‘We’d decided that the great thing was to keep them moving,’ Gail explained, determinedly sharing Perry’s brightness. ‘Not give them too much time to brood. The boys were going to have a high old time whatever we did. And for the girls – well, as far as I was concerned, just getting a smile out of them was … I mean, Christ …’ and left the rest unsaid.
Seeing Gail in difficulties, Perry quickly stepped in:
‘Very difficult to make a decent cricket pitch out of that soft sand,’ he explained to Luke, while she collected herself. ‘Bowlers get bogged down, batsmen capsize, you can imagine.’
‘I can indeed,’ Luke agreed heartily, quick to pick up Perry’s tone and match it.
‘Not that it mattered a hoot. Everyone had a blast and the winning side got ice creams. We called it a draw so both sides got ’em,’ said Perry.
‘Paid for by the new presiding uncle, I trust?’ Luke suggested.
‘I’d put a stop to that,’ Perry said. ‘The ice creams were strictly on us.’
With Gail recovered, Luke’s voice took on a more serious note:
‘And it was while both sides were winning – actually quite late in the match – that you saw inside the parked people carrier? Have I got that right?’
‘We were thinking of drawing stumps,’ Perry agreed. ‘And suddenly the side door of the carrier opened and there they were. Maybe they wanted a bit of fresh air. Or a clearer look. God knows. It was like a royal visit. An incognito one.’
‘How long had the side door been open?’
Perry on guard over his celebrated memory. Perry the perfect witness, never trusting himself, never answering too fast, always holding himself to account. Another Perry that Gail loved.
‘Don’t know actually, Luke. Can’t say exactly. We can’t’ – with a glance at Gail, who shook her head to say she couldn’t either. ‘I looked; Gail saw me looking, didn’t you? So she looked. We both saw them. Dima and Tamara, side by side and bolt upright, the dark and the light, the thin and the fat, staring at us from the back of the carrier. Then wham, and the door slides shut.’
‘Staring, not smiling, as it were,’ Luke suggested lightly, while he made a note.
‘There was something – well, I said it already – regal about him. Yes. About both of them. The royal Dimas. If one of them had reached out and pulled a silk tassel for the coachman to drive on, I wouldn’t have been all that surprised.’ He dwelled on this idea, then approved it with a nod. ‘On an island, big people seem bigger. And the Dimas were – well, big people. Still are.’
Yvonne has yet another photograph for them to consider, this time a police mugshot in black and white: full face and side view, two black eyes, one black eye. And the smashed and swollen mouth of somebody who has just made a voluntary statement. At the sight of it, Gail wrinkles her nose in disapproval. She glances at Perry and they agree: nobody we know.
But Scottish Yvonne is not disheartened:
‘So if I put a bit of curly wig on him, imagine for a moment, and if I cleaned his face up a wee bit for him, do the two of you not think this might just possibly be your fitness freak released from an Italian gaol last December at all?’
They think it might well be. Drawing closer to each other, they are sure.
*
Early notice of the invitation was delivered by the venerable Ambrose in the Captain’s Deck restaurant the same evening, while he was pouring wine for Perry to sample. Perry the puritan son doesn’t do voices. Gail the actors’ daughter does them all. She awards herself the part of the venerable Ambrose:
‘“And tomorrow night I’m going to have to forgo the pleasure of serving you young folks. You know why? Because you young folks will be the honoured surprise guests of Mr Dima and his lady wife on the occasion of the fourteenth birthday of their twin sons who, so I hear say, you have personally introduced to the noble art of cricket. And my Elspeth, she has made the biggest, finest walnut-whirl cake you ever saw. Any bigger, why, Miss Gail, by all accounts those kids would have you jump right out of it, they love you so deep.”’
For his final flourish, Ambrose handed them an envelope inscribed: To Mr Perry and Miss Gail. Inside, were two of Dima’s business cards, white and deckle-edged like wedding invitations, giving his full name: Dmitri Vladimirovich Krasnov, European Director, The Arena Multi Global Trading Conglomerate of Nicosia, Cyprus. And beneath it, the address of his company’s website, and an address in Berne styled Residence and Company Offices.
4
If it occurred to either of them to decline Dima’s invitation, they never admitted it to one another, said Gail:
‘We were in it for the children. Two hulking teenaged twin boys were having a birthday: great. That was how the invitation was sold to us, and it’s how we bought into it. But for me it was about the two girls’ – again privately congratulating herself on not mentioning Natasha – ‘whereas for Perry’ – she shot a doubtful glance at him.
‘For Perry what?’ Luke asked, when Perry did not respond.
She was already pulling back, protecting her man. ‘He was just so fascinated by it all. Weren’t you, Perry? Dima, who he was, the life-force, the formed man. This outlaw band of Russians. The danger. The sheer differentness. You were – well – connecting. Is that unfair?’
‘Sounds a bit like psycho-babble to me,’ Perry said gruffly, retreating into himself.
Little Luke, ever the conciliator, darted in to intervene. ‘So basically, mixed motives on both your sides,’ he suggested, in the manner of a man familiar with mixed motives. ‘Nothing wrong with that, surely? It’s a pretty mixed scene. Vanya’s gun. Tales of Russian cash in laundry baskets. Two small orphan girls desperately in need of you – maybe the adults too, for all you knew. And it was the twin boys’ birthday. I mean, how, as two decent people, could you resist?’
‘On an island,’ Gail reminded him.
‘Exactly. And on top of it all, dare one say, you were jolly curious. And why shouldn’t you be? I mean, that’s a pretty heady mix. I’m sure I’d have fallen for it.’
Gail was sure he would too. She had a feeling that, in his time, little Luke had fallen for most things, and was a bit worried about himself in consequence.
‘And Dima,’ she insisted. ‘Dima was the big lure for you, Perry, admit it. You said so at the time. It was the children for me, but when push came to shove it was Dima for you. We discussed it only a few days ago, remember?’
She meant: while you were penning your bloody document, and I was a Christian slave.
Perry brooded for a while, much as he might have brooded over any other academic premise, then with a sporting smile acknowledged the rightness of the argument.
‘It’s true. I felt appointed by him. Over-promoted is more like it. Actually, I don’t know what I felt any more. Maybe I didn’t then.’
‘But Dima knew. You were his professor of fair play.’
*
‘So in the afternoon, instead of going to the beach, we walked into town to do the shopping,’ Gail resumed, speaking past Perry’s averted head to Yvonne while referring her story to Perry. ‘For the birthday boys, the obvious thing was a cricket set. That was your department. You enjoyed looking for a cricket set. You loved the sports shop. You loved the old man. You loved the photographs of great West Indian players. Learie Constantine? Who else was there?’
‘Martindale.’
‘And Sobers. Gary Sobers was there. You pointed him out to me.’
He nodded. Yes, Sobers.
‘And we loved the secrecy bit. Because of the children. Ambrose’s notion of having me jump out of the cake wasn’t so far off the mark, was it? And I did presents for the girls. With a bit of help from you. Scarves for the little ones, and a rather nice shell necklace for Natasha with alternating semi-precious stones.’ Done it. She had let Natasha back in, and got away with it. ‘You wanted to buy one for me too, but I wouldn’t let
you.’
‘On what grounds, please Gail?’ – Yvonne, with her self-effacing, intelligent smile, looking for light relief.
‘Exclusivity. It was sweet of Perry, but I didn’t want to be paired off with Natasha,’ Gail replied, as much to Perry as to Yvonne. ‘And I’m sure Natasha wouldn’t have wanted to be paired off with me. Thanks, it’s a lovely thought, but save it for another time, I told you. Right? And I mean honestly, try buying decent wrapping paper in St John’s, Antigua!’
She plunged on:
‘Then there was the business of smuggling us in, wasn’t there? Because we were the big surprise. That was going to be a blast too. We thought of going as Caribbean pirates – you did – but we decided it might be a bit over the top, specially with people still in mourning, even if we didn’t officially know they were. So we went as we were, plus a bit. Perry, you had your old blazer and the grey bags you’d travelled in. Your Brideshead look. Perry isn’t exactly what you’d call a fashion freak, but you did your best. And your swimming trunks, of course. And I put a cotton dress over my swimsuit plus a cardigan in case it got nippy because we knew that Three Chimneys had a private beach and there was a chance we might be expected to swim.’
Yvonne writing a meticulous memorandum. Who to? Luke, chin in hand, drinking in her every word, a little too deeply for Gail’s taste. Perry gloomily studying a patch of brickwork on the darkened wall. All of them giving her their undivided attention for her swansong.
*
When Ambrose told them to be on parade at the hotel entrance at six, Gail continued in a more measured tone, they assumed they were going to be spirited up to Three Chimneys in one of the people carriers with blackened windows, and let in through a side door. They assumed wrong.
Taking a back route to the car park as instructed, they found Ambrose waiting at the wheel of a 4x4. The plan, he explained in conspiratorial excitement, was to infiltrate the surprise guests by way of the old Nature Path that ran along the spine of the peninsula right up to the rear entrance of the house, where Mr Dima himself would be waiting for them.
She did her Ambrose voice again:
‘“Man, they got fairy lights up in that garden, they got a steel band, a marquee, they got a shipment of the tenderest Kobe beef ever came out of a cow. I don’t know what they haven’t got up there. And Mr Dima, he has it all fixed and prepared down to a fine pin. He has packed off my Elspeth and that whole knockabout family of his to a major crab-racing event over the other side of St John’s, just so’s we can smuggle you in by the back door, and that’s how secret you folks are tonight!”’
If they had been looking for adventure, the Nature Path alone would have provided it. They must have been the first people to use it for simply years. A couple of times Perry actually had to beat a passage through the undergrowth:
‘Which of course he loved. Actually, he should have been a peasant, shouldn’t you? Then we came out in this long green tunnel with Dima standing at the end of it looking like a happy Minotaur. If there is such a thing.’
Perry’s bony index finger jerked upward in admonition:
‘Which was our first sighting of Dima alone,’ he warned gravely. ‘No bodyguards, no family. No children. No one to watch over us. Or none visible. We were a three, standing at the edge of a wood. I think we were both very much aware of that. The sudden exclusivity.’
But whatever significance Perry attached to this remark was lost in the insistent rush of Gail’s narrative:
‘He hugged us, Yvonne! Really hugged us. First Perry, then shoved him aside, then me, then Perry again. Not sexy hugs. Great big family hugs. As if he hadn’t seen us for ages. Or wasn’t going to see us again.’
‘Or else he was desperate,’ Perry suggested, on the same earnest, reflective note. ‘A bit of that got through to me. Maybe not to you. What we meant to him at that moment. How important we were.’
‘He really loved us,’ Gail swept on determinedly. ‘He stood there, declaring his love. Tamara loved us too, he was positive. She just found it difficult to say because she was a bit crazy since her problem. No explanation of what the problem might have been, and who were we to ask? Natasha loved us, but she doesn’t say anything to anyone these days, she just reads books. The whole family loved the English for our humanity and fair play. Except he didn’t say humanity, what did he say?’
‘Heart.’
‘We’re standing there at the end of the tunnel, having this great hug-fest, and he’s orating all this stuff about our hearts. I mean, how much love can you profess to somebody you’ve only ever exchanged six words with?’
‘Perry?’ Luke prompted.
‘I thought he was heroic,’ Perry replied, his long hand now flying to his brow to form a classic gesture of worry. ‘I just didn’t know why. Didn’t I put that in our document somewhere? Heroic? I thought he was’ – with a shrug dismissing his own feelings as valueless – ‘I thought dignity under fire. I just didn’t know who was firing at him. Or why. I didn’t know anything, except –’
‘You were on the rock face with him,’ Gail suggested, not unkindly.
‘Yes. I was. And he was in a bad place. He needed us.’
‘You,’ she corrected him.
‘All right. Me. That’s all I’m trying to say.’
‘Then you tell it.’
*
‘He walked us out of the tunnel, round to what we realized was going to be the back of the house,’ Perry began, and then broke off. ‘I take it that you do want an exact description of the place?’ he demanded sternly of Yvonne.
‘We do indeed, Perry,’ Yvonne replied, equally efficiently. ‘Every last dreary detail, please, if you don’t mind.’ And went back to her meticulous note-taking.
‘From where we’d emerged from the woods, there’s an old bit of service track covered in some sort of red cinder, probably made by the original builders as an access road. We had to pick our way uphill over the potholes.’
‘Carting our presents,’ Gail blurted from the wings. ‘You with your cricket set, me with the gift-wrapped presents for the kids in the fanciest bag I could find, which isn’t saying a lot.’
Is anybody listening out there? she wondered. Not to me. Perry is the horse’s mouth. I’m its arse.
‘The house as we approached it from the back was a pile of old bones,’ he continued. ‘We’d been warned not to expect a palace, we knew the house was up for demolition. But we hadn’t expected a wreck.’ The outward-bound Oxford don had turned field reporter: ‘There was a tumbledown brick building with barred windows, I deduced the old slave quarters. There was a high perimeter whitewashed wall, about twelve foot high and capped with razor wire, which was new and vile. There were white security lights stuck up on pylons round it like a football stadium, blazing down on whoever passed. We’d seen the glow from the balcony of our cabin. Fairy lights rigged between them, presumably in preparation for the night’s birthday festivities. Security cameras, but pointed away from us because we were the wrong side of them. I assume that was the intention. A shining new aerial dish, twenty foot high, directed northish, as far as I could read it on our way back. Pointed at Miami. Or Houston perhaps. Anyone’s guess.’ He thought about this. ‘Well, not yours, obviously. You people are supposed to know that stuff.’
Is this a challenge or a joke? It’s neither. It’s Perry showing them how brilliant he is at doing their job, in case they haven’t noticed. It’s Perry the climber of north-facing overhangs, telling them he never forgets a route. It’s the Perry who can’t resist a challenge provided the odds are stacked against him.
‘Then downhill again through more forest to a bit of grass meadow with the headland sticking up at the end of it. In reality, the house hasn’t got a back. Or it’s all back, take your choice. It’s a pseudo-Elizabethan hotchpotch of a bungalow built out of clapboard and asbestos, facing three ways. Grey stucco walls. Poky leaded windows. Plywood prete
nding to be half-timber and a rear porch with a lantern dangling in it. Are you with me, Gail?’
Would I be here if I wasn’t? ‘You’re doing fine,’ she said. Which wasn’t quite what he’d asked.
‘Add-on bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and offices with front doors on them, suggesting that the place had been some sort of commune or settlement at one time. So I mean, overall a shambles. It wasn’t Dima’s fault. We knew that, thanks to Mark. The Dimas had never lived there till now. Never touched it apart from a crash job on the security. The idea didn’t bother us. To the contrary. It had a much-needed touch of reality about it.’
The ever-inquisitive Dr Yvonne is peering up from her medical notes. ‘But were there no chimneys after all that, Perry?’
‘Two attached to the remnants of a sugar mill on the western edge of the peninsula, the third at the edge of the woods. I thought I put that in our document as well.’
Our bloody document? How many times have you said that now? Our document that you wrote and I haven’t been allowed to see, but they have? It’s your bloody document! It’s their bloody document! Her cheeks were scorching, and she hoped he’d noticed.
‘Then as we started down towards the house, about twenty metres from it, I suppose, Dima slowed us down,’ Perry was saying, his voice gathering intensity. ‘With his hands. Slow down.’
‘And would it be here also that he put his finger to his lips in a gesture of complicity?’ Yvonne asked, popping her head up at him while she wrote.