Restless by William Boyd Read Free Book Online Page A

We talked some more, blandly, made our appointment for next Saturday and I hung up. I rolled a joint, smoked it carefully, went to bed and slept a dreamless eight hours.
     
    When I returned from Grindle's the next morning, Hamid was sitting on the top step of our staircase. He was wearing a short new black leather jacket that didn't really suit him, I thought, it made him look too boxy and compact. Hamid Kazemi was a stocky, bearded Iranian engineer in his early thirties with a weightlifter's broad shoulders and a barrel chest: he was my longest-serving pupil.
    He opened the kitchen door for me and ushered me in with his usual precise politesse, complimenting me on how well I looked (something he'd remarked on twenty-four hours previously). He followed me through the flat to the study.
    'You haven't mentioned my jacket,' he said in his direct way. 'Do you not like it?'
    'I quite like it,' I said, 'but with those sunglasses and black jeans you look like you're a special agent for SAVAK.'
    He tried to cover up the fact that he didn't find this comparison amusing – and I realised that for an Iranian it could be a joke in dubious taste so I apologised. Hamid, I remembered, hated the Shah of Iran with special fervour. He removed his new jacket and hung it carefully on the back of his chair. I could smell the new leather and I thought of tack rooms and saddle polish, the redolence of my distant girlhood.
    'I received the news of my posting,' he said. 'I shall go to Indonesia.'
    'I am going to Indonesia. Is that good? Are you pleased?'
    'Am going… I wanted Latin America, even Africa…' He shrugged.
    'I think Indonesia sounds fascinating,' I said, reaching for The Ambersons.
    Hamid was an engineer who worked for Dusendorf, an international oil engineering company. Half the students at Oxford English Plus were Dusendorf engineers, learning English – the language of the petroleum industry – so they could work on oil-rigs around the world. I had been teaching Hamid for three months now. He had arrived from Iran as a fully qualified petro-chemical engineer, but virtually monoglot. However, eight hours of one-on-one tuition a day shared out between four tutors had, as Oxford English Plus confidently promised in their brochure, made him swiftly and completely bilingual.
    'When do you go?' I asked.
    'In one month.'
    'My God!' The exclamation was genuine and unintended. Hamid was so much a part of my life, Monday to Friday, that it was impossible to imagine him suddenly absent. And because I had been his first teacher, because his very first English lesson had been with me, somehow I felt I alone had taught him his fluent workmanlike English. I was almost his Professor Higgins, I thought, illogically: I had come to feel, in a funny way, that this new English-speaking Hamid was all my own work.
    I stood up and took a hanger off the back of the door for his jacket.
    'It's going to lose its shape on that chair,' I said, trying to disguise the small emotional turmoil I was feeling at this news of his impending departure.
    As I took the jacket from him I looked out of the window and saw, down below on the gravelled forecourt, standing beside Mr Scott's Dolomite, a man. A slim young man in jeans and a denim jacket with dark brown hair long enough to rest on his shoulders. He saw me staring down at him and raised his two thumbs – thumbs up – a big smile on his face.
    'Who's that?' Hamid asked, glancing out and then glancing back at me, noting my expression of shock and astonishment.
    'He's called Ludger Kleist.'
    'Why are you looking at him like that?'
    'Because I thought he was dead.'
     
The Story of Eva Delectorskaya
     
    Scotland . 1939
     
    EVA DELECTORSKAYA WALKED DOWN through the springy grass towards the valley floor and the dark strip of trees that marked the small river that flowed there. The sun was beginning to set at the far end of the small glen so at least she knew which direction was west. Looking east, she tried to see