Our Kind of Traitor

I’ve got an aunt like that, ex-tart turned Catholic convert. Each of her saints has a different job. If she’s lost her keys, it’s Anthony. If she’s taking the train, Christopher. If she’s stuck for a few quid, Mark. If a relative is sick, Francis. If it’s too late, Saint Peter.’

Hiatus. She had dried: another lousy actor, washed up and out of a part.

‘And the rest of the evening, briefly, Gail?’ Luke asked, not quite glancing at his watch, but as good as.

‘Simply scrumptious, thank you. Beluga caviar, lobster, smoked sturgeon, oceans of vodka, brilliant thirty-minute toasts in drunken Russian for the adults, great birthday cake, washed down with health-giving clouds of vile Russian-cigarette smoke. Kobe beef and floodlit cricket in the garden, a steel band banging away that nobody was listening to, fireworks that nobody was watching, a drunken swim for the last chaps standing, and home by midnight, for a jolly post-mortem over a nightcap.’

* * *

A stack of Yvonne’s glossy photographs is making its positively last appearance. Kindly identify anybody you believe you may recognize from the festivities, says Yvonne, speaking by rote.

Him and him, says Gail, wearily pointing.

And him too, surely? says Perry.

Yes, Perry, him too. Another bloody him. One day we’ll have equal opportunity for female Russian criminals.

Silence while Yvonne completes another of her careful notes and puts down her pencil. Thank you, Gail, you have been most helpful, says Yvonne. It’s randy little Luke’s cue to be brisk. Brisk is merciful:

‘Gail, I fear we should release you. You’ve been immensely generous, and a superb witness, and we can pick up on everything else from Perry. We’re very grateful. Both of us. Thank you.’

She is standing at the door, not sure how she got there. Yvonne is standing beside her.

‘Perry?’

Does he answer her? Not that she notices. She climbs the stairs, Yvonne her gaoler close behind her. In the plush, over-prinked hall, big Ollie of the cockney accent and foreign voices folds up his Russian newspaper, clambers to his feet and, pausing in front of a period mirror, carefully adjusts his beret, using both hands.

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.