‘Hi, Tom,’ says Perry idiotically.
‘Checked in OK, Milton?’
‘Fine, just fine. Good trip. Everything went perfectly,’ Perry says with enough enthusiasm for both of them.
‘You’re on your own tonight, OK?’
‘You said.’
‘Doolittle in the pink?’
‘Blooming.’
‘Call if you need anything. Service round the clock.’
*
In the hotel’s minuscule hallway on their way out, Perry discusses his anxieties about the weather with a formidable lady named Madame Mère after the mother of Napoleon. He has known her from his student days and Madame Mère, if she is to be believed, loves Perry like a son. She stands four foot nothing in her bedroom slippers and nobody, according to Perry, has ever seen her without a headscarf over her curlers. Gail enjoys hearing Perry rattling away in French, but his fluency has always been a challenge to her, perhaps because he is not forthcoming about his early instructors.
At a
tabac
in the rue de l’Université, Milton and Doolittle eat indifferent steak frites and a tired salad and agree it’s the best in the world. They don’t finish their litre of house red, so take it back to their hotel.
‘Just do whatever you’d normally do,’ Hector had told them airily. ‘If you’ve got Paris-based buddies and want to hang out with them, why not?’
Because we wouldn’t be doing what we normally do, is why not. Because we don’t want to be hanging out in a St Germain café with our Paris-based buddies when we’ve got an elephant called Dima sitting in our heads. And because we don’t want to have to lie to them about where we got our tickets for tomorrow’s Final.
*
Back in their room, they drink the rest of the red out of tooth-mugs and make deep and adoring love without speaking a word, the best. When morning comes Gail sleeps late out of nervousness, and wakes to find Perry watching the rain spotting the grimy window, and worrying again about what Dima will do if the match is cancelled. And if it’s postponed till Monday – Gail’s thought now – will she have to call her Chambers with another cock-and-bull story about a sore throat, which is Chambers code for a bad period?
Suddenly everything is linear. After coffee and croissants brought to their bedside by Madame Mère – with an appreciative murmur to Gail of ‘Quel titan alors’ – and a vacuous call from Luke asking whether they had a good night and are they feeling fit for tennis, they lie in bed discussing what to do before start of play at 3 p.m.,
allowing plenty of time to get to the stadium and find their seats and settle in.
Their answer is to take it in turns to use the tiny handbasin and dress, then march at Perry’s pace to the Musée Rodin, where they attach themselves to a queue of schoolchildren, make it to the gardens in time to be rained on, shelter under the trees, take refuge in the museum café and peer through the doorway while they try to work out which way the clouds are moving.
Abandoning their coffees by mutual consent, but for no reason either of them can fathom, they agree to explore the gardens of the Champs-Elysées, only to find them closed on the grounds of security. Michelle Obama and her children are in town, according to Madame Mère, but it’s a State secret, so only Madame Mère and all Paris knows.
The gardens of the Marigny Theatre, however, turn out to be open and empty, except for two elderly Arab men in black suits and white shoes. Doolittle selects a bench, Milton approves her choice. Doolittle stares into the chestnut trees, Milton at a map.
Perry knows his Paris and has of course fathomed exactly how they will reach the Roland Garros Stadium – metro to here, bus to there, a fat safety margin to make sure they meet Tamara’s deadline.
Nevertheless, it makes sense for him to be burying his face in the map, because what else is there to do if you’re a young couple on a spree in Paris and have decided, like a pair of idiots, to sit on a park bench in the rain?
‘Everything on course, Doolittle? No little problems we can solve for you?’ Luke directly to Gail this time, sounding like the Perkins’ all-male family doctor when she was a girl:
Sore throat, Gail? Why don’t we have those clothes off and take a look?
‘No problems, nothing you can help us with, thanks,’ she replies. ‘Milton tells me we’ll be hitting the trail in half an hour.’
And there’s nothing wrong with my throat either.
Perry folds his map. Talking to Luke has made Gail feel angry and conspicuous. Her mouth has dried up, so she sucks in her lips and licks them from the inside. How much madder does this get? They return to the empty pavement and set course up the hill towards the
Arc de Triomphe, Perry stalking ahead of her the way he does when he wants to be alone and can’t.
‘What the
fuck
d’you think you’re doing?’ she hisses into his ear.
He has dodged into an airless shopping mall that is blaring out rock music. He is peering into a darkened window as if his whole future is revealed there. Is he playing spy? – and incidentally flouting Hector’s injunction not to look for imaginary watchers?
No. He’s laughing. And a moment later, thank God, so is Gail as, arms slung round one another’s shoulders, they gaze in disbelief at a veritable arsenal of spy toys: brand-name photographic wristwatches that cost ten thousand euros, briefcase microphone kits and telephone scramblers, night-vision glasses, stun guns in all their glorious variety, pistol holsters with non-slip lap-straps as optional extras, and pick-your-own bullets of pepper, paint or rubber: welcome to Ollie’s black museum for the paranoid executive who has nothing.
*
There had been no bus to take them there.
They hadn’t ridden on the metro.
The pinch on the bum she’d received from a departing passenger old enough to be her grandfather was non-operative.
They had been wafted here, and that was how they had come to be standing in a queue of courteous French citizens at the left side of the western gate to the Roland Garros Stadium exactly twelve minutes before the time appointed by Tamara.
It was also how Gail came to be smiling her way weightlessly past benign uniformed gatekeepers who were only too happy to smile back at her; then sauntering with the crowd down an avenue of tented shops to the thump-chump of an unseen brass band, the mooing of Swiss alphorns and the unintelligible advice of male loudspeakers.
But it was Gail the cool-headed courtroom lawyer who counted off the sponsors’ names on the shopfronts: Lacoste, Slazenger, Nike, Head, Reebok – and which one did Tamara say in her letter? – don’t pretend you’ve forgotten.
‘
Perry
’ – tugging hard at his arm – ‘you promised me
faithfully
you’d buy me some decent tennis shoes.
Look
.’
‘Oh, did I? So I did,’ agrees Perry alias Milton, as a bubble saying
REMEMBERS!
appears over his head.
And with more conviction than she might have expected of him, he cranes forward to examine the latest thing by – Adidas.
‘And it’s high time you bought some for
yourself
too, and threw away that stinky old pair with verdigris round the uppers,’ bossy Doolittle tells Milton.
‘
Professor! I swear to God!
My friend! You don’t remember me?’
The voice had come at them without warning: the disembodied voice of Antigua bellowing above the three winds.
Yes, I do remember you, but
I’m
not the Professor.
Perry is.
So I’ll keep looking at the latest thing in Adidas tennis shoes, and let Perry go first before I turn my head in an appropriately delighted and highly astonished manner, as Ollie would say.
Perry is going first. She feels him leave her side and turn. She measures the length of time it takes for him to believe the evidence of his eyes.
‘Christ,
Dima
! Dima from Antigua! – incredible!’
Not too much, Perry, keep it down –
‘What in Heaven’s name are
you
doing here! Gail,
look
!’
But I won’t look. Not at once. I’m eyeing shoes, remember? And eyeing shoes, I’m always distracted, I’m on a different planet actually, even tennis shoes. Absurdly, as it had seemed to them at the time, they had practised this moment outside a sports shop in Camden Town that specialized in athletics shoes, and again in Golders Green, first with Ollie overplaying the back-slapping Dima and Luke playing innocent bystander, then with their roles reversed. But now she was glad of it: she knew her lines.
So pause, hear him, wake, turn.
Then
be delighted and highly astonished.
‘Dima! Oh my
God
. It’s
you
! You marvel! This is just totally – this is
amazing
!’ – followed by her ecstatic mouse-squeak, the one she
uses for opening Christmas parcels, as she watches Perry dissolve into the huge torso of a Dima whose delight and astonishment are no less spontaneous than her own:
‘What you
do
here, Professor, you lousy goddam tennis player!’
‘But Dima, what are
you
doing?’ Perry and Gail together now, a chorus of yaps in different keys, as Dima roars on.
Has he changed? He’s paler. The Caribbean sun’s worn off. Yellow half-moons under the sexy brown eyes. Sharper downward lines at the corners of the mouth. But the same stance, the same backward lean saying ‘come at me if you dare’. The same Henry the Eighth placing of the little feet.
And the man’s an absolute natural for the stage, just listen to this:
‘You think Federer gonna pussy this Soderling guy the way you pussy
me
? – you think he gonna tank the goddam match because he love fair play? Gail, I swear to God, come here! – I gotta hug this girl, Professor! You married her yet? You goddam crazy!’ – as he draws her into his enormous chest, driving his whole body against her, starting with a clammy, tear-stained cheek, then his chest, then the bulge of his crotch until even their knees are touching; then shoves her away from him in order to bestow the obligatory three kisses of the Trinity on her cheeks, left side, right side, left side again while Perry does ‘well, I must say this really
is
the most ridiculous, totally improbable coincidence’, with rather more academic detachment than Gail thinks appropriate: a little short on spontaneity in her opinion, and she’s making up for it with a thrilled gabble of too many questions all at once:
‘Dima,
darling
, how are Katya and Irina, for Heaven’s sake? I just can’t stop thinking about them!’ – true – ‘Are the twins playing
cricket
? How’s
Natasha
? Where have you all
been
? Ambrose said you’d all gone to
Moscow
. Is that where you all went? For the funeral? You look so
well
. How’s Tamara? How are all those weird, lovely friends and relations you had around you?’
Did she
really
say that last bit? Yes she did. And while she’s saying it, and intermittently receiving bits of answer in reply, she is becoming aware, if only in soft focus, of smartly dressed men and women
who have paused to watch the show: another Dima-supporters’ club, apparently, but of a younger, slicker generation, far removed from the mossy bunch assembled in Antigua. Is that Baby-Face Niki lurking among them? If so, he’s bought himself an Armani summer suit in beige with fancy cuffs. Are the link bracelet and the deep-sea-diver’s watch nestling inside them?
Dima is still talking and she is hearing what she doesn’t want to hear: Tamara and the children flew straight from Moscow to Zurich – yes, Natasha too, she don’t like goddam tennis, she wanna get home to Berne, read and ride a bit. Chill out. Does she also gather that Natasha hadn’t been all that well, or was it her imagination? Everyone is conducting three conversations at once:
‘Don’t you teach goddam
kids
no more, Professor?’ – mock outrage – ‘you gonna teach
French
kids be English gentlemen once? Listen, where you sitting? Some goddam bird house, top floor, right?’
Followed by, presumably, a rendering of the same witty suggestion over his shoulder in Russian. But it must have got lost in translation, because few of the group of smartly dressed onlookers smile, except for a spruce little dancer of a man at their centre. At first glance, Gail takes him to be a tour guide of some sort, for he is wearing a very visible cream-coloured nautical blazer with an anchor of gold thread on the pocket, and carrying a crimson umbrella which, together with the head of swept-back silvery hair, would have made him instantly findable by anyone lost in a crowd. She catches his smile, then she catches his eye. And when she returns her gaze to Dima, she knows his eye is still on her.
Dima has demanded to see their tickets. Perry makes a habit of losing tickets, so Gail’s got them. She knows the numbers by heart, so does Perry. But that doesn’t prevent her from not knowing them now, or from looking sweetly vague as she hands them to Dima who lets out a derisive snort:
‘You got
telescopes
, Professor? You so fucking high up, you need oxygen!’
Again he repeats the joke in Russian, but again the standing group behind him seems to be waiting rather than listening. Is his
breathlessness new since Antigua? Or new for today? Is it a heart thing? Or a vodka thing?
‘We gotta goddam hospitality box, hear me? Corporation shit. Young guys I work with from Moscow. Armani kids. Got pretty girls. Look at them!’
A pair of the girls do indeed catch Gail’s eye: leather jackets, pencil skirts and ankle boots. Pretty wives? Or pretty hookers. If so, top of the range. And the Armani kids a hostile blur of blue-black suits and sodden stares.
‘Thirty number-one seats, food you die for,’ Dima is bellowing. ‘You wanna do that, Gail? Come join us? Watch the game like a lady? Drink champagne? We got spare. Hey,
come on
, Professor. Why the fuck not?’
Because Hector told him to be hard to get, is why the fuck not. Because the harder he is to get, the harder you’ll have to work to get him, and me with him, and the greater will be our credibility with your guests from Moscow. Pushed into a corner, Perry is making a good job of being Perry: frowning, doing his diffident and awkward bit. For a rank beginner in the arts of dissembling, he’s putting on a pretty good turn. Time to help him out all the same: