Red Joan (12 page)

The second reason she didn't join is more complicated, and is not one that she would have admitted to anyone at the time, or now for that matter. Refusing to join was simply a way of holding a small piece of herself back from Leo, because even then, before anything had really happened, she had somehow known this was necessary. She remembers how she used to feel when she was with him, succumbing to him, moulding herself around him—it was almost physical, that curling sensation across her back—and she found it disconcerting. It was not how she imagined herself to be. Not very scientific. But, then again, she had never been in love before. Perhaps that was just how it was supposed to feel.

‘For goodness' sake,' Nick says, breaking impatiently into the silence. ‘There's no crime in having had a few leftie friends at university.'

‘We're building up a picture—' Ms. Hart begins once more, but she is interrupted by Nick, who has turned to Joan, struck by a sudden thought.

‘Did Dad know about this?' he asks. ‘I don't remember either of you ever mentioning politics when I was growing up.'

Joan glances at Ms. Hart and then looks down at her hands, folded carefully in her lap. She nods. ‘Of course,' she says, her voice calm and level.

Ms. Hart makes a note of this. ‘I'd have thought, in the circumstances, he'd have wanted to know more.'

‘What circumstances?' Nick asks sharply.

‘He knew enough,' Joan says quickly. ‘He knew all he needed to know. I didn't lie to him, Nick.'

Nick raises an eyebrow. ‘I hope not.'

Joan looks back at the photograph of Leo. She doesn't know who took it or at whom he is looking, not at the camera but slightly to the side, but she recognises the expression on his face, his eyes concentrated behind the lenses of his glasses to give the impression that he is listening intently—which he probably is—while also being conscious of the camera, evident in the slight upturn of his lips, allowing just a hint of that unreadable, blameless smile.

 

He is back! He is back! He is back! She has prayed for this every night, every morning. It is nearly three months since she last saw him and in that time there have been letters, but not what you might call love letters exactly. They are more like inventories in which he lays out his itinerary of factory visits, hospital visits, details about the Moscow underground system, descriptions of nursery schools where all the children have hair cropped in exactly the same style so you can't tell the girls from the boys, lists of collectivised farms . . . The list goes on and on.

The air here is fresher than any I have ever breathed,
he writes.
The central question of the modern world—poverty in the midst of plenty—has been solved, although not yet in its entirety as there are still some technical glitches. But it will come.

There is no mention of the night they spent together in any of his correspondence, although she thinks of it often enough: how he rolled himself on top of her in the morning, raising himself onto his elbows so that his whole body pressed against her. ‘Ah, my little comrade-in-arms,' he had said, laughing at his own joke while bending down to kiss her neck, his penis thickening against her thigh. ‘Did it hurt much?'

She remembers how she burrowed her face into his neck, breathing in the smell of him, musty and sleepy, and whispered, ‘No, not much.' And then she had paused, not knowing if it was the right thing to ask or not: ‘Did it hurt you?'

He laughed at this. ‘Of course not. Why would it hurt me? Silly girl.'

There was nothing she could say to that, and he had kissed her neck and breasts before getting up and carelessly tossing a shirt over to her to wear while she drank her tea before he smuggled her out of his college. Does that mean he has done it before? she wonders. And if so, with whom? The blonde girl in the pillbox hat? Possibly. Silly of her to imagine he hasn't. He's a man, after all, and he is older than her. She knows it's different for men, biologically, even though the details of this were never covered in science lessons at school; probably it wouldn't hurt them anyway. She doesn't know and she cannot ask, because she does not want him to laugh like that again, and she can't bring herself to mention it to Sonya.

She has worried about this while he has been away, wondering what it had meant, if it meant anything at all, how it would be between them when he got back. Did he think of her? Did he miss her? But she knows not to write such things to him. He would not know what to do with them. He would reprimand her and think her ridiculous, and so she refrains, adopting his letter-writing style in her replies to him: practical, unemotional, fact-based. It is an unsatisfying style, but she supposes that it is better than nothing. At least it means he is thinking of her.

But now he is back, and she can relax because the first thing he does after dropping off his bag is to climb through the window of the linen cupboard at Newnham College and stride along the corridor to her room as if he has absolute permission to be there. Which he doesn't. If they were to be discovered like this, lying together in Joan's narrow bed, the consequences would be disastrous. She knows the rules. If a man must come into your room for whatever reason, it must be with permission from the Head Porter and, in the words of the Senior Mistress of the College, at least one foot of each party must be kept on the floor at all times, a rule which Sonya dismisses as revealing more about the conservative habits of the college authorities than presenting any barriers to copulation, but Joan has not yet plucked up the courage to ask her how exactly this is the case. Perhaps she will find out for herself soon enough.

Joan sits up and tugs the curtain across the window behind them. It is almost dark. The shadows have slunk across the bed and her throat is dry. She gets up, steps over Leo's crumpled jacket on the floor, his boots, his trousers, until she comes to the small washbasin next to the wardrobe. She hears him stir and looks around.

‘Jo-jo,' he murmurs, rubbing his eyes and looking up at her. ‘It's really you.'

She smiles. ‘Of course it's me.' She gulps down the glass of lukewarm water, and then returns to bed, sliding her legs under the sheets, feeling the bristly warmth of his body against her skin. Unexpected, somehow. She had not anticipated this amount of heat to come from Leo.

He rolls towards her and pulls her back down under the covers. ‘Do you know what I'd like now?' he asks, his lips on hers and his hands slipping down towards her bottom.

She leans forward to kiss his neck. ‘I might have an idea.'

‘Roast beef. Potatoes. The lot.'

‘Oh,' she says, disappointed. ‘And there I was thinking the gnawing sensation in your stomach was desire for me.'

He laughs. ‘It is. But I'm hungry too. The food in Russia was as bad as I remember it.'

And so there it is. He is back, and nothing has changed.

They go to a pub on the outskirts of Cambridge and order two roast dinners, playing ping-pong on the cracked green table next to the fireplace until the food arrives. Untypically for a foreigner, Leo approves of English food. He thinks hot buttered toast is the most delightful thing in the world, and he cannot understand why anyone would wish to taint the perfection of this with anything as garish as jam or marmalade or with something as foul as Marmite. But he wants more than toast now. He wants thick-sliced meat, crispy roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, stuffing, horseradish, carrots, turnips, pickled cabbage, and he wants all of it to be swimming in hot, thick gravy.

When their plates arrive, she picks out a selection of food from her plate to add to his. ‘Have some of mine.'

‘Don't you want it?' He does not stop eating while he speaks, but he pushes her offering back towards her.

‘No, no. You have it. I can't eat all of it anyway. And you look hungry.'

He grins, and then spears some of her extra Yorkshire pudding onto his fork. ‘I am. Thanks, Jo-jo. My sweet little comrade.'

There it is, his old name for her, still there. She smiles. ‘What were you eating out there anyway?'

‘Oh, you know. This and that.'

What does that mean? She wants to know, she really does. She cannot imagine what he might have eaten.

‘More than most of the population anyway, that's for sure.'

Joan frowns. ‘I thought you said . . . '

He waves his fork. ‘I did. The problem
is
solved, theoretically.' He glances back over his shoulder and then leans forward conspiratorially. ‘But I mentioned technical glitches, didn't I?'

Joan nods.

‘Well,' he says, and then pauses, seemingly trying to decide whether to confide in Joan or not. ‘You must promise never to mention this to anyone.'

‘Of course I won't mention it.'

‘No, I mean it. You have to promise.'

Joan looks at him. She does not understand what could be so important but she sees that he wants her to say the words. ‘I promise,' she says.

He nods. ‘They took me out to the countryside to see what collectivisation meant in practice for the majority of peasants. Most of the farms were pretty well run, but the food production figures they were submitting just didn't seem to me to add up.' He pauses and takes a sip of beer. ‘I mentioned this to one of the economists at the university, Grigori Fyodorovich. To be honest, I pestered him about it, and even got my thesis out to go through the figures with him until eventually he cracked.' He pauses. ‘He told me something that he made me promise I would never link back to him. And I made him that promise. That's why you must never tell anyone. It's not my secret, or yours. It's his.'

‘I understand.'

‘You remember the statistics I'm using in my thesis?'

‘The comparisons with 1928?'

‘Exactly. Well, it turns out they are too good to be true. Grigori Fyodorovich told me that the 1928 figures come from the weight of the grain after it has been harvested and bagged. The Barn Yield, as it's known.'

Joan frowns, confused. ‘Well, how else would they weigh it?'

‘The way they do now. The Biological Yield. They estimate the amount of grain in the field before it has been harvested and they use those figures.'

‘So they're lying?'

‘No,' Leo whispers sharply. ‘Not lying.' He hesitates, and his expression softens a little. ‘Misleading, perhaps. There are many people who would like the Soviet system to fail, so naturally they're cautious about releasing statistics which could be exploited by their enemies.'

Joan allows this information to filter through her mind before responding. ‘But you'll publish this information, won't you?'

Leo twists his fork in his hand. ‘I don't know. I haven't decided yet.' He pauses. ‘I will if it comes to war and these figures aren't corrected.'

‘Why? What difference would that make?'

‘The Soviet Union relied heavily on aid from America during the last war and they will do again if Hitler targets Russia as he is bound to do.'

‘And?'

‘It's quite simple, Jo-jo. If the official figures are used, it will make America or Britain or whoever is in a position to provide aid think that there are more reserves in the country than there actually are. Russia would be left to starve.'

‘Don't you think people have the right to know the truth anyway, even if there isn't a war?'

Leo looks at her. ‘I think everyone has the right to live in a fair society. And if fudging a few figures achieves that aim then I'd say it's justifiable, wouldn't you?'

Joan says nothing. There is something about the strength of his conviction which makes his logic hard to dispute. She watches him as he dips a roast potato in gravy before transferring it to his mouth and then smiles. There were frequent occasions during the three months he was away when she had almost forgotten what he looked like, when she wished she had a photograph of him, something still and steady to help her remember. Perhaps one of him looking just as he does right now, holding his beer in one hand and his fork in the other; distracted, frowning, close enough for her to reach out and touch. Or maybe a gentler pose, him asleep in her arms as he was this afternoon, or perhaps as he was the first time she saw him, standing at the front of the stage and talking to his serious-looking comrades, his hands thrust into his pockets so that his jacket bunched up over his slender hips.

But even now, when he is sitting right in front of her, she finds that he will not stay still in her mind, that his face will not be still, and she realises that it is this quality in him which makes him so hard to remember accurately: the way his face slips from one expression to another in just a fraction of a second, leaving his features unchanged yet somehow transformed, like a barely noticeable flicker of paper in the animation booklets of her childhood. Yes, there it is: she can see it happening now, that infinitesimal shift in his eyes as he notices her watching him.

‘But remember, whatever happens, you must never tell anyone,' he whispers.

She leans over and kisses him on the cheek. ‘I promise.'

The Times,
24 August 1939

 

From Our Special Correspondent, MOSCOW

 

Herr von Ribbentrop, having signed the German–Russian Non-Aggression Pact, spent this morning sightseeing and then left by air for Germany. The terms of the Pact, published here this morning, with smiling photographs of M. Stalin, M. Molotov, and Herr von Ribbentrop, show that Russia has abandoned the policy of the Peace Front.

That being so, the continued presence of the British and French military missions is superfluous and the draft Three-Power Pact so laboriously negotiated is so much waste paper. The newspapers lay stress on the value of the Pact as a contribution to peace. The Peace Front is nowhere mentioned.