Chapter 14
Eve decides to take herself out to lunch.
She’s just seen an article in the Wiltshire Gazette about a nearby restaurant which has recently won its third Michelin star.
The Stag at Fairley, the piece claims, ‘is perhaps the finest of the neo-traditional English eateries’.
What ‘neo-traditional’ actually means Eve has no idea, but on a whim she rings The Stag, and asks if they have a lunchtime table for one.
She half-expects a snotty refusal, but when the receptionist answers he sounds friendly, and tells her that although The Stag is usually booked up for weeks ahead, she’s in luck; they’ve just had a cancellation.
With an hour in hand, Eve walks up to Cranborne station, where the same Toyota Prius is waiting as the day that she arrived.
Fairley, the driver tells her, is twenty minutes away, so she climbs into the back seat, he flicks his cigarette away, and they move off.
The driver’s keen to chat, but Eve closes down his questions.
The car smells of sweaty plastic and stale smoke, so she opens the window.
The Stag is a building of uncertain age at the south end of Fairley High Street.
Eve walks into a stone-floored bar, busy but not overcrowded with customers.
She’s fifteen minutes early for her booking, so she sits by the window with a glass of mineral water.
The place looks pretty traditional. Antique farming implements on the wall, a nicotine-brown ceiling, and a moth-eaten, glassy-eyed stuffed badger surveying the action from a shelf above the fireplace.
In London, Eve and Oxana never went to pubs.
Most play obnoxious music, serve terrible food, and are so jam-packed that conversation is impossible.
But this bar is peaceful, and Eve can imagine herself coming here quite often.
The other customers aren’t Barbour-jacketed metropolitan escapees, but ordinary, unremarkable people.
No one feels the need to shout anyone else down, or to draw attention to themselves.
She wouldn’t be invisible here, but people would leave her alone.
Was she romanticising this imagined new life?
She’s led to her table by the ma?tre d’h?tel, a man so French, and so outrageously charming, that she’s tempted to burst out laughing.
As it is, she bites her lip and follows him demurely to her table.
After the comfortable English shabbiness of the bar, the restaurant takes her by surprise.
A spacious, sunlit room suspended over the River Avon, enclosed on three sides by the trailing green-leafed branches of a weeping willow, it seems to exist in a dimension entirely its own.
The ma?tre d’h?tel directs Eve to a table overlooking the river, and she takes her seat, enchanted by the way the willow branches seem to echo the long emerald tresses of weed swaying in the current.
Most of the other tables are occupied; no one looks up.
The ma?tre d’h?tel hands her a menu. She examines it for a moment and then hands it back to him.
‘You know what I’d really like?’
He smiles. ‘Tell me.’
‘I’d like you to choose my meal, the wine, everything. I’d like to be… amazed.’
He inclines his head. ‘It will give me great pleasure, madame. Thank you for your confidence. Do you have any preferences, or dislikes?’
‘I can’t imagine disliking anything here.’
‘Very well. Leave the selection to me. I will instruct your waiter.’
He withdraws, leaving Eve to gaze out over the river. The gin-clear water appears almost viscous.
Oxana drowned a man once. A colleague of mine named Dennis Cradle whom I’d discovered to be in the pay of the Twelve.
Cradle was about to face a Security Service interrogation team when Oxana abducted him, battered him senseless, and tipped him into a weirpool on the River Wey in Surrey.
He didn’t surface for days. Or was it weeks?
That was when she and I were on opposite sides, of course, and our romance was in its infancy.
But she was already flirting with me. Laying out the corpses of her victims for me, like gifts.
Like a cat bringing home mutilated mice and birds.
I suppressed my responses to her, obviously.
Shut them down completely. She was, in a very pure and absolute sense, my enemy.
But I knew even then that there was nothing pure or absolute about our connection.
She wanted me, that much was clear, but whether as her lover or her torture victim I had no idea.
She broke into the house I shared with Niko – how long ago that seems – and left me a beautiful Van Diest bracelet.
In my bedroom drawer, for God’s sake. I pretended to be appalled, and of course I was, but at the same time the intimacy of the act, the sheer insolence of it, left me weak at the knees.
It wasn’t even the first time she’d done something like this.
She climbed into my hotel room in Singapore and watched me sleep.
I should have felt horrified and violated when I discovered what she’d done, but the truth is that I felt faint with excitement at the thought of it. If I’m honest, I was hers thereafter.
And then we were in Russia, and in love.
Sharing our lives and sharing the killing.
The electrocution and drowning of the Pakhan in the bath house.
His lips turning blue. The horrific shoot-out at Dasha’s apartment.
The chaos of it. The blood, the bone fragments, the brain matter sliding down the walls…
The food is like nothing Eve has encountered before.
A single scallop glazed with emerald-green seaweed that not only tastes of the sea but somehow distils the very essence of the sea.
Poached quail eggs with salmon roe. Pigeon breast with white cherries and wild blackcurrant flowers.
Course succeeds course, each in its way perfect, each accompanied by its chosen glass of wine.
‘How is everything, madame?’ the ma?tre d’h?tel asks, materialising beside her. ‘Do you approve of our choices?’
‘Oh, I do,’ Eve murmurs, her thoughts swirling pleasurably. ‘I absolutely do. I think you’ve taught me something very important about food.’
He nods encouragingly.
‘That it’s not really about eating, it’s about…
connection.’ The moment Eve’s spoken, she wonders if her words are completely banal, and indeed whether they even make sense.
‘I think what I’m trying to say is that the food doesn’t taste of food, but of ideas.
Ideas of home, and childhood, and the countryside.
And the wine tastes of dreams, the dreams you forget when you wake up. ’
I’m drunk. I sound ridiculous. It feels so liberating to eat alone, in my own time, ignoring everyone and everything around me, and letting my thoughts swirl wherever. But maybe I just look tragic.
The ma?tre d’h?tel gravely inclines his head. ‘If that is what you feel, madame, then we have succeeded. Thank you, it’s been a privilege.’
She stares at him. ‘Really?’
‘Really, madame.’