Our Kind of Traitor

She’d called him once from the train, and once when she reached the village. She’d promised to call him practically by the minute because Luke couldn’t talk to her himself, he had Dima sitting on top of him somewhere, so please use Perry as the cut-out. And she knew things were very fraught, she could hear it in Perry’s voice. The more calm he was, the more fraught she knew things were, and she assumed an episode of some sort. So she spoke calmly herself, which probably conveyed the same signal to him in reverse:

‘She’s all right. Fine, OK? I’ve got her here with me, she’s alive and well, we’re on our way. We’re walking towards the station now. We need a little time, that’s all.’

‘How much time?’

Now it was Gail who was having to watch her words, because Natasha was clinging to her arm.

‘Enough to repair our souls and powder our noses. One other thing.’

‘What?’

‘Nobody needs to be asked where they’ve been, all right? We had a small crisis, it’s over now. Life goes on. It’s not just about when we arrive. It’s from then on: no questions of the affected party. The girls will be fine. The boys I’m not sure.’

‘They’ll be fine too. I’ll see to it. Dick will be over the moon. I’ll tell him at once. Hurry.’

‘We’ll try.’

* * *

On the crowded train back to the valley there had been no opportunity to speak, which didn’t matter because Natasha showed no inclination to; she was in shock, and at times seemed unaware of Gail’s existence. But on the train from Spiez, under Gail’s gentle coaxing, she began to wake. They were sitting side by side in a first-class carriage and looking straight ahead of them, just as they had been in the tent at Three Chimneys. Evening was falling fast and they were the only passengers.

‘I am so –’ Natasha broke out, grabbing Gail’s hand, but then couldn’t finish the sentence.

‘We wait,’ Gail said firmly, to Natasha’s downturned head. ‘We have time. We put our feelings on hold, we enjoy life, and we wait. That’s all we need to do, either of us. Are you hearing me?’

Nod.

‘Then sit up. Don’t give me my hand back, just listen. In a few days you’ll be in England. I’m not sure whether your brothers know that, but they know it’s a mystery tour, and it’s going to begin any day now. There’s a short stop-over in Wengen first. And in England we’ll find you a really good woman doctor – mine – and you’ll find out how you feel, and then you’ll decide. OK?’

Nod.

‘In the meantime, we don’t even think about it. We just wipe it out of our minds. You get rid of this silly smock you’re wearing’ – plucking affectionately at her sleeve – ‘you dress slim and gorgeous. Nothing shows, I promise you. Will you do that?’

She will.

‘All the decisions wait till England. They’re not bad decisions, they’re sensible ones. And you make them calmly. When you get to England, not until. For your father’s sake, as well as yours. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Again.’

‘Yes.’

Would Gail have spoken in the same way if Perry hadn’t said it was the way Luke wanted her to speak? – that this was the absolute worst moment for Dima to be hit with shattering news?

Fortunately, yes, she would. She’d have made the same speech word for word, and she’d have meant it. She’d been there herself. She knew what she was talking about. And she was telling herself this as their train pulled into Interlaken Ost Station for their connection along the valley to Lauterbrunnen and Wengen, when she noticed that a Swiss policeman in smart summer uniform was walking down the empty platform towards them, and that a dull-faced man in a grey suit and polished brown shoes was walking beside him, and that the policeman was wearing the kind of rueful smile that, in any civilized country, tells you that you haven’t got much to smile about.

‘You speak English?’

‘How did you guess?’ – smiling back.

‘Maybe your complexion actually,’ he said – which she reckoned quite pert for your ordinary Swiss policeman. ‘But the young lady is not English’ – glancing at Natasha’s black hair and slightly Asian looks.

‘Well, actually she could be, you know. We’re all everything these days,’ Gail replied in the same sporty tone.

‘Do you have British passports?’

‘I do.’

The dull-faced man was also smiling, which chilled her. And his English was a little too good too:

‘Swiss Immigration Service,’ he announced. ‘We are conducting random checks. I’m afraid that these days with open borders we find certain ones who should have visas and do not. Not many, but some.’

The uniform was back:

‘Your tickets and passports, please. You mind? If you mind, we take you to the police station and we make a check there.’

‘Of course we don’t mind. Do we, Natasha? We just wish all policemen were so polite, don’t we?’ said Gail brightly.

Delving in her handbag, she unearthed her passport and the tickets and gave them to the uniformed policeman, who examined them with that extra slowness that policemen all over the world are taught to exhibit in order to raise the stress level of honest citizens. The grey suit looked over the uniformed shoulder, then took her passport for himself, and did the same thing all over again before handing it to her and turning his smile on Natasha, who already had her passport ready in her hand.

And what the grey suit did then was, in Gail’s later account to Ollie and Perry and Luke, either incompetent or very clever. He behaved as if the passport of a Russian minor were of less interest to him than a British adult’s passport. He flipped to the visa page, flipped to her photograph, compared it with her face, smiled in apparent admiration, paused a moment over her name in Roman and Cyrillic, and handed it back to her with a light-hearted ‘thank you, madam’.

‘You stay in Wengen long?’ the uniformed policeman asked, returning the tickets to Gail.

‘Just a week or so.’

‘Depending on the weather maybe?’

‘Oh, we English are so used to the rain we don’t notice!’

And they would find their next train waiting for them on platform 2, departure in three minutes, the last connection up tonight, so better not miss it or you have to stay in Lauterbrunnen, said the polite policeman.

It wasn’t till they were halfway up the mountain on the last train that Natasha spoke again. Until then she had brooded in seeming anger, staring at the blackened window, misting it over with her breath like a child, and angrily wiping it clean. But whether she was angry with Max, or the policeman and his grey-suited friend, or herself, Gail could only guess. But suddenly she raised her head and was staring Gail straight in the face:

‘Is Dima criminal?’

‘I think he’s just a very successful businessman, isn’t he?’ the deft barrister replied.

‘Is that why we’re going to England? – is that what the mystery tour’s all about? Suddenly he tells us we’re all going to great English schools.’ And receiving no reply: ‘Ever since Moscow the whole family has been – has been completely criminal. Ask my brothers. It’s their new obsession. They talk only of crime. Ask their big friend Piotr who says he works for KGB. It doesn’t exist any more. Does it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s the FSB now. But Piotr still says KGB. So maybe he is lying. Piotr knows everything about us. He has seen all our records. My mother was criminal, her husband was criminal, Tamara was criminal, her father was shot. For my brothers, anyone coming from Perm is completely criminal. Maybe that’s why the police wanted my passport. “Are you from Perm, please, Natasha?” “Yes, Mr Policeman, I am from Perm. I am also