‘Got any of that whisky?’ Kite asked.
‘Sure,’ Xavier replied. ‘Let’s drink it down by the pool.’
They lit a mosquito coil and sat looking out at the mountains as a storm rumbled in the distance. Kite opted to wait until the morning before confronting Peele: there was no safe way to get to the orchard and leave a note without it looking suspicious to Xavier or Martha. Nor could he get past Abbas and visit the safe house. Best to deal with everything later. With Leonard Cohen on Strawson’s ghetto blaster, they talked for almost an hour by the pool, Xavier finally asking Kite what was happening with Martha. Never happy talking about his private life, Kite ducked the question and said only that they were having a good time. Xavier reached for the bottle, poured himself another two inches of whisky and said: ‘Nothing wrong with that.’ It was perhaps his way of saying that he understood Kite’s need for privacy.
Just when they were on the point of going back to the house to find the girls, Kite heard Luc and Eskandarian talking in the garden. It sounded as though they were fifty metres away, somewhere close to the bench where Kite had earlier been confronted by Abbas.
‘Sounds like Ali and Papa,’ said Xavier, turning around in his deckchair. He had been drinking steadily since the café in Mougins and was already halfway through the Johnnie Walker. ‘Ali Papa,’ he slurred drunkenly. ‘Ali Papa and his forty thieves.’
The voices of the two men became louder, not because they were drawing closer, but because they were clearly having an argument. Kite heard Luc swear in French. He remembered what Eskandarian had said in the office: Luc, as you know, is a businessman with a wealth of experience. We are old friends. We talk candidly. It sounded as though the Iranian was trying to reason with him.
‘The chickens are coming home to roost,’ Xavier declared. ‘This was bound to happen.’
‘What do you mean?’ Kite asked.
‘Business thing,’ he replied. ‘Don’t understand it. Something’s happened.’
‘What business are they in?’ Kite wondered if the Falcons had a directional microphone aimed at the garden under cover of darkness.
‘Import-export,’ Xavier replied, sounding as if he knew more but didn’t want to breach his father’s confidence. ‘More whisky?’
The argument continued for another minute or so. It sounded to Kite as though Eskandarian was apologising to Luc, but that his entreaties were falling on deaf ears. There was silence. He assumed that one, or both of them, had gone back to the house.
‘Sounds like that’s that,’ said Xavier. ‘Night night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite.’
‘What’s going on?’
It was Jacqui. She had emerged with Martha from beneath the fallen branches of the palm tree. Kite had been too distracted by the argument to notice their approach.
‘Thought you guys were in bed,’ said Xavier.
‘We got stuck in the garden. Dad was having a massive row with Ali. Did you hear?’
‘No, we’re both completely deaf and couldn’t hear a thing.’ Xavier rolled his eyes. ‘Of course we heard it!’
‘All right, all right, smart arse,’ said Jacqui and pulled her dress over her head. She was wearing a bikini. ‘We’re going swimming. Want to get in or are you too pissed?’
‘Too pissed,’ said Xavier. ‘And knackered. I’m off to bed.’
‘I’ll come,’ said Kite. Martha was stepping out of a skirt.
‘Great,’ said Jacqui. ‘Leave me with the lovebirds.’
It began to rain. Grumbling about getting wet, Xavier left the bottle of whisky beside his chair, whispered a slurred ‘Enjoy yourselves’ and walked back towards the house. Jacqui swam for only a few minutes before announcing that she was ‘freezing’ and hurrying back to the villa in a towel.
‘That’s why I love her,’ said Martha, the rain beginning to fall more heavily. ‘She wasn’t cold. She just wanted to leave us together.’
Kite lifted her towards him. He was amazed by her weightlessness in the water; it was the first time he had ever held a woman in such a way.
‘You feeling a bit better?’ he asked.
She scrunched up her face.
‘Still annoyed,’ she said. ‘So sad to lose those pictures. Your breath stinks of whisky.’
‘Have some then,’ said Kite, and got out of the pool to grab the Johnnie Walker. They stood in the water up to their waists drinking from the bottle as the rain ran down their faces and bounced on the tiles around the pool. Later they slipped back into the house and went to Martha’s bedroom. Only when she was asleep, almost three hours later, did Kite head back to his own room. Xavier’s light was still on and his door ajar, so he knocked quietly and went inside.
His friend had fallen asleep in his clothes. A bottle of Smirnoff had tipped over beside him, soaking an old Turkish rug and a copy of the Herald Tribune. A cigarette had burned down to the filter in his hand. Kite took the cigarette and threw it in the bin. The smell of alcohol on Xavier’s breath was the smell of his father, passed out in the living room when Kite was still a child. The vodka bottle was half-empty. He prised it from Xavier’s grasp, screwed on the cap and put it on the bedside table. Kite then pulled his groaning, mumbling friend out of his clothes, lifted him in his boxer shorts onto the bed and covered him with a sheet. He thought of his mother, of all the nights when she had put Paddy to bed in this way, the unutterable sadness and fury of dealing with a drunk.
Wrapping the newspaper and the bottle of vodka inside the rug, Kite opened the door and carried it back to his room, moving as quietly as he could. Abbas’s door was open, but he was not inside. The sun was rising, the dawn perfectly still. Kite closed his bedroom door, stuffed the rug in the cupboard and set the alarm for nine. Knowing that he would be groggy when he woke up, he retrieved the rolls of film and the Walkman cassette from his chest of drawers, put them inside his running shoes and sat on the bed.
This is what happens to the people closest to me, he thought. They become alcoholics. He had been so distracted by his work for BOX 88 that he had not even stopped to notice that his closest friend was slipping deeper and deeper into addiction, drinking quantities of alcohol at eighteen that his father had drunk as a grown man of thirty-five. It felt like a double betrayal: not only to spy in Xavier’s home, but to ignore his descent into misery.
Try as he might, Kite could not sleep. He lay on the bed, his mind turning over, until at last the clock ticked past eight o’clock and he knew that there was no time left to rest. Having showered and changed into his running gear, he put the rolls of film in the pockets of his shorts, then wearily slipped the cassette in his Walkman and looped the headphones around his neck like a noose.
Luc was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs.
49
‘Lockie!’
Xavier’s father was wearing trainers, a pair of khaki shorts, a McEnroe headband and a plain white T-shirt. He looked like a man playing a role for his own private amusement. There was something profoundly unsettling at the sight of him.
‘Thought I would join you on your morning run.’ He tapped his stomach. ‘Rosamund says that with all this food and no exercise, I am developing a beer belly. Is that correct? Is that what you call it?’
‘A beer belly, yes,’ Kite replied. It was clearly a lie. Xavier’s father kept himself in exceptional physical condition and was probably fitter than half the boys at Alford. ‘But you look well. You’ve been swimming a lot, working in the garden.’
Kite needed to persuade Luc out of joining him on the run; if he came, it would be impossible to visit Peele. But it was a forlorn hope: Luc was changed and ready, hopping up and down in the hall like a football player waiting in the tunnel before a big game. He knew something about Kite’s hidden life. It was obvious. There was a constant glimmer of suspicion in his cheery gaze.
‘So how far do we go?’ he asked.
Kite had never been further than half a mile. He knew nothing of the surrounding countrys
ide, no route around the hills.
‘I usually just keep going until I get tired,’ he said, moving towards the front door. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Abbas in the kitchen. He was eating breakfast, staring at them, listening to every word. ‘Do you do much jogging back in London?’
‘Sometimes in Paris,’ Luc replied. Kite had a mental image of Luc running through the Bois de Boulogne alongside a pig-tailed, giggling mistress half his age. ‘So let’s go!’
Kite said that there was now no point in taking his Walkman. He went back to his room, threw it on the bed, put the roll of film in the drawer and returned to the hall. He did not know when, if ever, he would have the chance to get the film to BOX. Meanwhile, Luc was outside, doing squat thrusts beneath the lime tree. The idea of going through the motions of a forty-minute run, of passing the safe house and not being able to go in, was not just frustrating; it felt to Kite as though he was being led into a trap. He wished that he could turn round and go back upstairs, but desperately wanted to know what had motivated Luc to accompany him on his run.
‘OK, let’s go!’ he said, as if Kite was a personal trainer and he was paying him by the hour. ‘You lead the way!’
They set off down the drive. Kite hadn’t warmed up properly and his knee immediately started to ache. At the gates he paused and told Luc that he needed to stretch.
Near the bottom of the wall, as clear as day, was a four-inch line drawn in white chalk, the signal from Peele to make contact.
They were back at the house within half an hour. There had been no sinister reason why Luc had decided to go for a jog, no hidden agenda in his desire to accompany Kite. Or so it seemed. Though Kite tried to talk to him, Xavier’s father remained monosyllabic throughout, very obviously testing his fitness against a young man almost thirty years his junior. Back at the house, Kite leaning on his knees and gasping for breath, Luc made a point of drawing himself up to his full height, puffing out his chest and saying: ‘I thought you did this every day?’ Kite played the gracious, admiring underling, flattering Luc’s vanity by telling him that he had the heart and lungs of a professional athlete. That seemed to satisfy him. He went back into the house preening like a matador taking the applause of the crowd after a kill. Kite stumbled back to his room, tired and paranoid, and decided that there was only one way left open to him to contact Peele.
After taking a shower and eating breakfast, he asked Rosamund if he could phone his mother to find out about his A-level results. She thought that was a marvellous idea and told Kite to send Cheryl her love. Dialling the number felt like an act of surrender. He pictured Carl at the safe house, beckoning Peele towards him as he listened on the line, drawing a hand across his throat to indicate that Kite had hit the wall.
The number his mother had given him rang out until it was picked up by an answering machine. Kite did what he had been trained to do.
‘Mum, hi, it’s me, calling from France. Just wondering if you’ve heard anything about my results? Also, have there been any letters from the University of Edinburgh? I’m waiting for them to write to me. Give me a call. Hope everything’s OK with you. Lots of love.’
He would have liked to have spoken to her, to hear his mother’s voice. She probably wouldn’t have wanted to know much about France or Martha, but by speaking to her, Kite might at least have been able to forge some kind of connection with his old self, however briefly. He hung up and realised that he had said nothing about the holiday, hadn’t given the number of the villa or any indication when he would be back home. Eskandarian, Rosamund and Luc had all been in the kitchen as he made the call, well within earshot of the sitting room. Kite wondered if he should call back and leave the number but didn’t want to sound amateur to the eavesdropping Falcons. Xavier came into the sitting room looking surprisingly well-rested and beckoned him onto the terrace.
‘What happened last night?’ he whispered, closing the door behind him.
‘You passed out,’ Kite replied.
‘Did Mum see?’
‘I don’t think so. It was very late. They were asleep.’
‘Did you take off my clothes?’
‘Yeah, but nothing happened. You weren’t in the mood.’
Xavier made a face. ‘Very funny.’ He grabbed Kite on the shoulder and squeezed the muscle. ‘Thanks, mate. What happened to the bottle?’
‘Stuffed it in the cupboard in my room with the rug. What do I do with them?’
Xavier looked perplexed. ‘Maybe give them to Hélène?’ It was the kind of thing a boy who had grown up with servants assumed was the easiest thing to do. ‘Sorry to fuck up,’ he said. ‘Lost it a bit last night.’
‘It’s OK. I’m sorry you’re drinking so much.’
Xavier stepped back, as if Kite had swung a punch and missed.
‘I’m on holiday.’
‘We’re all on holiday, Xav.’
It wasn’t in the nature of their friendship for Kite to admonish him. Xavier looked puzzled.
‘What does that mean?’
Kite held up his hands as an indication that he wasn’t going to press the point. He wanted Xavier to know that he was worried, but didn’t want to come across as a prig.
‘It’s just that you seem upset about something. About your dad.’
‘Forget that.’ Xavier opened the door into the sitting room, escaping the conversation. ‘I’m going into Mougins on the Vespa. Want anything?’
Kite thought about going pillion in the hope of running into Peele, or perhaps a random Falcon carrying a rolled-up copy of the FT, but not enough time had passed since he had flown the signal. Besides, Xavier didn’t seem in the mood for company.
He went back to his room and lay down on the bed. He closed his eyes and quickly fell asleep, waking two hours later to the sound of the Vespa coming back and the noise of a car on the drive. Moments later Xavier was shouting up the stairs.
‘Lockie!’
Kite rolled out of bed and opened the door.
‘What?’
‘Come down. Look who I ran into.’
Standing in the hall, a bottle of wine in one hand and a box of chocolates in the other, beaming from ear to ear beneath a crumpled Panama hat, was Billy Peele.
‘Lachlan Kite, as I live and breathe,’ he said. ‘Fancy seeing you here.’
50
Peele had come prepared. He knew their A-level results – two As and a B for Xavier, the same for Kite – and gave a faultless account of running into Xavier ‘quite by chance’ in the back alleys of Mougins.
‘I’m here with my girlfriend,’ he explained to an enraptured Rosamund, who seemed delighted that a cultivated, charming, intelligent Englishman was visiting the villa. Jacqui and Martha were beside her in the sitting room, Luc and Xavier looking on. ‘She’s not been well, unfortunately. Ate some shellfish in Antibes and the blighters exacted a terrible revenge. I’d warned her – no oysters when there isn’t an “r” in the month – but she wouldn’t listen. So she’s back at our hotel nursing the most ghastly stomach cramps and feeling wretched that she’s left me all on my tod. But then who should I run into but the recently departed – and much-missed – old Alfordian Monsieur Xavier Bonnard, who very kindly asked me to lunch. I hope it’s not too much of an imposition?’
It wasn’t. Rosamund said that Hélène always prepared more food than the household could possibly eat and that laying another place at table would be the easiest thing in the world. As Xavier and Luc showed Peele around the garden, Kite tagged along, simultaneously impressed by Peele’s chutzpah and anxious to know when they would have the chance to talk.
An opportunity finally presented itself after lunch. Eskandarian had gone back to his office after speaking to Peele only briefly, not about Rushdie or the ayatollah but – of all things – the laws of cricket. As usual, Jacqui and Martha were helping Rosamund and Hélène with the washing-up; Luc was firmly of the view that kitchens were for women or professional male chefs and sat with Peele, Xavier and Kite on t
he terrace drinking coffee.
‘Fancy a game of pétanque?’ Xavier suggested, swallowing the final triangle of a Toblerone he had bought at Charles de Gaulle.
Luc thought this was a great idea and immediately stood up, clapping his hands together and dividing the four of them into teams.
‘The men against the boys,’ he said.
‘You’re on,’ Kite replied.
Throughout the ensuing match, just as had been the case at every moment since his arrival, Peele made no attempt to communicate with Kite about the operation. Every word they exchanged was all of a piece with Peele’s job at Alford and his former role as Kite’s tutor. There were no discreet looks, no indications that he was alarmed or frustrated, nothing at all to suggest that his relationship with Kite was anything other than that of a popular history beak and his former pupil. Only when Kite and Xavier had roundly defeated their opponents by five games to one, and Xavier had gone into the house to use the bathroom, did Peele make his move.
‘So Lockie. It’s been very good to see you. I want to hear all your plans. The A-level results are exactly where you must have wanted them. Congratulations indeed. Can I help with Edinburgh, with UCCA forms, with anything at all?’
Luc, who was standing with them, plainly wanted no part in the conversation. He went into the house to check on Rosamund and Eskandarian, promising to dig out a French novel from his office which Peele had shown an interest in at lunch.
‘Keep smiling,’ Peele whispered as soon as Luc was out of sight. ‘We’re catching up, I’m happy to see you. Neither of us has anything to worry about.’
He was beaming at Kite, wholly in character, the tone of his voice and occasional bursts of laughter completely at odds with the words that were coming out of his mouth.
‘Listen carefully. I don’t know why you haven’t been able to come to the house, why the bloody Gameboy wasn’t working, but not to worry. Things have moved on.’
Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Page 39