Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré Read Free Book Online

despite the licence badge he sports on his ample chest. Ollie, according to Luke, ‘keeps us all on the straight and narrow’, but Gail doesn’t buy this. A blue-stocking Scottish Calvinist is not in need of moral guidance, and for a gentleman jockey with a wandering eye and an armoury of upper-class charm, it’s way too late.
    Besides, Ollie has too much behind the eyes for his menial role, in Gail’s opinion. She’s also puzzled about his earring, whether it’s a sex-signal or just a lark. She’s also puzzled about his voice. When she first heard it over the house entryphone in Primrose Hill, it was straight cockney. As he chatted to them through the partition about the dismal weather we were having for May – after that lovely April, and dear me how was the blossom ever going to recover from last night’s deluge? – she detected foreign underlays and his syntax began to break up. So what was his home tongue? Greek? Turkish? Hebrew? Or is the voice, like the single earring, an act he puts on to bamboozle us punters?
    She wishes she’d never signed that bloody Declaration. She wishes Perry hadn’t. Perry wasn’t signing when he signed that form, he was joining .
    *
    Friday was the last day of the Indian honeymooners’ holiday, Perry is saying. They had therefore agreed to play the best of five sets instead of the usual three, and in consequence again missed breakfast.
    ‘So we settled for a swim in the sea, and maybe brunch if we were hungry. We picked the busy end of the beach. It wasn’t the bit we normally used, but we had our eye on the Shipwreck Bar.’
    His efficient tone, Gail recognizes. Perry the English tutor. Facts and short sentences. No abstract concepts. Let the story tell itself. They chose a sunshade, he is saying. They laid out their gear. They were heading for the water when a people carrier with blackened windows came to a halt in the NO PARKING bay. From it emerged first the baby-faced bodyguard, next the tam-o’-shanter man from the tennis match, now wearing shorts and a yellow buckskin waistcoat, but the tam-o’-shanter still firmly in situ . Then Elspeth, wife to Ambrose, and after her an inflated rubber crocodile with its jaws open, followed by Katya – Perry says, parading his fabled powers of recall. And after Katya, exit an enormous red bouncy ball with a smiley face and grab handles which turned out to be the property of Irina, also dressed for the beach.
    And finally Natasha emerged, he says, which is time for Gail to cut in. Natasha is my business, not yours :
    ‘But only after a stage delay, and just when we’re thinking there’s no one left in the people carrier,’ says Gail. ‘Dressed to kill in a Hakka-style lampshade hat and a cheongsam dress with toggle buttons and Grecian sandals cross-tied round her ankles, and she’s carting her leatherbound tome. After picking her way delicately over the sand for all eyes to see, she then settles herself languidly under the furthest sunshade of the row and begins her terribly serious reading. Right, Perry?’
    ‘If you say so,’ says Perry awkwardly, and jerks himself back in his chair as if to distance himself from her.
    ‘I do say so. But the truly eerie thing, the really spooky thing,’ she goes on stridently, now that Natasha is safely out of the way again, ‘was that each member of the party, big or small, knew exactly where to go and what to do as soon as they hit the beach.’
    The baby-faced bodyguard headed straight for the Shipwreck Bar,and ordered a can of root beer which he made last for the next two hours, she says, clinging to the initiative. The tam-o’-shanter man, despite his bulk – a cousin , according to Mark, one of the many cousins from Perm in Russia, the city not the hairdo – scaled the rickety steps of a lifeguard’s lookout, hauled a rubber ring from his buckskin waistcoat, blew it up and sat on it, presumably for his piles. The two little girls, followed at a distance by the ample Elspeth