart; as if we’ve known each other long before we ever met. It is the same as it was.
For nearly three days we say nothing about the reason I’m here and slowly the burden of it recedes. Finn ensures that we concentrate just on ourselves. We talk a lot about the distant past, about where we’ve come from, things that aren’t recorded in Finn’s file we kept at the Forest, things we never knew. And I respond with little stories of my own upbringing. It is like the games we used to play in Moscow, teasing each other with what we knew about the other, except that these are revelations, background that neither of us knew before, and we aren’t taunting each other with them any more.
Finn tells me one evening how he was recruited, or at any rate how they made the initial moves towards his
