swimmer’s stretch of his long arms, but Gail’s stress isn’t eased.
‘So the first thing I said to them was: tell me some more about Uncle Vanya. They’d been so cryptic about him I thought he might be a bad uncle. “Uncle Vanya plays the balalaika with us, we love him very much, and he’s funny when he gets drunk.” That’s Irina speaking. She’s decided to be more forthcoming than her big sister. But I’m thinking: a drunken uncle who plays music to them, what else does he play?’
‘And the language spoken still English, we take it,’ Yvonne asks, in her pursuit of every last detail. But gently now, woman to woman. ‘We’re not into basic French or anything?’
‘English was virtually their first language. Internat American English with a slight Italian accent. So then I asked, is Vanya a real uncle or just an honorary one? Answer: Vanya is our mother’s brother and he used to be married to Aunt Raisa who lives in Sochi with another husband nobody likes. We’re doing family tree now, which is great by me. Tamara is Dima’s wife, and she’s very strict, and she prays a lot because she’s holy and she is kind to have us. Kind? Have us how? And then I say – I’m being a really clever lawyer now, asking the tangential questions, not the in-your-face ones – is Dima kind to Tamara? Is Dima kind to his boys? Meaning: is Dima a bit too kind to you? And Katya says, yes, Dima is kind to Tamara because he is her husband and her sister’s dead, and Dima is kind to Natasha because he’s her father and her mother’s dead, and to his sons because he’s their father. Which opens the door to the question I really want to ask, and I put it to Katya because she’s older: So who’s your father, Katya? And Katya says, he’s dead. And Irina joins in and says, so’s our mother. They’re both dead. I do a kind of “oh really?” and when they just look at me, I say, I’m very sad for you. How long have they been dead? I wasn’t even sure I believed them. There was a bit of me that was still hoping they were pulling some gruesome children’s trick. By now it’s Irina doing the talking and Katya who’s gone into a kind of trance. So have I, but that’s beside the point. They died on Wednesday, Irina says. A lot of emphasis on the day. As if the day’s to blame. Wednesday was when they died, whenever Wednesday was. So I say – it just gets worse and worse – you mean last Wednesday? And Irina says, yes, Wednesday a week ago, the 29th of April: very precisely, making sure I get it right. So Wednesday last week and something about a car smash, and I just sit there staring at them, and Irina takes my hand and pats it and Katya puts her head in my lap, and Perry who I’ve completely forgotten about wraps his arm round me, and I’m the only person crying.’
* * * Gail has wedged the knuckle of her forefinger between her teeth, which is another thing she does in court to protect herself against unprofessional emotions.
‘Talking it over with Perry in the cabin afterwards, everything fell more or less into place,’ she says, raising her voice to give it an even more detached ring, but still keeping Perry out of her eye-line, and meanwhile trying to make it sound natural that two little girls should be having a jolly time beside the seaside a few days after their parents have been slaughtered in a car accident.
‘Their parents died on the Wednesday. The tennis match took place on the following Wednesday. Ergo, the household had mourned for a week and Dima had reckoned it was time to get them out into the fresh air: so all snap out of it and who’s for tennis? If they were Jewish, which for all we knew they may have been, or some of them were, or the dead parents were, then maybe they’d been sitting shiva, and by the Wednesday they’re supposed to be getting back into life. It hardly meshed with Tamara being Christian-holy and wearing a cross, but we weren’t talking religious consistency, not with that crowd, and Tamara was widely held to be weird.’
Yvonne again, respectful but firm: ‘I hate to press, Gail, but Irina said it was a car smash. Now is that all she said? Did she say, for instance, where the smash had happened?’
‘Outside Moscow somewhere. Vague. She blamed the roads. The roads had too many holes in them. Everyone drove in the middle of the road to avoid the holes, so naturally the cars hit each other.’
‘Was there any talk of hospitalization? Or did Mummy and Daddy die instantly? Was that the story?’
‘Dead on impact. “A great big lorry came rushing down the middle of the road and killed them dead.”’
‘Any other casualties at all, apart from the two parents?’
‘I wasn’t being awfully good at the follow-up questions, I’m afraid’ – feeling herself start to waver.
‘But was there a driver, for instance? If the driver was killed too, that would be part of the story, surely?’
Yvonne has reckoned without Perry:
‘Neither Katya nor Irina made any reference to a driver, dead or alive, direct or indirect, Yvonne,’ he says, in the slow, corrective tone he reserves for lazy students and predatory bodyguards. ‘There was no discussion of other casualties, hospitals, or what particular car anyone was driving.’ His voice is mounting. ‘Or whether there was third-party insurance cover, or –’
‘Cut,’ says Luke.
* * * Gail had gone upstairs again, this time unescorted. Perry had stayed where he was, head caged in the fingers of one hand, the other tapping restively at the table. Gail returned and sat down. Perry appeared not to notice.
‘So, Perry,’ said Luke, all brisk and businesslike.
‘So what?’
‘Cricket.’
‘That wasn’t till next day.’
‘We’re aware of that. It’s in your document.’
‘Then why not read it?’
‘I think we’ve been through that, haven’t we?’
All right, it was next day, same time, same beach, different part, Perry grudgingly conceded. The same black-windowed people carrier pulled up in the NO PARKING bay, and out poured not just Elspeth, the two girls and Natasha, but the boys.
All the same, on the word ‘cricket’ Perry had begun to brighten: ‘Looking like a couple of teenaged colts who’d been locked up in the stable for too long and were finally being allowed a gallop,’ he said with sudden relish as the memory took him over.
For today’s visit to the beach, he and Gail had picked themselves a spot as far from the house called Three Chimneys as it was possible to get. They weren’t hiding from Dima and company but they’d had a rocky night of it and woken late with splitting headaches, after making the elementary mistake of drinking their complimentary rum.
‘And of course there was no escape from them,’ Gail cut in, deciding it was her turn again. ‘Not anywhere on the whole beach. Well was there, Perry? Not on the whole island, when we started to think about it. Why were the Dimas so bloody interested in us? I mean, who were they? What did they want? And why us? Every time we turned a corner, there they were. We were getting to feel that. From our cabin, they were straight across the bay, peering at us. Or we imagined they were, which was just as bad. And on the beach, they didn’t even need binoculars. All they had to do was lean over the garden wall and gawp. Which no doubt they did a fair amount of, because it was only minutes after we’d pitched camp that the people carrier with black windows drove up.’
The same baby-faced bodyguard, said Perry, taking back the story. Not in the bar this time, but under a shade tree on the high ground. No Uncle Vanya from Perm with his tam-o’-shanter and family-sized revolver, but a gangly string-bean understudy who must have been some kind of fitness freak, because instead of shinning up the lookout he pranced up and down the beach timing himself and stopping each end for a bit of t’ai chi:
‘Bubble-haired chap,’ Perry said, his grin slowly stretching to its full width. ‘Kinetic. Well, manic was more like it. Couldn’t sit or stand still for five seconds. And beyond skinny. Skeletal. We put him down as a new arrival to the Dima household. We’d decided the Dimas had a high turnover of cousins from Perm.’
‘So Perry took one look at the children, didn’t you?’ Gail said. ‘The boys particularly – and you thought, Christ what do we do with this lot? Then you had your
