Alex Dryden - Red to Black

‘Yes,’ Adrian says nastily. ‘We can always fit her up so it looks like she’s ratted on her own people. They’ll really give her a good time at the Forest, I should think. There won’t be much of her left to fuck, that’s for sure.’

Then he turns away without another word and walks back on to the path and up through the park to his waiting car. Lev and Finn watch in silence as he blurs into the rain.

IT IS JUST MORE THANa week later. Finn and I are at Willy the Hungarian’s little ramshackle wooden empire on the beach near Marseilles. Willy is absent for a reason I don’t know. But we expect him any day now.

Willy drove Finn and me out to the cabin with its restaurant at the beach on a beautiful blue day. He hid us in the back of a van. Anyone watching would think that it was just a maintenance man going down there to do some winter repair work. He even put a ladder on the roof of the van to complete the fiction. But there was nobody about in the bleak, remote place Willy had carved out for himself, nobody to see who turned on or off the three-mile track to the beach. And if you looked along the track, across the saltpans from the road, all you saw were dunes, and even then only if the day was clear enough. The huts were always hidden.

Willy had brought books and told us there was wood in a store for unseasonably cold evenings and that, bearing in mind that this store would run out quickly, we’d better start collecting driftwood right from the start. There was plenty of it on the beach, he said, from last year’s violent Mediterranean storms that scoop up debris from the land or sweep it from the decks of ships.

Finn and I enjoyed a week of being alone without the hippies who had not yet returned from wintering in India.

‘For Adrian,’ Finn explained one night as we sat by a fire on the beach, ‘destroying me would be like destroying part of himself. He hates me, don’t get me wrong, Rabbit; he loathes everything there is about me. But I’m the part of himself that he hates. Even if he’s not conscious of it himself. He won’t kill a part of himself.’

Finn pokes the embers of the fire, which has just cooked our supper. I hope Finn’s instincts about other people are serving him well. And I wish that he would apply the same acute perceptions to himself.

‘But you’re not so protected, Anna,’ he continues and stares into the red embers. ‘He’d happily hurt you to hurt me, and leave himself untouched in the process. I know that. That’s why you’re in greater danger than I am, at least from Adrian. It’s you we have to protect right now.’

‘You really think you’re safe?’ I say. ‘After what Adrian said?’

‘I’m safe only from Adrian.’

Since the meeting with Adrian, there’s been no contact. In the meantime, Finn put it out to the Team that he had given up his pursuit. It was over, he told them, and the team was broken up. Thank you, another time perhaps. He met a few of the team, informed others by e-mail. He wanted it known that he’d reached the end, whether it convinced anyone any more, or not.

We had silently slipped out of the country on the night after his lunch with Adrian. We left, thanks to one of Finn’s French friends who came over in a sailing boat with no motor and gave me just about the worst ten hours of my life. The seas were heavy, and I thought we would either sink or I would simply die of sea-sickness. But Finn and his bearded French fisherman buddy thought it was great fun.

Abduction or worse was a real fear. At around this time, a retired British colonel was shot and killed in what was an unmistakable assassination that took place in a small English village in Buckinghamshire. He happened to share the same name as the judge who had approved the application for asylum in Britain of Putin’s great enemy, Boris Berezovsky, years before. The judge lived in the same street. It was a case of mistaken identity, and though the colonel’s death was reported only in one Scottish newspaper, with a single column inch, this to Finn and me was ample evidence that Russian hit squads were back on the streets of Britain.

And then the dissident Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in broad daylight in a London hotel, and whoever in Britain had tried to cover up the colonel’s death couldn’t keep this one out of the press. We knew that both of us were probably on a hit list somewhere in the Forest, where I’ve seen them use photographs of their targets for shooting practice.

By the end of the winter, Finn said he’d spoken to Dieter and that Dieter had contacted the German company Hammerein in an anonymous letter and had received information that they were putting their defences in place.

And then one day Willy turns up out of the blue and opens all the shutters in the restaurant and sweeps the sand away that has piled up against the doors in the course of winter storms. A posse of Polish women arrives and cleans up the rooms in the other huts and washes the cheap bedlinen.

Finn and I have lost weight, Willy tells us, but now he is doing the fishing things will be better.

Soon Willy’s summer guests, the hippies, arrive like migrating birds, in twos and threes. They come loaded with huge stripy plastic bags full of Indian clothes and trinkets, which they will sell at various hippy markets along the coast during the summer, and which keeps them in hash and whisky. Willy treats them like his naughty children and isn’t above cuffing them round the head if they get out of hand. Finn says Willy’s place is like a holiday home for dysfunctional kids, and that he feels right at home here.

Willy and Finn spend hours drinking beers and talking, while I start reading from the suitcase of new books that Willy has brought with him.

And then, on the third morning after Willy arrived, I realise that I am pregnant.

I don’t say anything for a few days. But I go into the local town with Willy and buy a kit to test myself. We stop at a café further up the street and I take the opportunity to do the test. It is positive, and I come out of the toilet at the back of the café clutching my bag of cosmetics to fool Willy, but the look in his eyes tells me I haven’t succeeded. He says nothing and neither do I. But when we get back to the beach and have lunch, Finn and I walk a mile or so along the edge of the sea and I tell him.

There is no hesitation, he literally jumps into the air with joy. If he had four legs, all of them would have left the ground. But I still ask him what he thinks we should do.

‘What do you mean?’ he says, and his joyful expression crashes for a moment. ‘Of course we want a baby,’ he says, then corrects himself. ‘I mean, don’t you, Anna?’

‘I’ve never wanted to have children,’ I say. ‘Not before.’

‘Well, of course not before, no. It would have been mad,’ he says, slightly madly. ‘But we’re free now. We have no jobs, no money, no home, no prospects and pretty much nothing at all. It’s the perfect moment.’

I laugh and then we can’t stop laughing.

A baby. I can hardly get the word out of my mouth.

Finn takes me by the shoulders.

‘Do you honestly think, darling, that you and I, of all people, can’t find a way to provide for something that eats mashed apples and is less than a foot long?’

‘That’s not how people normally see a baby,’ I reply.

‘Well, OK, no,’ he says. ‘Most people I know put their kids down for some school ten years before they’re born, they create Disneyland on one floor of a large house, then they sign it up for piano lessons, karate classes, swimming diplomas, extra maths, post-birth therapy, nannies and a nutrition expert. Other people seem capable of just having babies.’