Kite met Xavier Bonnard on his first day at Alford. Despite their contrasting backgrounds, they became the closest of friends. Both, in their separate ways, were dealing with problem fathers: Kite’s a dead alcoholic, Xavier’s a philandering Parisian chancer living off his wife’s vast wealth and seemingly limitless patience. While Xavier couldn’t wait to be free of Alford, it was Kite’s guilty secret that he often enjoyed himself. As it was for so many children from broken or otherwise unhappy homes, boarding school provided a respite from the permanent, stuck-record sadness of his existence in Scotland. Xavier seemed to understand this: indeed, he was proud of Kite when he made fifty for the cricket team or got to second base with a girl at a party. He knew that his friend was rootless and lost, but also fearless and clever in a way that was different from so many of the other boys in their house. Without Kite at his side to laugh at his jokes, smoke his cigarettes and accompany him on illegal trips to London, where they would hide out with girls at the Bonnard house in Onslow Square, Xavier might well have cashed in his chips and gone to school at the Lycée Charles de Gaulle in South Kensington. Nothing could alter his sincerely held view that boarding school was a moral and social scandal.
‘Alford is basically an open prison,’ Xavier had concluded by the end of his second year. ‘Everyone gets their own cell. You’re told when to wake up and when to go to sleep, your laundry is done for you and your meals are cooked three times a day. You’re allowed out, but only when the warden says you can leave, and only if you’re back by a certain time. There are exercise yards, escape attempts, people trading porn mags for cigarettes. Contact with the outside world is limited. We have one phone in the house and otherwise have to write letters which could be steamed open by Lionel if he thinks we’re complaining about him to our parents. There are strict hierarchies among the inmates, homosexuals pursuing pretty boys, disgusting food and limited access to alcohol. You get released after serving your sentence but then have to adjust to life in the outside world. For the rest of your time on earth, you’re known as an Old Alfordian. How is that different to being an ex-con from Wormwood Scrubs or Alcatraz?’
Xavier nevertheless did what he could to make his time at the school as enjoyable as possible. He was constantly in trouble with both Jones-Lewis and the headmaster, though the latter found it hard to disguise his affection for one of the school’s natural iconoclasts. By the time he was seventeen, Xavier had been caught with a naked girl in his room, been suspended for scaling the roof of the school chapel (with Kite alongside him) and reprimanded for leaving a live chicken – purchased from a farmer in Maidenhead – in Joyce Blackburn’s bathroom.
Xavier was also the unwitting key to Kite’s future as an intelligence officer. A few months before the two friends were due to take their A levels, Kite was lounging around in Xavier’s study at Alford, killing time on a cold February afternoon. Xavier’s room had a permanent smell of Deep Heat and patchouli oil and was decorated in the typical Alford fashion: there were posters of Bob Marley and Nelson Mandela on the walls alongside snapshots of Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista and Cindy Crawford culled from Rosamund Bonnard’s back issues of Tatler and Harpers & Queen. Maghreb-style drapes hung from the ceiling, with copies of Paris Match and The Face magazine scattered on the ground in case any girls popped their heads round the door while visiting the house. The overall effect, Kite joked, was of sitting in a tent erected by a teenage Muammar Gaddafi. His own slightly larger study was down the hall and dominated by photographs of his sporting idols – Daley Thompson, Kenny Dalglish, Gavin Hastings – as well as a poster of Jimi Hendrix setting fire to an electric guitar.
It was snowing. Xavier had an illegal two-bar fire switched on against the cold and was trying on a vintage suede jacket he had recently bought in Kensington Market. Kite was lying on a beanbag in a moth-eaten Lou Reed T-shirt and ‘Pop trousers’ – the Prince of Wales check trousers worn by the school’s prefects. Xavier had put Transformer on in tribute to his attire. They were listening to ‘New York Telephone Conversation’. Xavier, who had not long finished smoking a cigarette out of the window, sprayed himself with Eau Sauvage to smother the smell of tobacco.
‘What were you saying about your dad?’ Kite asked.
Xavier took the jacket off and threw it onto the bed.
‘He’s inherited a house in the South of France, near Mougins. Said I can invite a friend to stay in the summer. Wanna come?’
By then, Kite had been to Xavier’s family homes in London, Gloucestershire and Switzerland. One more addition to the Bonnard real estate portfolio came as no surprise.
‘Would love to.’
‘You won’t have to work at the hotel?’
Ordinarily, Kite spent at least three weeks of the school holidays helping his mother out at Killantringan, but she had put the hotel on the market and sold it to a couple from Glasgow. They were due to take over in July. Xavier remembered this and corrected himself.
‘Oh, that’s right. Your mum’s moving out.’
‘What are the dates?’ Kite asked.
Xavier shrugged. He clearly planned to be there all summer, smoking pot, drinking vodka, chasing French girls.
‘All I know is my godfather is coming to stay at some point. An old Iranian friend of my dad’s. I call him the “ayatollah”. They met in Paris when I was a kid. You’ll like him. Come whenever you want. Tu es ici
