I slipped back inside, put on the helmet and gloves and dug out my key-ring. I eased open the letter-box on the front door, brought the remote control switch for the bike alarm level with the slot, and pressed the button. The Kawasaki blipped back at me once to tell me that its alarm was now off, so I threw open the door and ran down to the street as fast as my armpit would let me.
The bike started first time, as Japanese bikes tend to do, so I slid it to half-choke, popped it into first gear, and eased out the clutch. I also got on it, in case you were worried. By the time I passed the dark-green van I must have been doing forty miles an hour, and I amused myself for a moment with the thought of a lot of men in anoraks banging their elbows on things and saying shit. When I reached the end of the street, I could see, in the mirror, the lights of a car pulling out after me. It was a Rover.
I turned left on to the Bayswater Road within shouting distance of the speed limit, and stopped at a traffic light that’s never once been green in all the years I’ve been coming up to it. But I wasn’t bothered. I fiddled with my gloves and visor for a while, until I sensed the Rover crawling up on the inside, and then I glanced across at the moustachioed face behind the wheel. I wanted to tell him to go home, because this was about to become embarrassing.
As the light switched to amber, I closed the choke fully and eased the throttle to around five thousand revs, then shifted my weight forward over the petrol tank to keep the front wheel down. I dropped the clutch as the light turned green and felt theKawasaki ’s gigantic rear wheel thrash madly from side to side like a dinosaur’s tail, until it found the grip it needed to sling me forwards down the road.
Two-and-a-half seconds later I was doing sixty, and two-and-a-half seconds after that the street lamps were melting into one, and I’d forgotten what the Rover driver looked like. Giare was a surprisingly cheerful place, with white walls and an echoing tile floor that turned every whisper into a shout and every smile into a howling belly-laugh.
A Ralph Lauren blonde with huge eyes took my helmet and showed me to a table by the window, where I ordered a tonic water for myself and a large vodka for the pain in my armpit. To pass the time before Woolf arrived, I had a choice between Ewan’s guide-book or the menu. The menu looked slightly longer, so I started on that.
The first item was fighting under the name ‘Crostini of Mealed Tarroce, with Benatore Potatoes’ and weighed in at an impressive twelve pounds sixty-five. The Ralph Lauren blonde came over and asked me if I needed any help with the menu, and I asked her to explain what potatoes were. She didn’t laugh.
I’d just started to unravel the description of the second dish, which could have been poached Marx Brother for all I know, when I caught sight of the Woolf at the door, clinging determinedly to a briefcase while a waiter peeled off his coat.
And then, at exactly the same moment that I noticed our table was laid for three, I saw Sarah Woolf step out from behind him.
She looked - and I hate to say this - sensational. Absolutely sensational. I know it’s a clichй, but there are times when you realise why clichйs become clichйs. She wore a plain-cut dress in green silk, and it hung on her in a way that all dresses would like to hang if they got the chance - staying still at the bits where it ought to have stayed still, and moving at the bits where movement was exactly what you wanted. Just about everybody watched her travel to the table, and there was a hush in the room while Woolf pushed the chair in behind her as she sat down.
‘Mr Lang,’ said Woolf major, ‘good of you to come.’ I nodded at him. ‘You know my daughter?’
I glanced across at Sarah, and she was looking down at her napkin, frowning. Even her napkin looked better than anyone else’s.
‘Yes of course,’ I said. ‘Now let me see.Wimbledon?Henley? Dick Cavendish’s wedding? No, I’ve got it. Down the barrel of a gun, that’s where we last met. How nice to see you again.’
It was supposed to be friendly, a joke even, but when she still didn’t look at me, the line seemed to curdle into something aggressive, and I wished I’d shut up and just smiled. Sarah adjusted the cutlery into what she obviously thought was a more pleasing formation.
‘Mr Lang,’ she said, ‘I’ve come here at my father’s suggestion to say that I’m sorry. Not because I think I did anything wrong, but because you got hurt and you shouldn’t have. And I’m sorry for that.’
Woolf and I waited for her to go on, but it seemed as if that was all we were going to get for now. She just sat there, rummaging in her bag for a reason not to look at me. Apparently she found several, which was odd, because it was quite a small bag.
Woolf gestured for a waiter, and turned to me. ‘Had a chance to look at the menu yet?’
‘Glanced at it,’ I said. ‘I hear that whatever you’re having is excellent.’
The waiter arrived and Woolf loosened his tie a little. ‘Two martinis,’ he said, ‘very dry, and…’
He looked at me and I nodded.
‘Vodka martini,’ I said. ‘Incredibly dry. Powdered, if you’ve got it.’
The waiter pushed off, and Sarah started looking round the place, as if she was bored already. The tendons in her neck were beautiful.
‘So, Thomas,’ said Woolf. ‘Mind if I call you Thomas?’
‘Okay with me,’ I said. ‘It’s my first name, afterall.’
‘Good. Thomas. First of all, how’s your shoulder?’
‘Fine,’ I said, and he looked relieved. ‘A lot better than my armpit, which is where I got shot.’
At last, at long last, she turned her head and looked at me. Her eyes were much softer than the rest of her pretended to be. She bowed her head slightly, and her voice was low and cracked.
‘I told you, I’m sorry,’ she said.
I wanted desperately to say something back, something nice, and gentle, but I came up empty-headed. There was a pause, which might somehow have turned nasty if she hadn’t smiled. But she did smile, and a lot of blood suddenly seemed to be crashing about in my ears, dropping things and falling over. I smiled back, and we kept on looking at each other.
‘I suppose we have to say it could have been worse,’ she said.
‘Of course it could,’ I said. ‘If I was an international armpit model, I’d be off work for months.’
This time she laughed, actually laughed, and I felt like I’d won every Olympic medal that had ever been struck.
We started with some soup, which came in a bowl about the size of my flat and tasted delicious. The talk was small. It turned out that Woolf was also a fan of the turf, and that I’d been watching one of his horses race atDoncaster that afternoon, so we chatted a little about racing. By the time the second course arrived, we were putting the finishing touches to a nicely-rounded three-minuter on the unpredictability of the English climate. Woolf took a mouthful of something meaty and sauce-covered, and then dabbed his mouth.