John le Carre: Our kind of traitor

'What racquet you got there?' he asked, with a twinkle of his soulful brown eyes. 'Looks illegal. Never mind, I beat you anyway.' And as he set off down the court: 'That's some girl you got. Worth a lot of camels. You better marry her quick.'

And how in hell's name does the man know we're not married? Perry fumed.

*

Perry has served four aces in a row, just as he did against the Indian couple, but he's overhitting, knows it, doesn't give a damn. Replying to Dima's service, he does what he wouldn't dream of doing unless he was at the top of his game and playing a far weaker opponent: he stands forward, toes practically on the service line, taking the ball on the half-volley, angling it across court or flipping it just inside the tramlines to where the baby-faced bodyguard stands with his arms folded. But only for the first couple of serves, because Dima quickly gets wise to him and drives him back to the baseline where he belongs.

'So then I suppose I began to cool down a bit,' Perry conceded, grinning ruefully at his interlocutors and rubbing the back of his wrist across his mouth at the same time.

'Perry was a total bully,' Gail corrected him. 'And Dima was a natural. For his weight, height and age, amazing. Wasn't he, Perry? You said so yourself. You said he defied the laws of gravity. And really sporting with it. Sweet.'

'Didn't jump for the ball. Levitated,' Perry conceded. 'And yes, he was a good sport, couldn't ask for more. I thought we were going to be in for tantrums and line disputes. We didn't do any of that stuff. He was really good to play with. And cunning as a box of monkeys. Withheld his shots till the absolute last minute and beyond.'

'And he had a limp,' Gail put in excitedly. 'He played on the skew and he favoured his right leg, didn't he, Perry? And he was stiff as a ramrod. And he had a knee bandage. And he still levitated!'

'Yeah, well, I had to hold off a bit,' Perry admitted, clawing awkwardly at his brow. 'His grunts got a bit heavy on the ear as the game went by, frankly.'

But for all his grunting, Dima's inquisition of Perry between games continued unabated:

'You some big scientist? Blow the goddam world up, same way you serve?' he asked, helping himself to a gulp of iced water.

'Absolutely not.'

'Apparatchik?'

The guessing game had gone on long enough: 'Actually, I teach,' Perry said, peeling a banana.

'Teach like you teach students? Like a professor, you teach?'

'Correct. I teach students. But I'm not a professor.'

'Where?'

'Currently at Oxford.'

'Oxford University?'

'Got it.'

'What you teach?'

'English literature,' Perry replied, not particularly wishing, at that moment, to explain to a total stranger that his future was up for grabs.

But Dima's pleasure knew no bounds:

'Listen. You know Jack London? Number-one English writer?'

'Not personally.' It was a joke, but Dima didn't share it.

'You like the guy?'

'Admire him.'

'Charlotte Bronte? You like her too?'

'Very much.'

'Somerset Maugham?'

'Less, I'm afraid.'

'I got books by all those guys! Like hundreds! In Russian! Big bookshelves!'

'Great.'

'You read Dostoevsky? Lermontov? Tolstoy?'

'Of course.'

'I got them all. All the number-one guys. I got Pasternak. Know something? Pasternak wrote about my home town. Called it Yuriatin. That's Perm. Crazy fucker called it Yuriatin. I dunno why. Writers do that. All crazy. See my daughter up there? That's Natasha, don't give a shit about tennis, love books. Hey, Natasha! Say hello to the Professor here!'

After a delay to show that she is being intruded upon, Natasha distractedly raises her head and draws aside her hair long enough to allow Perry to be astonished by her beauty before she returns to her leatherbound tome.

'Embarrassed,' Dima explained. 'Don't wanna hear me yelling at her. See that book she reading? Turgenev. Number-one Russian guy. I buy it. She wanna book, I buy. OK, Professor. You serve.'

'From that moment on, I was Professor. I told him again and again I wasn't one, he wouldn't listen, so I gave up. Within a couple of days, half the hotel was calling me Professor. Which is pretty bloody odd when you've decided you're not even a don any more.'

Changing ends at 2-5 in Perry's favour, Perry is consoled to notice that Gail has parted company from the importunate Mark and is installed on the top bench between two little girls.

*

The game was settling to a decent rhythm, said Perry. Not the greatest match ever but – for as long as he lowered his play – fun and entertaining to watch, assuming anybody wanted to be entertained, which remained in question since, other than the twin boys, the spectators might have been attending a revivalist meeting. By lowering his play, he meant slowing it down a bit and taking the odd ball that was on its way to the tramlines, or returning a drive without looking too hard at where it had landed. But given that the gap between them – in age and skill and mobility, if Perry was honest – was by now obvious, his only concern was to make a game of it, leave Dima with his dignity, and enjoy a late breakfast with Gail on the Captain's Deck: or so he believed until, as they were again changing ends, Dima locked a hand on his arm and addressed him in an angry growl:

'You goddam pussied me, Professor.'

'I did what?'

'That long ball was out. You see it out, you play it in. You think I'm some kinda fat old bastard gonna drop dead you don't be sweet to him?'

'It was borderline.'

'I play retail, Professor. I want something, I goddam take it. Nobody pussy me, hear me? Wanna play for a thousand bucks? Make the game interesting?'

'No thanks.'

'Five thousand?'

Perry laughed and shook his head.

'You're chicken, right? You chicken, so you don't bet me.'

'I suppose that must be it,' Perry agreed, still feeling the imprint of Dima's hand on his upper left arm.

*

'Advantage Great Britain!'

The cry resonates over the court and dies. The twins break out in nervous laughter, waiting for the aftershock. Until now Dima has tolerated their occasional bursts of high spirits. No longer. Laying his racquet on the bench, he pads up the steps of the spectators' stand and, reaching the two boys, presses a forefinger to the tip of each of their noses.

'You want I take my belt and beat the shit outta you?' he inquires in English, presumably for the benefit of Perry and Gail, for why else would he not address them in Russian?

To which one of the boys replies in better English than his father's: 'You're not wearing a belt, Papa.'

That does it. Dima smacks the nearer son so hard across the face that he spins halfway round on the bench before his legs stop him. The first smack is followed by a second just as loud, delivered to the other son with the same hand, reminding Gail of walking with her socially ambitious elder brother when he's out pheasant shooting with his rich friends, an activity she abhors, and the brother scores what he calls a left and a right, meaning one dead pheasant to each gun barrel.

'What got me was that they didn't even turn their heads away. They just sat there and took it,' said Perry, the schoolteachers' son.

But the strangest thing, Gail insisted, was how amicably the conversation was resumed:

'You wanna tennis lesson with Mark after? Or you wanna go home get religion from your mother?'

'Lesson, please, Papa,' says one of the two boys.

'Then don't you make any more ra-ra, or you don't get no Kobe beef tonight. You wanna eat Kobe beef tonight?'

'Sure, Papa.'

'You, Viktor?'

'Sure, Papa.'

'You wanna clap, you clap the Professor there, not your no-good bum father. Come here.'

A fervent bear-hug for each boy, and the match proceeds without further episode to its inevitable end.