John le Carre - Our kind of traitor

She's in the Bloomsbury basement, one moment Perry's life companion, the next his surplus baggage, not wanted on voyage. She's sitting with three people who, thanks to our document and whatever else Perry has managed to bubble to them in the meantime, know a whole lot she doesn't.

She's sitting alone in the drawing room of her desirable residence in Primrose Hill at half past midnight with Samson v. Samson on her lap and an empty wineglass beside her.

Springing to her feet – whoops – she climbs the spiral staircase to her bedroom, makes the bed, follows the trail of Perry's dirty clothes across the floor to the bathroom and stuffs them into the laundry basket. Five days since he made love to me. Will we establish a record?

She returns downstairs, one step at a time, one hand for the boat. She's back at the window, staring into the street, praying for her man to come home in a black cab with the last two numbers 73. She's riding buttock to buttock under the midnight stars with Perry in the bumpy people carrier with blackened windows as Baby Face, the short-haired blond bodyguard with the linked gold bracelet, drives them to their hotel at the end of the birthday revels at Three Chimneys.

'You had good night, Gail?'

This is your driver speaking. Until now, Baby Face hasn't let on that he speaks English. When Perry challenged him outside the tennis court, he didn't speak a word of it. So why's he letting on now? she wonders, alert as never in her life.

'Fabulous night, thank you,' she declares in her father's voice, filling in for Perry, who appears to have gone deaf. 'Simply wonderful. I'm so happy for those magnificent boys.'

'My name is Niki, OK?'

'OK. Great. Hello, Niki,' says Gail. 'Where are you from?'

'Perm, Russia. Nice place. Perry, please? You had good night too?'

Gail is about to jab Perry with her elbow when he comes to life by himself. 'Great, thanks, Niki. Fantastic food. Really nice people. Super. Best evening of our holiday so far.'

Not bad for a beginner, thinks Gail.

'What time you arrive Three Chimneys?' Niki asks.

'We nearly didn't arrive at all, Niki,' Gail exclaims, giggling to cover for Perry's hesitation. 'Did we, Perry? We took the Nature Path and had to hack our way through the undergrowth! Where did you learn your wonderful English, Niki?'

'Boston, Massachusetts. You got knife?'

'Knife?'

'To cut undergrowth, you got to have big knife.'

Those dead eyes in the mirror, what have they seen? What are they seeing now?

'I wish we had, Niki,' Gail cries, still in her father's skin. 'I'm afraid we English don't carry knives.' What gibberish am I talking? Never mind. Talk it. 'Well, some of us do, to be truthful, but not people like us. We're the wrong social class. You've heard about our class system? Well, in England you only carry a knife if you're lower-middle or below!' And more hoots of laughter to see them round the roundabout and into the drive to the front entrance.

Dazed, they pick their way like strangers between the lighted hibiscus to their cabin. Perry closes the door behind them, locks it, but doesn't switch the light on. They stand facing each other across the bed in the darkness. For an age, there's no soundtrack. Which should not imply that Perry hasn't made up his mind what he's about to say:

'I need paper to write on. So do you.' His I'm-in-charge-here voice, normally reserved, she assumes, for errant undergraduates who have failed to turn in their weekly essay.

He draws the blinds. He switches on the inadequate reading light on my side of the bed, leaving the rest of the room in darkness.

He yanks open the drawer of my bedside locker and fishes out a yellow legal pad: also mine. Emblazoned on it, my brilliant reflections on Samson v. Samson: my first case as a top silk's junior, my quantum leap to instant fame and fortune.

Or not.

Ripping off the pages on which I have recorded my pearls of legal wisdom, he stuffs them back in the drawer, snaps what's left of my yellow pad in two, and hands me my half.

'I'm going in there' – pointing to the bathroom. 'You stay here. Sit at the desk and write down everything you remember. Everything that happened. I'll do the same. All right by you?'

'What's wrong with both of us being in this room? Jesus, Perry. I'm fucking scared. Aren't you?'

Setting aside any pardonable desire for his companionship, my question is entirely reasonable. Our cabin contains, in addition to a much-used bed the size of a rugger field, one desk, two armchairs and a table. Perry may have had his heart-to-heart with Dima, but what about me, banged up with bonkers Tamara and her bearded saints?

'Separate witnesses rate separate statements,' Perry decrees, heading for the bathroom.

'Perry! Stop! Come back! Stay here! I'm the fucking lawyer here, not you. What's Dima been telling you?'

Nothing, to judge by his face. It has slammed shut.

'Perry.'

'What?'

'For fuck's sake. It's me. Gail. Remember? So just sit yourself down and tell Auntie what Dima has told you that's turned you into a zombie. All right, don't sit down. Tell me standing up. Is the world ending? Is he a girl? What the fuck is going on between you two that I can't know?'

A flinch. A palpable flinch. Enough flinch to give grounds for optimism. Misplaced.

'I can't.'

'Can't what?'

'Involve you in this.'

'Bollocks.'

A second flinch. No more productive than the first.

'You listening, Gail?'

What the fuck d'you think I'm doing? Singing 'The Mikado'?

'You're a good lawyer and you've got a splendid career in front of you.'

'Thank you.'

'Your big case is coming up in two weeks' time. Is that a fair summary?'

Yes, Perry, that is a fair summary. I have a splendid career in front of me, unless we decide to have six children instead, and the case of Samson v. Samson is set to be heard fifteen days from now, but if I know anything about our leading silk, I'm unlikely to get a word in edgeways.

'You're the shining star of a prestigious law Chambers. You're worked off your feet. You've told me so often enough.'

Yes indeed, it's true, I'm appallingly overworked. A young barrister should be so lucky, we have just endured the worst night of our lives by several lengths, and what the fuck are you trying to tell me through the orange in your mouth? Perry, you can't do this! Come back! But she only thinks it. The words have run out.

'We draw a line. A line in the sand. Whatever Dima told me is private to me. What Tamara told you is private to you. We don't cross over. We exercise client confidentiality.'

Her power of speech returns. 'Are you telling me Dima is your client now? You're as loony as they are.'

'I'm using a legal metaphor. Taken from your world, not mine. I'm saying, Dima's my client and Tamara's yours. Conceptually.'

'Tamara didn't speak, Perry. Not one solitary, fucking word. She thinks the birds round here are bugged. Periodically, she was moved to offer up a prayer in Russian to one of her bearded protectors, at which point she signed at me to kneel down beside her, and I obliged. I'm not an Anglican atheist any more, I'm a Russian Orthodox atheist. There is otherwise absolutely fuck-all that passed between Tamara and myself that I'm not prepared to share with you in the finest detail, and I've just shared it. My principal anxiety was that I might get my hand bitten off. I didn't. Both my hands are intact. Now it's your turn.'

'Sorry, Gail. I can't.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'I'm not telling. I refuse to drag you any deeper into this affair than you are already. I want you kept clean. Safe.'

'You want?'

'No. I don't want. I insist. I'm not to be wooed.'

Wooed? Is this Perry talking? Or the firebrand preacher from Huddersfield that he was named after?