‘Yes it was!’ Gail leaped in. ‘Exactly here. Huge complicity. First slow down, then shut up. We assumed the finger to the lips was all part of surprising the children, so we played along with it. Ambrose had said they’d been packed off to the crab races, so it seemed a bit odd they were still in the house. But we just assumed something had changed and they hadn’t gone after all. Or I did.’
‘Thank you, Gail.’
For what, for Christ’s sake? For upstaging Perry? Don’t mention it, Yvonne, it’s a pleasure. She raced on:
‘Dima had us on tiptoe by now. Literally holding our breath. We didn’t doubt him – I think it’s a point to make. We were obeying him, which isn’t like either of us, but we were. He led us to a door, a house door, but a side one. It wasn’t locked, he just pushed it and went in ahead, then immediately swung round, with one hand up in the air and the other one to his lips like’ – like Daddy playing Boots in a Christmas pantomime, but sober, she was going to say, but didn’t – ‘well, and this really intense stare, urging silence on us. Right, Perry? Your turn.’
‘Then, when he knew he had us, he beckoned us to follow. I went first.’ Perry’s tone by contrast minimal in deliberate counterpoint to hers – his voice for when he’s truly excited and pretending he isn’t. ‘We crept into an empty hall. Well, hall! It was about ten by twelve feet, with a cracked, west-facing window with diamond panes made out of masking tape and the evening sun pouring through them. Dima still had his finger to his lips. I stepped inside and he grabbed hold of my arm, the way he’d grabbed it on the court. Strength in a league of its own. I couldn’t have competed with it.’
‘Did you think you might have to compete with it?’ Luke inquired, with male sympathy.
‘I didn’t know what to think. I was worried about Gail and my concern was to get myself between them. For a few seconds, only.’
‘And long enough for you to realize it wasn’t a children’s game any more,’ Yvonne suggested.
‘Well, it was beginning to dawn,’ Perry confessed, and paused, his voice drowned out by the wail of a passing ambulance in the street above them. ‘You have to understand the amount of unexpected din inside the place,’ he insisted, as if the one sound had set off the other. ‘We were only in this tiny hall, but we could hear the wind bumping the whole rickety house around. And the light was – well, phantasmagoric, to use a word my students love. It was coming at us in layers through the west window. You had this powdery light from the low cloud rolling in from the sea, and then a layer of brilliant sunlight riding in over the top of it. And pitch-black shadows where it didn’t reach.’
‘And cold,’ Gail complained, hugging herself theatrically. ‘Like only empty houses are. And that chilly graveyard smell they have. But all I was thinking was: where are the girls? Why no sight or sound of them? Why no sound of anybody or anything except the wind? And if nobody’s around, who were we doing all this secrecy stuff for? Who were we fooling except ourselves? And Perry, you were thinking the same, weren’t you, you told me so afterwards.’
*
And behind Dima’s raised forefinger, a different face, Perry is saying. All the fun had gone out of it. Out of his eyes. It was humourless. Rigid. He really needed us to be afraid. To share his fear. And as we stand there bemused – and, yes, afraid – the spectral figure of Tamara materializes before us in a corner of the tiny hall where she’s been standing all along without us noticing, in the darkest recess on the other side of the shafts of sunlight. She’s wearing the same long black dress she wore at the tennis match, and wore again when she and Dima spied on them from the darkness of the people carrier, and she looks like her own ghost.
Gail grabbed back the story:
‘The first thing I saw was her bishop’s cross. Then the rest of her, forming round it. She’d plaited and braided her hair for the birthday party and rouged her cheeks, and daubed lipstick round her mouth – I mean, really round it. She looked as mad as a bedbug. She didn’t have her finger to her lips. She didn’t need to. Her whole body was like a warning sign in black and red. Forget Dima, I thought. This is really something. And of course I was still wondering what her problem was. Because boy, did she have one.’
Perry started to speak, but she talked stubbornly through him:
‘She was holding this sheet of paper in her hand – A4 typing paper, folded in half – and holding it up to us. For what? Was it a religious tract? Prepare to meet thy God? Or was she serving a writ on us?’
‘And Dima, where was he in this?’ Luke asked, turning back to Perry.
‘Finally let go of my arm,’ said Perry with a grimace. ‘But not before he’d made sure I was focusing on Tamara’s sheet of paper. Which she then proceeded to shove at me. With Dima nodding at me: read it. But still with his finger to his lips. And Tamara really possessed. Both of them possessed, actually. And wanting us to share their fear. But of what? So I read it. Not aloud, obviously. Not even immediately. I wasn’t in the sunlight. I had to take it to the window. On tiptoe: which shows you how much we were under the spell. And even after that, I had to turn my back to the window because the sunlight was so fierce. Then Gail had to give me my spare reading glasses from her handbag –’
‘– because as usual he’d left them behind in our cabin –’
‘Then Gail tiptoed up behind me –’
‘You beckoned to me –’
‘For your protection – and read it over my shoulder. And I suppose we read it, well, twice at least.’
‘And then some,’ said Gail. ‘I mean, what an act of faith! What were they doing trusting us like this? What made them think we were the ones suddenly? It was such a – such a bloody imposition!’
‘They didn’t have much choice,’ Perry softly observed, to which Luke added a wise nod that Yvonne discreetly copied, and Gail felt even more isolated than she had felt all evening.
*
Perhaps the tension in the under-ventilated basement was getting too much for Perry. Or perhaps – Gail’s thought – he was having an overdue fit of the guilts. He yanked his long body back into his chair, lowered his craggy shoulders to relax them and stabbed a forefinger at the buff folder lying between Luke’s small fists:
‘Anyway, you’ve got her text there in front of you in our document, so you don’t need me to recite it to you,’ he said aggressively. ‘You can read it for yourselves to your heart’s content. You have done so already, presumably.’
‘All the same,’ said Luke. ‘If you don’t mind, Perry. For completeness, as it were.’
Was Luke testing him? Gail believed he was. Even in the academic jungle that Perry was so determined to leave behind him, he was renowned for his ability to quote tracts of English literature on the strength of a single read. His vanity appealed to, Perry began reciting slowly and without expression:
‘Dmitri Vladimirovich Krasnov, the one they call Dima, European Director of Arena Multi Global Trading Conglomerate of Nicosia, Cyprus, is willing negotiate through intermediary Professor Perry Makepiece and lawyer Madam Gail Perkins mutually profitable arrangement with authority of Great Britain regarding permanent residence all family in exchange for certain informations very important, very urgent, very critical for Great Britain of Her Majesty. Children and household will return in approximately one and a half hour. There is convenient place where Dima and Perry may discuss advantageously without risk to be overheard. Gail will please accompany Tamara to other area of house. Is possible this house has many microphones. We will PLEASE NOT SPEAK until all persons return from crab races for celebration.’
‘Then the phone rang,’ said Gail.
*
Perry is sitting upright in his chair as if he has been called to order, hands as before spread flat on the table, back straight but shoulders on the slope as he meditates on the rightness of what he is about to do. His jaw is set in refusal although nobody has asked anything of him that needs to be refused, ex
cept for Gail, whose expression as she stares at him is one of dignified entreaty – or so she hopes, but maybe she’s just giving him the hairy eyeball, because she’s not sure any more what facial signals she’s emitting.
Luke’s tone is light-hearted, even debonair, which is presumably how he wishes it to be:
‘I’m trying to picture the two of you standing there together, you see,’ he explains keenly. ‘It’s a truly extraordinary moment, don’t you agree, Yvonne? Standing side by side in the hall? Reading? Perry holding the letter? Gail, you’re looking at it over his shoulder. Both literally struck mute. You’ve had this extraordinary proposition thrown at you to which you’re not allowed to respond in any way. It’s a nightmare. And as far as Dima and Tamara are concerned, simply by not speaking you’re halfway to being co-opted. Neither of you, I take it, is about to storm out of the house. You’re pinned down. Physically and emotionally. Am I right? So from their point of view, so far, so good: you’ve tacitly agreed to agree. That’s the impression you can’t help giving them. Totally inadvertently. Simply by doing nothing, by being there at all, you’re becoming part of their big play.’
‘I thought they were both totally barking,’ Gail says to deflate him. ‘Paranoid, the pair of them, frankly, Luke.’
‘Their paranoia taking what form exactly?’ – Luke undeterred.
‘How should I know? Deciding that somebody’s bugged the place, for openers. And little green men are listening.’
But Luke is more doughty than she expects. He comes back sharply:
‘Was that really so unlikely, Gail, after what you’d both seen and heard? You must have realized by now that you were standing with at least one foot in Russian crime. And you an experienced lawyer, if I may say so.’
*
A long pause followed. Gail had not expected to be locking horns with Luke, but if he wanted a fight he was welcome to one any time:
‘The so-called experience you refer to, Luke,’ she began furiously, ‘does not unfortunately cover’ – but Perry had already headed her off.
‘The phone rang,’ he gently reminded her.
‘Yes. Well, all right, the phone rang,’ she conceded. ‘It was a yard away from us. Less. Maybe two feet. It had a bell like a fire alarm going off. We jumped out of our skins. They didn’t, we did. A mossy, black, 1940s stand-up job with a dial and a concertina flex, sitting on a wobbly rattan table. Dima picked it up and bellowed Russian at it and we watched his face stretch into an arse-kissing smile that he didn’t mean. Everything about him was totally against his own free will. Forced smiles, forced laughter, false jollity, and a lot of yes-sir, no-sir, three bags full, and I’d like to strangle you with my bare hands. Eyes fixed all the time on batty Tamara, taking his cues from her. And the finger back in front of his lips, telling us no noises-off, please, all the time he’s talking. Right, Perry?’ – deliberately avoiding Luke.
Right.
‘So these are the people they’re afraid of, I’m thinking. And they want us to be afraid of them too. Tamara conducting him. Nodding, shaking her head, rouged cheeks and all, pulling a Medusa face for moments of mega-disapproval. Fair description, Perry?’
‘Florid, but accurate,’ Perry conceded awkwardly – then, thank the Lord, gave her a real full-beam smile, even if it was his guilty one.
‘And that was the first of many calls that evening, I rather believe?’ nimble Luke suggested, darting from one to the other of them with his quick, strangely lifeless eyes.
‘There must have been half-a-dozen phone calls in the time before the family came back,’ Perry agreed. ‘You heard them too, right?’ – for Gail – ‘And they were just for openers. All the time I was closeted with Dima, we’d hear the phone go and either Tamara would come yelling at Dima to answer it, or Dima would be jumping to his feet and hurrying off to take it himself, cursing in Russian. If there were phone extensions in the house I never saw them. He told me later that night that mobiles didn’t work up there because of the trees and the cliffs, which was why everyone called him on the landline. I didn’t believe him. I thought they were checking on his whereabouts, and calling the house on an old landline was the way to do it.’
‘They?’
‘The people who didn’t trust him. And he didn’t trust in return. The people he’s beholden to. And hates. The people they’re afraid of, so we’ve got to be.’
The people that Perry, Luke and Yvonne can know about and I mustn’t, in other words, thought Gail. The people in our bloody document that isn’t ours.
‘So this is the point where you and Dima retire to your convenient place where you can talk without risk of being overheard,’ Luke prompted.
‘Yes.’
‘And Gail, you went off to bond with Tamara.’
‘Bond my foot.’
‘But you went.’
‘To a tacky drawing room that stank of bat-piss. With a plasma television playing Russian Orthodox High Mass. She was carrying a tin.’
‘A tin?’
‘Didn’t Perry tell you? In our joint document that I haven’t seen? Tamara was carting a black tin handbag around with her. When she put it down it clanked. I don’t know where women carry their guns in normal society, but I had a feeling this was her Uncle-Vanya-equivalent.’
If it’s my swansong, I’ll bloody well make the most of it:
‘The plasma TV took up most of one wall. The other walls were decked out in icons. Travelling ones. Ornately framed for extra sanctity. Male saints, no Virgins. Where Tamara goes, there go the saints, or that was my guess. I’ve got an aunt like that, ex-tart turned Catholic convert. Each of her saints has a different job. If she’s lost her keys, it’s Anthony. If she’s taking the train, Christopher. If she’s stuck for a few quid, Mark. If a relative is sick, Francis. If it’s too late, Saint Peter.’
Hiatus. She had dried: another lousy actor, washed up and out of a part.
‘And the rest of the evening, briefly, Gail?’ Luke asked, not quite glancing at his watch, but as good as.
‘Simply scrumptious, thank you. Beluga caviar, lobster, smoked sturgeon, oceans of vodka, brilliant thirty-minute toasts in drunken Russian for the adults, great birthday cake, washed down with health-giving clouds of vile Russian-cigarette smoke. Kobe beef and floodlit cricket in the garden, a steel band banging away that nobody was listening to, fireworks that nobody was watching, a drunken swim for the last chaps standing, and home by midnight, for a jolly post-mortem over a nightcap.’
*
A stack of Yvonne’s glossy photographs is making its positively last appearance. Kindly identify anybody you believe you may recognize from the festivities, says Yvonne, speaking by rote.
Him and him, says Gail, wearily pointing.
And him too, surely? says Perry.
Yes, Perry, him too. Another bloody him. One day we’ll have equal opportunity for female Russian criminals.
Silence while Yvonne completes another of her careful notes and puts down her pencil. Thank you, Gail, you have been most helpful, says Yvonne. It’s randy little Luke’s cue to be brisk. Brisk is merciful:
‘Gail, I fear we should release you. You’ve been immensely generous, and a superb witness, and we can pick up on everything else from Perry. We’re very grateful. Both of us. Thank you.’
She is standing at the door, not sure how she got there. Yvonne is standing beside her.
‘Perry?’
Does he answer her? Not that she notices. She climbs the stairs, Yvonne her gaoler close behind her. In the plush, over-prinked hall, big Ollie of the cockney accent and foreign voices folds up his Russian newspaper, clambers to his feet and, pausing in front of a period mirror, carefully adjusts his beret, using both hands.
5
‘See you to the front door, at all, Gail?’ Ollie inquired, swivelling in his seat to quiz her through the partition of his cab.
‘I’m fine, thank you.’<
br />
‘You don’t look fine, Gail. Not from where I sit. You look bothered. Want I come in for a cup tea with you?’
Cup tea? Cuppa? Cup of?
‘No thanks. I’m fine. I just need to get some sleep.’
‘Nothing like a nice kip to see you right, eh?’
‘No. There isn’t. Goodnight, Ollie. Thanks for the ride.’
She crossed the street, waiting for him to drive off, but he didn’t.
‘Forgotten our handbag, darling!’
She had. And she was furious with herself. And furious with Ollie for waiting till she was on her own doorstep before charging after her. She mumbled more thanks, said she was an idiot.
‘Oh, don’t apologize, Gail, I’m completely worse. If it was loose, I’d forget my own head. Are we utterly sure, darling?’
Not utterly sure of anything, actually, darling. Not just now. Not utterly sure whether you’re a master-spy or an underling. Not sure why you wear spectacles with thick lenses for driving to Bloomsbury in broad daylight, and no spectacles on the journey back when it’s pitch dark. Or might it be that you spies can only see in the dark?
*
The flat she had jointly inherited from her late father wasn’t a flat but a maisonette on the two top floors of a pretty white Victorian terrace house of the sort that gives Primrose Hill its charm. Her upwardly mobile brother, who killed pheasants with rich friends, owned the other half of it, and in about fifty years, if he hadn’t died of drink by then, and Perry and Gail were still together, which she presently doubted, they will have paid him off.
The entrance hall stank of number 2’s Bourguignonne and resounded to other tenants’ bickerings and television sets. The mountain bike Perry kept for his weekend visits was in its usual inconvenient place, chained to the downpipe. One day, she had warned him, some enterprising thief was going to steal the downpipe too. His pleasure was to ride it up to Hampstead Heath at six o’clock in the morning and speed-cycle down the paths marked NO CYCLING.
The carpet on the four narrow flights of stairs leading to her front door was in its last stages of decay, but the ground-floor tenant didn’t see why he should pay anything and the other two wouldn’t pay till he did and Gail as the unpaid in-house lawyer was supposed to come up with a compromise, but since none of the parties would budge from their entrenched positions, where the hell was compromise?