Our Kind of Traitor

Emilio’s eyebrows have risen as he asks a comic question Luke can’t hear. Gail comes back with a jokey reply. Luke loves her hopelessly, which is how Luke loves. Always.

Emilio is glancing over Gail’s shoulder at the changing-room door. Is that what their joke was about? – Emilio saying, Whatever are those boys doing down there? Shall I go and break it up? And Gail replying, Don’t you dare, Emilio, I’m sure they’re having a lovely time – which is what she’d say.

Luke into his mouthpiece:

‘Time’s up.’

Ben, if only you could see me now. See the best of me, not always the bad stuff. A week ago, Ben had pressed a Harry Potter on him. And Luke had tried to read it, really tried. Coming home dog-tired at eleven at night, or lying wakefully alongside his irretrievable wife, he’d tried. And fallen at the first fence. The fantasy stuff made no sense to him – understandably, he might argue, given that his whole life was a fantasy, even his heroism. Because what was so brave about being caught, and allowed to run away?

‘So it’s good, isn’t it?’ Ben had said, tired of waiting for his father’s response. ‘You enjoyed it, Dad. Admit.’

‘I did and it’s terrific,’ Luke said handsomely.

Another lie and they both knew it. Another step away from the person he most loved in the world.

* * *

‘Stop talking, everybody, at once, please. Thank you!’ Bunny Popham, queen of the roost, is addressing the unwashed. ‘Our brave gladiators have finally agreed to grace us with their presence. Let us all immediately adjourn to the Arena!’ A patter of knowing laughter for Arena. ‘There are no lions today, apart from Dima. No Christians either, unless the Professor is one, which I can’t vouch for.’ More laughter. ‘Gail, my dear, kindly show us the way. I have seen many gorgeous outfits in my day but none, if I may say, so nicely filled.’

Perry and Dima lead. Gail, Bunny Popham and Emilio dell Oro follow. After them, a couple of clean envoys and their girls. How clean can you get? Then the podgy boy all alone except for his vodka glass. Luke watches them into a coppice of trees and out of sight. A shaft of sun lights up the flowered pathway and goes out.

* * *

It was the Roland Garros all over again: if only in the sense that neither then nor afterwards did Gail have any consecutive awareness of the great tennis-match-in-the-rain that she was so diligently following. Sometimes she wondered whether the players had any either.

She knew Dima won the toss because he always did. She knew that he chose to stand with his back to the advancing clouds rather than serve.

She remembered thinking that the players put up a pretty good show of competitiveness to begin with and then, like actors when their concentration flags, forgot that they were supposed to be engaged in a life-or-death duel for Dima’s honour.

She remembered worrying about Perry sliding on the slippery wet tape that marked out the court. Was he going to do something as bloody silly as sprain his ankle? Then about Dima doing the same thing.

And although, like yesterday’s sporting French spectators, she was meticulous in applauding Dima’s shots as well as Perry’s, it was Perry that she kept her eyes glued on: partly for his protection, partly because she had a notion that she might be able to tell by his body language what sort of luck they’d been having down there in the changing room with Hector.

She remembered also the faint squelch of the slowing ball as it slurped into the wet clay, and how now and then she let herself be transported to the last phase of yesterday’s Final, and had to relocate in time present.

And how the balls themselves got increasingly ponderous as the game dragged on. And how Perry in his distraction kept playing the slow ball too early, either hitting it out or – a couple of times to his shame – missing it altogether.

And how Bunny Popham at some point had leaned over her shoulder to ask her whether she would prefer to make a run for it now before the next cloudburst, or stay with her man and go down with the ship?

And how she had taken his invitation as an excuse for vanishing to the loo and checking her mobile on the off-chance that Natasha might have expanded on her most recent communication. But Natasha hadn’t. Which meant that matters stood where they had stood at nine this morning, in the ominous words that she knew by heart, even while she reread them:This house is not bearable Tamara is only with God Katya and Irina are tragic my brothers do only football we know a bad fate awaits us all I shall never look at my father in his face again Natasha

Press green to reply, listen to a vacuum, ring off.

* * *

She was also conscious that, after the second rain break – or was it the third? – gouges began to appear in the sopping clay, which had evidently reached a point where it simply couldn’t take any more water. And that in consequence an official gentleman of the Club appeared and remonstrated with Emilio dell Oro, pointing to the state of the court and telling him with sideways brushing movements of the hands ‘no more’.

But Emilio dell Oro must have had special powers of persuasion, because he took the official gentleman confidingly by the arm and led him under a beech tree, and by the end of the conversation the official was scurrying back to the clubhouse like a chastened schoolboy.

And amid these scattered observations and rememberings there was the ever-present lawyer in her, at it again, fretting about the membrane of plausibility that seemed from the outset to be on the point of breaking, which didn’t necessarily signify the end of the free world as we know it, just as long as she was able to get to Natasha and the girls.

And then, while she’s having these random thoughts, lo and behold, Dima and Perry are shaking hands across the net and calling it a day: a handshake not of reconciled opponents, to her eye, but of accomplices in a deception so blatant that the last few loyal survivors huddled on the stands should be booing rather than applauding.

And somewhere in the middle of the mix – since there are no limits to the day’s incongruities – up pops the podgy Russian man who’s been following her around, and tells her he would like to fuck her. In those very words: ‘I would like to fuck you,’ then waits to hear yes or no: an over-earnest thirty-something city boy with bad skin and an empty vodka glass in his hand and bloodshot eyes. She thought she misheard him first time round. There was hubbub inside her head as well as outside. She actually asked him to repeat himself, God help her. But by then he’d lost his nerve, and confined himself to trailing after her at five yards’ distance, which was why she had been content to place herself under the wing of Bunny Popham, the least bad option available to her.

And that in turn was how she came to confess to him that she too was a lawyer, a moment she always dreaded, since it resulted in awkward mutual comparisons. But for Bunny Popham it was just an excuse to be shocking:

‘Oh, my dear’ – lifting his eyes to Heaven – ‘I am overcome! Well, all I can say is, you can have my briefs any time.’

He asked which Chambers, so she told him, which was only natural. What else was she supposed to do?

She had thought a lot about packing. That too, she remembered. Stuff like whether she would use Perry’s new tennis bag for their dirty clothes, and equally weighty matters associated with getting out of Paris and on the road to Natasha. Perry had kept on their room for tonight so that they could pack last thing this evening before catching the train back to London, which in the world they had entered was how normal people travelled to Berne when they are potentially under surveillance and not supposed to be going there.

* * *

The massage room supplied bathrobes. Perry and Dima were wearing them. They were sitting three at the table again, where they had been sitting for the last twelve minutes by Perry’s watch. Ollie in his white coat was bowed over his laptop in the corner with his massage bag at his feet, and occasionally he scribbled a note and passed it to Hector, who added it to the pile in front of him. The claustrophobic atmosphere was reminiscent of the Bloomsbury basement without the smell of wine, and there was something similarly reassuring about the noise of real lives near by: the grumble of pipes, voices from the locker room, the flushing of a lavatory, the putter of a faulty air conditioner.