A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [143]
‘I’ve just learned that Harry was in a fight in Baku. Near his hotel. He’s been very badly hurt. He might even have brain damage. They’ve flown him to a hospital in Switzerland.’
Kate brings her elbows up on to the table, making a church with her fingers. She still wears that Russian wedding ring her mother gave her. I used to feel for it when we held hands, rolling the cold metal loops up to the knuckle and down. She would take it off when she had a bath.
‘And it was your people that did this?’ she says. ‘Because he found out what was going on? Because he knew the truth?’
‘Almost certainly. It’s too much of a coincidence.’
She is silent for a long time and the sense of my shame is sickening.
‘God, how you hurt people, Alec.’ She is shaking her head. ‘Is he going to be all right? Will he be OK?’
‘They think so. Yes.’
She looks up at me and that’s when I see pity. Such disappointment that it starts to anger me. I need understanding now, not contempt.
‘Kate, if I’d known, do you think…?’
She stands up and walks across to the far side of the room, getting herself away from me.
‘He’s going to be all right.’ My voice is slightly raised. ‘They haven’t killed the guy. It was just too dangerous to allow him…’
She puts out her hand to silence me, a weak floating limb which she retracts almost immediately.
‘Let’s just not talk about it for a bit. Is that OK? I’m sorry. I know you came here today because you needed someone to talk to, because all this has obviously had a bad effect on you. I can see that and I’m sorry, I really am. But I’m just so amazed, you know? I haven’t seen you in two years, my life has moved on in so many ways, and then this - that you could get involved in something like this. All the things you could have done and you end up…’
Her words tail off but I am too tired to argue, to try to make her see sense. I cannot force Kate to act against her will, to console me with words she does not believe. It was inevitable that she would react in the way that she has: I had allowed myself to forget her true nature. She always speaks her mind, judgemental to the point of being conceited. She sets such high standards for herself and for others that it is almost impossible to move within the narrow confines of her expectations. Kate is incapable of compromise, of seeing another point of view. She demands so much of people that she will only ever be disappointed by them.
Needing to be away from her as much as she needs to be away from me, I stand up and edge my way along the table back out into the room. I stand facing her, Kate staring beyond me at an opposite wall.
‘I need to splash some water on my face.’
No reply.
So I turn and leave the kitchen, walk upstairs to the bathroom and lock the door.
I see things that are not hers immediately. A can of shaving foam at the edge of the bath. Contact-lens cleaners and a small plastic case beside the sink. Two toothbrushes in the mug beside them. After everything that has happened, now this.
I sit down on the edge of the bath, head bowed. On the floor, a pair of white boxer shorts. Why didn’t she hide them?
There is a window open and a cold wind buffets against the glass, knocking the wooden frame against a brick wall outside. I tell myself that Kate is a pretty girl and that pretty girls have boyfriends and that this is all inevitable. But somehow it doesn’t help. Why