Prague Spring

4

Sam leaves the bed, crosses over to the window and draws back the curtains.

How does one end up here, he wonders, in this wooden-beamed room with its painted ceiling and arched windows and, beneath the floorboards, the soft tick of some beetle that will ultimately destroy everything? Of course he can provide a literal answer to all that – languages in the sixth form at school and then that Russian course at the Joint Services School for Linguists during his National Service, which gave a callow youth a taste for things Russian that he could never shake off. University followed as a matter of course, with an upper second in Slavonic languages and the foreign service examination in which his academic weaknesses were easily outshone by his sharp, clipped mind and ability to synthesise an argument from a plenitude of facts. And his knack for thinking on his feet. And the fact that he could actually speak Russian pretty well, where all the others could conjugate and decline and analyse and parse but they couldn’t actually feel it in the way he did. But none of that is quite what he means as he stands there looking out on the squat fifteenth-century towers, the grey bridge decked out with statues, the river that everyone knows from Smetana’s musical homage, Vltava.

Vltava; Moldau.

As always, a German name stands like a gothic shadow behind the Czech – Praha, Prag; Malá Strana, Die Kleinseite; Vltava, Moldau – just as German history looms behind Czech history, occasionally reaching forward to tap it on the shoulder and remind the Czechs that they only occupy a narrow Slavic salient thrust into the heart of the Teutonic world.

‘What’s the time?’

He glances at his watch, then back at the bed. ‘Six o’clock.’

Stephanie regards him through a blur of sleep. Her small face has the precise features of fine porcelain. Pretty. ‘I’d better get a move on.’

‘You haven’t got a train to catch.’

‘Still.’ She gets out of bed on the far side, with her back to him so that she preserves her modesty as much as possible. She dislikes being seen naked. Her slender figure flashes white across the room, seeking the sanctuary of the bathroom. When she emerges, three-quarters of an hour later, her public persona is in place – a faint blush of makeup, hair hitched back and gathered in a chignon, her crisp white blouse buttoned to her neck, her navy skirt as perfectly pleated as her mind. They have breakfast, barely speaking. It seems like the awkward silence of a funeral, mourning the loss of something permanent, whereas all they are doing is anticipating a temporary separation.

‘You could have gone by air.’

‘You’ve already said that a dozen times.’

‘It’s just—’

‘I know what it’s just. It’s just that there’s no way I would have left Ringo behind.’

‘Or waited so that I could come with you.’

‘You know I couldn’t do that.’

After breakfast he carries her bags out to the car and they stand together dejectedly, looking at her Volkswagen parked in the small square outside the building. As she has teasingly told him many times, the VW, purchased duty-free when she first came out eighteen months ago, is her real love. The name Ringo is discreetly painted on the bonnet. Ringo is Steffie’s favourite Beatle, although God knows why, because he is, as Sam has remarked, an ugly bugger. ‘I like ugly buggers,’ she replied.

‘So where does that leave me?’

Stephanie turns to face him. She is disturbingly lovely like that, standing there in her navy skirt and sky-blue linen jacket. White boots. A little black beret. The very antithesis of the Slav looks one sees in the girls around the city. They have strong bone structure and wide cheeks, but Steffie’s look is that of a Dresden shepherdess, her precise features composed into what she does best – an ironic little smile. Aren’t I pretty? it seems to ask. And, isn’t it all a bit of a sham? ‘We’ve talked it over a million times, haven’t we?’ she reminds him. ‘We know what we’re doing. Giving it a rest for a bit. Trying to get some kind of perspective on the whole thing.’

‘You know what perspective has? A vanishing point.’

‘But that’s where parallel lines meet up. So who’s to say?’

‘You mustn’t do that.’

‘Do what?’

‘Leave questions hanging.’

She composes her smile into a little pout. ‘Who cares?’ Then glances at her watch. ‘Look at the time. It’ll take me hours to get to Jenny and Jeremy’s. I must go.’

‘Be careful.’

‘You know very well I’m as tough as nails, and so’s Ringo. By this afternoon we’ll be with Jen in her cosy little married quarters in Munching Gladbark or whatever it’s called. Anyway, it’s you who must be careful.’

‘Me?’

‘Of Eric’s wife.’ Eric is Head of Chancery. His wife is French, acquired during a posting to Paris a decade earlier. There was some story about his having prised her away from her first husband who was a fonctionnaire at the Quai d’Orsay. The affair created something of a diplomatic incident, but in general everything worked in Eric’s favour – in the corridors of the Foreign Office it was considered quite a triumph to have one of ours steal a Frenchwoman from her husband while playing away from home. Like winning a test match in Australia.

‘Madeleine? She likes bigger prey. An ambassador here, a minister there, perhaps a film director, perhaps a writer.’

‘She also likes little snacks now and again. She’ll try to get you into bed as soon as my back is turned, you just wait and see. We women can tell these things. You poor men are little more than grazing gazelles when the female hyena is on the prowl.’ It might have been rabbits and vixens, but Steffie always likes to emphasise her African background – Zambia when it was still called Northern Rhodesia, where her father was something to do with copper.

‘You’re mixing your metaphors.’

‘As long as you don’t mix your affections.’

‘You don’t show affection for Madeleine. You might feel lust towards her, or loathing, or perhaps even love, but nothing so dangerous as affection.’

‘Oh, shut up.’ She raises herself up on her toes and puts her hands on his shoulders to kiss him. He catches her scent, the perfume she always wears, the one that he claims ought to be banned for indecency, for its name alone, never mind its smell: Youth Dew. Her kiss is hesitant, as though each time were the first and she isn’t quite sure how to do it. He puts his arms round her and feels her narrow fragility. ‘I’ll miss you,’ he tells her.

She laughs. ‘I’ll fly out and see you once things are settled at home. And remember my warning. Beware the hyena.’

Another tentative kiss and she climbs into the car, allowing him a glimpse of stocking-top and narrow, white thigh before she adjusts her skirt and slams the door. The vehicle starts with that familiar clattering that is more like a washing machine than a motor car, and then she is gone, the particular, personal fact of being Stephanie in her Beetle called Ringo translated into an anonymous Volkswagen stuttering out of the square, turning the corner and out of sight.

Once she has gone, Sam goes to his own car and drives across the river. He feels a bit disconsolate but also strangely liberated. On his own again. He wonders whether it is true about Madeleine Whittaker, but more immediately there is the question of whether he will be late for his appointment, and if he is, will the man wait? On balance, probably yes. An opportunity to talk to a First Secretary (Chancery) from the British embassy is not the kind of thing one turns down these days. Everyone is trying to get hold of an audience willing to listen to declarations, manifestos, opinions, promises, threats, hopes, all those things that go to make up the startling political life of the country at the moment. A little while ago the place was the usual depressed Soviet satellite, the kind of post that people at the Foreign Office would rather risk malaria in West Africa to avoid. But now everyone wants a tour of duty basking in the sun of Dubček’s socialism with a human face.

He drives along Resslova, through the sparse scattering of vehicles that passes for traffic in the city. Eric Whittaker always explains it as Soviet equality made manifest: cheap beer and trams for the masses; champanski and Tatra automobiles for the nomenklatura. The result is wide boulevards with barely a car in sight, and the guilty pleasure of exclusivity.

The meeting is in the New Town, in a café full of the noise of talk and the smoke of cheap cigarettes, with Marta Kubišová’s earthy voice over the speakers, belting out her version of ‘Walking Back to Happiness’. He stands on the edge of the crowd and watches for a while, trying to ignore the music and follow what is being discussed. The talk is all politics – not the comatose politics of the last two decades but the new, anxious, outrageous politics of the present. It’s like a new religion, a new creed that people believe might achieve some kind of earthly paradise. Passion lives in uneasy alliance with logic, neither emotion familiar in the political discourse of the country until the last few months. Appropriately enough, the man conducting the meeting, the man he has come to see, has the look of a prophet about him, the pinched features of an ascetic, the gaze of a visionary. Sam is reminded of Tom Courtenay playing the scar-faced Strelnikov in the film of Doctor Zhivago: a starveling face and the staring eyes of a messiah. But this particular man’s name isn’t Tom, it’s a distinctive Zdeněk; and his wife – brittle, energetic – is Jitka.

After the meeting breaks up – there are questions, statements, arguments, laughter, groans and catcalls – he comes over to Sam and grabs his hand with surprising strength. ‘We bring freedom to Czechoslovak people,’ he announces. ‘Freedom will be compulsory.’

‘That’s a good line.’

Jitka glosses her man’s English with a quiet urgency: ‘He means, not the freedom of Dubček’s party, not communist freedom given out like sweets to children. But real freedom, of heart and soul.’

Zdeněk speaks quickly to her in Czech, so fast and colloquial that Sam only gathers the odd word. Amongst which americký and kapitál. ‘And not American freedom either,’ Jitka explains. ‘We will not be slaves to capital any more than we will be slaves to Marxism. We are ready to forge a new instrument. We are, you see, the children of communism. We were born in the socialist state and that is all we have known, and now we are demanding something different.’

People have gathered round, listening to what is being said, eager to put their point of view. Word has got out that Sam is from the embassy. ‘When will the Americans help us?’ someone asks.

‘We don’t want Americans,’ another interrupts. ‘Americans are bad as Russians. We want our own future.’

‘You come to our public meeting tomorrow,’ says the Strelnikov character, leaning forward and speaking urgently into Sam’s face. ‘Can you do that? Can you?’ Once again he takes hold of Sam’s hand to emphasise his point, the urgency of it.

‘Of course I can. Just tell me where.’

Driving back through the Old Town, Sam is reminded of the protesting students back home. He saw them on a visit to his mother in Oxford a few months ago. They were occupying the Clarendon building, playing politics as though it were a parlour game dreamed up for a bit of entertainment. Deanz Meanz Feinz had been chalked on the walls of Balliol, alongside Je suis Marxiste, tendance Groucho. The Czech students might look no different from the Oxford ones – the same worn T-shirts and bomber jackets, the same faded jeans, the same unkempt hair, the boys barely differentiated from the girls – but this lot aren’t playing a game. At work he sees the intelligence briefings. He knows of the thousands of Russian troops within the Czechoslovak borders, still there after military exercises in the spring; and he knows of the hundreds of thousands more waiting just outside the borders in neighbouring, fraternal, East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Ukraine. Soldiers and tanks, the full panoply of the Warsaw Pact poised to crush one of its own member states. Unlike British students, Czech students won’t be able to run home to Mummy and Daddy if that particular axe falls.

That afternoon he tries to phone Steffie’s friends in Germany to see if she has arrived, but he can’t get through. ‘You can book a call,’ the operator informs him. ‘It will take five hours.’

5

The meeting next day was in a deconsecrated church in the new town. It was part of Sam’s job to attend as many meetings like this as he could, and since the first student protests the previous year he had got to know many of the leaders. Stephanie used to come with him whenever she was free – somehow she made his presence less obvious, although he never tried to conceal what he was doing there. ‘I’m at the British embassy,’ he’d say if asked. ‘I’m not a spy or anything. Just interested in what’s going on.’

This time the group was new, the Strelnikov character was new, and who could say what might become of it or him? The meeting was all to do with forming a new political movement. Svobodná strana or something; the Freedom Party.

When she caught sight of Sam, Strelnikov’s wife, Jitka, raised her hand in acknowledgement. She was one of a little gaggle of activists milling around in the place where the high altar had once been, fixing microphones and speakers and arguing about where the chairs should go. He went over and said hello to her and the preoccupied Zdeněk, shook a few hands, exchanged a few words. They were students, mainly. One of the helpers turned and smiled at him. Blue eyes and Slav cheekbones and careless hair. Jeans and a leather jacket. A complexion that wasn’t flawless like Stephanie’s and features that weren’t as perfect. But strong. Face not quite beautiful. Hair not quite blonde. If features betray character, then these suggested strength and a certain amused indifference. They hovered on the edge of beauty without doing anything so obvious as stepping over the borderline. ‘Lenka Konečková,’ she said, her eyes holding Sam’s at the same time as her hand grasped his. ‘I saw you at meeting before.’ Good English, which was rare. ‘I remember you.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t—’

‘You don’t see me. Of course not.’

‘I can’t think why I didn’t.’

A wry smile. And that look, a communication that moved at the speed of light, that was light, nothing more, crossing the gap between them and carrying with it a message that needed no deciphering but made things happen inside him – a swelling, a weakness, a fluttering running through his viscera as though something had come loose. He hadn’t expected this, really he hadn’t.

‘Samuel Wareham. I’m from the British embassy.’

‘They told me. You speak good Czech. A bit Russified but good.’

‘Russian was my main language at university.’

A beguiling laugh. ‘Tainted, then.’

‘I’m trying to purge it. Look…’ Sam hesitated, looking round, trying to work out if there was anyone else with particular claims on this girl – what was her name? Lenka? – but it seemed she was on her own. He thought of Stephanie somewhere in West Germany, chatting happily to Jenny – her old school chum – about life on the other side of the Iron Curtain, about Prague and her job, and, presumably, about Sam. Saying what? That they were sort of engaged. An understanding, really. Imagine being a dip’s wife! But the relationship wasn’t always easy… ‘Do you want to come for a drink when you’re finished here? So we can have a chat. In Czech.’

She shrugged. ‘And I can tell you how you go wrong? Sure.’

And then the rest of the meeting, the voting, the passing of motions, the arguing and the applauding, and all the time the girl called Lenka sitting on the other side of the nave from him, taking notes some of the time but also glancing across at him. The occasional conjunction of eyes. The suggestion of a smile. At the end of the speeches a young girl mounted the rostrum, carrying a guitar. People applauded as this approximate Joan Baez lookalike stood there in the crossing of the ex-church, looking faintly diffident, slightly dishevelled, watching the audience with something like embarrassment. ‘We’ve even got an anthem,’ she announced into the microphone. Lenka glanced across at Sam with a deprecating smile while the singer fiddled with a capo and then struck the first chord. It was all predictable enough: ‘We Shall Overcome’, sung without the evangelical fervour that seemed to characterise it in the West but with something that only central Europe could manage – a kind of bitter irony. We shall overcome some day, perhaps, but surely not now. No one sang along but at the end, everyone clapped. And standing there beneath the dome of the deconsecrated church, Lenka Konečková looked directly across at Sam and smiled. As though there was a joke to be shared.

He smiled back, wondering about Stephanie beetling around the German countryside in her Beetle. What would she think of the look that Lenka Konečková was even now directing back across the church at him, a blend of amusement and curiosity that brought with it disturbing possibilities? Surely this encounter was entirely innocent; but innocence could so easily spill over into guilt.

After the meeting they went to a well-known pivnice a few streets away where, it was said, Bohumil Hrabal would come in for a glass of Pilsner most days. ‘They say that about every pub in the city,’ was Sam’s view. ‘He’d be pissed as a newt if it were true.’

Pissed as a newt. Lenka laughed at his attempts to provide a translation. They found an unoccupied alcove where they could talk. Beer came. They drank a bit, looking at one another all the time, finding out how things were as much by glance and manner as by words. Lenka was at the university, doing a master’s degree in English. Why English? That shrug. Because it’s not Russian. He laughed. And she did some writing for one of the literary journals that had sprung up like mushrooms feeding on the rich humus of free speech. And the occasional piece for Czechoslovak radio. She was twenty-five years old, which made Sam feel almost fatherly; but she knew things far beyond her two and a half decades, he could see that. The conversation soon veered away from the personal to politics. Politics were on everyone’s lips, how things had changed since censorship was abandoned and where things might go next. What would happen when Dubček and his supporters confronted Brezhnev and the rest of the Soviet Politburo. ‘So what does Mr Samuel think will take place?’ Lenka asked. ‘All we want is to continue with free expression. Freedom to say what the hell we please and do what the hell we please. Will they let us?’

‘Depends what you say and what you do.’

‘We don’t know in advance. That’s what makes it so exciting.’

Sam considered the matter carefully, as though he had been asked it by the Head of Chancery. ‘The Party has made its decision, hasn’t it? Abandoning censorship was the point of no return.’

‘They could try to bring it back.’

‘Difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.’

‘Maybe the Russians will force them?’

‘I don’t think the Soviet Politburo really knows what to do at the moment. They’ve got troops left here since the spring manoeuvres and they don’t know whether to withdraw them or not. There are various currents within the Kremlin itself, although Brezhnev himself is a hawk and he’s the one who really matters. But there are other issues to consider, like the other Warsaw Pact countries, the fraternal allies. Romania, for example. What will Ceaușescu’s position be? And Hungary’s? Kádár needs to be brought on board. I imagine a lot of his sympathies are with Dubček. So any final decision is balanced on a knife-edge. But of course the main players are the Russians.’

Lenka laughed, running fingers through her hair. ‘You know what I think? I think, fuck Russians. And fuck the fraternal allies.’ That frank wide-open gaze. He had that feeling again, clotted at the base of his throat, like a sudden growth.

‘What about lunch,’ he suggested, not wanting this encounter to die. ‘I must get back to the office now but what about tomorrow? Let me buy you lunch tomorrow. I’ve got a meeting at the foreign ministry in the morning. And then…’

She took a moment to consider, as though assessing him and the implications of his invitation. When she answered, her tone seemed almost indifferent. ‘Why not?’

Masaryk

The Černín Palace guards its secrets as assiduously as a bank guards its vaults. Home to the Czechoslovak ministry of foreign affairs, the building sits across the ridge of land outside the gates of Prague Castle, the Hrad, as though blocking the way from the Castle to the West and freedom. Not for nothing had it been the seat of the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia during the Nazi occupation. But the biggest secret of all, hidden within the walls of this monstrous, monotonous building, was the one that stood prominently in Sam’s mind whenever he had an appointment here. It concerned the fate of Jan Masaryk, son of the first president of independent Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Masaryk, and it came down to the question: did he jump or was he pushed?

By March 1948 Masaryk, who had spent the war in London with the Czechoslovak government in exile, was foreign minister of the Czechoslovak Republic. More than that, he was the only non-communist minister not to have resigned in protest at the communist power grab of February. He was also middle-aged (sixty-one), lonely (a divorcee), mentally fragile (bipolar disorder) and disillusioned (who wouldn’t be?). In the early morning of 10 March his body was found lying on the paving of an inner courtyard of the Černín Palace. He was wearing pyjamas and lay forty-seven feet directly beneath the open bathroom window of his official apartment on the third floor.

Did he jump or was he pushed?

Two decades later, Sam Wareham walked over to the window of the anteroom and looked down on that selfsame courtyard. Bright sunlight dissected the space with sharp diagonals of shadow. Small ornamental trees. Basalt paving stones. Somewhere down there Jan Masaryk’s body had lain on that cold March morning.

Did he jump or was he pushed?

Outside the anteroom, in the corridors of the ministry through which Sam had been led by a uniformed flunkey, was the kind of chaos one expects in a beehive threatened by a bear. People hurried from office to office clutching files. Phones rang the second the receiver was replaced. Meetings were scheduled and rescheduled, then broken off because something more important had just cropped up. Oblivious to all this, Sam stood at the window and wondered.

Did he jump or was he pushed?

The popular feeling was, of course, that Masaryk had been pushed. Such a tidy man, they said with bitter irony, he had even made sure to close the window behind him.

That was the joke.

On the other hand, a number of friends and most of his relatives refused to accept this idea. Appalled at the political situation of the country and the dilemma in which he found himself, they said, Jan Masaryk took the honourable way out. Even his sister believed this. Yet the question remained, unanswered when Sam Wareham waited for his meeting, unanswered now, unanswered presumably for as long as vital files locked away within the former KGB archives in Moscow remained hidden from public scrutiny (which could be for ever): did he jump or was he pushed?

Prague is famous for its defenestrations. The first was in 1419 when a Hussite mob broke into the New Town Hall and threw a baker’s dozen of burghers to their deaths; the second was two hundred years later, when two imperial officials and their secretary were tossed out of a window of the Hrad. The first led to the fifteen-year Hussite Wars, the second to the devastating Thirty Years War. Both were about religion. The third defenestration was that of the liberal, saddened, disillusioned minister of foreign affairs, Jan Masaryk.

What did his defenestration lead to?

The man Sam Wareham was to meet, a harassed and confused apparátník who had somehow kept his job throughout the upheavals of the last year, apologised for having kept him waiting. ‘We are, as you can see, at the eye of the storm.’

Eyes of storms were, as far as Sam knew, places of great and sinister stillness, but there was no time to unpick mixed metaphors. Instead they could only deal with the matter in hand – an imminent visit to Prague by a British trade union group. There was this factory tour that had to be curtailed, that meeting which needed to be rescheduled.

Sam nodded and noted. ‘I’ll let His Excellency know of the changes.’

‘You know how it is, Mr Wareham, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do.’ Which wasn’t really true, but it was not too difficult to put himself in his opposite number’s place. After all, the Russian bear was right outside the hive. While all the little bees were panicking you could hear his heavy breathing. And yet… and yet at the end of the meeting he, Samuel Wareham, a First Secretary at Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, could walk out into the sunshine of Hradčaný and stroll down the road into Malá Strana with the thought of what the Russians might or might not do no more than a distant irritation. This city might be rendered drab by the dead hand of communism, but still it remained, quite simply, the most beautiful in Europe.

His apartment was in a seventeenth-century building tucked in between the river and the great geological mass that supports the Castle. It was edged by cobbled alleys and faced on a square where, it was said, public executions were once held. He unlocked the outside door and went up to his apartment on the first floor. Only the week before, security had been round to sweep the place to see that it was safe, devoid of listening ears. ‘Clean as a whistle,’ the man from security had said. ‘As far as we can see, at any rate. Difficult to get bugs through these old walls, so anything they manage to plant will be superficial, within the plaster, or behind pictures and in light fittings. That mirror, for example. Anyway, at the moment, zilch.’

Zilch? Where had he got that from?

Sam picked up the phone in the hallway and dialled through to the embassy. Dorothy answered his call, as impatient of his irregular habits as ever. ‘I’ve been trying to find you. Mr Whittaker was asking where you were.’

‘And what did you tell him?’

‘That you were out chasing girls.’

‘That I was out at a meeting in the ministry.’

‘That you were out at a meeting in the ministry.’

‘And I’m afraid I’m still tied up.’ He paused. ‘She’s very keen on bondage.’

He could hear the outraged laughter in her voice as he put the phone down. But did Dorothy even know what bondage was? He tried for a moment to imagine her tied up and gagged, but failed. She, surely, would be doing the tying up, and the whipping. Glancing at his watch he went through into the sitting room. From the windows there was that view of the squat Gothic towers which had sat on the end of the bridge like warty toads for the last four hundred years. Heads had been stuck there during the Thirty Years War, a dozen Protestant heads like the victims of a Stalinist purge, perhaps Slansky and his associates in 1952. He put some music on – an obscure piece of Janáček that he had discovered – and sat at his desk to type a memorandum summarising his meeting at the ministry. Three-quarters of an hour had passed before he glanced at his watch again. The damn thing would have to wait. He went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, combed his hair and adjusted his tie. Five minutes late. He had offered to pick her up from home, but she’d demurred. ‘You’d never find it,’ she said, which perhaps meant, ‘I don’t want you to find it.’ He went out, closing the door carefully behind him and, as always, leaving a tiny scrap of fluff wedged in the jamb.

There was what passed as a crowd on the bridge – tourists from the neighbouring countries, mainly. You heard German and Polish and occasionally the impossibly incomprehensible Magyar. Sometimes Russian. Almost never English, and when you did it was invariably strained through an American voice box.

At one of the statues an imitation Dylan was strumming a guitar and singing Časy se Mění, ‘Times They Are a-Changin’’, which was true enough in so many ways. Halfway along the bridge, at the statue of Saint John of Nepomuk, there she was, just as they had arranged.

She was different, metamorphosed from the casual, slightly dishevelled creature of their first encounter into a moth of various hues – a green, calf-length skirt, a navy blouse that was knotted beneath her bust and would have displayed her navel had she not been wearing a T-shirt underneath. Her face wore a touch of pale lipstick and a smudge of eyeshadow. Her hair was gathered up in a deliberately untidy chignon. They shook hands and he caught a breath of perfume: floral, slightly cloying, and something underneath – her own scent. ‘Do I look all right?’ she asked. ‘Lunch at Barrandov…?’ As though she was unsure of what exactly was involved. He felt a sensation that he had not experienced for a long time, a pulse of anticipation and excitement just above his diaphragm. Somewhere in the further reaches of his brain a small alarm of warning went off.

Talking about each other as you do when you are standing on the brink of intimacy, they walked to his car. She was sharp and blunt at one and the same time, asking probing questions but then driving the nail home with heavy blows: if you are a diplomat, why are you taking me to lunch? What’s in it for you? How is this in the interests of the British government?

Sam laughed. ‘Even a diplomat can have a private life. Although sometimes he has to be careful.’

‘Careful? Why careful? Are you married?’

‘No, not married.’

She turned to him almost accusingly. ‘But you think I am a spy?’

‘Actually, I don’t, but suspicion reigns high on Eastern European postings. Supping with the devil, you need a long spoon.’ He wasn’t sure how to put it in Czech, but she seemed to understand, even made a joke about it. ‘Well, it’s lunch we’re going to now, isn’t it? Not supper. And I’m not the devil.’ She looked at him knowingly as he held the car door open for her. ‘But I’m not an angel either.’

The restaurant was in the south of the city, perched on cliffs overlooking the river. There was an observation tower and projecting terraces like the bridges of a transatlantic liner. Below the terraces, in what might have been an old quarry, a swimming pool gleamed like turquoise set in tarnished silver. Splashes of laughter rose up to the diners. The tables were crowded with people from the film studios nearby – middle-aged men with loud voices, girls in short skirts and beehive hairdos, boys with longish hair and button-down shirts. Dark glasses were worn like a badge of office. The scene might have been in Hollywood, except there were no palm trees, no pink Cadillacs and a fraction of the money. Lenka tried not to gawp, but her eyes were alight with excitement as an obsequious waiter led the way to their table on the edge of the terrace. For almost the first time, she seemed her age, looking around and trying not to stare but spotting the stars nevertheless. ‘There’s Iva Janžurová. And Menzel, that’s Jiří Menzel.’ There were other names that Sam didn’t recognise. Apparently Lenka was something of a film buff, and for a while that is what they talked about. What had Sam seen of Czech film? What did he like? What did he admire? Like and admire were two different things, weren’t they? She was insistent on the point. You could like something such as Ben Hur without admiring it. Or admire A Report on the Party and the Guests without liking it. It was all a matter of the critical faculty, wasn’t it?

Sam was sure it was. He managed to move the conversation away from such matters on to the personal. What might she do once she’d finished her studies? Travel abroad, improve her spoken English, perhaps in London. There were possibilities now the shackles of the past twenty years were being thrown off.

Sam tried to picture her in London. What might she ultimately become? A writer? An academic? A full-time journalist? That kind of thing was imponderable, whereas Sam’s fate was altogether clearer: he would soon enough be Head of Chancery in some forgotten ex-colony, married to Steffie, with two children and a mortgage on a house in Surbiton that would be suitable for the retired ambassador he would inevitably become. Maybe he’d even acquire a K: Sir Samuel Wareham. Terrifying how quickly the options closed down. One moment the world seems your oyster; the next you see it for the mollusc it really is – an octopus that has grabbed you with its tentacles and will not let go.

‘At least now I’d get an exit visa,’ Lenka said. ‘Now things have changed for the better. You see, with my background I was lucky to get to university.’

‘Why lucky?’

Her mouth twisted in distaste. ‘Politics. Now everything may be different, but however hard they try to rewrite it, they can’t change history.’

‘What history are you talking about?’

‘My family’s.’ She attempted a smile, that ironic, Iron Curtain smile that Sam had long ago come to recognise. ‘Let’s talk about other things. Maybe I’ll introduce you to my mother sometime and then you can find out. But not now.’

So they talked about other things, and it was easy enough – the new freedoms, the freedom to write what you liked, report whatever concerned you. Food came and went. They had a bottle of Moravian wine which was not as dreadful as usual, and she wanted to know about London, swinging London, Carnaby Street, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles. Hippies. Hash. And then himself. Why exactly was he taking her out to lunch? He’d never said, the first time she asked.

‘Because I find you attractive. That’s not a sin, is it?’

‘It all depends. You say you have no wife.’

‘No.’

‘And is there no girlfriend?’

He hesitated with the tense. ‘There was. She’s called Steffie. She works for the Service, although she’s not a diplomat.’ He tried to pretend it was of no importance, but there was the snake-like slither of guilt running up his spine. He’d had a letter from her that morning, a brief but heartfelt missive enclosing a postcard of Cologne cathedral. Having a lovely time, wish you were here, was scrawled on the card. The letter said the same thing, but without the irony: Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so hasty, she had written. It’s being apart that makes me understand how good we are together.

‘She was posted back to England.’

‘And your heart is broken?’

‘We didn’t break up exactly. It’s just…’ Momentarily, he felt himself floundering beneath her steady, interrogator’s gaze. Blue eyes, narrowed against the light. ‘It’s always been a difficult relationship. When you are on post, when you meet such a limited range of people, things are always difficult. Artificial, I suppose.’

‘And now?’ It was a challenge, and he deflected it.

‘Now you must tell me about yourself. That’s only fair.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘No boyfriend?’

‘There has been. Not recently. Not serious, anyway.’

‘What’s serious?’

‘If they matter to me. One did. He played in a group. You know? Guitars, pretending to be The Beatles? We were together a couple of years. Since then…’ She let her voice trail away into silence.

For dessert they had the inevitable palačinky, pancakes, with a sharp cherry filling and too much whipped cream. Sam glanced at his watch. ‘Look, I’m sorry but I’ve got to get back to the office. People to see, minutes to write.’

‘Of course.’

‘Perhaps I can see you again?’

‘Why not? There is – I do not know if you are interested – there is a concert coming up. My flatmate is in the orchestra so I get tickets. You met her – Jitka.’

‘Of course.’ He thought for a moment, riffling mentally through his social diary and deciding that no one would notice if he didn’t turn up to the reception at the Swiss embassy to celebrate what? Their national day, presumably. Madeleine would notice but she could go hang. ‘Yes, that’s fine. Where? What time? Maybe we can get something to eat afterwards.’

Again that shrug. ‘The House of Artists. At six. On the steps. There will be others there. Friends.’

6

The concert. A scrum of people going up the steps into the auditorium, and Lenka grabbing Sam’s hand to lead him through a side entrance and up stairs to one of the balconies. ‘You’re with the poor students now, Mr Diplomat,’ she said. They shuffled sideways into narrow seats. He was introduced to some of her friends, faces that were familiar from the political meeting – the Barboras and Terezas, the Mareks and Pavels. There was a buzz of excited conversation as they peered down on the audience in the body of the auditorium. ‘There’s Smrkovský,’ someone said, and everyone craned to look at the tough-looking man taking his seat in the stalls.

‘Do you know who he is?’ asked Lenka. It was hot up there just beneath the ceiling. Her forehead and upper lip were beaded with sweat.

‘I’m political, remember? Of course I know him. I’ve even met him.’

‘You’ve met him?’

‘Talked with him. For about three minutes.’

‘So what do you think of him?’

Sam considered for a moment. Far below people were pushing and shoving to get a moment’s contact with the man. He smiled round, shaking hands. A pugnacious, genial face, a short brush of grey hair. A member of the Central Committee of the Party, he was one of Dubček’s closest associates. ‘I think you’re looking at a man riding a tiger. You know about riding a tiger?’

‘Hard to get off?’

‘Exactly.’

People applauded. The applause began close to Smrkovský and spread out like a wave in a pond until everyone in the auditorium was clapping, from the stalls to the gods, until the man was settled into his seat. More applause greeted the orchestra as it filed on stage. Lenka pointed. ‘There’s Jitka. Second violins, next to the bald-headed man. I rent a room in her flat.’

Down amongst the penguins Jitka seemed transformed from the febrile woman of the political meetings into an elegant lady in a black evening gown. There was the sense of her beauty, even at this distance. But then, you so often had a sense of beauty with Czech women, at whatever distance you might choose. After a few minutes the conductor appeared, bobbing and weaving like a footballer through the ranks of players. He bowed to the audience and turned to the orchestra, holding out his hands to calm the storm of clapping. Then, when a perfect silence had been achieved, he raised his baton and unleashed the first crashing, portentous notes of Blaník, the sixth and final of Smetana’s cycle of tone poems, Má Vlast. It wasn’t on the programme, that was the point. The programme, on a roneoed sheet handed round amongst Lenka’s friends, had Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances and Martinů’s Sixth Symphony, not pieces of music that would have stirred Sam’s interest very much. But here, without warning, were the familiar tones of Blaník sending a pulse of excitement through the hall.

Má Vlast, My Homeland. Patriotism without kitsch, an almost impossible trick to pull off. Blaník tells of the legend that Václav, Good King Wenceslas of the Christmas carol, a kind of Bohemian King Arthur, waits beneath the Blaník mountain with a company of knights, ready to emerge and save the Czech people at their moment of greatest need, when they are threatened – legend has it – by four hostile armies. We may savour the bitter irony of that now, but then, on that hot summer evening in Prague, the music seemed a clarion call to the nation. The Russians, the East Germans, the Poles, the Hungarians would all be defied. Holding hands, the Czechs and the Slovaks would move forward into the sunlit uplands of freedom and prosperity. Socialism would show its human face to all mankind.

The audience listened transfixed throughout and, at the crashing end, stood as one to applaud. Lenka’s eyes were bright with tears. There was sweat certainly, sweat and tears mingling on her cheeks. Sam dared to put up his hand to brush them away and was blessed with a wry smile.

After the concert they all went – Jitka the violinist and half a dozen others – to a place on the river where a quartet was playing cool jazz. There were tables outside under the trees and food was served till late. Laughter, argument, beer in the warm night, the kind of thing one dreamed of even in socialist Czechoslovakia, especially in socialist Czechoslovakia now that it was finding this thrilling, novel freedom. They were joined after a while by the Strelnikov character himself, Jitka’s husband Zdeněk. He greeted Sam with enthusiasm. ‘My Englishman. I like my Englishman,’ he said. The talk was a blend of practical politics and speculative philosophy. Names were bandied around – Lukács, Marcuse – and concepts that bore names like reification and alienation. Sam felt old, an emissary from another generation. ‘What do you think?’ they kept asking him, hoping for an optimistic answer. He did a great deal of shrugging, verbally and literally. He had exhausted this kind of talk when he was at university, and working for the Foreign Office had killed any residual idealism there might have been. Where do our best interests lie? was the watchword of the diplomatic corps: pragmatism elevated to a political philosophy.

‘Mr Wareham is a cynic,’ Lenka warned. ‘He doesn’t understand the power of an idea.’ She was holding onto his arm, tethering him to their earnest conversation as though otherwise he might float up in the warm air and go sailing away over the river and the city like a golem, back to the West perhaps. It pleased him, this display of ownership, this assumed knowledge of the workings of his mind.

‘I’m a realist,’ he said.

They laughed at that. ‘You haven’t lived here long enough,’ Zdeněk said. ‘No one can live in this place for long and still believe in reality.’

One of the group had a camera. While they talked he moved around them taking shots – close-ups, figures seen through beer glasses, candid shots. They laughed and made faces and got him angry because they weren’t taking his art seriously. When Sam produced his own camera – a neat little Japanese compact he’d bought duty-free in Berlin – there was even more laughter. ‘Tourist!’ they called, as though it were an insult. But he managed to get them to pose more or less sensibly for one shot. The flash gave its milliseconds of brilliant, zirconium flare and held the group in stark immobility on the retina of any watchers and on the film itself.

When it was time to go – the musicians had packed their instruments away, the waiters were stacking the chairs – the group of friends broke up, as such groups do, with promises and exhortations, with kisses and embraces, with awkward last-minute discussions on the pavement of the embankment. There was a moment when Lenka might have gone with Jitka and her husband, but then the moment was past and the couple had gone and Sam and Lenka were alone, walking together towards the bridge. He said something about his car and driving her to Jitka’s flat, wherever that was, but nothing was decided. Holding hands, talking about not very much, they walked across the river, over the Charles Bridge between the two rows of grimy statues that made it seem like walking up the aisle of a church. Ahead was the altar of the nation, Hrad, the Castle, lifting its shoulders to blot out the night sky. Lights were on up there, officials at work in the engine room of the ship of state, desperate to avoid the icebergs ahead, while down here two people were negotiating the first moves in a relationship. In the secluded cobbled square in front of his apartment building he stopped, keys in hand, beside his car. ‘My flat’s just here. Do you want to come up?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course I do.’ The ‘of course’ was curious. He unlocked the outside door and led the way upstairs. Why should this be so easy? With Stephanie it had taken weeks, circling round each other like animals as likely to kill as to love; but this was so straightforward. They both knew where they were going and why.

‘Nice place,’ Lenka remarked when he opened the door to his apartment.

‘Goes with the job.’ He showed the way through to the sitting room. ‘Do you want anything? A beer? Coffee?’

‘A glass of water,’ she said. ‘And the bathroom.’

‘Of course.’

Why was everything ‘of course’? Was it all so obvious, preordained and inevitable? Ineluctable. One of those words with no antonym, no ‘eluctable’ to make things easy to get out of. Maybe the word should be invented, for the benefit of diplomats.

When she came back there was something scrubbed about her face, as though she had stripped it of all artifice. Perhaps she had just taken off her makeup and brought her appearance back to how she’d been when they’d first met. It gave a vulnerable cast to her expression, made her look rather plain but somehow more attractive. Wide jaw and high, Slavic cheekbones. Pale blue eyes. A face that had come a long way, out of the Asian steppe thousands of years ago to end up here in his living room with the view of the bridge out of the window. He knew this was fanciful nonsense but the conceit pleased him.

They kissed, gently, thoughtfully, exploring each other’s taste and texture, eyes watching. Steffie had always closed her eyes when kissing. She’d seen it done like that on the films, but Lenka watched him closely all the time, as though measuring him up, assessing what his intentions might be. ‘You don’t have to get back to Jitka’s?’ he asked.

A small smile. ‘Are you looking for an escape? I have my own key.’

He put some music on – that Janáček piano music seemed appropriate – and led the way into the bedroom. They undressed, rather shyly at first, watching each other cautiously. If he had expected passion and frenzy, that was not what he got. Instead they lay on the bed touching very gently, moving slowly, watching each other’s eyes, sensing how things – heartbeat, expression, breathing – change. How bodies can be measured and vibrant, as though under a great tension, like the strings of a cello.

Afterwards, they dozed, touched each other again, dozed, kissed, dozed again. Sam realised, amongst many other things, that he felt unconscionably happy. It cannot last, he thought.

And then he slept and so, presumably, did she.

7

When he came back from the bathroom in the cool light of dawn Lenka was awake. Her face seemed blurred with sleep, the features ill-defined, her hair a chaotic cloud across the pillow. ‘What’s the time?’

‘Six-thirty.’

‘It’s early. Come back to bed.’

He stood, looking down on her. Already regrets were coalescing in his mind. What did a night like this mean? What did it mean to her? What did it mean to him? He knew how dangerous it all might be. Diplomats were warned about it time and again, warned of blackmail, warned of beautiful women who will flatter a man’s self-image and wheedle information out of him. Swallows, the Soviets called them, swallows, with its hints of what they might do to you, and, correspondingly, what you might do as a result – swallow them hook, line and sinker. It was worse if you were queer – they’d find pretty boys who’d suck your cock while the film cameras whirred away behind one-way glass mirrors. Look at Vassall. A clerk in the naval attaché’s staff in the British embassy in Moscow, he had been famously set up by the KGB, famously photographed pleasuring and being pleasured, and was now famously languishing in Wormwood Scrubs. Of course, Sam told himself, he was running nothing like that kind of risk. No wife to worry about. No heavy-handed policeman to arrest him for indecent behaviour. As Eric Whittaker, his boss, had memorably observed, ‘If you’re going to blow your nose, for God’s sake make sure that the handkerchief is clean.’ Well, Sam’s handkerchief, folded and pressed, had certainly been clean enough up to now because Stephanie was British and worked at the embassy. The worst that might have happened was a raised eyebrow from the ambassador’s wife and a suggestion from the ambassador himself that Sam make an honest woman of the gel. Which would have meant Stephanie resigning her job, the archaic ways of the Foreign Office insisting on the spinsterhood of its female employees. But that hadn’t happened. The ambassadress had said nothing, while he and Stephanie had spent three months more or less together before she got that posting back to London that she couldn’t turn down because her mother was unwell and she was needed to help her father deal with the problem. Aged parents, an only child. It wasn’t easy. The intention was to keep in touch and catch up when Sam got back to London, which would be in eighteen months.

In the meantime, what would happen to their oblique, tense relationship, based as it was on emotions never fully expressed and intentions never fully articulated?

Half-smiling, Lenka looked up at him from the bed. Nothing tense or oblique at this precise moment. He reached down and pulled the sheet aside to expose her to the cool light of dawn. Steffie would have cried in protest and struggled to cover herself. Lenka didn’t move, just lay there beneath his gaze, imperfect and erotic, and so unlike Stephanie as to belong to a different gender altogether. Lenka had a body; Steffie had a figure. Lenka had a scent; Steffie had perfume. Steffie’s perfume was alluring enough – something floral, hints of jasmine and citrus and sandalwood – but Lenka’s scent was different. Ripe and dark. Something sour, astringent. Mammal, organic. He recognised it from someone else, the first woman he had ever loved when he was young and naive. She had been a generation older, a strange, wayward woman who had taught him passion but not constancy. Standing over Lenka, he felt that familiar stirring. Lust? Love? Something beyond words, expressible only by actions.

‘Do you want?’ she asked. She could see that he did. There was no disguising what was happening. But time was pressing. ‘I’ve got a meeting at nine.’

‘It’s Saturday.’

‘Her Majesty’s envoys work tirelessly to protect the realm.’ He didn’t know how to do that in Czech or Russian without it coming out like a piece of Stalinist propaganda rather than the irony he intended, so he said it in English, which meant Lenka rather missed the point. He sat on the edge of the bed and put out a hand to touch her, just her face, the line of her chin, almost as though to define it.

Where, he wondered, do we go from here? And then he turned the thought into words before he had a chance to censor them. ‘Where do we go from here?’

She sat up, pulling the pillows behind her, unashamed of her nakedness. Her gaze was narrow, as though she was trying to see right through his eyes and read what was going on in his mind. ‘You’re worried about your girlfriend?’

‘Not only.’

She reached for a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table. ‘Ah, you think maybe I am an informer. Maybe I work for the StB?’

He smiled. ‘I doubt it, but you might. Diplomats always worry about that kind of thing. Should I be doing this? Is it a set-up? In the proximity of women we’re worse than priests.’

‘If you’re a priest, then I’m a nun.’

Was that a joke? It was difficult to tell. Her manner was strange, oblique at times, startlingly direct at others. Perhaps it was just her unfamiliarity with spoken English. She put her cigarette to her mouth and lit it. A skein of grey smoke appeared between her lips. He had already discovered many of her tastes, and that was one of them, the faint, acrid flavour of tobacco on her mouth.

‘You can’t be a nun. Nuns don’t smoke in bed.’

She laughed now, real, smoky laughter that took a moment to disperse. ‘So, if I am not StB, you ask where do we go from here? But it is not we, is it? It is you. Where do you go from here? Because you are thinking of your girlfriend whose name you have not yet told to me.’

‘Steffie. Stephanie, actually.’

‘That is Štěpánka in Czech. It is beautiful name.’

‘Better in Czech. To me it sounds very English.’

‘And is she very English?’

‘Very.’

‘But I am not, and you are wondering about the difference. Did Stephanie sleep with you the first evening you spent with her? I expect she did not. So, does that make me, what? A prostitute?’

No misunderstanding there. One of the universals. Prostitutka in both Russian and Czech, and probably every other language under the sun. ‘Don’t be absurd. I don’t think like that at all. We both did it, me and you together. Our choice.’

‘But that is how men are, you are thinking. And women aren’t. They should be saving themselves, like Štěpánka did.’

They were hovering on the edge of their first argument. ‘Rubbish. You’re putting words into my mouth.’

‘Ha! Then everything is all right. If we want to stay together, we stay together. If we want to go to bed together, we go to bed together. If we want to go away, we go away. Is that all right?’

‘It seems logical.’

Logic appeared to satisfy her. Logic was good. She sat there in his bed, on his side of the bed, looking as prim and determined as it is possible to be when you are entirely naked. ‘So, are you going to tell me about Štěpánka?’

He tossed the sheet over her knees to cover the disturbing sight. ‘Some other time. Now I must get a move on. Make yourself some coffee if you want. There’s stuff for breakfast. Cereal, toast, anything you find.’ He went to the bathroom to shower and shave and clean his teeth, trying, and failing, to rid himself of the thought of her. When he came back she was in the kitchen, laying out breakfast things, pouring coffee. She was wearing her shirt from yesterday and nothing else: bare legs, faintly dusted with golden hair, bare feet and, as he discovered as she reached up for something from a top shelf, bare arse. She’d made toast. There was butter in a dish and she had discovered a pot of Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade. ‘This is very English breakfast, isn’t it? But I cannot find sugar.’

‘The maid hides it. She thinks there may be shortages and we should keep it hidden.’ He opened the cupboard under the sink and took out a carton of sugar.

Lenka had stopped what she was doing. Her expression was transformed to that of angry primary school teacher – a frown, lips pursed. ‘You have maid?’

‘Goes with the job. Like the flat itself. She only comes one day a week. To clean the flat and take my laundry. ’

‘That is very bourgeois.’

‘We are pretty bourgeois in the Foreign Office.’

‘I’ll bet this služka she works for StB.’

‘She probably does. It’s better always to keep your enemy close, where you can see him.’

‘Close? Do you fuck her? Once a week?’

‘Certainly not. They tried an attractive one but I had to send her packing. She didn’t know how to iron shirts.’

‘So what is this ugly one’s name?’

‘Svetlana.’

‘There!’ Her tone was triumphant, as though the matter was certain. ‘You cannot get any more Russian than that. She is maybe KGB.’

Half an hour later he let her out of the flat, making her take the back way, out through the courtyard and the abandoned garden at the back of the building, where there was an ancient wall twelve feet high with an anonymous door that gave on to one of the alleys running down to the river. Once she had slipped away, Sam strolled through the Malá Strana to the palace that crouched warily beneath the Castle and housed the British embassy.

8

In the secure room deep within the embassy, an exclusive little group took its seats at the conference table. The secure room was not a cheery place. Windowless bare white walls, bleak fluorescent lighting, metal and plastic furniture. It was known as the mortuary.

‘Heard from the lovely Stephanie?’ the Head of Chancery asked Sam. Eric Whittaker had that knack, bestowed on high-flying diplomats, of being able to talk trivia while preparing for matters that matter. ‘So sorry to see her go.’

‘I had a card from her – Greetings from Cologne, wish you were here sort of thing. She was staying with friends at Rheindahlen but she should be crossing to England by now.’

‘We’ll miss her. Easy on the eye. You two still’ – a moment’s hesitation – ‘together? Madeleine always said you were perfect for each other.’

‘I used to think so too. Steffie has always had doubts.’

‘Frightened of becoming an embassy wife?’

‘Enough to put anyone off.’

Whittaker laughed, glancing round the meeting. There was a distinct feeling of Saturday morning. One member of the group was even without a tie. Whittaker coughed in that apologetic manner of his, to bring the meeting to order. ‘I’m afraid,’ he announced, ‘that H.E. cannot be here this morning – hobnobbing with the Yanks, I believe – so I’m in the hot seat. And’ – he glanced at the papers before him – ‘hot it certainly is.’ He tapped the paper. ‘So, what is this place, Čierna? Never heard of it myself.’

‘Čierna nad Tisou,’ someone said. ‘Eastern Slovakia, right on the Soviet border.’

‘Anyone been there?’

The fluorescent lighting of the secure room hummed thoughtfully. People waited for someone to contribute. Rather diffidently, Sam offered his own experience. ‘I have, as a matter of fact, Eric. Back of beyond, really. Little more than a rail terminus.’

‘Rail terminus? What on earth were you doing there, old chap? Trainspotting?’

There was a stir of amusement at the table.

‘If you remember, Eric, you sent me on a fact-finding tour of Slovakia when I first got here.’

‘Good God, I’d quite forgotten. What on earth had you done wrong?’

Laughter. Sam inclined his head, as though acknowledging applause. ‘But the rail terminus is actually rather interesting. It’s one of those forgotten corners of Europe, close to the point where Ukraine and Hungary meet with Slovakia – I believe geographers call it a tripoint – and there’s this enormous railway terminus with over nine hundred sidings. Makes Clapham Junction look like Adlestrop.’ He looked round at his audience. ‘I’m sorry, am I boring you?’

‘Not yet,’ Whittaker said, ‘but I bet you’re going to.’

There was further laughter. ‘I fear I already am. The problem is, Russian railways have a broader gauge than the rest of Europe, which means that every single trainload that crosses from East to West or West to East – goods, passengers, even politicians – has to trans-ship from one gauge to the other at Čierna. It makes for the most fantastic bottleneck, so much so that a few years ago they even built a broad-gauge spur over a hundred miles into Slovakia, just to bypass Čierna and ferry Ukrainian iron ore to the steelworks at Košice.’

The military attaché felt the need to contribute. He was a major in his final posting before retirement and was always conscious of being out of place amongst the diplomats. Perhaps he thought that Sam was trespassing on his territory. ‘It is worth pointing out that Russian armed forces have to do exactly the same thing when moving westwards – tanks, armoured cars, all materiel, in fact, has to be brought to Čierna nad Tisou, offloaded and either transferred to road or to another train. Wipe out Čierna and you block the way to the West for the Red Army.’

Eric raised his eyebrows in that infuriating manner he had when spotting a red herring swimming through the pond of his meeting. ‘But we’re not talking about war, are we David? At least, I hope we’re not. We’re talking about Dubček and his partners in crime being summoned to a meeting with the entire Soviet Politburo at this godforsaken railway station. Why on earth, one wonders, choose this place?’

Sam said, ‘I think the Czechoslovaks are most reluctant to meet outside their own borders at the moment. If you’re riding a tiger you don’t want to ride it into the tiger’s own den.’

‘To stretch a metaphor.’

‘Beyond its breaking point, I fear.’ More amusement at the table. He and Eric were good together, Chancery putting on a show of irony and self-deprecation, qualities that had once been a stand-by of such people through centuries of empire and now seemed equally well adapted to Britain’s lowered status in the post-war world. ‘At the same time, Comrade Brezhnev appears a little nervous about being seen in Czechoslovakia. I understand the Russian train is due to be shunted across the border to Čierna in the morning for talks, and then, in the evening when the discussions are over and they’ve had a jolly dinner with the fraternal comrades, they’ll be shunted back to Russia for the night. That’s what we gather.’

‘You’re not serious? They’re frightened of spending the night in Czechoslovakia?’

‘Something like that.’

They digested this piece of news in silence before Whittaker spoke again. ‘We can only await developments, I suppose. And hope that common sense prevails. In the meantime, I would like to draw your attention to a report that comes, unattributed and unattributable, of course, from the Friends.’

The Friends, everyone knew and no one mentioned, were those enigmatic individuals who rooted around in the shadows of events like dogs raiding dustbins in a back alley, and came up with what they called, oxymoronically at times, intelligence. They were an inferior species to the true diplomats, inferior yet somehow enviable. It was hard not to have grudging admiration for the rather stout fellow who was their particular Friend, a man of no apparent consequence and even less significance, but who was here or hereabouts all the time, pretending to be responsible for cultural affairs while reporting not to His Excellency, Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic but rather to a man in Century House on the Thames in London, a man who was head of an organisation so secret that even its true name was secret, a man who himself was only ever known, in the manner of the worst spy thrillers, by a single letter – C.

‘This is, of course, most secret,’ Whittaker said, adding in one of his familiar parentheses: ‘I do so hate the word “secret”. It always sounds like an invitation to tell all.’

The stout man remained impassive. Others round the table smiled knowingly. ‘Just a straw in the wind, really, Eric,’ the man said. ‘Nothing to get too excited about. It seems that SIGINT has detected attempts by Russian forces to cut telecommunications from Prague to the outside world. Just brief moments of blackout. Probably trials.’

The little group, couched in its sealed room, was silent. Whittaker raised an eyebrow. ‘SIGINT?’

The man looked crestfallen. ‘An acronym, Eric. Sorry. Signals intelligence.’

‘Ah. An Americanism, no doubt.’

‘I fear so.’

‘But not really an acronym sensu stricto. More an abbreviation.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, Eric. Anyway, it seems possible that these blackouts are some kind of rehearsal. If the Warsaw Pact forces were to intervene—’

‘—invade.’

‘They would wish to move in beneath an electronic blanket.’

Whittaker nodded wearily. ‘So that is the background against which the Czechoslovak presidium is meeting with Brezhnev and his henchmen at’ – he glanced hopelessly at the papers in front of him – ‘Trainspotters’ Delight.’ There was more amusement round the table, the laughter of relief. ‘How do you divine the mood on the streets, Sam? You seem best equipped to give us the low-down. To use another Americanism.’

Sam thought of Lenka and her friends. ‘There’s a kind of bloody-minded insouciance about the activists. If they do invade, so what? Armies cannot defeat an idea whose time has come. That seems to be the general feeling.’

‘Sounds like flower power to me,’ the major said. ‘Armies cannot defeat a crowd of hippies. Unfortunately it’s not true. There could be a lot of blood.’

‘Somehow, I doubt it. The Czechs…’ Sam hesitated. It was the kind of statement that you made with caution. You needed to phrase it exactly right. People might quote him. ‘…are pragmatists. It’s not for nothing that Good Soldier Svejk is their hero. They know when not to kick against the pricks – but how to deflect them instead. Look at what happened in 1938. Or rather, what didn’t happen. Had they fought, the country would have been destroyed and this city would have been left in ruins.’

‘Not got the stomach for a fight,’ the major said briskly.

Sam turned on him, still thinking of Lenka, but now imagining her lying in the street with blood on that elegant Slavic face. ‘Look what happened to the ones who did fight. Look what happened in Warsaw during the war, or East Germany in fifty-three or Hungary in fifty-six.’

Whittaker sensed tempers rising. ‘Let’s hope common sense prevails,’ he said pacifically. ‘As always we must hope for the best and prepare for the worst. And to that end, I want to circulate this proposal for how we might look after the best interests of families and auxiliary staff in the event of a Soviet’ – he hesitated – ‘interference in local affairs. Contingency planning, that’s all. Just in case. Naturally, I wouldn’t like this information to get out of these four walls lest it cause more upset than circumstances deserve…’

The typewritten sheets went round the table. There was a hasty scanning, some suggestions, nods of approval. ‘And in the meantime we have our Members of Parliament doing the rounds. Where exactly are they now, Sam?’

‘I believe they are in Pilsen this morning. This afternoon it’s a glass factory.’

‘It’s always a glass factory.’

‘And then in the evening there is an informal party hosted by your kind self. And Madeleine, of course.’

After the meeting Sam searched out the stout little fellow who was everyone’s Friend. Harold Saumarez. Could he have a word? In strictest confidence?

Of course he could. Perhaps a breath of fresh air in the garden? Where, it was understood but never mentioned, they would be out of the hearing of any hidden microphones. So they strolled across velvet lawns where the ambassador held a summer garden party, assuming the weather was kind, to celebrate the QBP, the Queen’s Birthday Party, symbol of British insouciance abroad.

‘Just a word in your ear, Harold. In strictest confidence, of course.’

‘That’s the second time you’ve said that.’

‘Shows how important it is, doesn’t it? There’s a name I’d like to have checked out, you see. Someone I’ve met recently. One Lenka Konečková.’ As they walked they tried to keep their faces averted from the balustrade of the Castle high above where, so the rumour went, expert lip-readers attempted to oversee conversations in the gardens of the British embassy below and interpret what was being said. He even put his hand to cover his mouth as he spoke the name. ‘Twenty-five years old. Calls herself a student. Does some journalism, occasional work for the radio, so she says.’

Harold raised what were, by any standards, heavy eyebrows. ‘Personal interest?’

‘Professional.’

‘It’s hardly my job, you know.’

‘Of course it’s not, Harold. But you know as well as I do that security doesn’t know its arse from its elbow. Mr Plod the policeman, retired. Whereas our dearly beloved Friends…’

Harold sniffed, torn between wounded pride and flattery. ‘I’ll see what I can do. You don’t have a photo, do you?’

Sam produced the film cartridge and tucked it into the man’s top pocket as he might have tucked a cigar. ‘In there, right at the end. Perhaps your chaps can have it developed. I didn’t have any time. There’ll be a few snaps of little consequence – Steffie and me doing something silly – but the last one should show her. It’s a group photo, gathered round a table, late evening. Taken with a flash, so I’ve no idea how it’ll come out. Some of them will be making faces, but not her. She’ll be on the far left.’

Harold removed the item from his top pocket and secreted it elsewhere about his person, as though there was a correct place for such things. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘I’d be most grateful.’

9

The Whittakers had a rooftop terrace. This elevated their apartment to a level appropriate to Head of Chancery. One reckoned one’s progress through the service by measures like that – the quality of posting, of housing, of furnishing – until finally you reached ambassadorial level and might live in a palace surrounded by furniture and artworks fit for a museum, at which point the time came for your K and subsequent retirement to that dull and unfamiliar bungalow in the Home Counties. But for the moment, as he showed his guests onto the terrace, Eric Whittaker was heedless of that. ‘Two messages are inherent in this apartment,’ he was explaining in his best academic manner. ‘One is that.’ He made a theatrical gesture to demonstrate what was obvious, the view before them, across the rooftops of Malá Strana to the river and the Charles Bridge. Beyond the river were the imposing buildings and pinnacles of Staré Město, the Old Town. On one building a red star glowed like a single, malevolent eye. ‘From that view you may appreciate that we are amongst the elite, rising above everyone else in the city, except’ – he turned in the opposite direction, backstage, to where a massive bastion rose up from the terrace like a cliff, blocking out half the night sky – ‘that lot up there.’

Up there, looming over everyone, was the Hrad, the Castle, where the president of the country resided and Kafka reigned supreme.

‘That,’ he said, ‘is the second message.’

The visitors laughed dutifully but nervously. They made up the parliamentary delegation come to convince itself that Socialism With A Human Face really was possible even behind the barbed wire and tank traps of the Iron Curtain. They’d spent the morning at the Škoda works in Pilsen and the afternoon in a glass factory, where each member of the party had been presented with a piece of abstract Bohemian glass resembling something you might find in the waste bin of a hospital operating theatre. Now it was an informal dinner at the Whittakers’ with carefully selected guests.

‘What dreadful, dull people,’ Madeleine whispered. She was tall and dark and vindictive towards things that did not amuse her. The MPs’ wives did not amuse her. Having spent most of the day showing them the sights of Prague (the wives not deemed serious enough to deal with the Škoda factory), she now considered her duty done and had enticed Sam into a secluded corner of the terrace where she could give vent to her spleen. ‘In France tout le monde understands that you must imitate the arbiters of good taste even if you ’ate what they admire; but these people seem to think that taste is a matter of opinion. Worse than that, they appear to think that it is a matter of démocratie.’

She’d had the foresight to put some music on the record player, and the cool voice of a soprano saxophone drifted out of the speakers. Sam knew what was coming next. She would suggest they dance and she would press her hips against him and get him aroused, and he would picture Steffie’s face twisted into a little scowl of ‘told-you-so’.

‘I think you ought to get your guests dancing,’ he suggested.

‘Pah!’ It was astonishing how dismissive an innocent exclamation could become when manipulated by a pair of French lips. ‘Those clod’oppers,’ she said. ‘There is nothing worse-dressed and worse-mannered than a British socialist. And nothing worse at dancing. So I want to dance with you, Sam, and find out how you are doing without the virginal Stéfanie at your side. Is celibacy already beginning to get you down?’

‘She’s only been gone a few days.’

She laughed. ‘Do you know what President Kennedy once told me?’

‘When did you meet President Kennedy?’

‘When Eric was in Washington. You don’t believe me?’

‘It all depends on what he said.’

‘He said, “I get terrible headaches if I haven’t had a new woman in three days.”’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘But it ’appens to be true.’

‘And you replied?’

‘“Do you have a headache now?” And he said, “Ma’am, I sure do.” To which I replied, “Well, Mister President, if you come with me we’ll see what’s in the medicine chest.”’

She laughed and took hold of him, moving with the music exactly as he had predicted, sinuously, pushing her hips against him, a rather expert movement that might have been mistaken for a tango. One of the visiting MPs laughed. There was a smattering of applause. Sam heard Eric’s voice saying ‘French’ to one of the guests, as though by way of explanation. Another couple joined them in the dance, with nothing like Madeleine’s snake-like immodesty but with a degree of regimented competence that spoke of hours of practice in Northern ballrooms.

Her mouth close to his ear, Madeleine whispered, ‘Steffie has entrusted me with looking after you. To ensure that you don’t suffer from Kennedy ’eadaches and go looking after lovely Czech ladies.’

‘Steffie asked you to do that? It’d be like putting the fox in charge of a chicken.’

A little breath of laughter, carrying with it the scent of Chanel No. 5. ‘Are you a chicken, Sam?’

Eric’s voice came from across the terrace. ‘Sam, put my wife down. You don’t know where she’s been.’

Gusts of laughter. These Foreign Office boys, the laughter seemed to say: nothing like as stuck up as they seem.

Madeleine’s voice continued in his ear, ‘Or are you just a tiny bit queer, like so many of you public school boys?’

‘Grammar school, I’m afraid. Altogether more normal. And duller.’

She laughed with him and detached herself from his arms to do a little pirouette. ‘So show me.’

To Sam’s relief the record changed. Something more upbeat, with a heavy bass riff and an organ wailing protest. Madeleine detached herself from him and began to dance in the middle of the terrace, her arms above her head, hips gyrating in time with the insistent beat. ‘Gimme some lovin’,’ a raucous blues voice demanded. One of the MPs began to jig around opposite Madeleine, leaving Sam to make his escape to the drinks table.

As he poured himself a whisky a Northern voice spoke over his shoulder. ‘So what’s your role in all this, young man?’

He turned to find one of the delegation at his elbow. The man was short and stout and would have fitted well enough into the Party Praesidium during Gottwald’s reign – ill-fitting grey suit that shone like beaten pewter, a shirt collar as tight as a garrotte, a glance that hovered between unease and malice. Before the delegation had arrived in the city the diplomatic staff had been briefed to treat members of the group with extreme caution; most of them were well to the left of almost anyone in Dubček’s government and all of them considered the Foreign Office little more than a sinecure for ex-public school boys. This particular example was one such, a trades unionist who was mainly renowned for having brought his own particular branch of industry to its knees through a series of wildcat strikes. ‘My role in this what, exactly?’

‘In Her Britannic Majesty’s embassy to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Aside from dancing with the boss’s wife, that is.’

‘I’m political.’

‘Are you, indeed? And where do your politics lie?’

‘Wherever the current government tells me they should.’

The man laughed humourlessly. ‘Ever the diplomat, eh?’

‘That’s what people keep telling me.’

‘I’ll bet you’re a Tory.’

‘I wonder if you’d find any takers amongst those who actually know me.’

‘So what’s your view of the politics here?’

‘I think I know too much about it all to have a single view. I have many views, each one calling the previous one into question.’

‘Typical Foreign Office response. Come off the bloody fence for once. Admit that Dubček’s a working-class hero. He’s showing how socialism should be. And you Tories are just as pissed off as the Russians.’

Sam looked at the man pityingly. ‘Actually, the Office doesn’t consider hero-worship of foreign leaders to be in our best interests. And whatever you may see now, it’s worth remembering that Dubček and his merry men all came up through the ranks during the Stalinist era, during which they accepted all kinds of horror as though it was the will of God. Now they’re standing on the brink, wondering whether to jump into the unknown or turn back into the familiar arms of Mother Russia. When push comes to shove, they’re likely to turn round and beg Mummy for forgiveness.’

‘And when will that be?’

‘It’s probably happening now, at their meeting in eastern Slovakia. No doubt the fraternal comrades are toasting peace and happiness at this very moment.’

‘Have you met the man?’

‘Dubček? Once, at a reception. The ambassador was in London and Eric Whittaker was ill, so the lot fell on me.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Courteous, amusing, intelligent. As far as one can tell from hello goodbye.’

The man hummed a bit, his bluff, aggressive humour dampened for a moment. ‘Speak the language, do you?’ he asked unexpectedly.

‘Czech? Well enough. My Russian is better.’

‘At least they’ve posted you to the right place.’

‘Pure chance, I can assure you. I might just as easily have got Ouagadougou.’

Wry laughter. Did the man even know where Ouagadougou was?

It wasn’t exactly clear what brought the evening to an end. Probably the arrival of cars to take people back to their hotel. There was much handshaking and a bit of two-cheek kissing, which rather surprised the parliamentarians. And then the terrace and the house below was empty of all but the hosts and Sam was making his belated farewells. Madeleine managed to get him alone for a moment, which was what he had been dreading. She took hold of his shoulders and kissed him full on the mouth. ‘Sam,’ she said, ‘will you go to bed with me?’

‘Did Steffie suggest you ask me that?’

‘More or less.’

‘Well tell her the answer’s no.’

She laughed. ‘Is that because you’re being faithful to her, or because you’ve got someone else lined up?’

‘Mrs Whittaker, you’re drunk.’

She was doing that thing, fiddling with his tie as though to make him look respectable. ‘And you are boring.’

‘Boring is what I should be, under the circumstances. Can you imagine what Eric would say if the First Secretary in Chancery was shafting his wife?’

‘Eric doesn’t mind. When he took me on I warned him that sometimes I’d have a little fling and he wasn’t to mind about it. It was my first husband who minded, and look what happened to him.’

He took her hand and lowered it to her side. ‘Was he pushed or did he jump?’

She thumped him gently in the chest. ‘I began to push,’ she said. ‘He thought it easier to jump.’

It was a short walk to Sam’s flat through the maze of alleys. As he reached the little square in front of his building a figure detached itself from the shadows and accosted him.

‘Did I give you a fright?’ the SIS man asked.

‘Not at all, Harold. Nothing gives me a fright in the Malá Strana. Safest place in the whole city.’

‘Ghosts, I thought. No amount of security can guard against them.’

‘Are you a ghost, Harold?’

‘Spook, maybe. But I’ve always thought of myself as a kind of golem. Occult powers, if you know what I mean. No, I won’t come up. Safer to have a quick chat out here.’

‘I’m sure my flat is clean.’

The man laughed. ‘Is that what Mr Plod the policeman tells you?’ He reached inside his jacket as though going for a gun, but all he brought out was a plain envelope. ‘I thought you’d like the photo. Nice little souvenir. Don’t bother looking at it now. I just wanted to say that she has form. Your young lady, I mean.’

‘Form? What kind of form?’

‘Interesting, really. A few years ago – sixty, sixty-one – she was having an affair with a member of the Party. Respectable chap, married, three children, house in Vinohrady, you know the kind of thing. Destined for the Presidium, by all accounts. So we got to know about his little peccadillo with this particular girl – don’t ask me how – and we had him lined up for a bit of gentle blackmail.’

‘Charming.’

‘We are, Sam, we are.’

‘And what happened?’

‘Total bloody failure. As soon as he was approached by us, he dropped her like a hot potato, confessed everything to the wife and told the StB. Our own chap had a difficult time extricating himself from the deal. He was working under diplomatic cover, thank God, but they declared him persona non grata and we had to get him out in a hurry.’

Nothing could be more normal, Sam told himself. Young girl falls for older, successful, married man, then gets thrown over when the affair threatens to go public. Yet nothing could be more abnormal than having Harold and his spooks sniffing around your private parts. ‘But she wasn’t actually working for us, was she? It wasn’t – what do you lot call it? – a honey trap?’

Harold glanced sideways at Sam. He was hoping, oh, surely he was hoping, that he looked like Orson Welles in that scene in The Third Man. Not as he was in the later scenes – not running through the sewers, and certainly not clawing at the grating of the manhole cover. But the one where Harry Lime appears for the first time, standing in the shadows of the doorway. ‘I’d say she was a not-so-innocent bystander caught in the crossfire.’

‘Not so innocent?’

‘Apparently your girl was only fifteen when she started with this fellow. Quite a little titbit.’

Sam felt something snap inside him. Nothing dramatic, just a small palpable rupture. Trust, or something. ‘Fifteen?’

‘That’s what it seems. Been with him for three or four years when we caught up with it. There’s a theory going around the files that we were trespassing on another operation. That she was set up by the East Germans. Who knows if that’s true or not?’

‘So she might have been an East German agent? At fifteen?’

‘Not saying so, old chap. Just a rumour.’

There was a pause while Sam digested this possibility. ‘Sure you won’t come up?’ he asked. ‘A nightcap?’

‘Quite sure, old chap. Must be getting along. Work all hours these days. I do hope I haven’t put the kibosh on the start of a lovely friendship.’

‘Nothing of the kind, Harold. And thank you for the information.’

In his sitting room Sam opened the envelope Harold had given him and tipped the photographic print out along with two strips of negatives. He examined the print. It was the kind of thing you took on holiday – a group of strangers gathered behind half-empty beer glasses, frozen by the flash and backed by shadows. Faces were white and staring, grimacing with laughter. One of the group had put his hand round the back of his neighbour’s head to give him an antenna of two fingers. In the centre was the violinist – Jitka, that was her name – and her husband. On the left of the group was Lenka. The others laughed, she smiled.

What, Sam wondered, was she smiling at?