Basil loosened his tie and blinked in the hard light. ‘God, if this is only April, what’s it going to be like later on? Never mind, we’ll have some tea in a minute. I want to take you to an hotel near here. Because it’s not just the money. There’s something else that will interest you about this job — partly why we’ve asked you to do it.’
‘What?’
‘Come. I’ll show you.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Tea-time. Should have started by now. We’re going to have some tea: some iced lemon tea and some expensive cream cakes, Peter. You can make up your mind after that — and I’ll tell you about the job then too.’
How confident he was, I thought. And yet I had to admit that I shared some of his confidence: with this money I wouldn’t have to lose the cottage — that was my first thought. The wine bill could be paid, all that San Patricio sherry — and the new radials that my car needed all round. We turned off before the Serpentine and walked south towards Knightsbridge.
‘Tea and tuck, Basil,’ I said. ‘It’s just blackmail. You think I can be bought for that — like Billy Bunter?’
Basil shrugged his shoulders. ‘You were always such a moral fellow, Peter. Well, you simply can’t afford them any more. That’s the long and short of it. Besides, this isn’t immoraclass="underline" you can see it’s straight. Why else the PM?’
‘You people could con even him,’ I said.
I should have walked away and left Basil then, sweating on the pavement, waiting for a break in the traffic, before we crossed over to Wilton Place. But I thought then that my life had been too full of what I ought to have done. Besides, Basil had set the whole thing up so skilfully that I couldn’t resist moving on to this next carrot: what could he possibly have in store for me over a glass of iced tea and a plate full of cream cakes? It was as simple as that — and Basil knew it, looking at me confidently when we finally managed to cross over and made our way towards the Grand Hotel.
The lobby was quiet and nearly empty, for this was a small Grand Hotel. But once through the bevelled glass doors and into the gilded tearoom, we sank into a pool of gentle privilege, the tact of money, a crowded well-being. We took a table right at the back, while the rich chatted softly over Royal Worcester teasets, nurtured by attentive waiters sailing round their tables, hands held high with plates of hot scones and Viennese chocolate cake.
A samovar of tea, a huge silver-plated edifice, bubbled in the centre of the room — and beyond it, standing by the window like a dark exclamation mark against the long white net curtains that filtered the afternoon sun and gave the room the feel of a watery, lemon-grey aquarium, was a woman — dark-haired and deeply bronzed, playing the flute.
They say you never forget a face. But I did then; it was clear that Basil, looking at me carefully and then up at the dais, wanted me to recognise something, to remember someone.
‘Well?’ I said, looking at the £5 a head tea menu. ‘You normally do your business here? Never miss a trick to ham it up, do you? I’ll have the Welsh rarebit — and a beaker of cold tea.’
Basil smiled ominously. ‘It’s ten or fifteen years, isn’t it? Or have you seen her since?’
‘Who?’
Basil glanced up again at the woman in the pale smock dress, her copper-coloured arms floating up and down as she nursed the instrument, which obscured her lips and chin. Perhaps that was why I hadn’t recognised her sooner — as I did then, a second before he mentioned her name.
‘Rachel Phillips.’
It was her short parting, just an inch or so long, right above her brow, and the bouncy, untutored hair that ran away from it down either side, enclosing her head in a windy circle of dark curls, that jogged my memory and made my stomach turn suddenly: hair that I’d run my hand through with such pleasure years ago. And then, before I’d fully appreciated her identity and presence here, I remembered a time on the lake in Scotland, below her house in Perthshire — the first time I’d done this, out in a rowing boat, when I’d leant forward on my oars and ruffled that hair, nearly twenty-five years before.
And my first thought then was: did Basil know about this too? Had he been hiding there then — on the wooded shore with binoculars? And I thought, yes, Basil must know practically everything, even that far back perhaps. And I wasn’t angry to begin with, as one isn’t when an outsider, a relative or a friend, admires someone one loves, when one has first introduced them into the family circle. Instead, for a moment, I was grateful to Basil, as though he were a long-lost uncle come to commend my choice of wife almost a generation after the engagement. And indeed, having run the gamut of childish infatuation and advanced on love, Rachel and I had once thought to marry and had met with little encouragement — either from ourselves or our circles.
Subsequently, in our twenties, and until she had married ten or so years before, we had shared each other intermittently, but without any permanency, for when she had wished that, I hadn’t, and by the time I changed my mind she had moved on to other dreams. We had grown together, home from boarding schools through years of holidays, in thoughtless leaps and bounds but with as many angry retreats. And when we had loved afterwards it had been with the same extremes of pain and excitement. Our exaggerated feelings for each other always retained the flavour of nursery antagonisms: petty squabbles over toys or idyllic trysts behind the laurels, which had become the bitter quarrels and loves of adulthood without any change in their childish nature: antipathies and desires which never benefited from growth or reason.
That Basil should bring me to her again, in the tearoom of a London hotel, her cool music flooding the spaces all around us — well, as I say, I was charmed at first. But a moment afterwards I was afraid. Basil rarely did anything without the long view in mind: I remembered a seemingly innocuous quarrel he had once inaugurated with a young visa clerk in our travel section which had ended in the man’s being sent down for fourteen years at the Old Bailey. Basil had spotted a flaw in the fellow long before anyone else. And now Rachel, for some reason, had swum into his sights — in a matter which, for some other reason, I was to be joined to her in. If I feared for her, I feared as much for us as well.
Basil intended some meeting between us — I sensed that clearly; it was part of his plan. But had he any idea of what such a renewal would mean to me? Had he really spied out that personal terrain — from a lakeside perch gazing across the water at us, children touching each other in a boat, or seen us through the window of that shabby blitzed flat we had once shared at the back of Notting Hill Gate? Did he know only the softness and easy humour we had found together in those early days in London: lying on that broken sofa, as I had done, listening to her practise behind a closed door in the bathroom, the only privacy she needed then. Or had he waited till the weekend, and been another customer in the small corner store in Ladbroke Grove, and seen the whirlwind row over what to buy and how much to spend on provisions for the following week?
Was my past that far back, long before I’d spied or married myself or come to such ruin in Durham Jail — all the life which had come before me now as precisely as an old scrapbook — was that untouched part of me to be opened to the casual view? — released by Basil from an airtight box and become, with all the other failed emotion, heir to corruption?
‘I want you to meet her — again,’ Basil said.
‘I thought as much.’
I breathed hard, restraining my anger in the polite room full of delicate music. A meeting, Basil would have thought, hardly different from one of his own held in those airless basement rooms in Holborn: hardly different indeed — in that it would have been just as devious. Rachel had always been proud of what she saw as her innocent carelessness in human affairs. She herself was a gift, she thought — like her music — which would inevitably be appreciated. In fact she knew well how wrong this view was, how frightened she was of herself — and so, like a spy, she constantly hid her tracks and changed her identity the better to avoid the unacceptable reality of her person.