The Russia House (43 page)

I was thinking about the island too. About the evening Barley and I had stood on the shingle beach watching the fog-bank roll at us across the grey Atlantic.

‘They’d never get her out, would they?’ Barley said. ‘Not if things went wrong.’

I didn’t answer and I don’t think he expected me to, but he was right. She was a thoroughbred Soviet national and she had committed a thoroughbred Soviet crime. She was nowhere near the swappable class.

‘Anyway, she’d never leave her children,’ he said, confirming his own doubts.

We watched the sea for a while, his eyes on Katya and mine on Hannah, who would never leave her children either, but wanted to bring them with her, and make an honest man out of a career-obsessed Chancery Lane hack who was sleeping with his senior partner’s wife.

‘Raymond Chandler!’ Uncle Matvey yelled from his chair, over the clamour of neighbours’ television sets.

‘Terrific,’ Barley said.

‘Agatha Christie!’

‘Ah well, now,
Agatha
.’

‘Dashiel Hammett! Dorothy Sayers. Josephine Tey.’

Barley sat on the sofa where Katya had settled him. The living room was tiny. The span of his arms could have bridged the width of it. A glass-fronted corner cupboard contained the family treasures. Katya had already given him the tour of them. The pottery mugs, made by a friend for her wedding, their medallions portraying the bride and groom. The Leningrad coffee set, no longer complete, that had belonged to the lady in the wood frame on the top shelf. The old sepia photograph of a Tolstoyan couple, the man bearded and resolute in his stiff white collar, the girl in her bonnet and fur muff.

‘Matvey is passionate for English detective fiction,’ Katya called from the kitchen, where she had last things to do.

‘Me too,’ said Barley untruthfully.

‘He is telling you it was not permitted under the Czars. They would never have tolerated such an intrusion into their police system. Do you have vodka? No more for Matvey, please. You must take some food. We are not alcoholics like you Westerners. We do not drink without food.’

Under the pretext of examining her books, Barley stepped into the tiny passage from where he could see her. Jack London, Hemingway and Joyce, Dreiser and John Fowles. Heine, Remarque and Rilke. The twins were in the bathroom chattering. He gazed at her through the open kitchen door. Her gestures had an air of timeless and deliberate delay. She’s become a Russian again, he thought. When something works, she’s grateful. When it doesn’t work, it’s life. From the living room Matvey was still talking gaily.

‘What’s he saying now?’ Barley asked.

‘He is talking about the siege.’

‘I love you.’

‘The Leningraders refused to accept that they were beaten.’ She was preparing cakes of liver on rice. Her hands kept still a moment, then went on with their work. ‘Shostakovich still composed even if the ink froze in his inkwell. The novelists went on writing, you could hear a chapter of a new novel any week if you knew the right cellars to go to.’

‘I love you,’ he repeated. ‘All my failures were preparations for meeting you. Fact.’

She breathed out sharply and they both fell silent, for a moment deaf to Matvey’s jolly monologue from the sitting room, and to the sounds of splashing from the bathroom.

‘What else does he say?’ Barley asked.

‘Barley –’ she protested.

‘Please. Tell me what he’s saying.’

‘The Germans were four kilometres from the city on the south side. They covered the outskirts with machine-gun fire and shelled the centre with artillery.’ She handed him mats and knives and forks and followed him to the living room. ‘Two hundred and fifty grams of bread for a labourer, others a hundred and twenty-five. Are you really so fascinated by Matvey, or are you pretending to be polite, as usual?’

‘It’s a mature, unselfish, absolute, thrilling love. I’ve never known anything approaching it. I thought you ought to be the first to know.’

Matvey was beaming at Barley in unalloyed adoration. His new English pipe gleamed from his top pocket. Katya held Barley’s stare, started to laugh, shook her head, not in negation but in daze. The twins rushed in wearing their dressing-gowns and swung on Barley’s hands. Katya settled them to the table and put Matvey at the head. Barley sat beside her while she poured the cabbage soup. With a prodigious show of power Sergey drew the cork from a wine bottle, but Katya would take no more than a half-glass and Matvey was permitted only vodka. Anna broke ranks to fetch a drawing she had made after a visit to the Timiryasev Academy: horses, a real wheatfield, plants that could survive the snow. Matvey was telling the story of the old man in the machine shop across the road, and once more Barley insisted on hearing every word.

‘There was an old man Matvey knew, a friend of my father’s,’ Katya said. ‘He had a machine shop. When he was too weak from starving, he strapped himself to the machinery so that he would not collapse. That was how Matvey and my father found him when he died. Strapped to the machinery. Frozen. Matvey also wishes you to know that he personally wore a luminous badge on his coat’ – Matvey was proudly indicating the very spot on his pullover – ‘so that he didn’t knock into his friends in the dark when they took their buckets to fetch water from the Neva. So. That is enough of Leningrad,’ she said firmly. ‘You have been very generous, Barley, as usual. I hope you are sincere.’

‘I have never been so sincere in my life.’

Barley was in the middle of toasting Matvey’s health when the telephone started ringing beside the sofa. Katya sprang up but Sergey was ahead of her. He put the receiver to his ear and listened, then replaced it on the cradle with a shake of his head.

‘So many misconnections,’ Katya said, and handed round plates for the liver cakes.

There was only her room. There was only her bed.

The children had gone to their bed and Barley could hear them snuffling in their sleep. Matvey lay on his army bedroll in the living room, already dreaming of Leningrad. Katya sat upright and Barley sat beside her, holding her hand while he watched her face against the uncurtained window.

‘I love Matvey too,’ he said.

She nodded and gave a short laugh. He put his knuckles against her cheek and discovered that she was weeping.

‘Just not in the same way I love you,’ he explained. ‘I love children, uncles, dogs, cats and musicians. The entire Ark is my personal responsibility. But I love you so profoundly that I am ashamed to be articulate. I would be very grateful if we could find a way to silence me. I look at you, and I am absolutely sick of the sound of my own voice. Do you want that in writing?’

Then with both hands he turned her face to him and kissed her. Then he guided her towards the top of the bed and laid her head on the pillow and kissed her again, first her lips and then her closed wet eyelashes while her arms gathered round his back and drew him down on her. Then she pushed him away from her and sprang up and went to look at the twins before returning. Then she slid the bolt inside her bedroom door.

‘If the children come, you must dress and we must be very serious,’ she warned, kissing him.

‘Can I tell them I love you?’

‘If you do I shall not interpret.’

‘Can I tell you?’

‘If you are very quiet.’

‘Will you interpret?’

She was no longer weeping. She was no longer smiling. Black, logical eyes, searching like his own. An embrace without reservation, no hidden codicils, no small print to the agreement.

I had never known Ned in such a mood. He had become the Jonah of his own operation and his rugged stoicism only made his forebodings harder to take. In the situation room he sat at his desk as if he were presiding at a court martial, while Sheriton lolled beside him like an intelligent Teddy bear. And when as a reckless throw I walked him down the road to the Connaught where I occasionally took Hannah and, to ease the waiting, fed him a magical dinner in the Grill, I still could not penetrate the mask of his forbearance.

For the truth was, his pessimism was seriously affecting my own spirits. I was on a see-saw. Clive and Sheriton were up one end, Ned was the dead weight at the other. And since I am no great decision-taker, it was all the more disturbing to watch a man normally so incisive resign himself to ostracism.

‘You’re seeing ghosts, Ned,’ I told him with little of Sheriton’s conviction. ‘You’ve gone far beyond whatever anybody else is thinking. All right, it’s not your case any more. That doesn’t mean it’s a shipwreck. And your credibility is, well, ebbing.’

‘A final and exhaustive list,’ Ned said again, as if the phrase had been dinned into him by a hypnotist. ‘Why final? Why exhaustive? Answer me that. When Barley saw him in Leningrad, he wouldn’t even accept our preliminary questionnaire. He threw it back in Barley’s face. Now he’s asking for the whole shopping list in one go.
Asking
for it. The
final
list. The Grand Slam. We’re to get it all together for the weekend. After that the Bluebird will answer no more questions from the grey men. “This is your last chance,” he’s saying.
Why?
’

‘Look at it the other way round a minute,’ I urged him in a desperate murmur, when the wine waiter had brought us a second decanter of priceless claret. ‘All right. The Bluebird has been turned by the Sovs. He’s bad. The Sovs are running him. So why do they close it down? Why not sit back and play us along?
You
wouldn’t close it down if you were in their shoes. You wouldn’t hand us an ultimatum, create deadlines. Would you?’

His reply put paid to the best and most expensive meal I had ever given a fellow officer in my life.

‘I might have to,’ he said. ‘If I were Russian.’

‘Why?’

His words were the more chilling for being spoken with a leaden dispassion.

‘Because he might not be presentable any more. He might not be able to speak. Or pick up his knife and fork. Or pour salt on his grouse. He might have made a couple of voluntary statements about his charming mistress in Moscow who had no idea, but really no idea, what she was doing. He might have –’

We walked back to Grosvenor Square. Barley had left Katya’s apartment at midnight Moscow time and returned to the Mezh, where Henziger had sat up for him in the lobby, ostensibly reading a manuscript.

Barley was in high spirits but had nothing new to report. Just a family evening, he had told Henziger, but good fun all the same. And the hospital visit still on, he added.

The whole of the next day nothing. A space. Spying is waiting. Spying is worrying yourself sick while you watch Ned sink into a decline. Spying is taking Hannah to your flat in Pimlico between the hours of four and six when she is supposed to be having a German lesson, God knows why. Spying is imitating love, and making sure she’s home in time to give dear Derek his dinner.

15

They went in Volodya’s car. She had borrowed it for the evening. He was to wait for her outside the Aeroport metro station at nine, and at nine exactly the Lada pulled up precariously beside him.

‘You should not have insisted,’ she said.

The tower blocks glowed above them but in the streets there was already the menacing atmosphere of curfew. Scents of autumn filled the damp night air. A half-moon, draped in shrouds of mist, hung ahead of them. Occasionally their hands brushed. Occasionally their hands grasped each other in a strong embrace. Barley was watching the wing mirror. It was smashed and some of the bits were missing but he could see enough in it to watch the cars that followed without overtaking. Katya turned left but still nothing passed them.

She wasn’t speaking so he wasn’t either. He wondered how they learned it, where is safe to speak, where isn’t. At school? From older girls as they grew up? Or was it your earnest little lecture from the family doctor somewhere round the second year of puberty? ‘It’s time you learned that cars and walls have ears just like people …’

They were bumping over a pitted sliproad into a half-finished carpark.

‘Imagine you are a doctor,’ she warned him as they faced each other across the roof of the car. ‘You must look very strict.’

‘I’m a doctor,’ Barley said. Neither of them was joking.

They picked their way between a maze of moonlit puddles to a pathway covered in asbestos awning, leading to double doors and an empty reception desk. He caught the first alarming smells of hospital: disinfectant, floor polish, surgical spirit. At a crisp pace she marched him across a circular hallway of mottled concrete, down a linoleum corridor and past a marble counter staffed by sullen women. A clock said ten-twenty-five. Making a consciously officious gesture, Barley compared it with his watch. The clock was ten minutes slow. The next corridor was lined with figures slumped on kitchen chairs.

The waiting-room was a gloomy catacomb supported by immense pillars with a raised platform at one end. At the other, swing doors gave on to the lavatories. Somebody had rigged a temporary light to show the way. By its pale light, Barley could make out empty coat racks behind a wooden counter, parked stretcher trolleys and, fixed to the nearest pillar, an ancient telephone. A bench stood against the wall. Katya sat on it, so Barley sat beside her.

‘He tries always to be punctual. Sometimes he is delayed by the connection,’ she said.

‘Can I speak to him?’

‘He would be angry.’

‘Why?’

‘If they hear English on a long-distance line they will immediately pay attention. It is normal.’

From the swing doors a man in a head-bandage looking like a blinded soldier from the front wandered into the women’s lavatory as two women emerged. They grabbed hold of him and redirected him. Katya unclipped her handbag and took out a notebook and a pen.

He will try at ten-forty, she had said. At ten-forty he will attempt the first connection. He will not speak for long, she had said. To speak too long even between safe telephones is unwise.

She stood up and walked to the telephone, ducking like a regular under the cloakroom counter.

Will he tell her he loves her? Barley wondered – ‘I love you enough to risk your life for me’? Will he give her the love talk he gave her in his letter? Or will he tell her that she is an acceptable price for the cleansing of his uneasy soul?