serious.
‘I’ve missed you, Rabbit. I’m so happy with you. Is it the same for you?’
‘Can’t you tell?’
‘Can’t you tell me?’
I’m thinking of Vladimir, of my deceit, and the foul taste it leaves in my throat now.
I put my hand on his face and we look at each other.
‘I’ve missed you too, Finn.’
‘Good. So that’s all right then,’ he says, and smiles easily.
‘I have to tell you something,’ I say.
He looks at me as if he knows what I’m going to say, but I go on anyway.
‘You remember Vladimir?’
‘Your old school friend? The man your dad wanted you to marry?’
‘Yes.’
‘You haven’t gone and married him, have you?’
‘No. He’s my new case officer on you, Finn.’
‘Very clever of them.’
‘Yes,’ I agree, and know that Finn is right. It is very clever of them and I have to be careful with Vladimir.
‘We trained at the Forest for two weeks before I came out here,’ I say.
‘And you slept together.’
‘Yes, we did.’
Finn looks at me and kisses me lightly on the lips.
‘And that’s very clever of you, darling,’ he says.
There is no need to say more. He understands everything.
We get up and walk slowly back along the beach with our arms around each other. Finn talks in a businesslike way, but all his tension from before has gone. That is what the truth does, I think.
‘You have your arrangements to communicate with them?’ Finn says as we walk slowly.
‘I have a contact in London,’ I answer. ‘Another in Geneva, whichever is closer. I’m supposed to check in every eleven days, even if there’s nothing worth saying. We have our usual rules of contact,’ I say.
‘And Moscow?’ Finn says.
‘They’ll contact me if they want me to go to Moscow.’
‘Nothing set in stone, then,’ he replies.
‘In London there was a contact who kept in touch with one of the trade reps at our embassy there, but who’s now been recalled,’ I say hesitantly. ‘A low-level Russian businessman working on the edge of the City. His handler was one of our long-standing trade reps at the embassy, from the Forest.’
‘This contact was arrested by your people a short while ago, however. He was released and he’s been replaced by another “businessman”,’ I say.
‘Why was he arrested?’ Finn says.
‘He’d been spotted by the Service coming out of a public convenience in Hyde Park,’ I say. ‘He was still doing up his zip. That’s what alerted MI5, apparently. They’d found a package concealed in a cistern and were watching the place and saw this guy come out doing up his zip. You wouldn’t believe the fuss at the Forest. He’s really in the shit. According to us, the English don’t come out of public conveniences doing up their zips. The Forest believes that’s why he was spotted as a foreigner.’
I laugh and Finn joins me.
‘So there’s a new contact for you in London.’
‘He’s called Valentin Malenkov,’ I say. ‘Highly trained, very special to us, one of our very best, in fact. A perfect English speaker travelling on a Swiss passport under the name Franz Noiber. He’s Forest to the core.’
‘He’ll know that he should do up his zip, then,’ Finn says.
We walk on and stop, holding each other from time to time. It feels closer than we’ve ever been.
‘We have to make sure you deliver,’ Finn says.
‘Yes.’
‘Every ten days we’ll compile your report, the two of us together,’ he says. ‘You have to be useful. You have to give them good stuff. That way we’ll buy ourselves time.’
The last time we stop before we reach the huts, Finn holds my hands.
‘Are you ready to leave?’ he says. ‘We can just forget everything but us, if you like. I’ll stop this now if you’re ready to come with me. We can start a pig farm. If you’re ready to leave,’ he says.
I don’t reply. I can’t make the leap.
‘Patrushev told me they’d look after Nana for me,’ I say.
Finn looks at me, with sympathy in his eyes.
‘And what does Nana say?’
‘She said, “Would you rather spend your time with Finn or with Patrushev?” ’
Finn laughs.
‘I want to come,’ I say. ‘I will come.’
‘When you’re ready,’ Finn says, understanding my fears, and we walk back, stopping once to kiss each other for so long it was as if a premonition of bad things crouched over us and we clung to each other for shelter.
23
TWO THINGS HAPPENED in the following seven days that changed the bright colours of our briefly carefree existence to black. The first event altered the psychological landscape for the whole world but the second was more personal, it attacked our world directly–Finn’s anyway, and therefore mine.
One late afternoon as the first cool September breeze blew in from the sea, Willy came running over to the shack where Finn and I were working on my first report to submit to the Forest. I had never seen Willy look agitated, let alone excited. He wore his past lightly and he took bad news in the same way he took good news, with tolerant equanimity.
‘Quick, come quick,’ he said.
Finn and I looked at each other, fearing that our hideaway had been discovered or worse, and immediately left what we were doing and followed Willy to the restaurant. He had an old radio that was screwed to the bar. It was a thing of great value to him, and reminded him of his youth when tuning into the BBC’s World Service up in a friend’s attic in Budapest could have had him imprisoned. He still treated a radio with reverence fifty years later.
One or two of the less stoned inhabitants of Willy’s little enclave on the beach were gathered around the radio and their normal expressions of varying degrees of blankness were relatively animated. He pushed them out of the way so that he and Finn and I could lean in closer.
‘A plane has hit a building in New York,’ Willy said.
We listened to the commentary as the second plane hit and stories flew around the airwaves of other planes in America that were evidently aimed at American targets. I don’t know how long we listened, but Finn and Willy must have drunk half a case of beer. It was an hour or more before we knew we wouldn’t know anything more that day and Willy switched off the radio, as if it were a precious finite resource that needed to be rested. Then we sat down for an early supper.
‘It’s not events that change history, but the way people react to them,’ I remember Finn saying, and Willy nodding with his mouth full of freshly caught red snapper, perhaps remembering Hungary again, back in 1956.
‘Whoever did this did it in the cause of chaos,’ Willy said eventually. ‘The devil loves chaos.’
Finn said prophetically, if strangely in the circumstances, ‘This will be good for Russia, for Putin.’
‘Surely you’re not going to blame it on Russia!’ I said, and felt the gap yawn between defending my country as a place, as a people, and defending the clique who ruled it.
‘No, no,’ he said and gently held my arm. ‘I don’t think that. But it will open a window of opportunity for
