The Execution, page 6
Then suddenly I thought I saw Marianne. It wasn’t so much the back of her head that I recognised, more the way she moved, those tiny steps. The guy was in my line of vision and I had to move over to one side to see better. The woman I thought was Marianne briefly inclined her head in my direction and for a second or two I got a clear view of her silhouetted face and bridgeless nose. I began to feel funny and light-headed, the way I feel sometimes just before I have to make a speech in public. I hadn’t really expected to see her here after all, I realised.
The man had shoved a card into my hands. It was the kind you get printed up in machines in train stations. He was saying: ‘I could come and see you next week. I can bring you the written proposal and we can discuss this.’
‘I don’t know … maybe.’
‘I’ve seen your name in the paper … that diplomat who’s been sentenced to death, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s just that I happen to know something about him. Might interest you. Maybe we can talk about it.’
‘Yeah. I’m sorry. Got to go, I’ve got a train.’
‘Shall I call you?’
‘Sure, call me.’
I’d lost Marianne and began struggling through the crowd in the direction I’d seen her walking. Then I caught sight of her again, much closer than I’d expected: if she’d turned round at that exact moment she definitely would have seen me. That panicked me a little and I dropped back. In any case I could clearly see where she was headed now. I glanced up at the indicator board. The 11.38 from Oxford was arriving on platform 12. It was gliding into the station as Marianne made her way to meet it. That was why she’d been in such a hurry, of course. She’d almost got there too late.
I hid by the Tie Rack shop and could see her only from the back. She was wearing jeans and the cashmere sweater I gave her last Christmas. Even in jeans she managed to look groomed and well-dressed. She looked good and I felt stupidly proud of her. I could tell she was nervous by the way she was pacing on the spot, scanning the crowd of alighting passengers. She was afraid of missing whoever it was she was waiting for, and that meant the person didn’t know she was there.
Then suddenly she started gesticulating. A man came into view. He was tall, middle-aged, slightly overweight and his hair was thinning. I couldn’t see Marianne’s face but the man’s was beaming. He hugged her and I could see them talking animatedly. Perhaps she was explaining why she’d come to the station. Perhaps the original plan had been for him to pick her up at the house. The man’s hand was against Marianne’s lower back and then at one moment it seemed to brush down by her buttocks. The memory of the last time I’d seen him seemed to explode onto my consciousness with a bizarre force, as if it had been impatiently waiting all this time to explain my idiocy to me.
I followed them through a labyrinth of scaffolding and hanging green canvas and cordons. The man was quite a bit taller than Marianne and had his arm protectively round her shoulder as they continued to talk. It was the first time I’d ever tried to tail someone and it took me a little while to get the hang of it. If I dropped too far back I was afraid I’d lose them but when I got close there was the chance that Marianne would turn round -I concentrated on getting the tactical trade-off right.
Then just as we reached the tube entrance I got a shock. Climbing up the stairs into the main station was Christian. I’d forgotten about him. I’d forgotten that he’d probably end up at Paddington this morning to catch his train back home. We’d talked only the night before but an era had passed since then. In the two or three minutes since I’d seen Marianne embrace the man on the platform I’d already become a different person -I could feel the change moving through my body like a drug. It was disconcerting but fascinating and I wondered where exactly it would take me.
Christian seemed changed as well. Last night he’d been drunk, shuffling and incoherent. Now there was a vague determination to his movements. His shirt, which had been badly crumpled, was freshly ironed and his long, lank hair was neatly combed and tied back. His face still looked kind of wrecked, but somehow less catastrophically so than the night before. He looked up as he got to the top of the stairs and we stared at each other – I could sense a disturbing intimacy in his gaze. It was hard to read this expression of his that seemed somehow quizzical, as though I had something to answer for. He stopped for no more than a second or two and so did I. Then we walked past each other wordlessly.
A tube pulled in to the Circle line platform. The doors snapped open and the two of them moved towards the carriage. I scuttled out of my hiding place behind the vending machine and into the next carriage – I’d been dreading this moment when I would be at my most vulnerable. The thing is, I couldn’t imagine what kind of confrontation Marianne and I could possibly have right now, what we could possibly say to each other. I kept an eye on them through the windows that separated the two carriages. They were sitting opposite each other, saying nothing now, maybe smiling at each other, it was hard to see. My heart was jolting strangely inside me and I took deep breaths to calm myself. I was sweating intensely. The image of Christian’s quizzical face came back to me. I could feel an anger surge up in me and yet it wasn’t particularly directed at Marianne or her lover. For some reason it was Christian who was the object of this peculiar fury.
They got out at High Street Kensington and I waited until the last moment to jump on to the platform. A group of Japanese tourists blocked the entrance and in the confusion I lost sight of Marianne and the man. I really thought I’d missed them altogether and felt an odd relief that I didn’t have to follow them any more. Then over the sea of camcorders and baseball caps I suddenly caught a glimpse of the man’s head – he’s tall, taller than me. A tour guide herded the Japanese tourists into a tube that had pulled in on the other side of the platform. Marianne and the man were on the stairs now and I could see them quite clearly.
I followed them to a square somewhere north of the High Street. There was a sloaney pub on the corner, someone had taken me there once years ago. It was the kind of place public-school boys and girls with year-round tans went to get drunk in. It was the kind of place I’d never have taken Marianne to. There was a garden out front and Marianne sat down at a table there while the guy went in to order drinks and food. She was on her own again. She started stroking her hair, patting it into place. I knew exactly what was going through her mind, I knew her so well. She was thinking: I want to check my make-up and hair but I don’t have my compact with me, and I can’t get up and go to the toilet until he comes back, otherwise we might lose the table.
I went into the little park on the square. Two dogs were copulating in a sand pit in the children’s play area while a few kids looked on. I sat down over the other side of the park, on a bench partially hidden by a ragged bush. I could peer through it with the near certainty that Marianne wouldn’t be able to see me. There was little danger of her looking my way in any case; the two of them barely took their eyes off each other. I was safe in that regard and that meant that I could relax for the first time since I’d spotted her on the concourse. My thoughts spurted ahead of me incoherently. I wondered where they slept together, whether the man was married, whether he’d ever been to our home. I was afraid of what would happen after their lunch at the pub. No doubt I’d follow them to some block of flats round the corner and then I’d find myself alone again, abandoned to my imagination.
Marianne and the man had been served lunch but they continued talking between mouthfuls as though it was not in their power to stop the tide of conversation, even to eat. It was strange to see Marianne garrulous like that when normally she’s quite sparing with her words. I remembered how different Charlotte had seemed on an intimate level compared with Marianne, that first time we’d slept together, and it struck me with even greater force how unfamiliar Marianne was to me now. It was as if there were a stranger inhabiting her that she’d never normally let me see.
An electronic blare seemed to burst up from beneath me, jerking my concentration away from Marianne. It took me a few startled moments to realise that it was my mobile phone. I fumbled clumsily with it in my state of heightened tension.
‘Jamie here. Listen, where the fuck are you? I’ve got the ambassador’s secretary on hold, he’s wondering when the hell you’re going to show up.’
I glanced at my watch. I’d forgotten about my appointment with the ambassador. I was already half an hour late. I’d have cancelled any other appointment but it had been such extraordinary luck to get the ambassador to see me in the first place that I couldn’t back out of it now.
‘Sorry. I’m stuck in a traffic jam. Tell him I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.’
I switched the mobile off and shoved it back in my pocket. Marianne and the man were finishing up, in any case. What was it that they were talking about with such passion? It was like watching a TV programme in a foreign language where you can sense the emotions but not understand the plot. This feeling of being a voyeur was entirely new to me. I’d always been one of those people who regard themselves as inside life, never on the outside.
The sun was streaming through the bushes and the day was warming up. I watched as Marianne suddenly pulled her cashmere sweater over her head in a single liquid movement. Underneath she was wearing a halterneck top I didn’t recognise. It looked good on her – revealing clothes like that suit her Mediterranean skin. She looked sexy in fact, and a curious aching feeling I’d never experienced before crawled through me.
VI
Around a dozen policemen were standing around outside the embassy, their walkie-talkies exploding into a crackle of voices every few seconds. What’s happening, I asked one of them. There’s going to be a protest here this afternoon, he said, I’m afraid that’s all I know sir. I went up to the main entrance and was searched by a security guard. I was wondering who’d organised the protest, it took my mind off things. I wondered why I hadn’t heard about it and it irritated me. I was supposed to be co-ordinating the Jarawa campaign. Anyone organising a protest should have got in touch with me.
The guard showed me into a small, stuffy reception room at the back of the building. It had been done out like the study of a Victorian anthropologist. African masks hung down from the picture railings and two small wooden statues of squat men with huge penises and screaming mouths stared at a hagiographic portrait of the President opposite. I barely had time to take all this in before a burly guy in his mid-forties, an embassy official of some sort, came in with a pile of documents. He was dressed in a pale grey suit and dark red tie. I also noticed a handkerchief peeking out of his breast pocket. It seemed somehow out of place, at odds with the man’s beefy build and shaved head. It reminded me of that photo of Jarawa and his fob watch.
‘Do you speak French?’
‘I can read it.’
‘Good. The ambassador has already gone to his lunch appointment but his secretary left these documents for you to look over. You can make notes if you wish. I’ll leave you the documents for thirty minutes then I’ll be back to answer any questions you may have.’
The guy left. I glanced through the papers. They were faxed copies of court digests, police reports, all kinds of stuff. They seemed to be mainly about a triple murder Jarawa was supposed to have ordered last year on the twenty-first of December. The trouble was that I couldn’t concentrate on the documents at all. Once I was by myself again a wave of confused thought seemed to swamp my mind. Flashes from this morning came back to me. I remembered Marianne in the kitchen, looking anxious, saying she had to go and meet a Belgian dealer at Joseph Kimberly. I’d never caught her lying to me before and I’d naïvely imagined that she never had. What struck me here was the detail of the fictional dealer’s nationality. Why Belgian and not American or Japanese, or even French or German? Or would those have been too likely and thus less believable? In any case it seemed a strange choice, the baroque touch of someone who was getting a kick out of the situation.
The guy came back in. Thirty minutes had apparently passed although it felt like five. The room was uncomfortably warm and I could feel sweat beading on my forehead. I hadn’t really digested any of the information in the documents.
Did I have any questions, he asked. Yes, I replied and I tried hard to think of something to say. All that came to me was that I was hungry, that it was past lunch time and I hadn’t had anything to eat since the piece of toast that morning. Finally I asked why I was being shown these documents now and why they hadn’t been released earlier. The man said there’d been a lot of confusion arising from the fact that the trial had been held in camera, but what Monsieur Jarawa had actually been sentenced for was complicity in the murder of three businessmen. He’d been defended by a French lawyer and convicted by a jury and a French-trained judge. The man said he wanted to stress this point, since there’d been so much speculation over the supposed political motivation of the sentence.
I said, so in other words what you’re saying is that he’s just a common criminal, he’s being put to death on account of an ordinary crime. The man smiled at me. He’s been convicted of murder and has been sentenced accordingly, he replied. If it’s the death penalty that particularly upsets you then why single us out? Why demand sanctions against us and not the United States?
Our contention is that he’s a political prisoner, I replied, trying to sound as indignant as possible. Even when I was unprepared, as I often was, I was used to holding my own in this kind of confrontation. But I could feel the words slipping away from me, slipping towards this clever bureaucrat with his French-inflected Oxbridge accent and his slick rhetoric. He continued to talk but because it had become so stiflingly hot in the little room I was finding it difficult to concentrate on his words. He leaned forward conspiratorially: In fact there are a lot of influential people working behind the scenes to get Monsieur Jarawa’s sentence commuted, he was saying, but this work could easily be compromised by pressure from Western governments and organisations. The government could well react adversely to interference from the West.
The official walked me back through the embassy to the front entrance. He put his hand on my shoulder and I could feel the dampness of my shirt. Of course I know Monsieur Jarawa quite well, he continued, as many of us in the diplomatic service do. He has a great sense of humour and his wife is a very beautiful woman. He and the ambassador are very friendly too. I can assure you that I’m personally doing all I can for Monsieur Jarawa. We used to go to galleries together, you know, when he was in London. He loves contemporary art!
We’d reached the entrance. The protest outside the embassy had already got under way – thirty or forty people were holding up placards and chanting. The embassy official made a great show of shaking my hand warmly in full view of the protesters and I walked down the stairs and out the gate. I tried to make my way through the crowd of people but it was difficult. They were encircling me then began chanting even more insistently. One guy in particular who looked nineteen or twenty stood right next to me and started shouting about murderers. He was accusing me of being complicit in a murder, or being a murderer, I don’t know which. He was shouting in my ear so that I couldn’t hear anything else, and piercing me with his accusing stare. What with the stuffiness of the room I’d been in and now the shouting I was beginning to feel dizzy. He was standing in my way and I felt hot and closed in and I sort of pushed at him and he pushed me back on to the gates, quite hard. I thought he might hit me. Then I heard a policeman say OK, OK, let the gentleman pass. The young guy kept shouting and staring at me but he didn’t push me again and the policeman cleared the way so that I could get back from the embassy gates.
I thanked the policeman and walked quickly away, in no particular direction. At one point I got out my mobile to make sure it was switched off – I didn’t want any calls. I should have gone straight to the office of course and worked out a press release with Jo and written up a report, but I didn’t feel like it. For one thing I’d fucked up the whole encounter. I hadn’t seen the ambassador. Then there was the letter signed by all the academics that I was supposed to have delivered. And I’d also been meaning to raise the matter of the visa applications I’d made for Jo and a volunteer, which had been rejected for no apparent reason. But I’d been comprehensively outmanoeuvred and hadn’t even found out who it was I’d spoken to. Worst of all, I’d messed up the documents business. I hadn’t taken any notes, I couldn’t remember a damn thing that was in them. The stupid thing was I could have easily stolen the more important ones, I could have slipped them into my wallet, they were only faxes printed on thermal paper.
Later I found myself back at the pub, the one where Marianne and the man had had lunch. I remembered the smile I’d seen her give him there, a smile that so patently hid nothing that it made me feel sick. They were long gone of course. I was hungry so I ordered a beer and a sandwich, but the barmaid told me the food was finished so I had a couple of packets of crisps instead. I drank a beer then had another one. A flat, nightmarish air of mid-afternoon seediness hung about the pub. Beside me at the bar, two young male doctors were getting drunk after a shift, exchanging medical horror stories: ‘They’d brought in this guy who’d had a hang-gliding accident. His testicles had been badly crushed and Steve had to, well, surgically castrate him to stop the haemorrhaging …’
I ended up getting a bus to Paddington, where I’d left the car. It was ages since I’d last caught a bus. I climbed upstairs and sat right at the front, like I used to do when I was a child, and waited for the conductor to come up, but they didn’t seem to have conductors on this route any more. I rubbed the grime from the window and looked out over the streets of West London. It occurred to me that Jarawa probably knew these streets too, and that although I’d never been to his city he’d certainly been to mine. So in some sense we shared a topography. I recalled what the embassy official had said about Jarawa, the personal details I mean, his sense of humour, how they’d gone to art galleries together. All this struck me as odd and at first I couldn’t see why. Then after a while I began to understand. On one level I was organising a campaign to get Jarawa’s death sentence commuted. But on another level I’d already kind of written him off as dead, or perhaps as someone who’d never been alive. It was as if he were simply an idea. It had been weird to hear the embassy guy talk about him in the present tense. It had been weird to hear about Jarawa as someone with a sense of humour who liked going to art galleries. And it was weird too to think that he had a wife, who was now in the UK, probably somewhere in London in fact, not half an hour from where I was.
