Old Flames (8 page)

‘Harumgrrum werrumbrum,’ said Churchill.

Troy understood not a syllable. What could the former leader of the western world, the undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the Second World War, possibly have to say to him?

The following evening, just before dusk, they took a launch down the Thames from Westminster Pier to Greenwich, one of the pleasantest trips London could offer. It had its
effect. A man who talked nineteen to the dozen had shut up by the time they slid under Tower Bridge. Khrushchev did what any man with the slightest poetry in his soul would do. He stared. London
changed from the dwarfing magnificence of St Paul’s, hogging the horizon with not a building to equal it for height or breadth, to the dark depths of the East End, a skyline slashed by the
blades of cranes and derricks, shoreline fretted by a hundred wharves and harbours, flashing with the rumpled black-and-red sails of countless Thames barges motionless in the Pool of London. As
they rounded the Isle of Dogs, the hill of Greenwich came into view, the complex, eye-baffling beauty of the Royal Naval College, the distant outline of the Observatory perched on the hilltop,
dividing East from West along an utterly arbitrary line. What better symbol could there be for this entire visit?

Khrushchev preached the new gospel of peaceful coexistence to the Senior Service, spoke of the speed of the arms race, described the
Ordzhonikidze,
the ship that had brought him to
Britain, as state of the art technology that would be out of date within a matter of months. It seemed to Troy to be a sound argument. Depending on how you read it, it was a warning to us all or a
threat to the West. Khrushchev tipped the scales, and added that the Russians had no wish to ‘push you off the planet’. But then that in turn implied that they had the power to do
so.

Within minutes of him resuming his seat Troy heard Khrushchev offering to sell the
Ordzhonikidze
to the First Sea Lord.

‘Buy two, and I’ll throw in a submarine for free,’ he said in best adman parlance.

The Englishman looked utterly baffled by this. He had no idea whether to take it as a joke or to name a price. Troy had no sympathy with such men, and on any other occasion it might have been a
good wheeze, a good ruffling of the feathers of these imperial peacocks; but Troy found the menace that lurked just beneath the surface of this unruly schoolboy behaviour too hard to stomach. Three
days of jokes and he was beginning to think there was no such thing as a joke that didn’t have hidden depths just like an iceberg. Perhaps the joke was the defence of the underdog? Coming
from the topdog it seemed brutal, bullying and boorish.

Only minutes later Khrushchev turned his sights on the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘one day soon we will be able to put nuclear warheads onto
guided missiles. Believe me, it will change the face of warfare.’

Troy knew from the look on the man’s face, as the interpreter put it into English, what was coming. His expression was the blinking, startled blankness of shock.

‘I find that,’ the interpreter reported back to Khrushchev, ‘a shocking suggestion.’

Khrushchev shrugged a little. ‘It may well be,’ he said. ‘It is nonetheless the future.’

The baldness of truth or the nakedness of threat? And once more Troy’s sympathies swung. Khrushchev’s party was over forty strong. They had required an entire floor of
Claridge’s, they were trucked out for all the interminable public functions in varying combinations in a logistic nightmare requiring a convoy of limousines, and enough coppers to mount an
invasion of Latvia or Lithuania. Khrushchev meant to show off Russia with an eighty-legged advertisement. Prominent in that advert were Messrs Tupelov and Kurchatov, known respectively for their
work on supersonic flight and atomic physics. If not to rub home the possibilities in the conjunction of the two, why else had Khrushchev brought them? To be shocked was the utmost naiveté.
The man was CIGS. To be shocked was crass stupidity. If we too were not going to put our nuclear weapons onto rockets and aim them at the cities of our enemies, why else had we gone to the trouble
of hijacking the German rocket scientists? Why, even now, was Werner von Braun, inventor of the V2, holed up in some American laboratory if not to invent a rocket capable of carrying a nuclear
warhead? Or did this man really think that we could fight another war as we had fought most of the others, by sending a gunboat out to one mutinous colony or another, or an expeditionary force to a
troubled ally—was the word ‘Imperial’ in his title so brain-befuddling that he could not see the world as it had been reborn in fire at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Both sides bored him rigid. He got into the habit of never being without a book or newspaper. Prompted by the Greenwich trip, he dug out an old copy of
The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad,
in which a child is blown to pieces unwittingly carrying a bomb to the Observatory. Every time he was shuffled into a side room at Number 10 or stuck in Khrushchev’s suite at Claridge’s
he would read a few more pages of Conrad and scan the newspapers. Occasionally the two worlds would meet. The world in front of his eyes would be reflected in the remote world-out-there, the
world-in-print: thirty thousand dissidents released in Poland; Soviet Admiral of the Fleet Kuznetsov sacked; Stalinist Politburo member Andrei Vishinsky denounced for his part in the show trials of
the thirties; the head of MI6 to be replaced. This was oddly timed. Why now of all times? And of course the newspapers did not name the new man. Troy made a mental note to ask Rod the next time
they met. Rod could not resist a bet, and Troy had a vague memory of him putting ten bob on some chap called White, or was it Black?

On the Saturday, out at Harwell, the Atomic Research Establishment, Khrushchev hit rock bottom in Troy’s esteem. Establishment was an odd term; it concealed more than it revealed about the
true nature of the place. But, in part, it was a factory, and being such had factory workers. As the visiting party sped around in their white coats, they would pause like passing royalty for
meaningless banter with the working man.

The working man departed from the script. A large man, northern accent, gentle face, huge hands, which he, playing the part to the hilt, was found wiping on a rag as the party approached. Troy
had no idea what job he did in this complex of concealment—it seemed to him that the only reason they were here was to shove the notion of ‘atomic’ down Khrushchev’s throat.
All the way there Troy had heard him ask, ‘Is this a factory, now? I asked for more factories.’

Khrushchev shook the working man’s hand.

‘Pleased to meet yer,’ the working man said.

Then he looked at his hand, palm up, checking the level of grease and dirt.

‘Yer’ll not have to mind the muck,’ he said. ‘Honest toil, after all.’

He smiled. Khrushchev smiled at the translation. For a moment they seemed to be on the same wavelength.

‘I’m a Union man meself,’ the working man went on. ‘Man and boy. Joined when ah were sixteen.’

Khrushchev clearly found this less than fascinating, but continued to smile.

‘Ah wanted to ask yer, like.’

His eyes strayed off to the accompanying faces, seeking authority. He looked at Troy, Troy pointed discreetly to the young chinless wonder from the Foreign Office who had trailed after them all
day looking lost.

‘I mean, it’s OK ter ask ’im a question, in’t it? ’E dun’t mind answerin’ questions.’

The FO wonder looked nonplussed. Khrushchev’s interpreter whispered it rapidly in his ear. Khrushchev said,
‘Da, da,’
syllables so simple as to be comprehensible across
any barrier, and gestured with his hand. A flicking, upward motion that seemed to Troy indicative of his dwindling patience.

‘When are you going to have free trade unions in the East?’ the working man asked at last, without a trace of the hesitation that had dogged him up to now.

The FO man gasped audibly. He’d obviously been expecting something about the price of cabbage, or Khrushchev’s recipe for a bloody Mary. The interpreter, a man who seemed to exercise
no censorship on anything put to him, rendered it precisely for Khrushchev. It was, Troy thought, the first sensible question anyone had asked. Khrushchev didn’t walk off in outrage. Nor did
he attempt an answer. He behaved like a politician; did what any politician, in any country, would do. He ducked it.

‘We’ll get nowhere if we start criticising each other. Consider our point of view and we will consider yours.’

Which meant absolutely nothing.

‘He’s just another damn politician,’ Troy told Charlie when Charlie phoned to ask ‘how things were going’.

‘What did you expect? The new Messiah?’

‘No. I just … I just thought he’d be … well … different.’

‘Oh, he’s different all right,’ said Charlie.

And Troy found himself wondering whether he could wait long enough to find out how different.

By the Monday following, as they piled into black Daimlers once more for dinner with the Labour bigwigs at the Commons, he found an old Hollywood phrase lodged in his mind:
‘Who do I have to fuck to get
off
this picture?’

But as they entered the Harcourt Room to be greeted by Hugh Gaitskell, suddenly Troy realised the turn the evening was about to take. The big picture was about to start. All they’d had
till now was Pearl, Dean and Younger and a short from the Three Stooges. Tonight they were showing in Cinemascope.

Gaitskell held out his hand. The interpreter rattled off his few words of greeting. Then Gaitskell said, ‘Allow me to introduce my Foreign Affairs spokesman, Rodyon Troy.’ And before
the interpreter could get his twopenn’orth in, Rod was shaking hands with Khrushchev and chatting to him in his flawless, old-fashioned, pre-revolutionary, upper-crust, Muscovite-accented
Russian.

Khrushchev’s eyes flickered between Rod and Troy. The subtle, perfect double-take of a comedian. Jack Benny eyeing Rochester could not have done it better. Rod was taller, stouter, older
than Troy, but the family resemblance was inescapable: the thick mop of black hair, the ebony eyes, the full mouth.

Rod led Khrushchev off into the room. He shook hands with odds and sods from the Shadow Cabinet, scarcely seeming to listen to the routine Russian rattle of Rod’s Who’s Who in the
Labour Party. As he gripped the hand of Shadow Chancellor Harold Wilson, Khrushchev’s piggy eyes shot Troy a reproachful glance, and he knew that whatever happened, the return to
Claridge’s would not be pleasant. Perhaps there was a God after all? Perhaps his wish had been granted, his cover blown—and in the morning Cobb would kick him off the job?

A Commons waiter appeared suddenly at his side.

‘Mr Troy, sir. We’ve put you at the top table. Next to Mr Brown. Your sergeants at opposite ends of the furthest table. Mr Cobb said you should be spread out across what he called
the field of vision.’

God, Cobb was an idiot. Full of jargon and fury. Signifying bugger all.

‘Good,’ Troy said. ‘When Manny Shinwell pulls out his sawn-off shotgun I want to be certain of catching him in a crossfire.’

The waiter didn’t seem to get the joke.

‘Mr Shinwell will not be attending, sir,’ he said quite seriously.

Perhaps Troy was catching tastelessness from Khrushchev? He found a place with his name card on it. There was nothing else to do, so he sat down, feeling the nip as his Browning in its ludicrous
holster jabbed him in the ribs. A few minutes later, the table began to fill. Next but one to him was Sergei, next to him one of the interpreters, next to him Wilson, next to him Rod, next to him
another interpreter, next to him Bulganin, then the last interpreter, then Khrushchev and then Gaitskell. He looked at the place name of the vacant seat between himself and Sergei. It said
‘Mr Brown’. But which Mr Brown?

Way over the other side, he could see Clem Attlee take his seat; down the room Clark and Beynon looked distinctly uncomfortable, disturbed by, rather than appreciative of, the democratic touch
that had led them to be seated at the table and fed, rather than stuck along the walls and ignored for the duration of a five-course dinner. He didn’t envy them—ordinary coppers having
to make small talk with the people’s representatives, whose grasp of the people they represented was based on researchers’ briefings and what the newspapers told them to believe.
He’d no idea what he’d say himself if any of these unworldly beings deigned to engage him in small talk. Down there with Clark and Beynon he caught a glimpse of Tom Driberg. A friend
from the war years. Too far away for a chat. Then he heard the scrape of a chair being pulled back and turned to see a short, stout, owlish man sat next to him. Brown. Of course. George Brown. MP
for Somewhere-up-North. Shadow Minister for Something-or-Other. He had met him once or twice. Neither a friend nor an enemy of Rod’s. Somewhat to the right of the party, and known for his
outspokenness.

Brown exchanged a few pleasantries with Troy. Nice enough bloke, thought Troy. The chap on his left was deep in conversation with his neighbour, and when Brown started an awkward, mediated chat
with Sergei, Troy realised he had been let off very lightly, and was free to graze his way through the awful House of Commons food and … well … dammit … daydream. In the event of any of
the old fogeys really having a shotgun, Beynon could be the one to plug him dead.

He dreamed his way through the delights of a weekend back in the country, something he looked forward to after a fortnight traipsing around London. Of spotted pigs and sprouting Aprilish
vegetables. And when he had dreamed his rural idyll away he seemed to see in his mind’s eye the score of a Thelonious Monk arrangement he had spent a small age trying to master.
April in
Paris.
The score was an illusion. He had never seen it written down—nor, he felt, had Monk—it was a visible pattern of fingers moving across a keyboard. An audible antipattern of
deliberative tangents, of musical geometry.

He had dreamed a dream too far. He could smell pipe tobacco, pulling him back to the solid world. The meal was over. They were into the speeches. He hadn’t noticed the pudding even as he
ate it. Khrushchev was on his feet, the translator racing to keep up with him. And the seat next to him was empty. At some point Brown had sloped off. Troy looked around. Brown had moved around to
face Khrushchev across the table, the pipe smoke was his. Suddenly Driberg appeared in the vacant seat.