(2013) Collateral Damage (3 page)
At first it went well enough with a lively discussion between
Dove and Toby about the pros and cons of reintroducing capital punishment for terrorists
- a conversation sparked by another bomb in Belfast. Dove protested violently against
Toby's modishly right-wing views. 'Nothing can be as bad,' he said, 'as telling
a man or woman the exact time, place and manner of their death and then dragging
them screaming and shitting to some gallows or firing squad.'
'Society has the right of revenge,' said the advertising man.
'Not society,' said Dove, 'Perhaps the individual...'
'That's anarchy,' snapped the other, pouring them both generous
glasses of their host's wine to show there were no hard feelings.
To Dove's great delight, Emma took his side and called her escort
'a sadistic swine' in what he thought he detected were only half-joking tones. Her
agreement was genuine, and reinforced by Dove's capacity to remain lucid and relatively
unheated on a large amount of drink, allowing his opponent to ramble before he attacked
in quick, accurate sentences. The only indication that the schoolteacher had been
drinking was a slightly flushed look, almost as if he suffered from high blood pressure.
Toby had a reputation for incipient violence when drunk: the raised voice; the gunfighter
stare; the pounding fist on the table - even the carefully thrown drink if he thought
he could get away with it. Emma doubted whether he would try anything on this occasion.
Dove's hands quite swallowed a wine-glass and she noted approvingly that his height
and breadth easily compensated for a few spare pounds. By this time Toby's argument
had degenerated into a dreary catechism of 'drag 'em out, string 'em up, and shoot
'em.'
When at last he had said his piece it soon became apparent that
his muteness was not the reciprocal silence of the conversationalist, but that he
had fallen into a drunken stupor. Their host was neither insulted nor amused. Instead,
mortified by this apparent rejection on the part of his brilliant and honoured guest,
he became deeply depressed.
It was Emma who salvaged the evening by first of all calling
a taxi for her companion and then refusing to accompany him when it arrived. After
Toby had been removed she concentrated all her attention on her stunned host - picking
up the pieces of his shattered ego, polishing them and putting them back together
again until he was restored to perfect working order. It was well known that he
was one of the best account executives in the firm, everybody said so. It was all
very well for that fat slob to write copy about airlines (who couldn't do that?)
but what was really stunning was the way he had handled that bathroom equipment
account. Nobody could understand why that gross idiot got the best accounts. When
it came to real flair, she said, Toby had about as much sensitivity as an elephant
in a banana patch. As the brandy was produced, her host protested that none of this
was true, could not possibly be, but Emma appealed to his wife for support and together
they all agreed, Dove and the grass widow included, that beneath their host's awful,
lovable modesty lay true genius.
It was Emma's performance: the rest were merely the chorus. Dove
watched her with awe and admiration. When it was time for them to leave she allowed
him to give her a lift home.
'That was nice of you,' he said in the car.
'What was?'
'Making him feel good, tending his wounds.'
'He was awfully hurt, poor man, like a wounded seal.'
'Yes.'
There was a pause while she lit her own cigarette (this made
Dove cross with himself, but he couldn't find his lighter in time). 'The trouble
is,' she said, 'he is a bit of a drip and fatty's better at his job.'
Dove winced at 'fatty', not being over-streamlined himself.
'He's a good man,' he said, 'I've known him for years.'
'Are you a good man?'
'Of course I am. I beat little boys and play rugby.'
'Oooh,' she said. And shortly after that they scrummed down for
the first time.
Dove was thinking about his wife now as the miles swished by
in a series of blue and white road-signs. He couldn't believe his luck when she
agreed to marry him and live in a converted cottage in what he liked to think of
as the country but was known to the General Post Office as part of the West Midlands
conurbation. For a few weeks she had even found herself a job in Birmingham, with
a small advertising company whose accounts were mostly to do with the motor trade.
Then, having completely re-organised the office and made one young man entirely
dissatisfied with provincial married life, she tired of it. 'I think I'd like to
be a kept woman for a while, darling,' she explained.
She still spent a fortune on clothes, but they were usually paid
for from her income, which came from a trust fund set up by her maternal grandfather.
Dove gathered he had made a fortune by doing something unspeakable in southern Africa.
Her parents, a brigadier and his wife, lived in a converted oast-house in Kent.
They didn't much care for Dove - 'no background and far too polite' - but at least
he was white. They had never quite got over the time Emma brought a West Indian
mechanic home and wanted to establish him in the garage business.
'Hypergamy - the act of marrying above your
station.
That's what you're about to do,' Roger Day, the English teacher
and his closest friend at school, had said after he first met Emma.
Well, he'd been wrong, hadn't he? And so had a lot of other people,
thought Dove, reducing speed to avoid sodomizing an articulated truck which had
decided to leap into the centre lane. It had worked out all right.
She went to London rather more often than he would have liked,
but that was to be expected: she liked to shop and when it came to clothes there
was no denying that Birmingham wasn't London.
Now a very pleasant weekend lay ahead. They were going to meet
in Frenchie's pub in Soho where they would drink kir, and afterwards they would
have dinner at Bianchi's in Frith Street. Emma had introduced him to both places.
Tomorrow, if she'd finished her shopping, they'd probably look in at a couple of
exhibitions he had noted in last week's Observer. There was a play they wanted to
see in the evening. After dinner, best of all, slightly drunk and full of good food,
they would go to bed.
They were staying at a flat near Sloane Square which belonged
to one of Emma's friends. Dove wasn't sure who they were or whether they would be
there or not. As a rule, her friends made him feel uneasy. It wasn't that he couldn't
handle them. On the contrary, being a bit of a prig he often felt morally superior,
but they represented part of her life that he knew
nothing about
and, more important, did not want to know anything about
. Most of them he
failed to recognize as individuals, but saw only as a backcloth to his wife. Emma
had neglected to mention the names of these people near Sloane Square on the telephone,
an omission that was entirely in character.
Emma was in bed with Toby - one friend whom Dove would have remembered.
She liked having sex in the afternoon. She always said it took the tension out of
the evening. Emma usually 'had sex', too, rarely made love. She was peculiarly honest
about things like that.
'Oh God, do you mean, do you really mean,' Toby was saying, 'that
I have to vacate my own bloody flat for you to cavort over my finest linen with
that dreary husband of yours?'
He was doing his best to sound indignant, but he was feeling
much too pleased with himself to convey any real reproach. It had been a bit demoralizing
when Emma rushed off and got married like that. Then a couple of months later she'd
started drifting back down to London and they'd hopped between the sheets again
just as naturally as if nothing had happened. 'Do you have an open marriage?' friends
asked. 'More ajar,' said Emma. Of course, Toby suspected that he wasn't the only
one on her itinerary, but it was nice to be included. She didn't even seem to mind
that he had run out of coke. But he felt some sort of protest was necessary. After
all, it was a bit thick. For a start he'd have to change the sheets.
'That's what you promised, darling,' said Emma, turning a long,
bare back to him as she searched among the glasses on the bedside table for one
with enough Scotch left in it to extinguish her cigarette. As she did so Toby noticed
a small brown mole just below her left shoulder-blade. This tiny imperfection excited
him. He wanted to smother it with kisses. He leapt on her.
'Gerroff,' she growled. 'My knight approaches. Even now his chariot
passes the Watford Gap service station.'
'Do you mean that '69 Cortina he took you out of my life in?'
'Don't be a snob. Only parasites can drive Lamborghinis. Useful
members of society get Cortinas.'
'Useful members of society are very boring,' said Toby. But he
did not have the energy to overcome resistance. A delightful languor was beginning
to creep over him which was spoilt only by the knowledge that it was not going to
be allowed to develop as it should into a blissfully spent sleep. It had been a
very tiring afternoon. It had started not long after midday with champagne before
lunch, gathered pace with a couple of good bottles of claret over the meal, hovered
provocatively for a while over the coffee and brandy then, for a man who despised
exercise, become distinctly energetic before they surfaced gasping, like swimmers,
for glasses of malt whisky and cigarettes in bed. He allowed her to leave his bed
and watched her slightly unsteady progress towards the bathroom door. 'Lovely, dirty
bitch,' he thought fondly.
Under the shower Emma was getting cross with Toby. Great oaf,
she thought. Perhaps Stephen was a bit boring sometimes, but it wasn't his bloody
place to say so. Yet, as she mechanically worked a Corsican sponge about her body,
she asked herself: he is boring, isn't he? And the answer came back loud and dear:
yes, oh yes, boring and a bit thick at times for all that calm, rational, unhurried
approach of his. And there were other things that irritated. Sometimes he was more
of a hypochondriac than she was: always trying to cut down on booze and fags and
worrying about his diet just because his quack had once mentioned the word 'coronary'.
Then there was the matter of, oh Christ, call it what you will: class, background.
Sometimes those flat Midlands 'a's of his which had sounded so attractive, so D.
H. Lawrence when they first met, made her squirm. There was also no denying that
they had a different attitude towards many things.
Money for one.
For Chrissake he was depositing fifty pounds a month into a building society somewhere
and she knew that soon she would be expected to walk without resistance into a three-bedroomed
semi and there breed kids until it was time to become the headmaster's wife.
Then there were his dreary friends. Roger Day, the English master,
for instance. A real drongo with a beard who thought he was Hemingway. Once, for
the hell of it, she had flirted with him. Naturally, he'd run a mile. Ugh!
Of course, she knew she was to blame. She'd wanted to get married.
She'd played Stephen along like some prize salmon and brought him panting to the
bank. Now the kindest thing to do would be to get out before things went too far.
Perhaps this weekend would be the best time, in London on her own territory. He
would be terribly hurt and she wasn't looking forward to that because he was, she
supposed, a good man, which was why ultimately she found him so fucking dull. Yes,
this weekend was the best time, but she would have to be careful how she did it.
Should she tell him or leave a note and disappear? Something like she didn't think
it was working out and she was going to stay with her parents for a while.
Nothing at all about Toby and the rest.
There was a television
research job coming up she thought she could get which involved a trip to Buenos
Aires.
Urban guerrillas and all that.
It might be the answer.
She didn't want to be around after she had told him.
Despite the warm water she found herself shuddering. Good heavens,
I'm frightened of him. It came to her as a genuine surprise. Then she thought: why
not? There was something about Mister Stephen Dove sometimes, something most women
sensed and some men, which said he could be an extremely violent man. She gave another
little shiver and stepped out of the shower. As she reached for a towel she thought:
perhaps that was what attracted me to him in the first place.
There is little more capricious than a terrorist's bomb. But
as a method of assassination it can be more certain than a bullet; even a trained
man can go badly wrong with a gun. The British Zionist Edward Sieff survived a shot
in the face from pointblank range because he possessed a particularly healthy buttress
of teeth which brought the bullet to rest only a centimetre away from vital blood
vessels. Yet, if a bomb is surer, it is also a sight less discriminating. The assassin
who decides on a bomb must not care who else he kills as long as he gets his man.
Hans Koller did not care. He had long ago decided that the struggle
justified, if necessary, innocent casualties. He had reached this conclusion early
on in his career as a terrorist and rarely thought of it again.
The man he had been ordered to murder was a Jordanian of Palestinian
extraction (his parents had fled to Jordan when Palestine became Israel in 1948)
who lived in Cadogan Gardens, just off Sloane Street. The son of a wealthy merchant,
he published and edited from London an Arabic magazine of political comment which
enjoyed considerable prestige in the Middle East where the printed word is still
respected. This magazine admirably reflected the publisher's own liberal education
for it was critical of all extremists, whether landgrabbing Zionists, homicidal
revolutionaries or oil-fired despots propagating their own visionary brands of Islam,
PanArab Marxism and other New Orders.
