‘Only four beats to the bar, Swede. You just drive the plane; leave the passenger manifest to me, right?’
‘It’s the best way,’ he said, with a silly smile on his face.
It was only then that it dawned on me. ‘You bastard. You’re as drunk as a skunk.’
‘Naw, naw, naw,’ he said.
I stepped forward to slap him, or rattle him, I’m not sure what. He waved the huge replica Colt at me in a way more comical than threatening. ‘Don’t shake the pin-table machine, or you won’t get your peanuts,’ he said.
‘If you let me down, Swede, I’ll kill you.’
‘Yah, yah. I know what you’re like.’ It didn’t sound like warm approval. ‘Gabrielle left me,’ he said sorrowfully. ‘A marketing development analyst, he calls himself. What’s that? What the hell does a development analyst do? He’s just a youngster. She says he makes a hundred thousand dollars a year. Can you believe it?’
‘I can believe it,’ I said. I’d never heard of Gabrielle; I didn’t know if she was his wife or his girlfriend, or his pet piranha. But whatever she was, I could easily believe she’d want to get away from him.
‘Gabi! Gabi!’ He said it more loudly to help me remember. ‘The one you borrowed the car from.’
‘Oh, yes.’ I remembered now. Gabi Semmler, a thirty-year-old Berliner who worked as a private secretary to an air charter company with which the Swede wanted to do business. I had in fact seen her in Berlin quite recently. I wondered if that was before, during or after the break-up. But I didn’t wonder about it very much.
‘Don’t worry, my old Bernd. Swede won’t spill your beans. Swede never lets you down.’
‘Sober up,’ I said. ‘And make it quick.’
‘Yah.’ He put the muzzle of the long-barrelled gun against his own temple and shouted ‘Bang’ loudly enough to make me jump.
‘Come along, Swede. Time to go walkies. Put away your toys.’ It was terrible weather. We emerged into Charing Cross Road just as a thunderbolt ripped the dark sky apart with a jagged blue line. The crash of its thunder echoed all along the street. Cars, delivery vans, black taxis and the red double-decker buses, glistening with rain, were suddenly frozen by the lightning’s flash. Gutters, swollen and turbulent, swept fleets of litter to the maelstrom of the drain. The ferocious downpour made tall stalks on the pavement, and there was a clatter of noise as rain hit the shop-window glass and drenched me. The Swede came into the street and we both huddled in the shelter of a shop doorway, trying to spot an available taxi-cab.
‘Sometimes I wonder what goes on in that head of yours, Bernd,’ the Swede said. ‘Is this a dream of a new life far away?’
‘Tell people your dreams, and they never come true,’ I said.
‘Yah, yah, yah,’ said the Swede and laughed. He had an awful laugh; like the bray of an angry mule. Suddenly he spotted a cab. He ran into the street, dodging between the cars as they braked and swerved to avoid him, and all the time he bellowed ‘Taxi! Taxi!’ to get the driver’s attention. ‘Heathrow: terminal one,’ he shouted to the driver as he climbed inside. He gave me a brief salute of thanks – or was it mockery? – before sliding the cab window closed. I watched him go, suspecting that as soon as he was out of sight he’d tell the driver some other destination.
Then a white Ford Transit pulled away from the kerb and into the traffic. It bore the lettering that proclaimed it to be from a supplier of luxury foodstuffs to restaurants. The driver’s face was familiar to me but I couldn’t place him. One of the Department’s corps de ballet perhaps. If they were tailing the Swede, I wondered if I’d been logged too. I preferred to believe it must be some sidekick of the Swede’s. I told myself he was apt to be over-cautious even when meeting old friends. Engaging a minder was usually a sign of bad conscience, or bad company, or carrying too much cash.
I finally got a cab. My next stop was Mayfair and the office of an estate agent. I told the cab-driver I was still looking for the precise address, and let him go round Grosvenor Square twice while closely watching the other traffic. That uncomfortable, unhealthy and neurotic paranoia that had helped keep me alive so long, made me think I was being followed. I wondered if the Ford Transit had not been Swede’s man after all, but rather the changeover vehicle for my tail. But if there was someone tailing me now, he was an expert. Or perhaps simply someone who knew what my appointments were, and got there ahead of me.
I was ten minutes late. One of my father-in-law’s many lawyers was waiting too, and tapping his fingers on a thick bundle of papers. In 1983, when Fiona suddenly abandoned me and the children, and departed to East Germany, our home was rented to four young Americans. But now the Americans were moving out. Three of them were posted to banks in Singapore and Hong Kong, and the last remaining tenant couldn’t find anyone to share the rent. The agent wanted me to sign papers reassigning the property to my father-in-law. I had little alternative, for the major financial investment in the house had been made by him: our investment had been no more than love and labour.
The agent’s office was an elegant room furnished with antique furniture, with framed engravings and maps of historic London on the walls. Maps are of course the décor adopted by men reluctant to display their taste in art. The only discordant note was struck by the grey plastic word-processor that occupied a table in the corner and buzzed. ‘So good of you to be so punctual,’ said the estate agent, as if he’d been warned that I might not show up at all. He smiled reassurance and I smiled right back at him. My father-in-law wasn’t a crook; Fiona and I would come out of it with reasonable compensation for our slice of the mortgage, but I hated the way he always did these things through his minions. Why the sudden summons to this office? Why couldn’t he have discussed the Duke Street property with us when we were with him at the weekend?
I signed over the pencilled crosses.
When I returned to work Dicky was waiting for me. He was sitting in his office, a large comfortable room with the skins of genuine lions stretched across the floor, and a view across the trees from the two windows. Between the windows he had positioned his lovely rosewood table. The top of it was virtually clear. It was Dicky’s oft-stated belief that ordinary office desks, telephones and word-processors were not necessary for work, and for the sort of work that Dicky did, they weren’t. He had only one telephone, and the only reason he had a fax machine here was because he had recently been deferring his choice of lunch place until he’d studied the faxed daily menus of his favourite haunts.
‘Have coffee,’ he suggested. It was a significant offering, and demonstrated that Dicky had something important to ask me. The coffee appeared from the next room, where Dicky stored all the ugly office machinery and the pretty young girls with whom Daphne competed.
‘You saw Uncle Silas?’
‘Yes,’ I said. I was sipping coffee and sitting in the soft white leather armchair that Dicky had recently installed for his visitors. There were new curtains too, and the official sepia portrait of the sovereign had been put into a rosewood frame, so that it matched his table.
‘He sent for you?’ And in case I didn’t understand: ‘Silas Gaunt sent for you?’ Dicky sat behind his table with his arms folded. He was wearing a blue pinstripe suit of very ordinary style. I guessed he’d been with the politicians.
‘There was a garbled message …’ I explained. I thought he was going to complain about my taking time off to go there without asking his permission.
‘He’s been refusing to see anyone.’ Dicky touched his lips with his fingertips. It was a gesture he often used, but I sometimes saw it as some kind of unconscious fear that he was saying too much. ‘Silas refused to see the D-G last week. He said he was ill. When Bret tried to meet with him he was extremely abusive.’
I savoured the coffee. It came from the shop of Mr Higgins. Dicky said it was the best coffee in England and Dicky was very fussy about coffee.
‘Ye gods, Bernard. Don’t just sit there drinking coffee and smiling at me. I’m ask
ing you a question.’
‘What are you asking, Dicky?’
‘Why you? Why would Uncle Silas send for you while he refuses to see anyone from the top floor? Even the D-G. He told Bret he wouldn’t even let the prime minister into his home. He was swearing at Bret like a drunken sailor. Bret recorded the call. He was really insulting. So why you, Bernard? What’s it all about?’
‘He wanted to talk about my father.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes, that was all,’ I said.
‘All right, don’t go taking offence at every little thing. No reflection on your father.’
Dicky’s phone rang. ‘It’s for you, Bernard.’ He handed it to me. It was Bret on an internal line. With that brisk and unmistakable transatlantic accent he had no need to identify himself: ‘Bernard.’ The accent on the second syllable. ‘There’s been an irritable female caller on an outside line. Desperately trying to reach Fiona.’
‘She’s in Rome,’ I said. ‘The terrorist symposium.’
‘Sure, I know that,’ said Bret imperiously. ‘I sent her there. Do you want to talk to Gloria? She will tell you who took the call.’
‘Is it something for Dicky?’ I said. I couldn’t understand why I should be suddenly handling my wife’s day-to-day workload.
‘It’s not work,’ said Rensselaer. ‘It’s a family matter. Private.’ His voice was uncharacteristically concerned as he added: ‘You haven’t got a car here, have you?’
‘No.’
‘Take Gloria’s.’
‘To do what?’
‘If you need it, if you need it,’ said Bret, almost losing his cool. Then, more calmly, he said: ‘Gloria has her car here. She will sort it out, Bernard. She’s good at this sort of thing.’
At what sort of thing, I was about to ask, but he had already hung up his phone.
I made hurried excuses to Dicky and went to the office I was using. I was looking up Gloria’s number in the internal directory when she put her head round the door. She was wearing a crimson suit. Her blonde hair was drawn back and her forehead covered in a neat fringe. The change in her appearance was startling. ‘Bernard!’ she said. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been phoning everywhere trying to locate you. You don’t have a mobile phone; there was no contact number. You just disappeared. I had security go to every room in the building.’ She wasn’t smiling; she seemed annoyed.
‘I do that sometimes,’ I said.
She stepped into the room and pushed the door behind her closed as if about to confide a secret to me. ‘Did Bret tell you?’ Now I could see her more clearly. She appeared to be brimming over with rage. Her face was full and rounded with it, her lips pouting, and her big brown eyes wide open and glistening with animosity.
‘What? Tell me what?’
‘The school phoned. I phoned them back. It may be nothing.’ She stopped before bringing out the rest of it in a rush. ‘The school minibus went off the road and turned right over. It’s mostly just cuts and bruises but some of the children – five, the matron said – will be kept in hospital overnight.’
‘Billy’s school?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry, I should have said that. Yes, Billy’s school, A collision with a motorcycle … on the way to a football game with a school in south London. The driver’s badly hurt and the motorcyclist is in intensive care. Oh, Bernard!’
‘Where is he?’
She was trying to make it easier for me, I could see that. ‘We’re not sure that Billy is hurt. There were several ambulances and the children were taken to different hospitals. One of the girls downstairs said it was on the radio. I phoned the BBC but they said it must have been some local news bulletin.’
‘Do you know which hospitals?’
‘The school said they would telephone again as soon as they hear more about it. But I think it’s best we go to the school. Other parents are there already. They will know everything that’s happening.’
‘It’s all right. I know the way.’
‘Let me drive, Bernard. Look, your hands are trembling.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said, but I found myself pushing my hands into my pockets in case she was right.
‘Your in-laws are away. Their housekeeper, or whoever it was I spoke to, said she didn’t know how to contact them.’
‘They’re at a fat-farm. They don’t leave contact numbers; they don’t like to be disturbed there.’
‘I’ll leave all this stuff; I’ll get you to the school.’
It was a nerve-racking journey, with Gloria driving like a Mexican car thief and the rain beating down and the traffic jams that always result from such storms. Gloria was giving all her attention to the road as an excuse not to engage in conversation, but I couldn’t mistake how much the news had upset her.
With other circumstances it might have proved a perfect opportunity to confide in her. I strapped in tight, sat back and looked at her. It was no good denying that I needed her. I needed her now, when the news had brought me low, and I badly needed to hear her say she loved me. I wanted to hear her say that she would gladly exchange her life in England for some lack-lustre penny-pinching life with me. A life in some distant foreign land without an extradition treaty. But I didn’t broach any of these complex and far-reaching matters. I sat huddled in her car, an old Saab that she’d got ready for rally-driving but which had blown up on a reconnaissance trip before even starting the first rally. Now it had become her London runabout, a fierce roaring beast which called for endless tinkering and a driving technique that catered to its many vices.
Billy’s private school was distinguished more for its high fees and exclusivity than for its academic excellence. It had been chosen by Fiona’s father. The school had made its home in a fine old creeper-covered mansion long since adapted, subdivided and bent to the needs of academe. When we arrived its gravel forecourt was crowded with the hastily parked cars of distraught parents. The marques of BMW, Volvo, Mercedes and Rolls measured the aspirations of parents whose faith in the government’s oft-promised meritocracy was less than absolute.
The school matron was a plump grey-haired woman in a high-necked white blouse, pleated tweed skirt and flat-heeled shoes. She had been assigned to greet with a weary smile, and copious sweet tea and biscuits, those relatives who had flouted the instruction to stay at home by the phone.
Gloria and I were sitting in the staffroom under a colourful poster depicting the fiercer members of various endangered species of the animal world. I was on my second cup of tea, and selecting a jam-filled biscuit from the plate Gloria offered, when a thin young man in a mauve track-suit told us his name was Hemingway and that he was my son’s house master, while studying a clipboard and avoiding our eyes.
‘I don’t think your son was on the bus,’ he said, still looking down at his paperwork. ‘He’s certainly not in the football team.’
When I replied that I thought he was, Mr Hemingway ran a nicotine-coloured fingertip down the typewritten list on his board and said: ‘His name isn’t here. So he couldn’t have been on the bus. No spectators went along; just the team and two teachers.’
‘If he’s not on the team and wasn’t on the bus, why did you phone?’ I said.
‘Phone?’ He looked up at me.
‘My wife’s office. Someone called my wife and left a message.’
‘But not from here,’ he said, tucking the clipboard under his arm. ‘No one from here phoned any of the parents.’
‘But …’
‘No one from the school phoned. We are responding to calls but we are not alarming people.’ He smiled. He was obviously selected as a man who would face irate parents resolutely. ‘The Head was saying to me – only half an hour ago – that it was incredible that the word got around so quickly. No parents or next-of-kin have been contacted by us. It was on the radio of course, and parents phone around their friends. It must have been a friend who phoned you, not the school. The Head decided to wait until we had a proper report from the hospital, an
d a list of who will be held there overnight. It still hasn’t come, but as you see there are at least two dozen parents here.’
‘How can I be sure about Billy? That he’s safe?’
‘The little lad must be here. On weekdays no boys are permitted to leave the school grounds without written permission. Why don’t I send one of the boys to find him? This afternoon he should be at the social awareness class … ah, no, Mrs Phelan is ill. Wait a moment, your son’s class were swimming … no, I tell a lie: current affairs …’
They found him eventually. Billy was in the library, sitting at the back near the heating radiator, memorizing the names of the world’s highest peaks for a geography test. He was wearing shorts, long socks and a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Bad Spellers of the World – Untie’. He was a different child here in the environment of his school, his hair parted carefully and his shoes polished. And his movements were diffident and restrained. For a moment I found it difficult to recognize him as my little Billy.
‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ he said.
‘We were worried,’ I said, embracing him.
He kissed Gloria. She suppressed a little sob and then blew her nose loudly on a small handkerchief that, after some rummaging, she had tugged from her handbag.
‘They said I could be a reserve. One of the half-backs had a wisdom tooth seen to. But he got better too quickly.’
‘Would you and Mrs Samson like to take your son off for the evening?’ said Hemingway, patting Billy on the head and smiling at Gloria. ‘He could miss prep, I’m sure.’
‘Yes,’ said Gloria, assuming the role of Mrs Samson effortlessly, ‘we’d like to do that.’
‘Wow. Thank you, sir. Would that be all right, Dad? There’s a super new Chinese restaurant opened in the high street, where that rotten old second-hand bookshop used to be. It starts serving early: the Pekin Duck it’s called – but my friends all call it the Piping Hot.’
‘Sounds good,’ I said, looking quizzically at Gloria. She nodded. ‘It’s Gloria’s car,’ I explained to Billy.