INCARNATION (8 page)

‘You,’ she said, looking at Karim. 'I want you to stay here. But I want you to understand that this is not for your pleasure.’ To Karim’s surprise and confusion, she started to unbutton her jacket. Carefully and methodically, she undid the buttons from top to bottom, then unfastened the sleeves and removed the jacket, handing it to Chang Zhangyi. Next came her boots, then her trousers. Underneath, she wore an army-issue bra and pants, but not even the tired green underwear of the People’s Liberation Army could conceal the perfection of her body. Karim did not know which way to look. He wanted to close his eyes, but try as he might, he could not tear them from Huang Zhengmei. As though stripping in the shower-room among a hundred other women, she removed her bra and pants and passed them to Chang Zhangyi.

‘He can see me,’ she said. ‘Somewhere in his mind, he finds me attractive. He can’t help that. Beneath all the filth he’s still a man. Watch.’

She took a step forward and put her hand inside the cage. Softly, she began to stroke the prisoner’s thigh, then his genitals. It was the most grotesque thing Karim had ever witnessed. He looked at her face, the pretty face he had so much admired when he first caught sight of her, and found it ugly. To his horror, the man’s penis began to stiffen.

‘He may be nearly dead,’ she said, ‘but his nerve-endings still have life in them. Instinct takes over. He becomes excited, in spite of everything. The heart begins to beat faster. The lungs pull in more air. It gets harder to keep still, harder to conserve energy. Watch.’

And her fingers moved cunningly back and forth, bringing the man’s organ slowly and painfully to new life. Karim could hear the laboured breathing grow harder and tighter. There was a moan, and as he looked the man struggled to keep what little control he had. Huang Zhengmei stroked and feathered and tickled his swelling penis, like a cheap prostitute hurrying her John to climax.

‘Ask him again,’ she said. ‘From the beginning. If he gives straight answers, I’ll stop. If not, I’ll make him come.’

She remained intent on what she was doing. Karim looked at her, at her small breasts and perfectly rounded backside, at her thin arms and well-toned legs. He should have felt desire, he should have felt his own genitals urging him; but all he could feel was revulsion.

‘The M80 stage of the weapons project had five protocols. Did you know that?’

The prisoner turned his eyes full on Karim. And for a moment Karim was sure he smiled at him. Then, with an effort of will that later seemed to Karim past belief, he pushed himself back and his feet forward, knocking the top board out of position. All his weight was taken suddenly by his neck.

Chang Zhangyi shouted and tried to get the cage open in order to stop his victim slipping out of his clutches. But by the time he had him upright again, it was too late. Swearing, Chang Zhangyi released the bolt that held the upper part of the cage in place, and the body swung forward, collapsing on the floor.

Huang Zhengmei had already started to dress again. She saw Karim eyeing her.

‘You will not talk about this to anyone,’ she said. ‘Do you understand?’

He nodded.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’m not a fool.’

‘Some of the biggest fools here are the scientists. Try not to be like them. You are not at home. You are not in a safe place.’

He nodded and turned to Chang Zhangyi.

‘Did he have a name?’ he asked. It seemed important to him to know.

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I watched him die. I would like to know what he called himself.’

Huang Zhengmei’s voice broke in.

‘Hyde,’ she said. ‘His name was Matthew Hyde. He was a British agent. Now do you understand why it was so important to find out what he knew?’

Part II

E
lizabeth Laing took a long sip from her gin and tonic, and made a face only she could see, reflected back from the long mirror facing her. She felt friendless and at odds with the world. Sex always made her feel disrupted. Her drink tasted foul. She’d stepped up the gin recently, and was finding excuses to imbibe at the most inappropriate times. ‘Maybe I’m developing an alcohol problem,’ she thought, and as usual scolded herself for being a baby. Her need for booze was nothing more than a reaction to having broken free from her husband of twenty-six years.

She still didn’t know why she’d stayed with David so long. After all, she told herself, nobody could describe her as clinging, and she wasn’t exactly the loyal type. Anthony wasn’t her first affair, and wouldn’t be her last. She looked herself up and down in the cheval glass and almost smirked.

Not bad for forty-six, she thought. A bit of cellulite on the bum, a spot of sagging in the chest, but nothing to worry about yet. Maybe the menopause would change everything, but she was convinced she had quite a few years yet before it came. And when it did, she had her programme worked out: daily doses of HRT, silicone in bucketfuls, plastic surgery as and when, yoga with Vimla and Jerry at the Harbour, and five years’ supply of the funny little yellow pills Dr Ramesh had given Sarah. And she’d stay off the booze. No problem. She took another sip.

‘Admiring yourself again?’

Anthony’s lazy voice pulled her back to the room and the afternoon. A scarf of sunlight had worked its way through the blinds and across her breasts. She didn’t move. If he wanted her again, he could bloody well get off the bed and come over. The curtains lent the sunlight their weave. The scarf lay on her like real silk, so warm she could believe she felt it lie against her skin. She would not move, not even an inch.

'That’s the third drink you’ve had since lunch,’ he murmured. Not interfering, not even concerned. Just stating a bald fact.

She took another sip and rotated the glass so that the ice chinked gently inside.

‘I feel like it. Sex and gin go very well together.’ 

‘Do they?’

‘Sex gets me worked up, gin calms me down. Don’t know where I’d be without it.’

He said nothing, knowing that any remark, however carefully put, would lead to a massive over-reaction. She was defensive about her drinking. And what did he care anyway? He hadn’t started his affair with her for love, after all. He looked round the vast hotel room. It was soulless and dreary, just a tired room that held too many secrets. They’d been coming here for years, furtively at first, and openly since she left David. There wasn’t much need for it any more, but it was convenient when he wanted sex in the afternoon. The hotel was just a ten-minute walk from the office. Outside the window, a heavy boat made its way doggedly up the Thames. She still kept her back to him.

‘Your ex-husband’s been trying to get me all afternoon,’ he said.

‘Don’t call him my ex-husband. That won’t be official for absolutely ages, if it ever is.’

‘You aren’t thinking of going back to him, are you?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Anthony. Don’t be so bloody bourgeois.’

He looked at her naked back, at the sunlight inching over it like silk, and felt the beginnings of another erection. It had been the same with Penelope at first. They’d been married for almost twenty years, had two lovely daughters, pursued separate careers, but sex had never been the problem for them it became for most people.

He wondered why on earth it was that thoughts of his beloved Penelope always seemed to come at the most inappropriate moments, as though he harboured guilty thoughts. And yet, he mused, guilty thoughts of what, exactly? He’d loved Penelope, more than it’s given to most people to love someone. He hadn’t had so much as a whiff of an affair while they lived together. And even afterwards, well, there’d been a long gap before he’d started his relationship with Elizabeth.

Was it easier if you split up first? he wondered. With Penelope there hadn’t been the slightest lessening of affection. It had made it seem all the more unfair at the time.

They’d owned a place in France, and flew out there several times a year. There was enough money to mean they didn’t have to rent it, which meant in turn that any of them could go over at a moment’s notice for a weekend or a week or longer.

One weekend in spring, when the girls had a little time before school restarted, Penelope had made a last-minute reservation with a small airline operating out of Gatwick.

They’d taken off in high winds - ‘well within the limits of operating safety’, according to the subsequent inquiry -and flown up into a storm much too violent for such a tiny plane. The pilot had done his best to get back down again, but he’d lost control at two thousand feet, and the craft, a Shorts 360, had gone into a long nosedive that ended in the face of a cliff. No one on board had survived. The girls had been called Emma and Suzie. They’d been sixteen and fourteen.

He’d never recovered, never expected to. In some ways, never needed to. All feelings of tenderness and joy had been swallowed up in him by darker emotions, sometimes visible, mostly well concealed. Out of private tragedy, he’d made himself what he now was. It wasn’t Penelope’s death that disfigured him; he’d never had a chance to grow out of love with her, to experience the disenchantment that allowed hope of something different. He was that rare thing, a man who kept his mistress in the public eye without caring about scandal or notoriety, yet who maintained his wife as a well-hidden secret, a phantom in the truest sense.

With her long back and sloping buttocks and God knows what other spurs to desire, Elizabeth seemed to think men owed her a living. She was keen on sex, but controlled herself, and knew how to turn it to her advantage.

Which suited him down to the ground, since he had his own reasons for making her his mistress, which he was sure never to reveal to her or anyone else. 

‘He’s going to be a very busy man soon.’ 

‘Really?’ Her voice had a bored edge to it. He felt himself go limp again. Bored was dangerous. Bored was tantrums and tears and spending sprees and drinking till well after midnight. She was a child, he thought, an expensive, lustful, angry child. But she could use him as cunningly as he used her, for her own ends, in her own ways.

‘Elizabeth, turn round. I can’t talk to the back of your head.’

She spun to face him, and for a moment he thought he’d angered her, but instead she smiled, a huge, disarming smile that put her beyond any criticism. It was a tactic, of course, he knew that even as he felt relief not to have to cope with another outburst; but it was at least a familiar tactic.

‘What I’m saying ...’ He paused, asking himself exactly what it was he was saying. He couldn’t tell her everything, but he wanted to protect her. Not because he loved her, but because she was of more use to him now than ever. ‘I’m saying that you should keep away from him at the moment. He may be tied up. I just don’t think you should be around him, that’s all.’

‘I’d no intention to. Why would you think I had?’

‘I didn’t mean that. Just that it’s … not entirely safe.’

‘It was never safe, Anthony. You know that as well as I do. Nothing’s changed.’

‘Then why did you leave him? If nothing’s changed.’

‘He was too nice, Tony dear. A poppet. A sweetie-pie. He doted on me, did you know that? He’d have done anything for me. Or Maddie.’

‘How is Maddie?’

‘I’m not entirely sure, to tell you the truth. There was a bit of a scene after I told her I was leaving her precious father. Bit of an upset. You know how bloody unstable she is.’

‘She is your daughter.’

‘You don’t have to remind me.’

‘I see nothing particularly wrong with her. A bit woolly-headed, bit lefty in her politics.’

‘She never got over that awful Chinese boy. But for that she’d be all right.’

‘But for that ... Indeed. That’s what undoes us all, isn’t it?’

He looked frankly at her body. She was right to admire herself, he thought. He’d seen twenty-year-olds who would have envied her firm breasts and flat stomach.

‘I’ve got to get back to the office,’ he said. ‘Things are brewing.’

‘So I see,’ she said. She stood up gracefully, and poised herself like a cat, and moved towards the bed.

The phone rang angrily. Farrar swore. The only person who had his number here was his secretary. He rolled over, reached for the phone, and dragged it off the hook.

‘Farrar.’

‘Sir Anthony, it’s Linda. I’m sorry to disturb you, but it’s somewhat urgent. I have Mrs Laing’s daughter on the other line. She wants to speak with her mother.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, can’t you ask her to wait?’

Elizabeth was kneeling on the bed now, smiling at him invitingly.

‘Not really, sir, no. She’s a little distraught. Apparently, she’s been trying to get hold of her mother for some time. That’s why she rang me. She says it’s an emergency.’

‘Where is she?’

‘At a clinic in Esher. I can get the number, if you like.’

He put his hand over the mouthpiece.

‘It’s Maddie,’ he said. ‘She’s in some sort of clinic. She wants you to ring back. Shall I get the number?’

Her face seemed to crumple. Behind her, against the open window, the curtain flapped and flapped like a tramped bird’s wing. She shook her head.

‘No,’ she said in her quietest voice. ‘That’s all right. I know it by heart.’

He murmured a quick explanation and put the phone down. When he looked at her again, her face had gone rigid, and her arms were folded, tight as a baby’s swaddling, across her unprotected breasts.

T
here was a tailback six miles long and three lanes broad on the other carriageway. The late afternoon sun beat down mercilessly on the roofs of the slowly crawling cars. Hot, frustrated drivers, eager to be home, fumed and fretted in their narrow metal cages. An air-conditioning salesman could have spent the rest of his life on a sun-licked beach had there been world enough and time to pitch his wares to each and every one of those sweat-tormented souls. For once, David felt he was headed in the right direction.

‘Your people use Arwel’s place a lot, do they?’ he asked.

Chris Donaldson popped a mint in his mouth and sucked hard. He offered one to David, who shook his head and started sneezing.