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: