The Russia House

CHAPTER 4

He had made a base camp at his own end of the room on a stiff school chair as far away from us as he could get. He perched on it sideways to us, stooped over his whisky glass, which he held in both hands, peering into it like a great thinker or at least a lonely one. He spoke not to us but to himself, emphatically and scathingly,not stirring except to take a sip from his glass or duck his head in affirmation of some private and usually abstracted point of narrative. He spoke in the mixture of pedantry and disbelief that people use to reconstruct a disastrous episode, such as a death or a traffic accident. So I was here and you were there and the other chap came from over there.

'It was last Moscow book fair. The Sunday. Not the Sunday before, the Sunday after,' he said.

'September,' Ned suggested, at which Barley rolled his head around and muttered 'Thanks,' as if genuinely grateful to be prodded. Then he wrinkled his nose and fussed his spectacles and began again.

'We were knackered,' he said. 'Most of the exhibitors had got out on the Friday. It was only a bunch of us who hung around. Those who had contracts to tidy up, or no particular reason to get back in a hurry.'

He was a compelling man and he had centre stage. It was difficult not to attach to him a little, stuck out there on his own. It was difficult not to think, 'There, but for the grace of God, go!' And the more so since none of us knew where he was going.

'We got drunk on Saturday night and on the Sunday we drove out to Peredelkino in Jumbo's car.' Once again he seemed to have to remind himself that he had an audience. 'Peredelkino is the Soviet writers' village,' he said as if none of us had heard of it. 'They get dachas there for as long as they behave themselves. Writers' Union runs it on a members-only basis – who gets a dacha, who writes best in prison, who doesn't write at all.'

'Who's Jumbo?' said Ned – a rare interjection.

'Jumbo Oliphant. Peter Oliphant.Chairman of Lupus Books. Closet Scottish Fascist. Black belt Freemason. Thinks he's got a special wavelength to the Sovs. Gold card.' Remembering Bob, he tilted his head at him. 'Not American Express, I'm afraid. A Moscow book fair gold card, dished out by the Russian organisers, saying what a big boy he is. Free car, free translator, free hotel, free caviar.jumbo was born with a gold card in his mouth.'

Bob grinned too broadly in order to show the joke was taken in good part. Yet he was a large-hearted man and Barley had spotted this. Barley, it occurred to me, was one of those people from whom good natures cannot hide, just as he 'could not disguise his own accessibility.

'So off we all went,' Barley resumed,returning to his reverie. 'Oliphant from Lupus, Emery from the Bodley Head.And some girl from Penguin, can't remember her name. Yes, I can. Magda.How the hell could I forget a Magda? And Blair from A & B.'

Riding like nabobs in jumbo's stupid limo, said Barley, tossing out short sentences like old clothes from his memory box. Ordinary car not good enough for our Jumbo, had to be a damn great Chaika with curtains in the bedroom, no brakes and a gorilla with bad breath for a driver. The plan was to take a look at Pasternak's dacha which rumour had it was about to be declared a museum,though another rumour insisted that the bastards were about to pull it down. Maybe his grave as well. Jumbo Oliphant didn't know who Pasternak was at first but Magda murmured 'Zhivago' and Jumbo had seen the film, said Barley. There was no earthly hurry, all they wanted was a bit of a walk and a peck of country air. But Jumbo's driver used the special lane reserved for official roadhogs in Chaikas, so they did the journey in about ten seconds flat instead of an hour, parked in a puddle and schlepped upto the cemetery still trembling with gratitude from the drive.

'Cemetery on a hillside among a lot of trees. Driver stays in the car. Raining. Not much, but he's worried about his awful suit.' He paused in contemplation of the driver. 'Mad ape,' he muttered.

But I had the feeling Barley was railing at himself and not the driver. I seemed to hear a whole self-accusing chorus in Barley, and I wondered whether the others were hearing it as well. He had people inside himself who really drove him mad.

Point was, Barley explained, that as luck would have it they had hit a day when the liberated masses were out in force. In the past, he said, whenever he'd been there, the place had been deserted. just the fenced-in tombs and the creepy trees. But on that September Sunday with the unfamiliar smells of freedom in the air, there were about two hundred fans crammed round the grave and more by the time they left, all shapes and sizes. Grave was knee-deep in flowers, Barley said. Offerings pouring in all the time. People passing bouquets over the heads to get them on the heap.

Then the readings began. Little chap read poetry. Big girl read prose. Then a filthy little aeroplane flew so low overhead you couldn't hear a thing. Then it flew back the other way. Then back the same way.

'Wang, wang!' Barley yelled, his long wrist whipping back and forth through the air. 'Wee-ah, wee-ah,' he whined through his nose in disgust.

But the plane couldn't damp the enthusiasm of the crowd any more than the rain could. Someone began singing, the punters took up the refrain and it became a knees-up. Finally the plane pushed off, presumably because it was low on fuel. But that wasn't what you felt, said Barley. Not a bit. You felt the singing had shot the little swine out of the sky.

The singing grew stronger and deeper and more mystical. Barley knew three words of Russian, and the others none. Didn't stop them joining in. Didn't stop the girl Magda from crying her eyes out. Or Jumbo Oliphant from swearing to God, through lumps in his throat, as they walked away down the hill that he was going to publish every word Pasternak had written, not just the film but the other stuff, so help me, and subsidise it out of his very own personal pocket as soon as he got back to his damask castle in the docklands.

'Jumbo has these hot flushes of enthusiasm,' Barley explained with a disarming grin, returning to his audience, but principally to Ned. 'Sometimes they don't die down for minutes on end.' Then he paused and frowned again and pulled off his strange round spectacles that seemed to be more an infliction than a help, and peered at everybody in turn as if to remind himself of his situation.

They were still walking down the hill, he said, and still having a good cry when this same little Russian chap came darting up to them holding his cigarette to one side of his face like a candle, asking in English whether they were Americans.

Once again Clive was ahead of all of us. His head slowly lifted. There was a knife-edge to his managerial drawl. 'Same? What same little Russian chap? We haven't had one.'

Unpleasantly reminded of Clive's presence, Barley screwed up his face in a renewal of distaste. 'He was the reader, for goodness' sake,' he said. 'Chap who'd read Pasternak's poetry at the graveside. He asked if we were American. I said no, thank God, British.'

And I noticed, as I supposed we all did, that it was Barley himself, not Oliphant or Emery or the girl Magda, who had become the appointed spokesman of their group.

Barley had fallen into direct dialogue. He had the mynah bird's ear. He had a Russian accent for the little chap and a Scottish woof-woof voice for Oliphant. The mimicry slipped out of him as if he were unaware of it.

'You are writers?' the little chap asked, in Barley's voice for him.

'No, alas. just publishers,' said Barley, in his own.

'English publishers?'

'Here for the Moscow book fair. I run a corner shop called Abercrombie & Blair and this is the Chairman Himself of Lupus Books. Very rich bloke.Be a knight one day. Gold card and bar. Right, Jumbo?'

Oliphant protested that Barley was saying far too much. But the little chap wanted more.

'May I ask then what were you doing at Pasternak's grave?' said the little chap.

'Chance visit,' Oliphant said, barging in again. 'Total chance. We saw a crowd, we came up to see what was going on. Pure chance. Let's go.'

But Barley had no intention of going. He was annoyed by Oliphant's manners, he said, and he wasn't going to stand by while a fat Scottish millionaire gave the brush-off to an undernourished Russian stranger.

'We're doing what everyone else here's doing,' Barley replied. 'We're paying our respects to a great writer. We liked your reading too. Very moving.- Great stuff. Ace.'

'You respect Boris Pasternak?' the little chap asked.

Oliphant again, the great civil rights activist, rendered by a gruff voice and a twisted jaw. 'We have no position on the matter of Boris Pasternak or any other Soviet writer,' he said. 'We're here as guests. Solely as guests. We have no opinions on internal Soviet affairs.'

'We think he's marvellous,' Barley said. 'World class. A star.'

'But why?' asked the little chap, provoking the conflict.

Barley needed no urging. Never mind he wasn't totally convinced that Pasternak was the genius he was cracked up to be, he said. Never mind that, as a matter of fact, he thought Pasternak quite seriously overpraised.That was publisher's opinion, whereas this was war.

'We respect his talent and his art,'Barley replied. 'We respect his humanity. We respect his family and his culture. And tenthly or whatever it is, we respect his capacity to reach the hearts of the Russian people despite the fact that 'he had the daylights hounded out of him by a bunch of bureau-rats who are very probably the same little beasts who sent us that aeroplane.'

'Can you quote him?' the little chap asked.

Barley had that kind of memory, he explained to us awkwardly. 'I gave him the first lines of "Nobel Prize". I thought it was appropriate after that foul aeroplane.'

'Give it to us now, please, will you?' said Clive as if everything had to be checked.

Barley mumbled, and it crossed my mind that he might actually be a very shy man.

'Like a beast in the pen I'm cut offFrom my friends, freedom, the sunBut the hunters are gaining groundI've nowhere else to run.'

The little chap was frowning at the lighted end of his cigarette while he listened to this, said Barley, and for a moment he really did wonder whether they had walked into a provocation, as Oliphant feared.

'If you respect Pasternak so much, why don't you come and meet some friends of mine?' the little chap suggested. 'We are writers here. We have a dacha. We would be honoured to talk to distinguished British publishers.'

Oliphant had only to hear the first half of this speech to develop a severe case of the bends, said Barley.jumbo knew all about accepting invitations from strange Russians. He was an expert on it. He knew how they ensnared you, drugged you,compromised you with disgraceful photographs and obliged you to resign your directorships and give up your chances of a knighthood. He was also in the middle of an ambitious joint publishing deal through VAAP and the last thing he needed was to be found in the company of undesirables. Oliphant boomed all this to Barley in a theatrical whisper that assumed the little stranger was deaf.

'Anyway,' Oliphant ended triumphantly,'it's raining. What arc we going to do about the car?'

Oliphant looked at his watch. The girl Magda looked at the ground. The bloke Emery looked at the girl Magda and thought there could be worse things to do on a Sunday afternoon in Moscow. But Barley, as he told it, took another look at the stranger and decided to like what he saw. He had no designs on the girl or on a knighthood. He had already decided he would rather be photographed in the raw with any number of Russian tarts than fully dressed on the arm of Jumbo Oliphant. So he waved them all off in Jumbo's car, and threw in his lot with the stranger.

'Nezhdanov,', Barley declared abruptly to the silent room, interrupting his own flow. 'I've remembered the chap's name. Nezhdanov. Playwright. Ran one of these studio theatres,couldn't put on his own plays.'

Walter spoke, his soaring voice shattering the momentary lull. 'My dear boy, Vitaly Nezhdanov is a laterday hero. He has three one-acters opening in Moscow just five weeks from now, and everyone has the most exotic hopes for them. Not that he's a blind bit of good, but we're not allowed to say that because he's a dissident. Or was.'

For the first time since I had set eyes on him, Barley's face took on a sublimely happy aspect, and at once I had the feeling that this was the real man, whom the clouds till now had hidden. 'Oh, now that's really great,' he said with the simple pleasure of someone able to enjoy another man's success. 'Fantastic. That's just what Vitaly needed. Thanks for telling me, he said, looking a fraction of his age.

Then once again his face darkened over and he began drinking his whisky in little nips. 'Well, there we all were,' he murmured vaguely. 'More the merrier. Meet my cousin. Have a sausage roll.' But his eyes, I noticed, like his words, had acquired a remote quality, as if he were already looking forward to an ordeal.

I glanced along the table. Bob smiling. Bob would smile on his death bed, but with an old scout's sincerity. Clive in profile, his face keen as an axe and about as profound. Walter never at rest. Walter with his clever head thrown back, twisting a hank of hair around his spongy forefinger while he smirked at the ornate ceiling, writhed and sweated. And Ned, the leader - capable. resourceful Ned - Ned the linguist and the warrior, the doer and the planner - sitting as he had sat from the beginning, to attention, waiting for the order to advance. Some people, I reflected, watching him, are cursed with too much loyalty, for a day could come when there was nothing left for them to serve.

Big, rambling house, Barley was reciting in the telegraphese he had resorted to. Edwardian clapboard, fretted verandahs, overgrown garden, birch forest. Rotting benches, .Charcoal fire, smell of a cricket ground on a rainy day, ivy. About thirty people, mostly men, sitting and standing around in the garden, cooking, drinking, ignoring the bad weather just like the English. Lousy old cars parked along the roadside, just like English cars used to be before Thatcher's pigs in clover took over the ship. Good faces, fluent voices, arty nomenclatura. Enter Nezhdanov leading Barley. No heads turn.

'Hostess was a poet,' Barley said. 'Tamara something. Dikey lady, white hair, jolly. Husband editor of one of the science magazines. Nezhdanov was his brother-in-law. Everyone was someone's brother-in-law. The lit scene has clout over there. If you've got a voice and they let you use it, you've got a public.'

In his arbitrary memory, Barley now split the occasion into three parts. Lunch, which began around two-thirty when the rain stopped. Night, which followed immediately upon lunch. And what he called 'the last bit', which was when whatever happened had happened, and which so far as any of us could ever fathom occurred in the blurred hours between about two and four when Barley, to use his own words, was drifting painlessly between nirvana and a near terminal hangover.

Until lunch came along, Barley had pottered from group to group, he said first with Nezhdanov then alone, having a shmooze with whoever felt like talking to him.

'Shmooze?' Clive repeated suspiciously, as if he had learned of a new vice.

Bob hastened to interpret. 'A chat, Clive,' he explained in his friendly way. 'A chat and a drink. Nothing sinister.'

But when lunch was called, said Barley, they sat themselves at a trestle table with Barley up one end and Nezhdanov the other and bottles of Georgian white between them, and everyone talking -their best English about whether truth was truth if it was not convenient to the great proletarian so-called Revolution, and whether we should revert to the spiritual values of our ancestors and whether the perestroika was having any positive effect on the lives of the common people, and how if you really' wanted to know what was wrong with the Soviet Union the best way to find out was to try sending a refrigerator from Novosibirsk to Leningrad.

To my secret irritation, Clive again cut in. Like a man bored by irrelevances he wanted names. Barley slapped his forehead with his palm, his hostility to Clive forgotten. Names, Clive, God. One chap a professor at Moscow State but I never caught his name, you see. Another chap in chemical procurement, that was Nezhdanov's half-brother, they called him the Apothecary. Somebody in the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Gregor, but I didn't get round to finding out what his name was, let alone his angle.

'Any women at the table?' Ned asked.

'Two, but no Katya,' said Barley, and Ned like myself was visibly impressed by the pace of his perception.

'But there was someone else, wasn't there?' Ned suggested.

Barley leaned himself slowly backwards to drink. Then forward again as he planted the glass between his knees and stooped over it, nose down, inhaling its wisdom.

'Sure, sure, sure, there was someone else.' he agreed. 'There always is, isn't there?' he added enigmatically. 'Not Katya. Someone else.'

His voice had changed. From what to what I couldn't fathom. A shorter ring. A hint of regret or remorse. I waited as we all did. I think we all sensed even then that something extraordinary was appearing on the horizon.

'Thin bearded chap,' Barley went on, staring into the gloom as if he were making him out at last. 'Tall. Dark suit, black tie. Hollow face. Must be why he grew a beard. Sleeves too short. Black hair. Drunk.'

'Did he have a name?' asked Ned.

Barley was still staring at the half-dark, describing what none of us could see.

'Goethe,' he said at last. 'Like the poet. They called him Goethe. Meet our distinguished writer, Goethe. Could have been fifty, could have been eighteen. Thin as a boy. These dabs of colour on his cheeks, very high up. Beard.'

Which, as Ned remarked later, when he was playing over the tape to the team, was operationally speaking the moment when the Bluebird spread his wings. It is not marked by any awesome silence or the intake of breath around the table. Instead Barley chose this moment to be assailed by a sneezing fit, his first of many in our experience of him. It began as a series of single rounds, then accelerated to a grand salvo. Then it slowly petered out again while he beat his face with his handkerchief and cursed between convulsions.

'Bloody kennel cough,' he explained apologetically.

'I was brilliant,' Barley resumed. 'Couldn't put a hoof wrong.'

He had refilled his glass, this time with water. He was sipping from it in slow rhythmic movements like one of those plastic drinking birds that used to bob up and down between the miniatures on every gloomy English bar in the days before television sets replaced them.

'Mr. Wonderful, that was me. Star of stage and screen. Western, courteous and specious. That's why I go there, isn't it? Sovs are the only people daft enough to listen to my bullshit.' His forelock dipped towards his glass again. 'It's the way it happens there. You go for a walk in the countryside and end up arguing with a bunch of drunk poets about freedom versus responsibility. You take a leak in some filthy public loo, somebody leans over from the next stall and asks you whether there's life after death. Because you're a Westerner.So you know. And you tell them. And they remember. Nothing goes away.

He seemed to be in danger of ceasing to talk at all.

'Why don't you just tell us what happened and leave the reproaches to us?' Clive suggested, somehow implying that the reproaches were above Barley's station.

'I shone. That's what happened. A glib mind had a field day. Forget it.'

But forgetting was the last thing anybody intended, as Bob's cheerful smile showed. 'Barley, I think you are being too hard on yourself. Nobody should blame themselves for being entertaining, for Pete's sake. All you did was sing for your supper, by the sounds of it.'

'What did you talk about?' said Clive, undeflected by Bob's goodheartedness.

Barley shrugged. 'How to rebuild the Russian Empire between lunch and teatime. Peace, progress and glasnost by the bottleful. Instant disarmament without the option.'

'Are these subjects you frequently enlarge upon?'

'When I'm in Russia, yes they are,' Barley retorted, provoked again by Clive's tone, but never for long.

'May we know what you said?'

But Barley was not telling his story to Clive. He was telling it to himself and to the room and whoever was in it, to his fellow passengers, point for point, an inventory of his folly. 'Disarmament was not a military matter and not a political one, I said. It was a matter of human will. We had to decide whether we wanted peace or war and prepare for it. Because what we prepared for was going to be what we got.' He broke off. 'It was top-of-my-head stuff', he explained, again selecting Ned. 'Warmed-up arguments I'd read around the place.'

As if he felt more explanation was required, he started again. 'It so happened I was an expert that week. I'd thought the firm might commission a quick book. Some tout at the book fair wanted me to take UK rights in a book on glasnost and the crisis of peace. Essays by past and present hawks, reappraisals of strategy. Could real peace break out after all? They'd signed up some of the old American warhorses from the sixties and shown how a lot of them had turned full circle since they left office.'

He was apologising and I wondered why. What was he preparing us for? Why did he feel he should lessen the shock in advance? Bob, who was no kind of fool, for all his candour, must have been asking himself the same question.

'Sounds a fine enough idea to me, Barley. I can see money in that. Might even take a piece of it myself,' headed with a locker-room chuckle.

'So you had the patter,' Clive said in his barbed undertone. 'And you regurgitated it. Is that what you're telling us? I'm sure it isn't easy to reconstruct one's alcoholic flights of fancy but we'd be grateful if you'd do your best.'

What had Clive studied, I wondered, if he ever had? Where? Who bore him, sired him? Where did the Service find these dead suburban souls with all their values, or lack of them, perfectly in place?

Yet Barley remained compliant in the face of this renewed onslaught. 'I said I believed in Gorbachev,' he said equably, giving himself a sip of water. 'They mightn't, I did. I said the West's job was to find the other half of him, and the East's was to recognise the importance of the half they had. 1 said that if the Americans had ever bothered as much about disarmament as they had about putting some fool on the moon or pink stripes into toothpaste, we'd have had disarmament long ago. I said the West's great sin was to believe we could bankrupt the Soviet system by raising the bidding on the arms race, because that way we were gambling with the fate of mankind. I said that by shaking our sabres the West had given the Soviet leaders the excuse to keep their gates locked and run a garrison state.'

Walter let out a whinnying laugh and cupped his gappy teeth with his hairless hand. 'Oh my Lord! So we're to blame for Russia's ills. Oh, I think that's marvellously rich! You don't think that by any chance they did it to themselves, for instance? Locked themselves up inside their own paranoia? No, he doesn't. I can see.'

Undeterred, Barley resumed his confession. 'Somebody asked me, didn't I think nuclear weapons had kept the peace for forty years? I said that was Jesuitical bollocks. Might as well say gunpowder had kept the peace between Waterloo and Sarajevo. Anyway, I said, what's peace? The bomb didn't stop Korea and it didn't stop Vietnam. It didn't stop anyone from pinching Czecho or blockading Berlin or building the Berlin Wall or going into Afghanistan. If that's peace, let's try it without the bomb. I said what was needed was not experiments in space but experiments in human nature. The superpowers should police the world together. I was flying.'

'And did you believe any of this nonsense?' Clive asked.

Barley didn't seem to know. He seemed suddenly to regard himself as facile by definition, and became shamefaced. 'Then we talked about jazz,' he said. 'Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, Lester Young. I played some.'

'You mean somebody had a saxophone?' Bob cried in spontaneous amusement. 'What else did they have? Bass drums? A ten-piece? Barley, I'm not believing this!'

I thought at first that Barley was walking out. He unwound himself and clambered to his feet. He peered round for the door, then headed apologetically towards it, so that Ned rose in alarm, afraid that Brock would get to him first. But Barley had balted halfway across the room where a low carved table stood. Stooping before it, he began lightly slapping his fingertips on the edge while he sang 'pah-pahpaah, pah-pah-pah-pah,' through his nose, to the simulated accompaniment of cymbals, wire brushes and drums.

Bob was already applauding, Walter too. So was I, and Ned was laughing. Clive alone found nothing to entertain him. Barley took a sobering pull from his glass and sat down again.

'Then they asked me what could be done,' he said as if he'd never left this chair.

'Who did?' said Clive, with that maddening note of disbelief he had.

'One of the people at the table. What does it matter?'

'Let's assume everything matters,' said Clive.

Barley was doing his Russian voice again, clogged and pressing. "'All right, Barley. Given is all as you say. Who will conduct these experiments in human nature?" You will, I said. They were very surprised. Why us? I said because, when it came to radical change, the Sovs had it easier than the West. They had a small leadership and an intelligentsia with great traditional influence. In a Western democracy it was much harder to make yourself heard above the crowd. They were pleased by the paradox. So was I.

Not even this frontal assault upon the great democratic values could ruffle Bob's genial forbearance. 'Well, Barley, that's a broad-brush judgement but I guess there's some truth in it at that.'

'But did you suggest what should be done?' Clive insisted.

'I said there was only Utopia left. I said that what had looked like a pipe dream twenty years ago was today our only hope, whether we're talking disarmament or ecology or plain human survival. Gorbachev understood that, the West didn't want to. I said that Western intellectuals must find their voice. I said the West should be setting the example, not following it. It was everyone's duty to start the avalanche.'

'So unilateral disarmament,' said Clive, clamping his hands together in a knot. 'Aldermaston, here we come. Well, well. Yes.' Except that he didn't say 'yes' so much as 'ears' which was how he said yes when he meant no.

But Bob was impressed. 'And all this eloquence just from reading around the subject a little?' he said. 'Barley, I think that's extraordinary. Why, if I could absorb that way, I'd be a proud man.'

Perhaps too extraordinary, he was also suggesting, but the implications evidently passed Barley by.

'And while you were saving us from our worst instincts, what was the man called Goethe doing? asked Clive.

'Nothing. The others joincd in. Goethe didn't.'

'But he listened? Wide-eyed, I should imagine.'

'We were redesigning the world by then. Yalta all over again. Everyone was talking at once. Except Goethe. He didn't eat, he didn't talk. I kept tossing ideas at him, simply because he wasn't joining in. All he did was grow paler and drink more. I gave him up.'

And Goethe never spoke, Barley continued in the same tone of mystified self-recrimination. All through the afternoon not a dicky bird, Barley said. Goethe would listen, he'd glare into some invisible crystal ball. He'd laugh, though not by any means when there was anything much to laugh about. Or he'd get up and cut a straightish line to the drinks table to fetch himself another vodka when everyone else was drinking wine, and come back with a tumbler of the stuff, which he knocked off in a couple of swigs whenever anyone proposed a fitting toast. But Goethe, he proposed no toasts at all, said Barley. He was one of those people who exert a moral influence by their silence, he said, so that you end up wondering whether they're dying of a secret illness or riding on some great accomplishment.

When Nezhdanov led the group indoors to listen to Count Basie on the stereo, Goethe tagged obediently along. It wasn't till late into the night, when Barley had given up all thought of him, that he finally heard Goethe speak.

Once again Ned permitted himself a rare question. 'How did the others behave towards him?'

'They respected him. He was their mascot. "Let's see what Goethe thinks. " He'd raise his glass and drink to them and we'd all laugh except Goethe.'

'The women too?'

'Everyone. They deferred to him. Practically made way for him. The great Goethe, here he comes.'

'And no one told you where he lived or worked?'

'They said he was on holiday from somewhere where drinking wasn't approved of so it was a drinking holiday. They kept drinking to his drinking holiday. He was someone's brother. Tamara's, I don't know. Maybe cousin. I didn't catch it.'

'Do you think they were protecting him?' said Clive.

Barley's pauses are like nobody else's, I thought. He has his own tenuous hold on present things. His mind leaves the room and you wait on tenter hooks to see whether it will come back.

'Yes,' said Barley suddenly, sounding surprised by his own answer. 'Yes, yes, they were protecting him. That's right. They were his supporters' club, of course they were.'

'Protecting him from what?'

Another pause.

'Maybe from having to explain himself. I didn't think that at the time. But I think it now. Yes I do.'

'And why should he not explain himself? Can you suggest a reason without inventing one?' asked Clive, determined apparently to hold Barley to the angry edge.

But Barley didn't rise. 'I don't invent,' he said, and I think we all knew that was true. He was gone again. 'He was high-powered. You felt it in him,' he said, returning.

'What does that mean?'

'The eloquent silence. All you hear at a hundred miles an hour is the ticking of the brain.'

'But no one told you,- "He's a genius," or whatever?'

'No one told me. No one needed to.'

Barley glanced at Ned to find him nodding his understanding'. A fieldman to his fingertips, if necessarily a grounded one, Ned had a way of popping up ahead of you when you thought he was still trying to catch you up.

Bob had another question. 'Anyone take you by the elbow and explain to you just why Goethe had a drinking problem, Barley?'

Barley let out an unfettered laugh. His momentary freedoms were a little frightening. 'You don't have to have a reason to drink in Russia, for Christ's sake! Name me a single Russian worth his salt who could face the problems of his country sober!'

He dropped into silence again, grimacing into the shadows. He wrinkled up his eyes and muttered an imprecation of some kind, I assumed against himself. Then snapped out of it. 'Woke with a jolt round midnight,' he laughed. "'Christ. Where am I?" Lying in a deck chair on a verandah with a bloody blanket over me! Thought I was in the States at first. One of those New England screened porches with panels of mosquito gauze and the garden beyond. Couldn't think how I'd got to America so fast after a pleasant lunch in Peredelkino. Then I remembered they'd stopped talking to me and I'd got bored. Nothing personal. They were drunk and they were tired of being drunk in a foreign language. So I'd settled on the verandah with a bottle of Scotch. Somebody had thrown a blanket over me to keep the dew off. The moon must have woken me, I thought. Big full moon. Bloodshot. Then I heard this chap talking to me. Very sombre. Immaculate English. Christ, I thought, new guests at this hour. "Some things are necessary evils, Mr. Barley. Some things are more evil than necessary," he says. He's quoting me from lunch. Part of my world shaking lecture on peace. I don't know who I was quoting. Then I take a closer look around and I make out this nine-foot-tall bearded vulture hovering over me, clutching a bottle of vodka, hair flapping round his face in the breeze. Next thing I know he's crouching beside me with his knees up round his ears, filling up his glass. "Hullo, Goethe," I say. "Why aren't you dead yet? Nice to see you about."'

Whatever had set Barley free had put him back in prison again, for his face had once more clouded over.

'Then he gives me back another of my lunchtime pearls. "All victims are equal. None are more equal than others."

'I laugh. But not too much. I'm embarrassed, I suppose. Queasy. Feel I've been spied on. Chap sits there all through lunch, drunk, doesn't eat, doesn't say a word. All of a sudden ten hours later he's quoting me like a tape recorder. It's not comfortable.'

'"Who are you, Goethe?" I say. "What do you do for a living when you're not drinking and listening?"'

'"I'm a moral outcast," he says. "I trade in defiled theories."'

'"Always nice to meet a writer," I say. "What sort of stuff are you turning out these days?"'

'"Everything," he says. "History, comedy, lies, romances." Then off he goes into some drivel he wrote about a lump of butter melting in the sun because it lacked a consistent point of view. Only thing was, he didn't talk like a writer. Too diffident. He was laughing at himself, and for all I knew he was laughing at me too. Not that he hadn't every right to, but that didn't make it any funnier.'

Once more we waited, watching Barley's silhouette. Was the tension in us or in him? He took a sip from his glass. He rolled his head around and muttered something like 'not well' or possibly 'to hell' which neither his audience nor the microphones ever completely caught. We heard his chair crackle like wet firewood. On the tape it sounds like an armed attack.

'So then he says to me, "Come on, Mr. Barley. You're a publisher. Aren't you going to ask me where I get my ideas from?" And I thought, That's not what publishers ask actually, old boy, but what the hell? "Okay, Goethe," I say. "Where do you get your ideas from?"'

'"Mr. Barley. My ideas are obtained from – one" – he starts counting.'

Barley too had spread his long fingers and was counting on them, using only the lightest Russian intonations. And once again I was struck by the delicacy of his musical memory, which he seemed to achieve, less by repeating words than by retrieving them from some cursed echoing chamber where nothing ever faded from his hearing.

'"My ideas are obtained from – one, the paper tablecloths. of Berlin café in the 1930s." Then he takes a heave of vodka and a great noisy snort of night air both at once. He creaks. Know what I mean? Those chaps with bubbling chests? "Two," he says, "from the publications of my more gifted competitors. Three, from the obscene fantasies of generals and politicians of all nations. Four, from the liberated intellects of press-ganged Nazi scientists. Five, from the great Soviet people, whose every democratic wish is filtered upwards by means of consultation at all levels, then dumped in the Neva. And six, very occasionally from the mind of a distinguished Western intellectual who happens to drop into my life." That's me, apparently, because he glues his eyes on me to see how I take it. Staring and staring like a precocious child. Transmitting these life-important signals. Then suddenly he changes and becomes suspicious. Russians do that. "That was quite a performance you gave at lunch," he says. "How did you persuade Nezhdanov to invite you?" It's a sneer. Saying I don't believe you.

'"I didn't persuade him," I say. "It was his idea. What are you trying to hang on me?"'

'"There is no ownership of ideas," he says. "You put it into his head. You are a clever fellow. Cunning work, I would say. Congratulations."'

'Then instead of sneering at me he's clutching on to my shoulders as if he's drowning. I don't know whether he's ill or he's lost his balance. I've got a nasty feeling he may want to be sick. I try to help him but I don't know how. He's hot as hell and sweating. His sweat's dripping on to me. Hair's all wet. These wild childish eyes. I'll loosen his collar, I think. Then I get his voice, shoved right down my ear, lips and hot breach all at once. I can't hear him at first, he's too near. I back away but he comes with me.

'"I believe every word you said," he whispers. "You spoke into my heart. Promise me you are not a British spy and I'll make you a promise in return."'

'His words exactly,' Barley said, as if he were ashamed of them. 'He remembered every word I'd said. And I remember every word of his.'

It was not the first time that Barley had spoken of memory as if it were an affliction, and perhaps that is why I found myself, as so often, thinking of Hannah.

'Poor Palfrey,' she had taunted me in one of her cruel moods, studying her naked body in the mirror as she sipped her vodka and tonic and prepared to go back to her husband. 'With a memory like yours, how will you ever forget a girl like me?'

Did Barley have that effect on everyone? I wondered -touch their central nerve unconsciously, send them rushing to their closest thoughts? Perhaps that was what he had done to Goethe too.

The passage that followed was never paraphrased, never condensed, never 'reconstrued'. For the initiated, either the unedited tape was played or else the transcript was offered in its entirety. For the uninitiated it never existed. It was the crux of everything that followed and it was called with deliberate obfuscation 'the Lisbon Approach'. When the alchemists and theologians and end-users on both sides of the Atlantic had their turn, this was the passage they picked out and ran through their magic boxes to justify the preselected arguments that characterised their artful camps.

'"Not a spy actually, Goethe, old boy. Not now, never have been, never will. May be your line of country, not mine. How about chess? Fond of chess? Let's talk about chess."

'Doesn't seem to hear. "And you are not an American? You are nobody's spy, not even ours?"

'"Goethe, listen," I say. "I'm getting a bit jumpy, to be honest. I'm nobody's spy. I'm me. Let's either talk about chess or you try a different address, okay?" I thought that would shut him up, but it didn't. Knew all about chess, he said. In chess, one chap has a strategy, and if the other chap doesn't spot it or if he relaxes his watch, you win. In chess, the theory is the reality. But in life, in certain types of life, you can have a situation where a player has such grotesque fantasies about another one that he ends up by inventing the enemy he needs. Do I agree? Goethe, I agree totally. Then suddenly it's not chess anymore and he's explaining himself the way Russians do when they're drunk. Why he's on the earth, for my ears only. Says he was born with two souls, just like Faust, which is why they call him Goethe. Says his mother was a painter but she painted what she saw, so naturally she wasn't allowed to exhibit or buy materials. Because anything we see is a State secret. Also if it's an illusion it's a State secret. Even if it doesn't work and never will, it's a State secret. And if it's a lie from top to bottom, then it's the hottest State secret of the lot. Says his father did twelve years in the camps and died of a surfeit of intellectual ability. Says the problem with his father was, he was a martyr. Victims are bad enough, saints are worse, he says, but martyrs are the living end. Do I agree?' I agree. Don't know why I agree but I'm a polite soul and when a chap who is clutching my head tells me his father's done twelve years then died, I'm not about to quarrel with him even when I'm tight.

'I ask him his real name. Says he hasn't got one. His father took it with him. Says that in any decent society they shoot the ignorant, but in Russia it's the other way round, so they shot his father because, unlike his mother, he refused to die of a broken heart. Says he wants to make me this promise. Says he loves the English. The English are the moral leaders of Europe, the secret steadiers, the unifiers of the great European ideal. Says the English understand the relationship between words and action whereas in Russia nobody believes in action any more, so words have become a substitute, all the way up to the top, a substitute for the truth that nobody wants to hear because they can't change it, or they'll lose their jobs if they change it, or maybe they simply don't know how to change it. Says the Russians' misfortune is that they long to be European but their destiny is to become American, and that the Americans have poisoned the world with materialistic logic. If my neighbour has a car, I must have two cars. If my neighbour has a gun, I must have two guns. If my neighbour has a bomb, I must have a bigger bomb and more of them, never mind they can't reach their targets. So all I have to do is imagine my neighbour's gun and double it and I have the justification for whatever I want to manufacture. Do I agree?'

It is a miracle that nobody interrupted here, not even Walter. But he didn't. he held his tongue, as they all did. You don't even hear a chair creak before Barley goes on.

'So I agree. Yes, Goethe, I agree with you to the hilt. Anything's better than being asked whether I'm a British spy. Starts talking about the great nineteenth-century poet and mystic Piturin.'

'Pecherin,' says a high sharp voice. Walter has finally brimmed over.

'That's right. Pecherin,' Barley agrees. 'Vladimir Pecherin. Pecherin wanted to sacrifice himself for mankind, die on the cross with his mother at his feet. Have I heard of him? I haven't. Pecherin went to Ireland, became a monk, he says. But Goethe can't do that because he can't get a visa and anyway he doesn't like God. Pecherin liked God and didn't like science unless it took account of the human soul. I ask him how old he is. Goethe, not Pecherin. He looks about seven by now, going on a hundred. He says he's nearer to death than life. He says he's fifty but he's just been born.'

Walter chimes in, but softly, like someone in church, not his usual squeak at all. 'Why did you ask him his age? Of all the questions you could have asked? What on earth does it matter at that moment how many teeth he's got?'

'He's unsettling. Not a wrinkle on him till he scowled.'

'And he said science. Not physics. Science?'

'Science. Then he starts reciting Pecherin. Translating as he goes. The Russian first, then the English. How sweet it is to hate one's native land and avidly await its ruin … and in its ruin to discern the dawn of universal renaissance. I may not have got it quite right but that's the gist. Pecherin understood that it was possible to love your country at the same time as hating its system, he says. Pecherin was nuts about England, just as Goethe is. England as the home of justice, truth and liberty. Pecherin showed there was nothing disloyal in betrayal provided you betrayed what you hated and fought for what you loved. Now supposing Pecherin had possessed great secrets about the Russian soul. What would he have done? Obvious. He'd have given them to the English.

'I'm wanting him out of my hair by now. I'm getting panicky. He's coming close again. Face against face. Wheezing and grinding like a steam engine. Heart breaking out of his chest. These big brown saucer eyes. "What have you been drinking?" I said. "Cortisone?"

'"You know what else you said at lunch?" he says.

'"Nothing," I say. "I wasn't there. It was two other blokes and they hit me first." He's not hearing me again.

'"You said, 'Today one must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being."'

'"That's not original," I say. "None of it is. It's stuff I picked up. It's not me. Now just forget everything I said and go back to your own people." Doesn't listen. Grabs my arm. Hands like a girl's bur they grip like iron. "Promise me that if ever I find the courage to think like a hero, you will act like a merely decent human being."

"'Look," I say. "Leave this out and let's get something to eat. They've got some soup in there. I can smell it. You like soup? Soup?"

'He's not crying as far as I can tell but his face is absolutely soaked. Like a pain sweat all over this white skin. Hanging on to my wrist as if I were his priest. "Promise me," he says.

'"But what am I supposed to be promising, for God's sake?"

'"Promise you'll behave like a gentleman."

'"I'm not a gentleman. I'm a publisher."

'Then he laughs. First time. Huge laughter with a sort of weird click init. "You cannot imagine how much confidence I derive from your rejection," he says.

'That's where I stand up. Nice and easy, not to alarm him. While he goes on clutching me.

'"I commit the sin of science every day," he says. "I turn ploughshares into swords. I mislead our masters. I mislead yours. I perpetuate the lie. I murder the humanity in myself everyday. Listen to me."

'"Got to go now, Goethe, old lad. All those nice lady concierges at my hotel sitting up and worrying about me. Let me loose, will you, you're breaking my arm."

'Hugs me. Pulls me right on to him. Makes me feel like a fat boy, he's sothin. Wet beard, wet hair, this burning heat.

'"Promise," he says.

'Squeezed it out of me. Fervour. Never saw anything like it. "Promise! Promise!"

'"All right," I say. "if you ever manage to be a hero, I'll be a decent human being. It's a deal. Okay? Now let me go, there's a good chap."

'"Promise," he says.

'"I promise," I say and shove him off me.'

Walter is shouting. None of our preliminary warnings, no furious glares from Ned or Clive or myself, could switch him off any longer. 'But did you believe him, Barley? Was he conning you? You're a sharp cookie underneath the flannel. What did you feel?'

Silence. And more silence. Then finally, 'He was drunk. Maybe twice in my life I've been as drunk as he was. Call it three times. He'd been on the white stuff all day long and he was still drinking it like water. But he'd hit one of those clear spells. I believed him. He's not the kind of chap you don't believe.'

Walter again, furious.

'But what did you believe? What did you think he was talking to you about? What did you think he did? All this chatter about things not reaching their targets, lying to his masters and yours, chess that isn't chess but something else? You can add, can't you? Why didn't you come to us? I know why! You put your head in the sand. "Don't know because don't want to know." That's you.'

And the next sound on the tape after that is Barley cursing himself again as he stomps round the room. 'Damn,damn, damn,' he whispers. On and on. Until, cutting through him, we hear Clive's voice. If it ever falls to Clive to order the destruction of the universe, I imagine him using this same deserted tone.

'I'm sorry but I'm afraid we're going to need your rather serious help,' he says.

Ironically, I believe Clive was sorry. He was a technology man, not at ease with live sources, a suburban espiocrat of the modern school. He believed that facts were the only kind of information and he despised whoever was not ruled by them. If he liked anything at all in life apart from his own advancement and his silver Mercedes car, which he refused to take out of the garage if it had so much as a scratch on it, then it was hardware and powerful Americans in that order. For Clive to sparkle, the Bluebird should have been a broken code, a satellite or an Inter Agency committee. Then Barley need never have been born.

Whereas Ned was all the other way, and more at risk on account of it. He was by temperament and training an agent-runner and captain of men. Live sources were his element and, so far as he knew the word, his passion. He despised the in-fighting of intelligence politics and left all that happily to Clive, just as he left the analysis to Walter. In that sense he was the determined primitive, as people who deal in human nature have to be, while Clive, to whom human nature was one vast unsavoury quagmire, enjoyed the reputation of a modernist.