“Yes, terrible. Deciding to have you was much easier—though that wasn’t so important, I suppose.”
“Oh, you!” Robbie raised his fist shoulder high and brought it down on Colin’s forearm. Then he realized what he was being offered and quickly said, “Did you and Mother really decide to have me, or was it, just … you know?”
“I think … the Glenlivet. Just a quick poke on a dark night?” “Dad!”
“Whoops, sorry, I forgot.” They had nearly reached the cashier and Colin was fumbling for his boarding pass. “Never did get around to telling you about the birds and the bees, did I?”
Then it happened. Two Arabs thrust their way past them, causing Colin to stagger. His heel slipped on the polished floor and he fell awkwardly. The bottle of malt fell from his hands, and although protected by a cardboard case he could tell from the sound that it had smashed.
“Sorry,” one of the Arabs disdainfully offered, over his shoulder. “Plane to catch.”
“And you think I haven’t?” Colin shouted as he hauled himself vertical again. “My God, you people should be lynched!” The Arabs, tossing large denomination banknotes at the cashier, paid no heed; until, that is, Colin raised the soggy cardboard case and said, “To the health of General Ariel Sharon.”
The Arab who had pushed him swung around at that, and Colin read the murder in his eyes, but his companion clasped his arm and muttered in his ear, until the first Arab turned away, relegating Colin to a realm beneath contempt.
Colin went to collect a replacement bottle. “That wasn’t like you,” Robbie said as he returned. “A bit … over the top, wasn’t it?”
“A bit.” Colin heaved a deep sigh. “That’s how I met your mother,” he said. “In a roughhouse with Arabs.”
Robbie, seeing the valley suddenly materialize before him, took one deep breath, spread his wings, and soared. “Tell me!”
“F
OREGONE
conclusion,” Mark Stamford observed gloomily. “Don’t know why they bothered to viva you. You’ll stay on to do the BCL, of course?” “
Haven’t decided.”
Two young men were walking by the river near Oxford, up Marston way, on a weekday afternoon of sun and puff-ball cloud. There was no one else about. The bank became difficult here, overgrown with high reeds and prone to sink into bog where the ground looked firmest, but Colin Raleigh knew the path. A loner by nature, he’d often sought out this tranquil stretch of river. Mark was the nearest he had to a friend at Oxford, but even so, it was unusual for him to invite anyone on these solitary tramps. Today, however, he wanted advice.
“I don’t know about staying on for a BCL,” Colin went on. “I buggered up the trusts paper in finals, you see. Completely misread one whole question.”
“Oh, come on! You got a
first!
As everyone knew you would.”
Colin shrugged irritably. He hadn’t dragged Mark up here to discuss what everybody knew.
“Anyway,” he said, “I scraped through, and I’m fucked if I know what to do next.” He plucked a long reed and threw it on one side, as if it had offended him and he were obeying some hitherto unpublicized biblical injunction about it. “What do you think I should do?”
“Oh, the higher degree, without question. Even if you opt for the bar later, it can only stand you in good stead. But you won’t, will you—you’ll teach.”
“Christ. ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t—’ ”
“Sit up half the night drinking vintage port, having no thought for the morrow. Let’s not be
too
quick to reject that, shall we?”
“Yes, but imagine it,” Colin exploded. “Spending the next forty years stuck in the Bodleian Library, churning out textbooks.”
“What do your parents think? Oh, your father’s dead, didn’t you once tell me?”
Colin nodded. He’d scarcely talked about his parents to anyone since arriving in Oxford. “Do you know Andrew Smythe?” he asked.
“History bod, isn’t he?”
“That’s him. He was on my staircase for two years. About once a year he’d mutter something about going off to visit relatives in Winchester for the weekend; then one day I found out he meant his parents. Which about sums it up in my case too.”
“Mother difficult, is she?”
Colin just grunted. “At least she can’t stop me living my own life now,” he said after a while, as they continued to force a path through the weeds. “There’s a bit of cash, thanks to Father’s will and so on. Nothing much.” He glanced sideways at his companion. “No rich wife in the offing.”
Mark laughed. He’d just become engaged to the girl he’d fallen in love with during his first week at Magdalen; her father owned casinos, a ceramics factory, and much else; soon, Colin thought privately, he would own Mark Stamford.
“You’re priceless,” Mark said, still laughing. “You’d find life easier if you’d only stop fooling around and find the right person.”
“I’ll take your word for it. There’s a place near here where we can get some tea…. ”
When Colin deviated left, plunging into the meadow, Mark followed blindly, trusting his friend even though here the grass was chest high. On the other side of the copse that fringed the field lay an overgrown space, half public and half private, by the look of it; two overflowing litter bins suggested that Oxford City Council had a not very effective say in what happened here, but the single narrow outlet to the highway was blocked by a couple of oil drums and two logs laid to form an elongated X.
“No girl’s good enough for you, that’s the problem,” Mark was saying as they entered the copse.
“One might be,” Colin said. He stopped, causing Mark to cannon into him and half turned, laying a hand on the other man’s chest. “Don’t move.”
For a moment, Mark could not make out what Colin had seen. They were standing about five yards back from the clearing, invisible to anyone in the open space. Then a girl crossed Mark’s field of vision. A turn of the head showed him a white Ford parked back from the road; evidently the girl must have driven in and then rearranged the barrier, for there was no other entrance.
“Gosh.” The word escaped from Mark’s mouth in a dying fall. “Do you know her?”
Colin pulled Mark back into the copse. “No,” he whispered. “But I’d like to.”
The object of their attention showed no sign of having seen either of them. She was wearing a pair of clinging white pants and a dark blue tank top, not tucked in at the waist. As she walked up and down she kept her hands thrust deep into her pockets, stretching the material tightly over her bottom in such a way as to remind Colin of a peach. When she turned he caught a glimpse of her face, already familiar to him after many a surreptitious scan in the past; she was fair-skinned, but he would have known she wasn’t English even if he hadn’t managed to discover her name through one of her fellow students at St. Anne’s. The girl with peach buttocks was called Hanif. Leila Hanif.
Leila meant darkness, in Arabic, and
hanif
meant true believer. Or so the acquaintance said, claiming to have received this information from the mare’s mouth. Colin could believe it. This girl, glimpsed on the other side of smoky bars, at the next counter in Blackwell’s bookshop, in a punt going in the opposite direction, had started to come between him and his sleep.
She was beautiful, not least because she so obviously cared about herself. She wore her wavy hair, black with the glossiness of a newly developed monochrome photograph, at shoulder length, with a hairband, or sometimes just white-framed sunglasses pushed back to keep the tresses from falling over her eyes: so unlike your typical female undergrad, with unkempt rats’ tails drooping to the waist. She wore clothes that amounted to a proper wardrobe too, discarding the uniform of faded jeans and baggy sweaters in favor of designer pants, like the ones she was wearing now, and tailored shirts; even the tank top she wore this summer’s afternoon was by Mary Quant.
Leila’s cheekbones were high and ever so slightly concave, bringing out a sexy contrast with lips that tended to pout. Colin did not know about her eyes; he’d never gotten close enough to find out what color they were. All he knew was that when she laughed—she had an amazingly sexy laugh—her eyes squeezed shut, radiating a skein of premature laughter lines around their corners. A happy woman, then.
“She’s Lebanese,” Colin muttered.
“East of Suez, eh? Lucky coincidence, us running into her like this. Why are we lurking in the undergrowth, incidentally?”
When Colin made no reply Mark looked at his friend in time to see him blushing furiously. “Ah. Not a coincidence.”
“She comes here sometimes.” Colin’s tone was sulky. “This is the tearoom car park.”
“Perfect opportunity: no one about, just barge right up to her and—”
“Some
people can do that,” Colin hissed. “It’s all right for them.” He clicked his teeth and sighed. “Besides, she comes here with friends.”
“You’ve been watching her, haven’t you?”
Colin made as if to hurl Mark a defiant look but narrowly failed to follow through.
“Well, well,
well.
Anyway, Uncle Mark will ride to the rescue. Watch.”
Before Colin could stop him he had marched forward, almost to the edge of the copse, when suddenly he came to a dead halt. “Oh, shit.”
For another car, a black Mercedes-Benz, had silently driven up to the X-shaped barrier and someone was getting out to clear it aside: an Arab-looking man in his thirties, with a square head and thick black wavy hair and something about the hang of his suit to suggest he wasn’t comfortable in it. He pushed the logs away and waved the driver through before replacing them. As he straightened up, his right hand went to the waistband of his trousers, and for an instant the two young men watching from the cover of the trees shared a perception that each was unwilling to articulate for fear of being thought stupid: This Arab packed a gun.
Without taking his eyes off the scene unfolding in front of them, Colin laid a hand on Mark’s chest and pushed him farther into the protective shadow of the copse. From the instinctive way in which Mark followed his lead, Colin guessed that he, too, was frightened.
The driver of the Mercedes got out, straightening the jacket of a suit that looked identical to his companion’s, seam for seam, tint for tint. He, however, was an altogether leaner specimen; perhaps richer also, for gold glittered across the insteps of his black leather shoes, on several fingers, even in the smile he flashed at Leila Hanif as he went to kiss her on both cheeks, holding her at arm’s length like a long-lost prodigal daughter.
The second Arab did not greet the girl. Instead, he donned a pair of dark glasses and began a survey of the rustic parking area. Colin and Mark retreated a few steps farther, although they knew that from the glade they must already be invisible. The second man kept adjusting the lapels of his suit while he wiggled his shoulders. Nervous, uncomfortable, armed: the composite impression forced itself on Colin like a physical assault, lashing his heartbeat up off the scale.
The driver and the girl talked in low voices. At first the man continued to hold Leila as if she were a close friend. But then he began to draw her in to himself, and she resisted; not powerfully, not with violence, but with a tension that found expression in the rigidity of her shoulders. Suddenly her hands flew up, destroying his grip. The man stepped backward and surveyed her for a moment without ever dropping his golden smile. He spoke a few words; to judge from the look on his face, words of great tenderness and affection.
He struck her on the side of the face, once.
She staggered, recovered; for a moment she merely held a hand to the site of the blow, as if in stunned disbelief. Then she raised her own hand to retaliate. But the man was quicker, moving to one side and capturing both her hands in his own. He shouted some words while holding his face very close to hers. Then he transferred both her wrists to his left hand, and Colin knew he did that because he meant to hit her again.
“I thought I’d come to blows with the senior examiner,” he said loudly. When Mark Stamford looked at him in petrified astonishment, he grabbed his friend’s arm and marched him forward, almost shouting. “I said I couldn’t see what—Leila! For heaven’s sake. Leila Hanif, my God.”
Now everybody was looking at him, each coping with his or her own brand of fear: Leila, dreading the next blow; the two Arabs, aware only that they had been caught out in a crime, not yet realizing the weakness of the forces ranged against them; and Mark, who knew in his heart what Colin also knew: that the object they both had seen at the second man’s waist was in truth a gun. Colin had the initiative. It was for him to decide how the scene played.
“Leila, we were talking about you only this morning.”
As if through a fog Colin recognized Mark’s voice speaking those words, he knew his friend was recovering faster than the opposition, and his heart lifted.
“Hi, youse guys.” Leila’s smile, unforced and serene, would have launched more ships than Helen’s. “Long time no see. Thought you must have gone down, or something.”
Her contralto voice wrung something deep in Colin’s guts, but he could not concentrate on that, for pace and timing would dictate the outcome of this scene. He was director, star, and scriptwriter rolled into one. He called the shots, and if he called them wrong….
“No, no,” he said confidently. “I’m staying up for the vac. Mark’s going home next week. Friends of yours? Hi… I’m Colin Raleigh.”
He turned to the Arab who had struck Leila, offering his hand. The man stared at it, then his eyes flickered toward his companion. After what seemed an interminable pause, he said something like “ha.”
“And this is my friend, Mark Stamford. He’s been to your part of the world, haven’t you, Mark?”
The Arab’s hand briefly touched Colin’s before leaping away as if stung.
“Oh, yes, absolutely,” Mark said. “Tabriz. Know it, do you? Persia, actually.”
“Leila, can you do us a huge favor?” Colin smiled into her eyes, giving his co-star direction in the only way he knew how. “Mark and I’ve got an appointment with the Dean and we’re going to be hideously late…. ”
“Of course, I can drive you back into town.” She shot a furious look at the two Arabs, whose livid faces were more than a match for hers. “The keys are in the ignition, Colin, why don’t you drive?”
“Mark?” Colin nodded in the direction of the barrier blocking their exit to the main road and Mark hurried off to dismantle it. Colin took Leila’s arm—it was surprisingly muscular, for a woman’s—and escorted her to the car. He did not know what the two Arabs were doing behind his back.
It seemed a long walk, the longest he’d ever taken.
Don’t
throw yourself on the door and wrench it open, he told himself; don’t look weak. But still his fingers crushed the handle hard enough to leave a bruise.
The engine started first time; Colin heaved a short, jerky sigh of relief. Leila was in the front seat next to him. Ahead, he could see Mark standing beside the logs, their exit clear. Colin put the car into gear.
He knew at once that they weren’t going to make it.
The Arabs’ Mercedes was parked just inside the clearing, perhaps a quarter of its length still blocking the short driveway. Colin stared through the windshield at Mark, who raised both hands from his sides in a forlorn gesture of helplessness. Strain on Mark’s face…. Oh
God, on mine too; relax!
His brain wouldn’t work. He had a first in law and he couldn’t have told you his own name to save his life. Leila was staring at him. She expected him to come up with the solution. There was no solution.
His hands tightened on the wheel. They were shaking. He banged the wheel in sheer frustration, then, very slowly, wound down the window.
“Excuse me.” He forced himself to look at the Arab with all the gold. It amazed him to hear how confidently his clipped, assumed upper-class accent cut through the warm July air. “But would you mind awfully shifting your car? Just a few feet should do it.”