The Russia House

CHAPTER 13

Katya collected Barley at ten o'clock on the Sunday morning from the forecourt of the immense Mezhdu narodnaya, which was where Henziger had insisted they stay. Westerners know it familiarly as 'the Mezh'. Both Wicklow and Henziger, seated in the hotel's preposterous Great Hall, contrived to witness their happy reunion and departure.

The day was fine and autumn-scented and Barley had started waiting for her early, hovering in the forecourt amid the blind limousines that fetched and disgorged their Third World chieftains in a steady flow. Then at last her red Lada popped up among them like a burst of fun at a funeral, with Anna's white hand streaming out of the rear window like a handkerchief and Sergey, upright as acommissar beside her, clutching his fishing net.

It was important to Barley to notice the children first. He had thought about it and told himself it was what he would do, because nothing was insignificant any more, nothing could be left to chance. Only when he had waved enthusiastically at both of them therefore and pulled a face at Anna through the back window, did he allow,himself to peer into the front, where Uncle Matvey sat squarely in the passenger seat, his polished brown face glowing like a chestnut and his sailor's eyes twinkling under the brim of his plaid cap. Sunshine or storm, Matvey had put-on his best things to honour the great Englishman: his twill jacket, his best boots and bow tie. The crossed enamelled flags of the Revolution were pinned to his lapel. Matvey lowered his window and Barley reached through it,. grasping his hand and yelling 'Hullo, hullo!' at him several times. Only then did he venture to look at Katya. And there was a kind of hiatus as if he had forgotten his lines or his cover story, or simply how beautiful she was, before he hoisted his smile.

But Katya showed no such reticence.

She leapt out of the car. She was wearing badly-cut slacks and looked marvellous in them. She rushed round to him beaming with happiness and trust. She yelled, 'Barley!' And by the time she reached him she had flung her arms so wide that her body was cheerfully and unthinkingly open to him for his embrace - which as a good Russian girl she then decorously curtailed, standing back from him but still holding on to him, examining his face, his hair, his ancient outdoor gear, while she chatted away in a flood of spontaneous goodfellowship.

'It is so good, Barley, really so good to see you!' she was exclaiming. 'Welcome to the book fair, welcome to Moscow again. Matvey could not believe it, your phone call from London! "The English were always our friends," he said. "They taught Peter how to sail, and if he had not known how to sail, we would not today have a navy." He is speaking of Peter the Great, you see. Matvey lives only for Leningrad. Do you not admire Volodya's fine car? I am so grateful he has something he can love at last.'

She released him and, like the happy idiot he by now was looking, Barley let out a cry of 'God, nearly forgot!' He meant the carrier bags. He had propped them against the wall of the hotel beside the entrance and by the time he reappeared with them, Matvey was trying to climb out of the car to make room for him in the front, but Barley would have none of it.

'No, no, no, no! I'll be absolutely fine with the twins! Bless you all the same. Matvey.' Then he threaded and backed his long body into the rear seat as if he were. parking an articulated lorry, while he handed round his parcels and the twins giggled at him in awe: this giant Westerner with so many joints and bits left over, who has brought us English chocolates, and Swiss crayons, and drawing books, one each, and the works of Beatrix Potter in English to share, and a beautiful new pipe for Uncle Matvey, which Katya is saying Will make him happier than is possible to imagine, with a pouch of English tobacco to smoke in it.

And for Katya everything she could want for the rest of her life – lipsticks and a pullover and scents and a French silk scarf too beautiful to wear.

All this by the time Katya drove out of the Mezh forecourt and bumped on to a pockmarked highway, chatting about the book fair that was opening tomorrow, and steering inaccurately between the flooded craters.

They were heading roughly cast. The friendly gold September sun hung ahead of them, making even the Moscow suburbs beautiful. They entered the sad flatland of Moscow's outskirts, with its proprictorless fields, desolate churches and fenccd-in transformers. Clusters ofold dachas were scattered like ancient beach-huts along the roadside, and their sculptured gables and boxed gardens reminded Barley as always of the English country railway stations of his youth. From his seat in the front, Matvcy was poisoning them all with his new pipe and proclaiming his ecstasy through the clouds of smoke. But Katya was too busy putting out the sights to pay him much attention.

'Over that hill lies the so-and-so metal foundry, Barley. The shabby cement building to your left is a collective farm.'

'Great,' said Barley. 'Fascinating! What a day, though, wow!'

Anna had emptied her crayons on to her lap and discovered that if she licked the points they left wet trails of paint. Sergey was urging her to put them back in their tin and Barley was trying to keep the peace by drawing animals in her sketch book for her to colour, but Moscow road surfaces are not kind to artists.

'Not green, you chump,' he told her. 'Who ever saw a green cow? Katya, for heaven's sake, your daughter thinks cows are green.'

'Oh Anna is completely impractical!' Katya cried laughing, and spoke quickly to Anna over her shoulder, who giggled up at Barley.

And all this had to be heard over Matvey's continued monologue and Anna's immense hilarity and Sergey's troubled interjections, not to mention the anguished thunder of the little engine, until nobody could hear anything except themselves. Suddenly they swung off the road, across a grass field and up a hill without even a track to guide them, to huge laughter from the children and from Katya too, while Matvey clutched his hat with one hand, and his pipe with the other.

'You see?' Katya was demanding of Barley above the din, as if she had proved a long-contested point between lovers. 'In Russia we may go exactly where our fancy takes us, provided we do not trespass into the estates of our millionaires or government officials.'

They crested the hill amid more riotous laughter and plunged into a grass dip, then rose again like a brave little boat on a wave tojoin a farm track that ran beside a stream. The stream entered. a birch grove, the track raced beside it. Katya somehow hauled the car to a halt, heaving on the handbrake as if she were slowing down a sledge. They were alone in Paradise with the stream to dam, and a bank to picnic on, and space to play lapta with Sergey's stick and ball from the boot of the car, which required everybody to stand in a ring, and one to bowl and one to bat.

Anna, it quickly became apparent, was frivolous about lapta. Her ambition was to get through it with as much laughter as possible, then settle down ta lunch and flirt with Barley. But Sergey the soldier was a believer and Matvey the sailor was a zealot. While Katya spread out the picnic, she explained the mystical importance of lapta to the development of Western culture.

'Matvey assures me it is the origin of American baseball and your English cricket. He believes it was introduced to you by Russian immigrants. I am sure he also believes that it was invented by Peter the Great.'

'If it's true, it's the death of the Empire,' said Barley gravely.

Lying in the grass, Matvey is still talking volubly while he puffs at his new pipe. His generous blue eyes, receding into their glorious Leningrad past, are filled with a heroic light. But Katya hears him as if he were a radio that can't be switched off. She picks on the odd point and is deaf to all the rest. Marching across the grass, she climbs into the car and closes the door behind her, to reappear in shorts, carrying the picnic in an oilcloth bag, with sandwiches wrapped in newspaper. She has prepared cold kotleti and cold chicken and meat pies. She has salted cucumber and hard-boiled eggs. She has brought bottles of Zhiguli beer, Barley has brought Scotch, with which Matvey fervently coasts some absent monarch, perhaps Peter himself.

Scrgey stands on the bank, raking the water with his net. His dream, Katya explains, is to catch a fish and cook it for everyone who depends on him. Anna is drawing. Ostentatiously, leaning away from her work so that others may admire it. She wishes to give Barley a portrait of herself to hang in his room in London.

'She is asking, are you married?' Katya says, yielding to her daughter's importuning.

'No, not at present, but I'm always available.'

Anna asks another question but Katya blushes and rebukes her. His loyalist duties completed, Matvey is lying on his back with his cap over his eyes, rattling on about heaven knows what, except that, whatever it is, it is all delightful to him.

'Soon he will describe the siege of Leningrad,' Katya calls with a fond smile.

A pause while she glances at Barley. She means, 'Now we can talk.'

The grey lorry was leaving, and high time too. Barley had been resenting it over her shoulder for quite a while, hoping it was friendly but wishing it would leave them alone. The side windows of its cab were dark with dust. Gratefully he, saw it lumber to the road then lumber out of sight and mind.

'Oh, he is very well,' Katya was saying. 'He wrote me a long letter and everything is excellent with him. He was ill but he is completely recovered, I am sure. He has many matters to discuss with you and he will make a special visit to Moscow during the fair in order to meet you and hear the progress concerning his book. He would like to see some prepared manuscript soon, perhaps only a page. My opinion is that this would be dangerous but he is so impatient. He wants proposals about the title, translations, even illustrations. I think he is becoming a typical dictatorial writer. He will confirm everything very soon and he will also find an apartment where you can meet. He wishes to make all the arrangements himself, can you imagine? I think yqu have been a very good influence for him.'

She was searching in her handbag. A red car had parked on the other side of the birch grove but she seemed oblivious to everything but her own good spirits. 'Personally I believe his work will soon be regarded as redundant. With the disarmament talks advancing so rapidly and the new atmosphere of international cooperation, all these terrible things will shortly belong to the past. Naturally the Americans a re suspicious of us. Naturally we are suspicious of them. But when we have joined our forces, we can disarm completely and between us prevent all further trouble in the world.' It was her didactic voice, brooking no argument.

'How do we prevent all further trouble in the world if we haven't got any arms to prevent it with?' Barley objected, and won a sharp look for his temerity.

'Barley, you are being Western and negative, I think,' she retorted as she drew the envelope from her handbag. 'It was you, not 1, who told Yakov that we required an experiment in human nature.'

No stamp, Barley noticed. No postmark. just 'Katya' in Cyrillic, in what looked like Goethe's handwriting, but who could tell? He felt a sudden sense of warning in his head and shoulders, like a poison, or an allergy coming on.

'What's he been recovering from?' he asked.

'Was he nervous when you met him in Leningrad?'

'We both were. It was the weather,' Bailey replied, still waiting for an answer. He was feeling slightly drunk as well. Must be something he had eaten.

'It was because he was ill. Quite soon after your meeting he had a bad collapse and it was so sudden and severe that even his colleagues did not know where he had disappeared to. They had the worst suspicions. A trusted friend told me they feared he might be dead.'

'I didn't know he had any trusted friends except you.'

'He has appointed me his representative to you. He naturally has other friends for other things.' She drew out the letter but did not give it to him.

'That's not quite what you tol~ me before,'he said feebly, while he continued to battle with his multiplying symptoms of mistrust.

She was unmoved by his objection. 'Why should one tell everything at a first encounter? One has to protect oneself. It is normal.'

'I suppose it is,' he agreed.

Anna had finished her self-portrait and needed immediate recognition. It showed her picking flowers on a rooftop.

'Superb!' Barley cried. 'Tell her I'll hang it above my fireplace, I know just the spot. There's a picture of Anthea skiing on one side. and Hal sailing on the other. Anna goes in the middle.'

'She asks how old is Hal?' Katya said.

He really had to think. He had first to remember Hal's birth year, then the year it was now, then laboriously subtract the one from the other while he fought off the singing in his cars.

'Ah well now, Hal's twenty-four. But I'm afraid he's made a rather foolish marriage.'

Anna was disappointed. She stared reproachfully at them as Katya resumed their conversation.

'As soon as I heard he had disappeared I tried to contact him by all the usual means but I was not successful. I was extrdmely distressed.' She passed him the letter at last, her eyes alight with pleasure and relief. As he took it from her, his hand closed distractedly over hers and she let it. 'Then eight days ago, a week ago yesterday which was Saturday, just two days after you telephoned from London, Igor telephoned me at my house. "I have some medicine for you. Let us have a coffee and I will give it to you." Medicine is our code for a letter. He meant a letter from Yakov. I was amazed and very happy. It is even years since Yakov has sent me a letter. And such a letter!'

'Who's Igor?' Barley said, speaking rather loudly in order to defeat the uproar inside his head.

There were five pages of it, written on good unobtainable white writing paper, in an orderly, regular script. Barley had not imagined Goethe capable of such a conventionallooking document. She took back her hand, but gently.

'Igor is a friend of Yakov from Leningrad. They studied together.'

'Great. What does he do now?'

She was annoyed by his question and impatient to have his good reaction to the letter, even if he could only judge it by appearance. 'He is a scientist of some kind with one of the ministries. What does it matter how Igor is employed? Do you wish me to translate it to you or not?'

'What's his other name?'

She told him, and in the midst of his confusion he was exalted by her abrasiveness. We should have had years, he thought, not hours. We should have pulled each other's hair when we were kids. We should have done everything we never did, before it was too late. He held the letter for her and she knelt herself carelessly behind him on the grass, steadying herself with one hand on his shoulder, while with the other she pointed past him at the lines as she translated. He could feel her breasts brushing against his back. He could feel his world steady itself inside him, as the monstrosity of his first suspicions made way for a more analytical frame of mind.

'Here is the address, just a box number, that is normal,' she said, her fingertip on the top right corner. 'He is in a special hospital, perhaps in a special town. He wrote the letter in bed – you see how well he writes when he is sober? – he gave it to a friend who was on his way to Moscow. The friend gave it to Igor. It is normal. "My darling Katya" – that is not exactly how he begins, it is a different endearment, never mind. "I have been struck down with some variety of hepatitis but illness is very instructive and I am alive." That is so typical of him, to draw at once the moral lesson.' She was pointing again. 'This word makes the hepatitis worse. It is "irritated".'

'Aggravated,' Barley said quite calmly.

The hand on his shoulder gave him a reproving squeeze. 'What does it matter what is the right word? You want me to fetch a dictionary? "I have had a high temperature and much fantasy – "'

'Hallucination,' Barley said.

'The word is gallutsinatsiya' she began furiously.

'Okay, let's stick with that.'

'" – but now I am recovered and in two days I shall go to a convalescent unit for a week by the sea." He does not say which sea, why should he? "I shall be able to do everything except drink vodka, but that is a bureaucratic limitation which as a good scientist I shall quickly ignore." Is that not typical also? That after hepatitis he thinks im- mediately of vodka?'

'Absolutely,' Barley agreed, smiling in order to please her - and perhaps to reassure himself.

The lines were dead straight as if written on a ruled page. There was not a single crossing out.

'"If only all Russians could have hospitals like this, what a healthy nation we would soon become." He is always the idealist, even when he is ill. "The nurses are so beautiful and the doctors are young and handsome, it is more a house of love here than a house of sickness. " He says this to make mejealous. But do you know something? It is most unusual that he comments- on anybody happy. Yakov is a tragedian. He is even a sceptic. I think they have cured his bad moods as well. "Yesterday I took exercise for the first time but I soon felt exhausted like a child. Afterwards I lay on the balcony and got quite a suntan before sleeping like an angel with nothing on my conscience except how badly I have treated you, always exploiting you." Now he writes love talk, I shall not translate it.'

'Does he always do that?'

She laughed. 'I told you. It is not even normal that he writes to me, and it is many months, I would say years, since he spoke of our love, which is now entirely spiritual. I think the illness has made him a little sentimental, so we shall forgive him.' She turned the page in h is hand, and again their hands met, but Barley's was as cold as winter and he was secretly- surprised that she did not comment on it. 'Now we come to Mr. Barley. You. He'is extremely cautious. He does not mention you by name. At least the illness has not affected his discretion. "Please tell our good friend that I shall try my best to see him during his visit, provided that my recovery continues. He should bring his materials and I shall try to do the same. I have to deliver a lecture in Saratov that week" - Igor says that is the military academy, Yakov always gives a lecture there in September, so many things one learns when somebody is ill - "and I shall come to Moscow as soon as possible from there. If you speak to him before I do, please tell him the following. Tell him to bring all further questions because after this I do not wish to answer any more questions for the grey men. Tell him his list should be final and exhaustive."'

Barley listened in silence to Goethe's further instructions which were as emphatic as they had been in Leningrad. And as he listened, the black clouds of his disbelief swept together to make a secret dread inside him, and his nausea returned.

A sample page of translation, but in print, please, print is so much more revealing, she was saying on Goethe's behalf.

I wish for an introduction by Professor Killian of Stockholm, please approach him as soon as possible, she was reading.

Have you had further reactions from your intelligentsia? Kindly advise me.

Publishing dates. Goethe had heard that autumn was the best market, but must one really wait a whole year? she asked, for her lover.

The title again. How about The Biggest Lie in the World? The blurb, please let me see a draft. And please send an early copy to Dr. Dagmar Somebody at Stanford and Professor Herman Somebody-else at MIT…

Barley painstakingly wrote all this down in his notebook on a page he headed BOOK FAIR.

'What's in the rest of the letter?' he asked.

She was returning it to its envelope. 'I told you. It is love talk. He is at peace with himself and he wishes to resume a full relationship.'

'With you.'

A pause while her eyes considered him. 'Barley, I think you are being a little childish.'

'Lovers then?' Barley insisted. 'Live happily ever after. Is that, it?'

'In the past he was scared of the responsibility. Now he is not. That is what he writes and naturally it is out of the question. What has been has been. It cannot be restored.'

'Then why does he write it?' said Barley stubbornly.

'I don't know.'

'Do you believe him?'

She was about to be seriously angry with him when she caught something in his expression that was not envy and not hostility but an intense, almost frightening concern for her safety.

'Why should he spin you the talk just because he's ill? He. doesn't usually fool around with people's emotions, does he? He prides himself on speaking the truth.'

And still his penetrating gaze would not relinquish her or the letter.

'He is lonely', she replied protectively. 'He is missing me so he exaggerates. It is normal. Barley, I think you are being a little bit – '

Either she could not find the word, or on second thoughts she decided against using it, so Barley supplied it for her. 'Jealous,' he said.

And he managed what he knew she was waiting for. He smiled. He composed a good, sincere smile of disinterested friendship and squeezed her hand and clambered to his feet. 'He sounds fantastic,' he said. 'I'm very happy for him. For his recovery.'

And he meant it. Every word. He could hear the true note of conviction in his voice as his eye moved quickly to the parked red car on the other side of the birch grove.

Then to the common delight Barley hurls himself upon the business of becoming a weekend father, a r6le for which his torn life has amply prepared him. Sergey wants him to try his hand at fishing. Anna wants to know why he hasn't brought his swim suit. Matvey has gone to sleep, smiling from the whisky and his memories. Katya stands in the water in her shorts. She looks more beautiful to him than ever before, and more remote. Even collecting rocks to build a dam, she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.

Yet nobody ever worked harder on a dam than Barley that afternoon, nobody had a clearer vision of how the waters should be held at bay. He rolls up his stupid grey flannel trousers and soaks himself to the crotch. He heaves sticks and stones till he is half dead, while Anna sits astride his shoulders directing operations. He pleases Sergey with his businesslike approach, and Katya with his romantic flourish. A white car has replaced the red one. A couple sit in it with the doors open, eating whatever they are eating, and at Barley's suggestion the children stand on the hilltop and wave to them, but the couple in the white car don't wave back.

Evening falls and a tang of autumn fires drifts through the dying birch leaves. Moscow is made of wood again, and burning. As they load the car, a pair of wild geese fly over them and they are the last two geese in the world.

On the journey back to the hotel, Anna sleeps on Barley's lap while Matvey chatters and Sergey frowns at the pages of Squirrel Nutkin as if they are the Party Manifesto.

'When do you speak to him again?' Barley asks.

'It is arranged,' she says enigmatically.

'Did Igor arrange it?'

'Igor arranges nothing. Igor is the messenger.'

'The new messenger,' he corrects her.

'Igor is an old acquaintance and a new messenger. Why not?'

She glances at him and reads his intention. 'You cannot come to the hospital, Barley. It is not safe for you.'

'It's not exactly a holiday for you either,' he replies.

She knows, he thought. She knows but does not know she knows. She has the symptoms, a part of her has made the diagnosis. But the rest of her refuses to admit there's anything amiss.

The Anglo-American situation room was no longer a shabby basement in Victoria but the radiant penthouse of a smart new baby skyscraper off Grosvenor Square. It styled itself the Inter-Allied Conciliation Group and was. guarded by shifts of conciliatory American Marines in military plainclothes. An air of thrilled purpose pervaded it as the expanded team of trim young men and women flitted between clean desks, answered winking telephones, spoke to Langley on secure lines, passed papers, typed at silent keyboards or lounged in attitudes of eager relaxation before the rows of television monitors that-had replaced the twin clocks of the old Russia House.

It was a deck on two levels, and Ned and Sheriton were seated side by side on the closed bridge, while below them on the other side of the sound-proofed glass their unequal crews went about their duties. Brock and Emma had one wall, Bob, Johnny and their cohorts the other wall and centre aisle. But all were travelling in the same direction. All wore the same obediently purposeful expressions, faced the same banks of screens that rolled and flickered like stock exchange quotations as the automatic decodes came in.

'Truck's safely back in dock,' said Sheriton as the screens abruptly cleared and flashed the codeword BLACKJACK.

The truck itself was a miracle of penetration.

Our own truck! In Moscow! Us! In English it would have been a lorry but here it was a truck in deference to the American proprietorship. An enormous separate operation lay behind its acquisition and deployment. It was a Kamaz, dirty grey and very big, one of a fleet of trucks belonging to SOVTRANSAV-rO, hence the acronym daubed in Roman letters across its filthy flank. It had been recruited, together with its driver, by the Agency's enormous Munich station during one of the truck's many forays to West Germany to collect luxury commodities for Moscow's privileged few with access to a special distribution store. Everything from Western shoes to Western tampons to spare parts for Western cars had been shuttled back and forth inside the truck's bowels. As to the driver. he was one of the Long Distance Gunners, as these luckless creatures are known in the Soviet Union - State employees, miserably underpaid, with neither medical nor accident insurance to protect them against misfortune in the West, who even in deepest winter huddle stoically in the lee of their great charges, munching sausage before sharing another night's sleep in their comfortless cabins - but making for themselves, in Russia nevertheless, vast fortunes out of their opportunities in the West.

And now, for yet more immense rewards, this particular Long Distance Gunner had agreed to 'lend' his truck to a 'Western dealer' here in the very heart of Moscow. And this same dealer, who was one of Cy's own army of toptuny, lent it to Cy. who in turn stuffed inside it all kinds of ingeniously portable surveillance and audio equipment. which was then swept away again before the truck was returned through intermediaries to its legal driver.

Nothing of the sort had ever happened before. Our own mobile safe room, in Moscow!

Ned alone found the whole idea unsettling. The Long Distance Gunners worked in pairs, as Ned knew better than anyone. By KGB edict, these pairs were deliberately incompatible, and in many cases each man had a responsi- bility to report upon the other. But when Ned asked if he could read the operational file, it was denied him under the very laws of security he himself held dear.

But the most impressive piece of Langley's new armoury had still to be unveiled, and once again Ned had not been able to hold out against it. From now onwards, sound tapes in Moscow would. be encrypted into random codes and transmitted in digital pulses in one-thousandth of the time that the tapes would take to run if you were listening to them in your drawing room. Yet when the pulses were restored to sound by the receiving station, the Langley wizards insisted, you could never tell the tapes had had such a rough time.

The word WAIT was forming in pretty pyramids. Spying is waiting.

The word SOUND replaced it. Spying is listening.

Ned and Sheriton put on their headsets as Clive and I slipped into the spare seats behind them and put on ours.

Katya sat pensively on her bed staring at the telephone, not wanting it to ring again.

Why do you give your name when none of us give names? she asked him in her mind.

Why do you give mine?

Is that Katya? How are you? This is Igor speaking. just to tell you I have heard nothing more from him, okay?

Then why do you ring me to tell me nothing?

The usual time, okay? The usual place. No problem. just like before.

Why do you repeat what needs no repetition, after I have already told you I will be at the hospital at the agreed time?

By then he'll know what his position is, he'll know which plane he can catch, everything. Then you don't have to worry, okay? How about your publisher? Did he show up all right?

'Igor, I do not know which publisher you are referring to.'

And she rang off before he could say more.

I am being ungrateful, she told herself. When people are ill it is normal that old friends should rally. And if they promote themselves overnight from casual acquaintance to old friend, and take centre stage when for years they have hardly spoken to you, it is still a sign of loyalty and there is nothing sinister about it, even if only six months ago Yakov declared Igor to be unredeemable - 'Igor has continued along the path I left behind,' he had remarked after a chance meeting in the street. 'Igor asks too many questions.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what tragedy?

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

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

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

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

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

'Elope with me,' he said.

'Tonight?'

'Horses are saddled, food for three days.'

'But are you also sober enough to elope?'

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

He sounded sober too. Sober and close.

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

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

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

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

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

'But that's terrible!' she cried, deeply shocked. 'Barley, what are you telling rne?'

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

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

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

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

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

'Because I don't feel anything?'

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

'More.'

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

'Are there any pies left over?'

'You mean you feel hunger too?'

I want to come and eat them.'

'Now?'

'Now.'

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

'Tomorrow.'

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

'What time?'

A beautiful silence was settling between them.

'You may come at perhaps-half-past-seven.'

'I may be early.'

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

He was singing.

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

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

Sober.

Hot sober.

Barley Blair.

Alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or Goethe's cumbersome, untypicaljokes about bureaucrats and vodka.

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

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

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

And that if Barley were ever called upon to choose, he would rather go Goethe's path than Ned's or anybody else't, because his presence would be urgently required in the extreme middle ground of which he had elected himself a citizen.

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

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

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

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

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

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