Restless

He looked at her, his face giving nothing away, the control absolute. All the same, I savoured my mother's triumph over him – I felt like cheering, whooping with delight.

'As far as the British government is concerned you're a traitor,' he said, his voice flat, without the trace of any threat or bluster.

'Oh yes, yes, of course,' she said, with massive irony. 'We're all traitors: me and Morris and Angus and Sylvia. A little nest of British traitors in AAS Ltd. Only one man straight and true: Lucas Romer.' She looked at him, with a kind of pure scorn, not pity. 'It's all finally gone wrong for you, Lucas. Face it.'

'It all went wrong at Pearl Harbor,' he said, with a pursed ironic grin, as if he finally realised he was impotent, all control having passed from his hands. 'Thanks to the Japanese – Pearl Harbor rather fucked everything up.'

'You should have left me alone,' my mother said. 'You shouldn't have kept looking for me – I wouldn't have bothered with all this.'

He looked at her, baffled. This was the first genuine emotion I had seen his face register. 'What on earth are you talking about?' he said.

But she wasn't listening. She opened her bag and took out the sawn-off shotgun. It was very small, it couldn't have been more than ten inches long – it looked like an antique pistol, some highwayman's firepiece. She pointed it at Romer's face.

'Sally,' I said. 'Please…'

'I know you won't do anything stupid,' Romer said, quite calmly. 'You're not stupid, Eva, so why don't you put it away?'

She took a step towards him and straightened her arm, the two blunt stubby barrels were aimed full at his face, two feet away. He did flinch a little, now, I saw.

'I just wanted to know what it would be like to have you at my mercy,' my mother said, still perfectly under control. 'I could happily kill you now, so easily, and I just wanted to know what that moment would feel like. You can have no idea how imagining this moment has sustained me, for years and years. I've waited a long time.' She lowered the gun. 'And I can tell you it was worth every second.' She put the gun away in her bag and snapped it loudly shut, the click making Romer jump a little.

He reached for a bell on the wall, pressed it and the awkward, nervy Petr was in the room in a second, it seemed.

'These people are leaving,' Romer said.

We walked to the door.

'Goodbye, Lucas,' my mother said, striding out, not even looking round at him. 'Remember this evening. You'll never see me again.'

I, of course, did look round as we left the room to see that Romer had turned away slightly and his hands were in the pockets of his jacket, pushing down hard, I could tell, from the creases that had formed, and how the lapels of his jacket were deformed; his head was bowed and he was staring at the rug in front of the fireplace again, as if it held some sort of clue as to what he should do next.

We climbed into the car and I looked up at the three tall windows. It was growing dark now and the panes glowed orange-yellow, the curtains still unpulled.

'The gun freaked me out, Sal,' I said.

'It wasn't loaded.'

'Oh, right.'

'I don't want to talk at the moment, if you don't mind. Not yet.'

So we drove out of London, via Shepherd's Bush on to the A40 heading for Oxford. We sat in silence all the way until we reached Stokenchurch and saw, through the great gap that they had carved through the Chilterns for the motorway, the lazy summer night of Oxfordshire laid out before us – the lights of Lewknor, Sydenham and Great Haseley begi

I was thinking back over everything that had happened this summer and I began to realise that, in fact, it had started many years ago. I saw how my mother had so cleverly manipulated and used me over the last few weeks and I began to wonder if this had been my destiny as far as she was concerned. She would have lived all her life with the thought of that final meeting with Lucas Romer and when her child was born – maybe she was hoping for a boy? – she would have thought; now I have my crucial ally, now I have someone who can help me, one day I will bring Romer down.

I began to see how my return to Oxford from Germany had been the catalyst, how the process had begun – now that I was back in her life and the entanglement could slowly begin. The writing of the memoir, the sense of danger, the paranoia, the wheelchair, the initial 'i

'I made a mistake,' she said, suddenly, making me start.

'What?'

'He knows you're my daughter. He knows your name.'

'So what?' I said. 'He also knows you've got him cold. Everything's going to come out. He can't lay a finger on you. You told him – you challenged him to pick up the phone.'

She thought about this.

'Maybe you're right… Maybe that's enough. Maybe he won't make any calls. But he might leave something written.'

'What do you mean: "leave something written"? Leave something written where?' I couldn't follow her.

'It would be safer to leave something written, you see, because…' She stopped, thinking hard as she drove, hunching forward almost as if, in that posture, she could drive the car home more swiftly.

'Because what?'

'Because he'll be dead by tomorrow morning.'

'Dead? How can he be dead tomorrow morning?'

She glanced at me, an impatient glance that said: You still don't get it, do you? Your brain doesn't work like ours. She spoke patiently: 'Romer will kill himself tonight. He'll inject himself, take a pill. He'll have had the method ready for years. It'll look exactly like a heart attack, or a fatal stroke – something that looks natural, anyway.' She flexed her fingers on the steering wheel. 'Romer's dead. I didn't need to shoot him with that gun. The second he saw me he knew that he was dead. He knew his life was over.'