Old Flames (7 page)

The Royal Navy provided a guard of honour, and the Marines a band to play the round of dreary national anthems. Under the vast grey shadow of the Soviet Navy’s battlecruiser
Ordzhonikidze,
the dignitaries lined up in precedence to prepare to greet the Russians. Troy found himself between Cobb and Beynon. Peering round Cobb, he could see the Russian Ambassador,
Jakob Malik, and the two faces of Britain: the civil in Lord Reading, Minister of State at the Foreign Office, and the military in Lord Cilcennin, First Lord of the Admiralty. Quite what the
difference was in their roles he could not say. Although both of them were in the Government, he could not be certain whether Cilcennin was actually in the Navy or not, or whether it was even
necessary that he should be in the Navy. Neither of them mattered much. Dogsbodies sent out to do duty on a windswept quayside. Nothing mattered much till they got to Victoria Station, the back
door to Westminster, and came face to face with the Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, a veteran of the thirties—that dirty, double-dealing decade—the bright young Foreign Secretary
who’d had the courage to resign from the Cabinet over Munich and Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler, and who had for so long been heir apparent to the ageing and ailing Winston
Churchill. Heir no longer—he had been PM for almost a year now, carrying with him the hopes of a nation deeply loyal to the old man, but desperately in need of the new man. The problem, as
Troy saw it, was that heir apparent was a role one could play too long.

The idea of meeting Khrushchev rolled Troy back into memories of youth. When he was nineteen or twenty a cousin of his father’s had visited England as part of a Soviet trade mission. He
was the only Troitsky Troy had ever met. One of the few to have stayed and tried to make the best of a dire inevitability. Troy’s father had entertained cousin Leo royally, keen for any news
of the old country, lost in time like the Sisters Prozorova, dreaming of Moscow once more, drunk on Moscow once more. Moscow. Moscow was the fiefdom of the party boss of the city, a cunning peasant
named Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. It was the first time anyone had heard the name. A hardy survivor of the Revolution, Khrushchev was in the process of building Moscow’s showcase
Metro—the triumph of public works over private demands. From the outside it began to look as though the new Soviet Union was raising its head above the parapet for the first time. Cousin Leo
had an abundance of tales of the eccentric, domineering, charming, drunken apparatchik in charge of the first burst of colour the Soviet Union had seen in almost twenty years. From time to time
Troy had followed the career of this intriguing little man. The late thirties had seen him put in charge of the entire Ukraine—where he took to dressing like a peasant and imitating the
accent of the region. More peasant than the peasant, full of old aphorisms and Ukrainian lore. The pretence had cost him. Ever wise to the weaknesses of his subordinates, Stalin had hoisted
Khrushchev on his own petard. ‘Dance!’ he had told Khrushchev, and the fifty-two-year-old fat little Khrushchev danced for his life, flailing and sweating at his pastiche of the
Ukrainian
gopak
for the delight of a man who would have thought little of putting him on the next train to Siberia or seeing him hanged in public. The war had found Khrushchev in uniform as
a front-line political commissar, a Lieutenant-General—one better than Bulganin, whose title of ‘Marshal’ was hardly more meaningful than that of a Southern Colonel in Mississippi
or Tennessee. Khrushchev had, by 1949, reappeared in Moscow as a full-blown member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee, complete with overcoat, Homburg and his place on top of Lenin’s
tomb each May Day. Soon enough the old dictator was dead. To those who hardly paid attention to matters Soviet there might have been some immediate confusion as to who had really inherited
power—Beria? Malenkov? The mock Marshal, Bulganin? Or the real Marshal, Voroshilov? Nominally, the head of state was Voroshilov, and for the purposes of this visit it fell to Bulganin.
Neither Troy, nor HM Government it seemed, had any doubts as to where the real power lay. As far as Troy was concerned, Khrushchev was a rocket waiting for someone to light the blue touch paper and
retire. The only thing that was predictable about the man was that he was unpredictable. In his public persona Khrushchev had often struck Troy as having the fundamental defining characteristic of
a kitten—a boundless, reckless curiosity.

Sometime between the war and the fall of Beria, cousin Leo had vanished. Troy’s brother Rod had been in the Cabinet in the dying days of the Labour Government and had used what influence
he could. All Rod’s enquiries had yielded was that the man had never existed in the first place. A non-person, even in death. In a nation where simply to have survived was an achievement,
Khrushchev was the survivor
par excellence.

For weeks now rumours had circulated in the Western press that he had denounced Stalin, denounced him as a tyrant responsible for the slaughter of countless numbers of his own people. No one
knew for certain, and no one had been able to quote a word the man said as gospel. The Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been addressed by Khrushchev in a closed
session. Yet the effects were noticeable. Reports came in from Poland and from Hungary of a change in the political climate, amounting to a faith in the veracity of the rumour—it was, as so
many journalists had remarked, the first sign of a thaw in the cold war, the tinsel rustle of political spring.

The Band of the Royal Marines struck up. Troy looked up at the ship. An interminable row of Soviet dignitaries stood to attention for their national anthem. At their head, two stout little men
in vast black coats. Bulganin was not a well-known figure, Khrushchev was, yet they both seemed to Troy to be variations on the same theme as they made their way down the red-carpeted gangplank to
the quay. They were stout men, they were little men, but their stoutness was at odds with their boyishness. He could think of no other word to describe them. With their round, smiley faces, and
bright, darting eyes they were like two little boys, two schoolboys blown up into men with a bicycle pump.

They approached the start of the British line and began pumping flesh, Khrushchev following and smiling fiercely, Bulganin leading, smiling, it seemed, more naturally, his beautiful blue eyes
shining and his hair coiffured like icing on a cake. As he shook Troy’s hand he looked to Troy like a living parody of Sir Thomas Beecham, right up to the goatee beard. And Khrushchev,
Khrushchev only a foot away now, shaking the giant paw of Norman Cobb and looking like the Russian peasant he really was, another rendition of the Ur-Russian face that Troy had seen staring back at
him from countless pictures and photographs all his life.

Khrushchev let go of Cobb’s hand. Troy let go of Bulganin’s, and in the twinkling of an eye he found himself clasping the podgy hand of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, looking into
the nut-brown eyes of the leader of the Other World, and counting the warts on the face of the most fascinating man alive.

Khrushchev was a bore. A bully and a bore. There were no two ways about it, the man was terrible. He had all the character and gusto that Troy had expected of him, but shot
through with the corruption of power, an easy manipulation of others that manifested itself in an utter lack of regard for the feelings of those others.

In public he deferred to the nominal head of state, Bulganin, and took an impish delight in back-seat driving. In private he bawled him out, shouted at him, called him stupid and told him to the
nth detail what to say. He was scarcely better behaved towards his son Sergei, a twenty-two-year-old, slim, quiet version of his father, hidden behind what appeared to be National Health
spectacles, who smiled pleasantly at everyone and seemed as eager to please as a boy scout.

But what really put Troy off him were the jokes. Troy thought of himself as a man with a sense of humour, but Khrushchev’s jokes struck him as tasteless and adolescent, as though he were
striving too hard to outrage.

The first evening they did a mind-boggling, whistle-stop tour of the sights of London, faster than an American senator running for reelection in the boondocks, pressing the flesh while
double-parked. The Royal Festival Hall, that stirring example of the British Soviet School of Architecture; dark, brooding, ancient Westminster Abbey; sublime St Paul’s, a surviving Wren
masterpiece in the midst of a sea of wartime ruins; and the floodlit white walls of the Tower of London at dusk, with its red and black romance of beefeaters and ravens. All in less than two
hours.

At the RFH Khrushchev appeared singularly unimpressed. He looked at the prices on the bar tariff and said he’d come back on pay day when he could afford it. Not bad, thought Troy, some
sense of the wage packet if nothing else. At the Tower, informed that, according to legend, the empire would cease when the ravens left, Khrushchev quipped that he couldn’t see any ravens in
the first place. Nelson putting the telescope to his blind eye. A few smiles were forced but no one laughed. Hardly offensive, but Troy began to wonder if the man had any tact.

At St Paul’s—a building known to still even the arid souls of atheists like Troy—the old Dean showed them the vast dome, in an eerie silence of muted voices and leather
footsteps, and remarked with some pride that this was the spot on which a German incendiary had landed in 1940, how the cathedral had been saved, the damage repaired, and how London had lost
seventeen of its precious Wren churches. Khrushchev blithely remarked that the Dean wouldn’t have to worry about repairs when the Russians dropped ‘the bomb’.

He did not need to qualify the term. ‘The Bomb’ was ‘T
HE
B
OMB
’. Not HE or incendiary, not 500lb or a ton, but
mega
tons—a word still virtually
incomprehensible to most people, often paraphrased in multiples of Hiroshima: twenty Hiroshimas; fifty Hiroshimas. The same town atomised time after time in the power of metaphorical fission. In
his mind’s eye Troy saw tiny atolls in the South Pacific going whumpf and disappearing from sight beneath the icon of the times, a colossal mushroom cloud.

The Dean looked blankly at Khrushchev. The presence of an interpreter, the passage of words through a second language and a second voice, seemed somehow to deflect the sense of just who had
spoken, to deflate the sense of menace and the contrivance at outrage. Bought the time for tact that Khrushchev himself could not muster. The Dean led off, taking them in search of John
Donne’s memorial. Just behind his right shoulder Troy heard a muttered ‘Jesus Christ’ from Mulligan.

Troy rapidly lost count of the number of trips they had made. He seemed to be in and out of Claridge’s and Number 10 three or four times a day; and each evening he would dutifully report
to Cobb, usually telling him that Khrushchev had said nothing of any significance within earshot. Or did MI5 and MI6 really want to know that he had thrown a tantrum when he couldn’t find a
diamond cufflink, or that he complained constantly about the tea? And that on one occasion Troy had found him crawling around the bedroom of his suite on all fours, and had been unable to tell
whether this was another search for the missing cufflink or capitulation to the effects of his favoured drink, red pepper vodka?

On the evening of the second day, Downing Street had given a formal dinner for their guests. B & K met C & A, former Prime Ministers Churchill and Attlee, and the Leader of the
Opposition, Prime Minister-Apparent Hugh Gaitskell. The Night of the Nobs, as Clark put it.

It was an easy shift ‘doing’ Downing Street. One simply escorted the Russians there, handed over to the highly visible uniformed coppers and shuffled into a side room to sit out the
occasion in something resembling a bad version of a dentist’s waiting room. Nothing to read and nothing to do.

‘What’s that?’ said Troy as a uniformed copper pushed the door to.

‘It came yesterday, sir.’

It looked like a ten-foot-long wooden spoon.

‘It’s a ten-foot-long wooden spoon, sir. It was left on the doorstep. The PM ordered it brought in at once before the press saw it. We’re to get rid of it as soon as the
Russians are safely out of the country.’

Troy looked at the label attached to the monstrosity.

‘From the League of Empire Loyalists. We fear it may not be long enough for tomorrow’s dinner.’

‘What do you think it means?’ asked the copper.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ said Troy. ‘A long spoon to sup with the devil.’

There had been a curious reception for the two emissaries of Satan, from the minute the train slid into Victoria station; and a curious form of protest. And what they both had in common was that
they were lukewarm. Neither welcome nor dissent seemed to have feeling or meaning to it. Neither could muster a crowd large enough to cut through the roar of the traffic. This particular protest
lacked wit. Whilst the duty copper might be the dimmest of flatfoots, and possibly the only person in Britain who had not heard the cliché, it was a symbol so obvious as to be pointless. The
cliché of clichés. The League of Empire Loyalists were hardly typical of the British, a nation of non-joiners; but at the same time they were—the nation of non-joiners was also
the nation of endless committees and self-appointed bodies. This was simply the silliest of many, the association of old men who had failed to grasp the way of the world since 1945. As Rod put it,
describing so many of the institutions of the country from the Carlton Club to the magistracy, just another League of Little Men.

Molloy, with the practised skill of a career copper, had perfected the knack of sleeping bolt upright. Clark, as ever, had a book. Troy was the one who was bored. He wondered if he could get
away with stretching his legs. He opened the door quietly. There was a hum of voices, a solitary young copper standing in the hallway. Troy expected a reprimand, but the man simply nodded and said
a quiet, ‘Evenin’, sir’, as though Troy had every right to be wandering about. Emboldened by this he strolled as casually as he could up the staircase past endless portraits of
previous incumbents from Walpole via Palmerston and Disraeli all the way to Churchill, to the first floor and the reception rooms. The hum of voices grew louder. English and Russian. He could hear
someone almost shouting, and deduced that this was translation for the deaf. He was gazing out of a front window when a door behind him opened, the volume surged and he saw what he momentarily took
to be an elderly waiter shuffling towards him. It was not an elderly waiter; it was an elderly Prime Minister, a portrait come to life.