The Russia House (41 page)

Yet here was Igor acting as Yakov’s closest friend and putting himself out for him in risky and invaluable ways. ‘
If you have a letter for Yakov, you have only to give it to me. I have established an excellent line of communication to the sanatorium. I know somebody who makes the journey almost every week
,’ he had told her at their last meeting.

‘The sanatorium?’ she had cried excitedly. ‘Then where is he? Where is it located?’

But it was as if Igor had not yet thought of the answer to this question, for he had scowled and looked uncomfortable and pleaded State secrecy. Us, State secrecy, when we are flaunting the State’s secrets!

I am being unfair to him, she thought. I am starting to see deception everywhere. In Igor, even in Barley.

Barley. She frowned. He had no business to criticise Yakov’s declaration of affection. Who does he think he is, this Westerner with his attaching manners and cynical suspicions? Coming so close so quickly, playing God to Matvey and my children?

I shall never trust a man who was brought up without dogma, she told herself severely.

I can love a believer, I can love a heretic, but I cannot love an Englishman.

She switched on her little radio and ran through the shortwave bands, having first put in the earpiece so as not to disturb the twins. But as she listened to the different voices clamouring for her soul – Deutsche Welle, Voice of America, Radio Liberty, Voice of Israel, Voice of God knew whom, each one so cosy, so superior, so compelling – an angry confusion came over her. I’m a Russian! she wanted to shout back at them. Even in tragedy, I dream of a better world than yours!

But
what
tragedy?

The phone was ringing. She grabbed the receiver. But it was only Nasayan, an altered man these days, checking on tomorrow’s plans.

‘Listen, I am confirming privately that you really wish to be at the October stand tomorrow. Only we must begin early, you see. If you have to get your kids to school or something of that sort, I can easily instruct Yelizavyeta Alexeyevna to come instead of you. It is no hardship. You have only to tell me.’

‘You are very kind, Grigory Tigranovich, and I appreciate your call. But having spent most of last week helping to put up the exhibits, I should naturally like to be present at the official opening. Matvey can manage very well to see the children off to school.’

Thoughtfully, she put the receiver back on its cradle. Nasayan, my God – why do we address each other like characters on the stage? Who do we think is listening to us who requires such rounded sentences? If I can talk to an English stranger as if he is my lover, why can’t I talk normally to an Armenian who is my colleague?

He rang, and she knew at once that she had been waiting all this while for his call, because she was already smiling. Unlike Igor, he did not say his name or hers.

‘Elope with me,’ he said.

‘Tonight?’

‘Horses are saddled, food for three days.’

‘But are you also sober enough to elope?’

‘Amazingly, I am.’ A pause. ‘It’s not for want of trying but nothing happened. Must be old age.’

He sounded sober too. Sober and close.

‘But what about the book fair? Are you going to desert it as you deserted the audio fair?’

‘To hell with the book fair. We’ve got to do it before or never. Afterwards we’ll be too tired. How are you?’

‘Oh, I am furious with you. You have completely bewitched my family, and now they ask only when you will come back with more tobacco and crayons.’

Another pause. He was not usually so thoughtful when he was joking.

‘That’s what I do. I bewitch people, then the moment they’re under my spell I cease to feel anything for them.’

‘But that’s terrible!’ she cried, deeply shocked. ‘Barley, what are you telling me?’

‘Just repeating the wisdom of an early wife, that’s all. She said I had impulses but no feelings and I shouldn’t wear a duffle coat in London. Anyone tells you something like that, you believe it for the rest of your life. I’ve never worn a duffle coat since.’

‘Barley, that woman – Barley, that was a totally cruel and irresponsible thing for her to say. I am sorry but she is completely wrong. She was provoked, I am sure. But she is wrong.’

‘She is, is she? So what do I feel? Enlighten me.’

She broke out laughing, realising she had walked straight into his trap.

‘Barley, you are a very, very bad man. I shall have nothing to do with you.’

‘Because I don’t feel anything?’

‘For one thing, you feel protection for people. We all noticed that today, and we were grateful.’

‘More.’

‘For another, you feel a sense of honour, I would say. You are decadent, naturally, because you are a Westerner. That is normal. But you are redeemed because you feel honour.’

‘Are there any pies left over?’

‘You mean you feel hunger too?’

‘I want to come and eat them.’

‘Now?’

‘Now.’

‘That is completely impossible! We are all in bed already and it’s nearly midnight.’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Barley, this is too ridiculous. We are about to begin the book fair, both of us have a dozen invitations.’

‘What time?’

A beautiful silence was settling between them.

‘You may come at perhaps-half-past-seven.’

‘I may be early.’

For a long while after that neither of them spoke. But the silence joined them more closely than words could have done. They became two heads on a single pillow, ear to ear. And when he rang off it was not his jokes and self-ironies that stayed with her but the tone of contented sincerity – she would almost say solemnity – that he had seemed unable to keep out of his voice.

He was singing.

Inside his head, and outside it too. In his heart and all over his body at last, Barley Blair was singing.

He was in his big grey bedroom at the gloomy Mezh on the eve of the Moscow book fair, and he was singing ‘Bless This House’ in the recognisable manner of Mahalia Jackson while he pirouetted round the room with a glass of mineral water in his hand, glimpsing his reflection in the immense television screen that was the room’s one glory.

Sober.

Hot sober.

Barley Blair.

Alone.

He had drunk nothing. In the safe truck for his debriefing, though he had sweated like a racehorse, nothing. Not even a glass of water while he had regaled Paddy and Cy with a sweetened, unworried version of his day.

At the French publishers’ party at the Rossiya with Wicklow, where he had positively shone with confidence, nothing.

At the Swedes’ party at the National with Henziger, where he had shone yet more brightly, he had grabbed a glass of Georgian
shampanskoye
in self-protection because Zapadny was so pointedly amazed he was not drinking. But he had contrived to leave it undrunk behind a flower vase. So still nothing.

And at the Doubleday party at the Ukraina with Henziger again, shining like the North Star by now, he had clutched a mineral water with a bit of lemon floating in it to look like gin and tonic.

So nothing. Not out of highmindedness. Not a reformed spirit, God forbid. He had not signed the Pledge or turned over a new leaf. It was merely that he wished nothing to mar the clear-headed, reasoned ecstasy that was collecting in him, this unfamiliar sense of being at dreadful risk and equal to it, of knowing that whatever was happening he had prepared himself for it, and that if nothing was happening he was ready for that too, because his preparedness was an all-round defence with a sacred absolute at its centre.

I have joined the tiny ranks of people who know what they will do first if the ship catches fire in the middle of the night, he thought; and what they will do last, or not do at all. He knew in ordered detail what he considered worth saving and what was unimportant to him. And what was to be shoved aside, stepped over and left for dead.

A great house-cleaning had taken place inside his mind, comprising quite humble details as well as grand themes. Because, as Barley had recently observed, it was in humble detail that grand themes wrought their havoc.

The clarity of his view amazed him. He peered round him, took a turn or two, sang a few bars. He came back to where he was, and knew that nothing had been left out.

Not the momentary inflection of uncertainty in her voice. Or the shadow of doubt flitting across the dark pools of her eyes.

Or Goethe’s straight lines of handwriting instead of wild scrawls.

Or Goethe’s cumbersome, untypical jokes about bureaucrats and vodka.

Or Goethe’s guilty dirge about the way he had treated her, when for twenty years he had treated her however he had damn well felt like, including using her as a throwaway delivery-girl.

Or Goethe’s callow promise to make it all up to her in the future, so long as she’ll stay in the game for the time being, when it is an article of Goethe’s faith that the future no longer interests him, that his whole obsession is with now. ‘There is only
now
!’

Yet from these spindrift theories that were most likely nothing more than theories, Barley’s mind flew effortlessly to the grandest prize of his clarified perception: that in the context of Goethe’s notion of what he was achieving, Goethe was
right
, and that for most of his life Goethe had stood on one side of a corrupt and anachronistic equation while Barley in his ignorance had stood on the other.

And that if Barley were ever called upon to choose, he would rather go Goethe’s path than Ned’s or anybody else’s, because his presence would be urgently required in the extreme middle ground of which he had elected himself a citizen.

And that everything that had happened to Barley since Peredelkino had delivered the proof of this. The old isms were dead, the contest between Communism and capitalism had ended in a wet whimper. Its rhetoric had fled underground into the secret chambers of the grey men who were still dancing away long after the music had ended.

As to his loyalty to his country, Barley saw it only as a question of which England he chose to serve. His last ties to the imperial fantasy were dead. The chauvinist drumbeat revolted him. He would rather be trampled by it than march with it. He knew a better England by far, and it was inside himself.

He lay on his bed, waiting for the fear to seize him, but it wouldn’t. Instead, he found himself playing a kind of mental chess, because chess was about possibilities, and it seemed best to contemplate them in tranquillity rather than try and sort through them when the roof was falling in.

Because if Armageddon didn’t strike, there was nothing lost. But if Armageddon did, there was much to save.

So Barley began to think. And Barley began to make his preparations with a cool head, exactly as Ned would have advised if Ned were still holding the reins.

He thought till early morning and dozed a bit and when he woke he went on thinking, and by the time he strode cheerfully into breakfast already looking round for the fun of the fair, there was an entire section of his head that was given over full time to thinking what the fools who do it describe as the unthinkable.

14

‘Oh come, Ned,’ said Clive airily, still elated by the wizardry of the transmission. ‘The Bluebird’s been ill before. Several times.’

‘I know,’ said Ned distractedly. ‘I know.’ And then, ‘Maybe I don’t mind him being ill. Maybe I mind him writing.’

Sheriton was listening chin in hand, as he had been listening to the tape. An affinity had grown up between Ned and Sheriton, as in an operation it must. They were handling the transfer of power as if it had happened long ago.

‘But my dear man, that’s what we all do when we’re ill,’ Clive exclaimed in a misjudged demonstration of human understanding. ‘We
write
to the whole world!’

It had never occurred to me that Clive was capable of illness, or that he had friends to write to.

‘I mind him handing chatty letters to mysterious intermediaries. And I mind him talking about trying to bring more materials for Barley,’ Ned said. ‘We know he never normally writes to her. We know he’s security conscious to a fault. Suddenly he falls ill and writes her a gushing five-page love letter via Igor. Igor who? Igor when? How?’

‘He should have photographed the letter,’ said Clive, becoming disapproving of Barley. ‘Or taken it off her. One or the other.’

Ned was too wrapped up in his thoughts to give this suggestion the contempt it deserved.

‘How could he? She knows him as a publisher. That’s all she knows him as.’

‘Unless the Bluebird told her otherwise,’ said Clive.

‘He wouldn’t,’ Ned retorted, and returned to his thoughts. ‘There was a car,’ he said. ‘A red car then a white car. You saw the watch report. The red car went in first, then the white car took over.’

‘That is pure speculation. On a warm Sunday the whole of Moscow takes to the countryside,’ said Clive knowledgeably.

He waited for a reaction but in vain, so he returned to the subject of the letter. ‘
Katya
didn’t have any problems with it,’ he objected. ‘
Katya’s
not crying foul. She’s jumping for joy. If she didn’t smell a rat, and Scott Blair didn’t, why should
we
– sitting here in London, doing their worrying for them?’

‘He asked for the shopping list,’ said Ned, as if still hearing distant music. ‘A final and exhaustive list of questions. Why did he do that?’

Sheriton had finally stirred himself. He was flagging Ned down with his big paw. ‘Ned, Ned, Ned, Ned. Okay? It’s Day One again, so we’re jumpy. Let’s get some sleep.’

He stood up. So did Clive and so did I. But Ned stayed doggedly rooted where he was, his hands clasped before him on his desk.

Sheriton spoke down at him. With affection, but with force as well. ‘Ned, just hear me, Ned, okay? Ned?’

‘I’m not deaf.’

‘No, but you’re tired. Ned, if we bad-mouth this operation one more time, it will never come back. We are going with
your
man, the one
you
brought to
us
in order to persuade
us
. We moved hell on earth to get this far. We have the source. We have the appropriation. We have the influential audience. We are within pissing distance of filling gaps in our knowledge that no smart machines, no electronic heavy breathers, no Pentagon Jesuits can get within light years of. If we keep our nerve, and Barley does, and Bluebird does, we will have landed a bonanza beyond the dreams of the most accomplished fantasists. If we stay in there.’