Our Kind of Traitor

If Perry and Gail didn’t actually saunter into the centre court, they agreed, they took their time. There was the stroll down the flowered walkway with the bodyguards acting as guards of honour and Gail holding on to the brim of her broad sunhat and making her flimsy skirts swirl:

‘I flounced around a bit,’ she admitted.

‘And how,’ Perry agreed, to contained smiles from across the table.

There was shuffle at the entrance to the court when Perry appeared to have second thoughts, until it turned out that he was stepping back to let Gail go ahead of him, which she did with enough ladylike deliberation to suggest that, while the planned offence might not have taken place, neither had it gone away. And after Perry sloped Mark.

Dima stood centre court facing them, arms stretched wide in welcome. He was wearing a fluffy blue crew- neck top with full-length sleeves, and long black shorts that reached below his knees. A sunshade like a green beak stuck out from his bald head, which was already glistening in the early sun. Perry said he wondered whether Dima had oiled it. To complement his bejewelled Rolex, a gold trinket chain of vaguely mystical connotation adorned his huge neck: another glint, another distraction.

But Dima, to Gail’s surprise, was not, at the moment of her entry, the main event, she said. Arranged on the spectators’ stand behind him was a mixed – and to her eye weird – assembly of children and adults.

‘Like a bunch of gloomy waxworks,’ she protested. ‘It wasn’t just their overdressed presence at the ungodly hour of seven in the morning. It was their total silence and their sullenness. I took a seat on the empty bottom row and thought, Christ, what is this? A people’s tribunal, or a church parade, or what?’

Even the children seemed estranged from each other. They caught her eye at once. Children did. She counted four of them.

‘Two mopy-looking little girls of around five and seven in dark frocks and sunhats squeezed together beside a buxom black woman who was apparently some sort of minder,’ she said, determined not to let her feelings run ahead of her before time. ‘And two flaxen-haired teenaged boys in freckles and tennis gear. And all looking so down in the mouth you’d think they’d been kicked out of bed and dragged there as a punishment.’

As to the adults, they were just so alien, so oversized and so other, that they could have stepped out of a Charles Addams cartoon, she went on. And it wasn’t only their town clothes or 1970s hairstyles. Or the fact that the women despite the heat were dressed for darkest winter. It was their shared gloom.

‘Why’s nobody talking?’ she whispered to Mark, who had materialized uninvited in the seat beside her.

Mark shrugged. ‘Russian.’

‘But Russians talk all the time!’

Not these Russians, Mark said. Most of them had flown in over the last few days and still had to get used to being in the Caribbean.

‘Something’s happened up there,’ he said, nodding across the bay. ‘According to the buzz, they’ve got some big family powwow going on, not all of it friendly. Don’t know what they do for their personal hygiene. Half the water system’s shot.’

She picked out two fat men, one wearing a brown Homburg hat who was murmuring into a mobile, the other a tartan tam-o’-shanter with a red bobble on the top.

‘Dima’s cousins,’ said Mark. ‘Everybody’s somebody’s cousin round here. Perm they come from.’

‘Perm?’

‘Perm, Russia. Not the hairdo, darling. The town.’

Go up a level and there were the flaxen-haired boys, chewing gum as if they hated it. Dima’s sons, twins, said Mark. And yes, now that Gail looked at them again, she saw a likeness: burly chests, straight backs, and droopy brown bedroom eyes that were already turning covetously towards her.

She took a quick, silent breath and released it. She was approaching what in legal discourse would have been her golden-bullet question, the one that was supposed to reduce the witness to instant rubble. So was she now going to reduce herself to rubble? But when she resumed speaking, she was gratified to hear no quaver in the voice coming back to her from the brick wall, no faltering or other telltale variation:

‘And sitting demurely apart from everybody – demonstratively apart, one would almost have thought – there was this really rather stunning girl of fifteen or sixteen, with jet-black hair down to her shoulders and a school blouse and a navy blue school skirt over her knees, and she didn’t seem to belong to anyone. So I asked Mark who she was. Naturally.’

Very naturally, she decided with relief, having listened to herself. Not a raised eyebrow round the table. Bravo, Gail.

‘“Her name is Natasha,” Mark informed me. “A flower waiting to be plucked,” if I’d pardon his French. “Dima’s daughter but not Tamara’s. Apple of her father’s eye.”’

And what was the beautiful Natasha, daughter to Dima but not Tamara, doing at seven in the morning when she was supposed to be watching her father playing tennis? Gail asked her audience. Reading a leatherbound tome that she clutched like a shield of virtue on her lap.

‘But absolutely drop-dead gorgeous,’ Gail insisted. And as a throwaway: ‘I mean, seriously beautiful.’ And then she thought: Oh Christ, I’m beginning to sound like a dyke when all I want is to sound unconcerned.

But once again, neither Perry nor her inquisitors seemed to have noticed anything out of tune.

‘So where do I find Tamara who isn’t Natasha’s mother?’ she asked Mark, severely, taking the opportunity to edge away from him.

‘Two rows up on your left. Very pious lady. Known locally as Mrs Nun.’

She did a careless swing round and homed in on a spectral woman draped from head to toe in black. Her hair, also black, was shot with white and bound in a bun. Her mouth, locked in a downward curve, seemed never to have smiled. She wore a mauve chiffon scarf.

‘And on her bosom, this bishop-grade Orthodox gold cross with an extra bar,’ Gail exclaimed. ‘Hence the Mrs Nun, presumably.’ And as an afterthought: ‘But wow, did she have presence. A real scene-stealer’ – shades of her acting parents – ‘you really felt the willpower. Even Perry did.’

‘Later,’ Perry warned, avoiding her eye. ‘They don’t want us to be wise after the event.’

Well, I’m not allowed to be wise before it either, am I? she had half a mind to shoot back at him, but in her relief at having successfully negotiated the hurdle of Natasha, let it go.

Something about the immaculate little Luke was seriously distracting her: the way she kept catching his eye without meaning to; the way he caught hers. She’d wondered at first whether he was gay, until she spotted him eyeing the gap in her blouse where a button had opened. It’s the loser’s gallantry in him, she decided. It’s his air of fighting to the last man, when the last man is himself. In the years when she was waiting for Perry, she’d slept with quite a few men, and there’d been one or two she’d said yes to out of kindness, simply to prove to them that they were better than they thought. Luke reminded her of them.

* * *

Limbering up for the match with Dima, Perry by contrast had scarcely bothered with the spectators at all, he claimed, talking intently to his big hands set flat on the table before him. He knew they were up there, he’d given them a wave of his racquet and got nothing back. Mainly, he was too busy putting in his contact lenses, tightening his shoelaces, smearing on sun cream, worrying about Mark giving Gail a hard time, and generally wondering how quickly he could win and get out. He was also being interrogated by his opponent, standing three feet away:

‘They bother you?’ Dima inquired in an earnest undertone. ‘My supporters’ club? You want I tell them go home?’

‘Of course not,’ Perry replied, still smarting from his encounter with the bodyguards. ‘They’re your friends, presumably.’

‘You British?’

‘I am.’

‘English British? Welsh? Scottish?’

‘Just plain English, actually.’