Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination (18 page)

_p. 202
I
t was only back in the familiar surroundings of her flat—the plastic bottle of Fairy Liquid by the sink, the vacuum in the hall cupboard, the log McNuggets in the basket by the fireplace—that Olivia realized exactly how extraordinary the events of the last few days had been. Incredibly, it was less than two weeks since she had left London. The milk she had left in the fridge had gone off, but the butter was absolutely fine.

All the things that Olivia loved to escape to hotel rooms to avoid were here: an answering machine with thirty-one messages, the mail piling up in the hallway, the cupboard in the hall, which was full of things she hadn’t got round to throwing away. It was freezing cold; the boiler had gone out, and she had to faff around pressing the ignition button over and over again, remembering as she did so how Morton C. had pulled the starter cord on the boat on the way to Bell Key, until the thing suddenly ignited and made her jump. She stood in the kitchen with a can of Heinz baked beans in her hand: all the clues and theories, wild imaginings and suspicions of the last two weeks whirling round her head like clothes in a washing machine.
MI6 have made a mistake letting me go,
she thought.
They should be using me.

She looked out of the small arched kitchen window onto the familiar scene: the flat opposite with a piece of fabric instead of a curtain, and the floor beneath, where the man wandered around
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naked. In the street, she saw a man open the passenger door of a blue Ford Mondeo and get in beside the driver. The two of them looked up at her window, then, seeing her, looked quickly away. They didn’t drive off.
Amateurs,
she thought, giving them a little wave, wondering who had made the bad employment decision: Feramo or MI6. She lit the fire, took a loaf of bread out of the freezer, made beans on toast and fell asleep in front of
EastEnders.

Olivia didn’t wake until noon the next day. The first thing she did was check the kitchen window. The men in the Ford Mondeo were still there. She was just wondering where they’d gone to pee in the night and hoping it wasn’t on her doorstep when the phone rang.

“Olivia? It’s Sally Hawkins. I’m so relieved that you’re back safely.” This was odd. Sally, Olivia realized, had no way of knowing she was back unless either the security services or Feramo had tipped her off. “How are you? How did the Honduras story go?”

“Well, er, I think maybe we need to talk about it,” said Olivia, frowning, trying to work out what was going on. “I only got back last night.”

“Pierre Feramo telephoned me. I think he spoke to you. He’s offered us a trip to the Red Sea to do another leg of the diving-off-the-beaten-track story. We’re very keen to set it up. I just wanted to make sure that you’d be happy to make the trip, you know, so we can . . .”

This was too weird. Sally Hawkins sounded scared.

“Sure,” Olivia said casually. “It sounds pretty exciting, and the diving’s supposed to be great. I might need a couple of days to turn myself around, but I’m definitely up for it.”

“Good, good.” There was a pause. “Er, just one more thing, Olivia.” She sounded strangely wooden, like a terrible actress reading lines. “There’s a chap I’d like you to meet, someone who’s written for us a few times in the past. He’s an expert on all things
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Arabian. Very interesting man. Must be in his eighties by now. He happens to be in London today. It might be a good idea if you could meet for tea and get a few, er, travel tips.”

“Sure,” said Olivia, pulling a “She’s mad!” face in the mirror.

“Excellent. Brooks’s on St. James’s. Do you know it? Just round the corner from the Ritz.”

“I’ll find it.”

“Three-thirty. Professor Widgett.”

“Oh yes. I read his book on the Arab sensibility when I was in LA. Some of it, anyway.”

“Excellent, Olivia. Well, welcome back. And give me a ring tomorrow afternoon.”

Olivia put down the phone and reached for her bedside drawer. She was going to need another hatpin.

There were two different men watching her door now, from a brown Honda Civic parked across the road.

She raised a hand to them, turned on her new MI6-issue computer and Googled Professor Widgett: Arabist.

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W
idgett was a distinguished professor at All Souls and the author of forty books and more than eight hundred articles on various Middle Eastern topics including
The Sinister West: The Arab Mind and the Double-Edged Sword of Technology, Lawrence of Arabia and the Junior Suite: The Bedouin Ideal and Urban Hospitality
and
The Arabian Diaspora: Yesterday and Tomorrow.

She spent a couple of hours online, reading what she could find of his work, then got dressed for a February day. It felt weird putting on tights, boots and a coat, but she kind of liked it. She glanced out of the window. The shadows were still there. She moved to the back of the flat, climbed out of the bedroom window and down the fire escape, scrambled over the wall of Dale’s garden downstairs, went through the post office and came out on the busy main road of Primrose Hill. There was no sign of anyone following her. Whoever they were, they weren’t very good.

Brooks’s was the sort of place which still didn’t admit ladies, unless accompanied by a member, and offered three-course meals with savories as dessert. It had a porter’s lodge at the entrance, a black and white tiled floor and a real coal fire in an ornate Victorian fireplace. A doorman with a nicotine-lined face and a worn waistcoat and tails showed her up to the library.

“Professor Widgett is right over here, miss,” he said. The room
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was silent apart from the ticking of a grandfather clock. Four or five old men sat on the worn leather armchairs behind copies of the
FT
or the
Telegraph.
There was another coal fire, an ancient globe, walls covered in books and a lot of dust.
Ooh, I’d like to take a cloth and a bottle of Pledge to this lot,
Olivia thought.

Professor Widgett got to his feet. He was immensely tall and old. He made her think of lines in a poem she’d learned at school: “Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin.” Widgett’s skull was almost visible beneath his translucent, papery skin and the pattern of blue veins at his temples. His hair was all but gone.

The second he started to speak, though, Olivia was reminded of how ridiculous is the urge to patronize the old. Widgett was no kind, jolly old gentleman. As he spoke, she saw in his face the ruin of the beautiful roué he must once have been: the full, sensuous lips, the mesmerizing blue eyes—mocking, roguish, cool. She could see him galloping on a camel, scarf wrapped round his head, firing on some nineteenth-century desert fort. There was something theatrical about him: almost camp, but distinctly heterosexual.

“Tea?” he said, raising one eyebrow.

Professor Widgett’s serving of the tea reminded her of someone doing a classroom chemistry experiment. It was such a performance: milk, tea strainer, hot water, butter, cream, jam. She suddenly realized why the English so loved their tea. It gave them things to fiddle with when they were bringing up other things which might stray into the difficult area of emotion and instinct. “Ahm . . . that too strong for you? Drop more hot water?” Professor Widgett huffed and harrumphed between enquiries about her take on the Arab world, which seemed strangely irrelevant to a travel piece on diving off the beaten track. What had been her experience of the Arab world? What, in her view, was the motivating factor behind the jihad? Had she ever found it odd that there was no piece of technical equipment in general Western use—no TV,
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no computer, no car—which was manufactured by an Arab country? Little more milk? Let me top up the pot. Did she think it a result of an Arabic disdain for manual labor or a product of Western prejudice? Was it, did she feel, an ineradicable source of Arab resentment of the West, given the Arabs’ insatiable urge to use and own the new technology? Drop more milk in that? Sugar lump? Ever had a love affair with an Arab? Oh my God, this stuff is like cat’s piss. Let’s get the waiter over for another pot.

“Professor Widgett,” she said, “did Sally Hawkins contact you, or did you contact her and ask her to contact me?”

“Terrible actress, isn’t she?” he said, taking a sip of tea. “Absolutely appalling.”

“Are you from MI6?”

He took a bite of scone, scanning her with cool, insolent blue eyes.

“A bit clumsy, my dear,” he drawled in his slightly camp way. “Traditionally, one waits for the spook to pop the question.”

He drank some more tea and ate some more scone, scrutinizing her. “So,” he said. He leaned forward dramatically, putting his bony old hand on hers, and said in a stage whisper, “Are you going to help us?”

“Yes,” she whispered back.

“You’ll have to come now.”

“Where to?”

“Safe house.”

“How long for?”

“Don’t know.”

“I thought those were your people watching outside my flat.”

“Yes. It’s the others I’m worried about.”

“Oh, I see,” she said, composing herself for a minute. “What about my things?”

“Things, Olivia, things. One must never allow oneself to become attached to
things
.”

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“I quite agree. But, still, there are things I’ll need if I’m going to come.”

“Make a list. I’ll have someone”—he waved his hand vaguely—“fetch the ‘things.’ ”

“Why didn’t you take me in at the airport and save all this trouble?”

“Operational blunder, darling,” he said, getting to his feet.

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W
idgett carried himself like a sultan. He strode through the gridlocked streets of St. James’s, elegant in a long cashmere overcoat, meeting anyone who crossed his path with a stare which was either hawklike or fond, depending on the subject. Olivia thought how dazzling he must have been at forty. She could imagine rushing through the same streets with him in evening dress to dinner and dancing at the Café de Paris.

“Where are we going?” she asked, beginning to fear that Widgett was not MI6 at all, but just mad.

“The river, darling.” He led her on a complicated route through the back streets of Whitehall until they emerged onto the Embankment. A police launch was waiting. At the sight of Widgett, the officers, rather than loading him into an ambulance in a straitjacket, stood to attention. This was reassuring.

“Handsome fellows, aren’t they?” he said, handing her into the launch.

“Where is the safe house?” she said.

“No need to know,” he said. “Get some dinner and a good night’s sleep. I’ll be with you in the morning.” He gave them an elegant wave and disappeared into the crowd.

Immediately, the launch swung out from the bank and into the central flow of the Thames, picking up speed and bouncing against the current. As they powered upstream, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament were silhouetted against the moonlit sky. Olivia stood at
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the prow, heart leaping with excitement, the James Bond theme playing in her mind. She was a spy! She formed her fingers into a gun shape and whispered, “Kpow! Kpow!” Then the boat banged down hard against a wave, and a spray of thick brown river water hit her in the face. She decided to spend the rest of the journey in the cabin.

There was a plainclothes officer inside. “Paul McKeown,” he said. “I’m Scotland Yard’s liaison with the security services. So, what do you make of Widgett?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Who is he?”

“Come on. You know who Absalom Widgett is.”

“I know he works for MI6 and that he’s a well-known Arabist,” she said. “That’s all.”

“Absalom Widgett? He was a devil, he was. He seduced everybody’s wives and daughters all over the Middle East and Arabia. He had a chair at Oxford and a rug shop on the Portobello Road. He used to pretend to be a gay oriental carpet specialist.”

“Is he the head of something?”

“He was. He was pretty high up. But he grew disenchanted in the seventies. It was never clear what happened in the end, whether it was someone’s wife, or drink, or opium, or an ideological row. He was very much of the old school: chaps on the ground, native-lingo-speakers, trusting to instinct—that sort of thing. He thought all the new technology was the worst possible thing to happen to Intelligence. Anyway, whatever happened, it was a mistake on someone’s part. The Arabic section was never the same, and they pulled him out of retirement on the twelfth of September 2001.”

Olivia nodded thoughtfully. “Would you tell me where I’m going?”

“Not allowed to say. Don’t worry. I think you’ll find it’s pretty comfortable.”

At Hampton Court she was ushered from the boat to a helicopter and, after a short journey, into a car with darkened windows, which
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purred through the country lanes of Berkshire and the Chilterns. They crossed the M40 and she recognized the Oxford ring road, then they plunged deep into the Cotswold countryside, glimpsing flickering fires and cozy-looking scenes through the windows of pubs and cottages. Then they were following the high walls of a country estate, and Olivia heard the crunch of gravel beneath the wheels as wrought-iron gates swung slowly open, the headlights beaming up a long drive. It was the sort of journey which she imagined would end with a uniformed butler opening the door holding a silver tray of Bloody Marys, or a bald midget in a wheelchair, a cat on his knee being stroked with a metal claw.

She was, indeed, met by a butler, an excessively courteous man in uniform, who informed her that her bags had already arrived and ushered her up stone steps into a magnificent hallway. Oil paintings covered the paneled walls, and a wide staircase of dark wood led on to the upper floor.

He asked if she wanted dinner or a “hot tray” in her room. She wasn’t sure what a “hot tray” was, but the image it conjured was so beguiling—potted shrimps, Welsh rarebit, Gentleman’s Relish, sherry trifle—that she decided she
would
like one, thank you very much.

At the sight of the bed, she lost all interest in her surroundings and sank, exhausted, between the crisp white sheets, noticing to her intense joy that there was a hot-water bottle with a quilted cover in exactly the right position for her feet.

Olivia never discovered the constituents of the hot tray. The next thing she knew it was morning and she had the traveler’s syndrome of not remembering where she was. She fumbled for the bedside lamp. The room was in darkness, but bright sunlight was flaring around the edges of the thick curtains. She was in a four-poster bed with heavy chintz drapes. She could hear sheep. It didn’t seem to be Honduras.

She swung her legs around and sat on the edge of the bed. She
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ached all over. She felt dehydrated and vile. She padded over to the window, pulled the curtains aside and found herself looking at a splendid English country-house garden: lawns, manicured hedges in ordered lines, a honey-colored stone terrace directly below her. Moss-covered steps, with a mock-Grecian urn on either side, led down to the lawn, on which there were croquet hoops. Beyond the lawn were chestnut trees, wintry and bare, and beyond that soft gray-green hills, dry-stone walls and smoke rising from the chimneys of gray rooftops clustered around a church spire.

She turned back to the room. Miraculously, her tan and olive case was there, containing the items from her flat she’d requested from Professor Widgett. There was an envelope under her door. It contained a map of the premises, a number to call when she was ready for breakfast and a note which said,
Report to Tech Op Room as soon as you have eaten.