The pain in my bladder worsened until it overcame my feebleness, and I crawled out of bed and staggered through to the bathroom. After I had finished I splashed my face and took a long drink of water. I still felt sick. I thought I would step outside in the hope that the night air would do me good.
It worked. A cool gentle breeze bathed my face. I was surrounded by the urgent communications of a thousand insects. I walked over to the marble railings and looked towards the black silhouette of Cap Ferrat against the shifting grey of the sea. I could make out the ruined watchtower in the gloom next to the lone olive tree, silently guarding the house as it had for centuries. The smell of salt and pine mingled in the air. I leaned over the railings and peered down to the small breakers below, and felt better.
I’m not sure how long I stayed there, slumped against the railings. I may even have fallen asleep. But I slowly became aware of voices in the house behind me. Angry voices. I stood up and strained to listen. It was Tony and Dominique. They were speaking French and I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. Until Dominique’s voice rang through the garden towards me. ‘Salaud! Une gosse! Tu as baisé une gosse!’ A door slammed and the garden returned to the sounds of the crickets and the wind in the trees and the waves.
‘Salaud! Une gosse! Tu as baisé une gosse!’ My addled brain scraped through my French vocabulary. It was all a bit colloquial for me. What the hell was a gosse? A goose, perhaps? Then I remembered baiser from a Molière play we had studied at school. Kiss. Tony had been kissing someone he shouldn’t have. And somehow I doubted it was a goose. Hm.
I made my way back to my room and crawled into bed, wondering if what I thought had happened really had happened. Perhaps I had got completely the wrong end of the stick, like the time when I had confused the French word for vicar with that for virgin in a French dictation, with disastrous consequences. The words tumbled over and over in my increasingly disjointed mind until I lost consciousness.
5
April 1999, The City, London
I had never been sure I could trust Guy in the seventeen years I had known him and I wasn’t sure I could trust him now. He was asking me to place my career, my savings, my whole future in his hands and, as so often in the past, he was tempting me.
Guy was like that.
When he had phoned me that afternoon, out of the blue, I had recognized the American-tinged public-school drawl immediately. He suggested we meet for a beer. It was seven years since I had decided I would be better off avoiding him. Seven years is a long time. Besides, I was bored and I was curious. So I agreed to meet him at the Dickens Inn in St Katherine’s Dock.
I arrived early; I was eager to escape the office and the walk from Gracechurch Street had taken less time than I had anticipated. I ordered a pint of bitter at the bar and pushed through the heaving mass of bankers, commodity traders and the odd tourist to the door. The evening sun glanced off the smooth water of the dock and slapped against the sleek motor-yachts and sedate wooden sailing boats tethered there. The air was cool, but after a week of rain it felt good to be outside.
‘Davo!’
Only one person called me Davo. I turned to see him shouldering his way through the scrum, a lithe figure in black jacket, T-shirt and jeans. ‘Davo, how are you?’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘How about you?’
‘Large, Davo, large.’ The blue eyes twinkled. He glanced inside the crowded pub. ‘Jesus, doesn’t anybody work any more?’
‘I thought seven o’clock was a bit late for you?’
‘Not these days.’
‘Here, let me get you a beer.’
I fought my way back through the mob and returned with the brand of Czech beer that I knew Guy used to like. I noticed that he had moved a few feet away from the clump of drinkers outside the pub.
‘Don’t want to be overheard, eh?’
‘Since you ask, no,’ he said, taking a swig of his beer. ‘So, you’re a true City boy, now? Leipziger Gurney Kroheim. That’s as fancy as they come, isn’t it?’
‘Not since the merger,’ I said. ‘A lot of the top people left Gurney Kroheim, and Leipziger is one of the more staid German banks.’
‘But it’s still a merchant bank, isn’t it?’
‘We’re all called investment bankers now.’
‘Are you enjoying it?’
I paused before answering the question. I had been proud to join the ancient and still-powerful institution of Gurney Kroheim four years before. But after it had been swallowed up by Leipziger Bank, one of the largest banks in Germany, it underwent reorganizations every six months or so. And somehow Project Finance, where I had ended up, had turned out to be a bit of a backwater. I usually put an optimistic face on things to people outside the bank. But not to Guy.
‘Not really. I seem to do a lot of work and get little credit for it. The story of my life.’
‘But they pay you well?’
‘I suppose. Most of your pay these days comes from bonuses, and I don’t get much of those. Not yet, anyway.’
Guy smiled sympathetically. ‘Give it a couple of years.’
‘Possibly. I’m not convinced. Leipziger is pretty bad at the moment. How about you? How’s the acting? I’ve been looking out for you on the box but I haven’t seen anything yet.’
‘Then you obviously don’t watch every episode of The Bill.’
‘I can’t imagine you as a cop,’ I said, surprised.
‘I wasn’t even a villain. More a passer-by. But then I got the call from LA.’
I realized now that the trace of American in his accent was stronger than I remembered it.
‘Hollywood, eh? I bet Brad Pitt was shaking in his shoes.’
‘He coped. There’s room in that town for Brad and me. Plenty of room. They wanted me for a movie: Fool’s Paradise. Have you seen it?’
‘No.’
‘It got pretty bad reviews. Anyway, they wanted an English actor to speak three lines and snog Sandra Bullock. I was their man.’
‘You snogged Sandra Bullock?’
‘I did. It turned out it was the pinnacle of my career.’
I had to ask: I couldn’t help myself. ‘What was it like?’
Guy smiled. ‘What can I say? It was a passionate scene. She’s a great actress. The bad news was I got killed two minutes later.’
Sandra Bullock. I was impressed.
‘I stayed in LA for a couple of years after that, hoping for a big break, but nothing happened. So I came back to London to try my luck.’
‘Have you had any?’
‘Not much.’
I wasn’t completely surprised. Guy had the looks of a certain type of actor and I suspected that his charisma would translate well on to the screen. But I remembered the last time I had seen him, seven years ago, when he had just got out of drama school. His attitude then could hardly have been called professional.
‘Still flying?’ I asked.
‘Sadly, no. Can’t afford it these days. Dad isn’t quite as understanding as he used to be. You?’
‘Yeah, every now and then when the weather’s OK. Still from Elstree.’ It was Guy who had inspired me to take up flying. An expensive hobby, but one I enjoyed. ‘How is your father? Do you see much of him these days?’
‘Not much. You could say we’ve grown apart. Far apart.’
‘Too bad,’ I said. I didn’t mean it. After what had happened in France, it wouldn’t bother me if I never saw Tony Jourdan again.