The Russia House

CHAPTER 5

We had moved to the library where Ned and Barley had begun. Brock had set up a screen and projector. He had put chairs in a horseshoe with a special person in his mind for each chair, for Brock, like other violent minds, had an exaggerated appetite for menial labour. He had been listening to the interview over the relay and despite his sinister inklings about Barley a glow of excitement smouldered in his pale Baltic eyes. Barley, deep in thought, lounged in the front row between Bob and Clive, a privileged if distracted guest at a private screening. I watched his head in silhouette as Brock switched on the projector, first turned downward in contemplation, then sharply upward as the first frame struck the screen. Ned sat beside me. Not a word, but I could feel the disciplined intensity of his excitement. Twenty male faces flicked across our vision, most of them Soviet scientists who on a first hasty search around the Registries of London and Langley were deemed to have had possible access to the Bluebird information. Some were featured more than once: first with beards then with their beards touched out. Others were shown when they were twenty years younger because that was all the archives had of them.

'Not among those present,' Barley pronounced when the parade was over, suddenly shoving his hand to his head as if he had been stung.

Bob just couldn't believe this. His incredulities were as charming as his credulities. 'Not even a perhaps or a maybe, Barley? You sound pretty sure of yourself for a man who was drinking well when he made the original sighting. Jesus, I've been to parties where I couldn't remember my own name.'

'Not a tickle, old boy,' said Barley and returned to his thoughts.

Now it was Katya's turn, though Barley couldn't know it. Bob advanced on her cautiously, a Langley professional showing us his footwork.

'Barley, these are some of the boys and girls around the Moscow publishing scene,' he said over-casually as Brock ran up the first stills. 'People you might have bumped into during your Russian travels, people at receptions, book fairs, people on the circuit. If you see anybody you know, holler.'

'Bless us, that's Leonora!' Barley cut in with pleasure while Bob was still talking. On the screen a splendid burly woman with a backside like a football field was marching across a stretch of open tarmac. 'Leni's top gun with SK,' Barley added.

'SK?' Clive echoed as if he had unearthed a secret society.

'Soyuzkniga. SK order and distribute foreign books throughout the Soviet Union. Whether the books get there is another matter. Leni's a riot.'

'Know her other name?'

'Zinovieva.'

Confirmed, said Bob's smile to the knowing.

They showed him others and he picked the ones they knew he knew, but when they showed him the photograph of Katya that they had shown to Landau � Katya in her overcoat with her hair up, coming down the steps with her perhaps-bag - Barley muttered, 'Pass,' as he had to all the others he didn't know.

But Bob was delightfully upset. Bob said, 'Hold her there, please,' so unhappily that a babe in arms would have guessed that this picture had unrecognised significance.

So Brock held, as we all did: held our breath.

'Barley, the little lady here with the dark hair and big eyes in this picture is with the October Publishing Company, Moscow. Speaks a fine English, classical like yours and Goethe's. We understand she's a redaktor, commissioning and approving English language translations of Soviet works. No bells?

'No such luck', said Barley.

At which Clive handed him to me. With a tip of his head. Take him, Palfrey. Your witness. Scare him.

I do a special voice for my indoctrination sessions. It's supposed to instil the terror of the marriage vow and I hate it because it is the voice that Hannah hates. If my profession had a false white coat, this would be the moment where I administered the wicked injection. But that night as soon as I was alone with him, I chose a more protective tone and became a different and perhaps rejuvenated Palfrey, the one that Hannah used to swear could overcome. I addressed Barley not as I would some raw probationer but as a friend I was seeking to forewarn.

Here's the deal, I said, using the most non-legal jargon I could think of. Here's the noose we're putting round your neck. Take care. Consider.

Other people, I make them sit. I let Barley roam because I had seen that he was more at case when he was able to pace and fidget and chuck his arms back in a luxurious stretch. Empathy is a curse even when it is short-lived, and not all the bad law in England can protect me from it.

And while I temporarily warmed to him I noticed a number of things about him I had not registered in the larger company. How his body leaned away from me, as if he were guarding himself against his deep-rooted disposition to give himself to the first person who asked for him. How his arms, despite their striving for self-discipline, remained unruly, particularly at the elbows, which like renegades seemed to be wanting to break free of whatever uniform they were pressed into.

And I noticed my own frustration that I could still not observe him closely enough, but cast round for other glimpses of him in the gilded mirrors as he passed them. Even to this day, I think of him as being a long way off.

And I noticed the pensiveness in him as he dipped in and out of my homily, taking a point or two then swinging away from me in order to digest it, so that suddenly I was facing a breadth of powerful back that was not to be reconciled with the unreconciled front.

And how, as he returned to me, his eyes lacked the subservience that in other recipients of my wise words so often sickened me. He was not daunted. He was not even touched. His eyes disturbed me nonetheless, as they had the first time they appraised me. They were too truthful, too clear, too undefended. None of his milling gestures could protect them. I felt that I or anyone else, could have waded into them and claimed possession of him, and the feeling scared me as if it were a threat. It made me fear for my own security.

I thought about his file. So many headlong crashes, acts of seeming self-destruction, so little prudence. His frightful school record. His efforts to earn himself a few laurels by boxing, for which he ended up in the school sanatorium with a broken jaw. His expulsion for being drunk while reading the Epistle at Sung Eucharist. 'I was drunk from the night before, sir. It was not intentional.' Flogged and expelled.

How convenient, I thought, for him and me, if I could have pointed to some great crime that haunted him, some act of cowardice or omission. But Ned had shown me his entire life, secret annexes and all, medical history, money, women, wives, children. And it was small stuff all the way. No big bang, no big crime. No big anything - which may have been the explanation of him. Was it for want of a greater sea that he had repeatedly wrecked himself against life's little rocks, challenging his Maker to come up with something bigger or stop bothering him? Would he be so headlong when faced with greater odds?

Then abruptly, before I am aware of it, our rôles are reversed. He is standing over me, peering down. The team is still waiting in the library and I hear sounds of their restlessness. The declaration form lies before me on the table. But it is me that he is reading, not the form.

'So have you any questions?' I ask up at him, conscious of his height.

'Anything you want to know before you sign?' I am using my special voice after all, for self-protection.

He is at first puzzled, then amused. 'Why? Have you got more answers you want to tell me?'

'It's an unfair business,' I warn him sternly. 'You've had a big secret thrust on you. You didn't ask for it but you can't unknow it. You know enough to hang a man and probably a woman. That places you in a certain category. It brings obligations you can't escape.'

And, God help me, I think of Hannah again. He has woken the pain of her in me as if she were a brand-new wound.

He shrugs, brushing off the burden. 'I don't know what I know,' he says.

There is a thump on the door.

'The point is, they may want to tell you more,' I say, softening again, trying to make him aware of my concern for him. 'What you know already may be only the beginning of what they want you to find out.'

He is signing. Without reading. He is a nightmare client. He could be signing his life away and he wouldn't know it and wouldn't care. They are knocking but I have still to add my name as witness.

'Thanks,' he says.

'What for?'

I put away my pen. Got him, I think, in ice-cold triumph, just as Clive and the rest of them march in. A tricky customer but I signed him up.

But the other half of me is ashamed and mysteriously alarmed. I feel I have lit a fire inside our own camp, and there is no knowing how it will spread or who will put it out.

The only merit of the next act was that it was brief. I was sorry for Bob. He was never a sly man and he was certainly not a bigot. He was transparent, but that is not yet a crime, even in the secret world. He was more in Ned's stamp than Clive's, and nearer to the Service's way of doing things than to Langley's. There was a time when Langley had a lot of Bob's sort, and was the better for it.

'Barley, do you have any concept at all of the nature of the material that the source you call Goethe has so far provided? Of its overall message, shall we say?' Bob enquired awkwardly, putting up his broad smile.

Johnny had pitched the same sort of question at Landau, I remembered. And burned his fingers.

'How can I?' Barley replied. 'I haven't set eyes on the stuff. You won't let me.'

'Are you quite certain Goethe himself gave you no advance indication? No whispered word, author to publisher, of what he might – one day, if you both kept your promises – supply? Beyond what you have already accounted for in Peredelkino - the broad talk of weaponry and unreal enemies?'

'I've told you everything I remember,' said Barley, shaking his head in confusion.

Also like Johnny before him, Bob began squinting at the brief he held below the table. But in Bob's case with genuine discomfort. 'Barley, in the six visits you have made to the Soviet Union over the last seven years have you formed any connection, however briefly, with peaceniks, dissidents or other unofficial groups of that nature?'

'Is that a crime?'

Clive cut in. 'Answer the question, will you?'

Amazingly, Barley obliged. Sometimes Clive was simply too small to reach him. 'You meet all sorts, Bob. Jazz people, book people, intellectuals,journalists, artists - it's an impossible question. Sorry.'

'Then can I turn it around a little and ask whether you are acquainted with any peace people back in England at all?'

'I've no idea.'

'Barley, would you be aware that two members of a certain blues group you played with between 1977 and 1980 were involved with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, as well as other peace outfits?'

Barley seemed puzzled but a little enchanted. 'Really? Do they have names?'

'Would it amaze you if I said Maxi Bums and Bert Wunderley?'

To the amusement of everyone but Clive, Barley broke out in jolly laughter. 'Oh my Lord! Forget the peace label, Bob. Maxi was a red-toothed Com. He'd have blown up the Houses of Parliament if he'd had a bomb. And Bert would have held his hand while he did it.'

'I take it they were homosexual?' said Bob, with an old dog's smile.

'Gay as trivets,' Barley agreed contentedly.

At which, with evident relief, Bob folded up his piece of paper and gave Clive a glance to say he'd finished, and Ned proposed to Barley that they take some air. Walter moved invitingly to the door and opened it. Ned must have wanted him as a foil, for Walter would never have dared otherwise. Barley hesitated a moment, then picked up a bottle of Scotch and a glass and dropped them one into each side pocket of his bush-jacket, in what I suspect was a gesture designed to shock us. Thus equipped he ambled after them leaving the three of us alone without a word between us.

'Were those Russell Sheriton's questions you were shooting at him?' I asked Bob amiably enough.

'Russell's too bright for all that damn stuff these days, Harry,' Bob replied with evident distaste. 'Russell's come a long way.'

Langley's power struggles were a mystery even to those who were involved in them, and certainly - however much we pretended otherwise - to our barons of the twelfth floor. But in the seethings and jockeyings, Sheriton's name had featured frequently as the man likely to come out at the top-of-the heap.

'So who authorised them?' I asked, still upon the questions. 'Who drafted them, Bob?'

'Maybe Russell.'

'You just said Russell was too bright!'

'Maybe he has to keep his boyars quiet,' Bob said uncomfortably, lighting up his pipe and swinging out the match.

We settled down to wait on Ned.

The shade tree is in a public garden near the waterfront. I have stood under it and sat under it and watched the dawn rise over the harbour while the dew made teardrops on my grey raincoat. I have listened, without understanding, to an old mystic with a saintly face who like's to receive his disciples there, in that self-same spot by daylight. They are of all ages, and call him the Professor. The bench is built round its trunk and divided by iron arm-rests into seats. Barley sat at the centre with Ned and Walter either side of him. They had talked first in a sleepy sailors' tavern, then on a hilltop, Barley said, but Ned for some reason refuses to remember the hilltop. Now they had come back into the valley for their final place. Brock sat wakefully in the hired car keeping a view of them across the grass. From the warehouses on the other side of the road came a whine of cranes, a pumping of lorries and the yells of fishermen. It was five in the morning but the harbour is awake from three. The first clouds of dawn were shaping and breaking like the First Day.

'Choose somebody else,' Barley said. He had said it before in several

different ways. 'I'm not your man.'

'We didn't choose you,' Ned said. 'Goethe did. If we knew a way of getting back to him without you, we'd jump at it. He's taken a fix on you. Probably been waiting ten years for someone like you to turn up.'

'He chose me because I wasn't a spy,' said Barley. 'Because I sang my bloody aria.'

'And you won't be a spy now,' said Ned. 'You'll be a publisher. His. All you'll be doing is collaborating with your author and with us at the same time. What's wrong with that?'

'You've got the draw, you've got the wits,' said Walter. 'No wonder you drink. You've been under-used for twenty years. Now's your chance to shine. You're lucky.'

'I shone at Peredelkino. Every time I shine, the lights go out.'

'You might even be solvent,' said Ned. 'Three weeks of preparation back in London while you're waiting for your visa, a jolly week in Moscow and you'll be off the hook for ever.'

With the prudence that was innate in him, Ned had avoided the word 'training'.

Back comes Walter, a touch of the whip, a piece of flattery, both over the top, but Ned let him run. 'Oh never mind the money, Barley's far too grand! It's one shot for your country and a lot of people never get the chance. They dream of it, they write in for it but it never comes their way. And afterwards, when you've done your bit. you can sit back and enjoy the benefits of being British, knowing you've earned them even if you sneer at them, which is your good right, something that has to be fought for like everything else.'

And Ned had judged rightly. Barley laughed and told Walter 'Come off it,' or something of the kind.

'One shot for your author too, if you think about it,' Ned cut in, with his plain man's talk. 'You'll be saving his neck for him. If he's going to hand over State secrets, the least you can do for him is put him on to the competent people. You're a Harrowman, aren't you?' he added as if he had just remembered this. 'Didn't I read somewhere you'd been educated at Harrow?'

'I just went to school there,' Barley said and Walter let out one of his hoots of laughter, in which Barley out of politeness joined.

'Why did you apply to us all those years ago? Do you remember what prompted you?' Ned asked. 'Some sense. Of duty, was it?'

'I wanted to stay out of my father's firm. My tutor said teach at a prep school. My cousin Lionel said join the spies. You turned me down.'

'Yes, well I'm afraid we can't do you the favour a second time.' said Ned.

Like old companions the three men silently surveyed the waterfront. A chain of naval ships straddled the harbour mouth, their rigging drawn in necklaces of lights.

'Do you know I've always dreamed there'd be one?' Walter sang suddenly, talking out to sea. 'I'm a God man at heart, I'm sure I am. Or else a failed Marxist. I always believed that sooner or later their history had to throw one up. How much science have you got? None. You wouldn't. You're that generation - the last of the arts virgins. If I asked you what a rate of burn was, you'd probably think I was talking about baking a cake.'

'Probably,' Barley agreed, laughing again despite himself.

'CEP? Not a concept?'

'Don't like initials, I'm afraid.'

'Circular-error-probable then. How's that?

'Illiterate,' Barley snapped, in one of his unpredictable fits of tetchiness.

'Rccalibrate? Whom or what do I recalibrate, and what with?'

Barley didn't bother to reply.

'Very well, then. What's the Big Motherfucker, familiarly known in circles as the BMF? That won't offend your ear for English, will it? Nice Anglo-Saxon words?'

Barley shrugged.

'The BMF was the Soviet SS9 superrocket,' Walter said. 'It was wheeled out at a May Day parade in the dark years of the Cold War. Its dimensions were breathtaking and it was later credited with a notorious footprint. Also not a name to you? Footprint? Never mind, it will be. The footprint in this case was three huge holes in the Russian wastes, that looked like the pattern of the Minuteman silo group with its command centre. The argument was whether they were made by independently targetable warheads, and could the Sovs therefore hit three American silos at once? Those who didn't want to believe they could called the footprints A fluke. Those who did upped the ante and said the warheads were for destroying cities not silos. The believers won the day and got themselves a green light for the ABM programme. Never mind their theory was discredited three years later. They squeezed through. I'm losing you, I see.'

'You never had me,' Barley said.

'But he's a fast learner, of course he is,' Walter assured Ned contentedly across Barley's body. 'Publishers can get their minds halfway round anything.'

'What's wrong with finding out?' Ned complained in the tone of a good man confused by smart talk. 'That's what I never understand. We're not asking you to build the beastly rockets or push the button. We're asking you to help us improve our knowledge of the enemy. If you don't like the nuclear business, so much the better. And if the enemy turns out to be a friend where's the harm?'

'I thought the Cold War was supposed to be over,' Barley said.

At which Ned, in what appeared to be genuine alarm, exclaimed, 'Oh my dear Lord,' under his breath.

But Walter showed no such restraint. Walter pretended to be indignant, and perhaps he was. He could be anything at any moment and often several things at once. 'Cheap political theatricals and feigned friendships!' he snorted. 'Here we are, locked into the biggest ideological face-off in history and you tell me it's all over because a handful of statesmen find it convenient to hold hands in public and scrap a few obsolete toys. The evil empire's on its knees, oh yes! Their economy's a disaster, their ideology's up the spout and their back-yard's blowing up in their faces. just don't tell me that's a reason for unbuckling our guns, because I won't believe a word of you. It's a reason for spying the living daylights out of them twenty-five hours a day and kicking them in the balls every time they try to get off the floor. God knows who they won't think they are ten years from now!'

'I suppose you do realise that if you walk out on Goethe you'll be leaving him to the Americans?' said Ned on a practical point of information. 'Bob won't let him go, why should he? Don't be fooled by those old Yalie manners of his. How will you live with yourself then?'

'I don't want to live with myself,' said Barley. 'I can't think of anybody worse to live with.'

A slate-coloured cloud slid across the red sun path before shattering into fragments.

'It comes down to this,' said Ned. 'It's crude and unEnglish but I'll say it anyway. Do you want to be a passive or an active player in the defence of your country?'

Barley was still hunting for an answer when Walter supplied it for him, and with an air of finality that brooked no contradiction. 'You're from a free society. You've no choice,' he said.

The din of the harbour rose with the advancing daylight. Barley slowly stood up and rubbed his back. He seemed to have a permanent patch of pain there, just above the waistband. Perhaps it accounted for his slope.

'Any decent Church would have burned you bastards at the stake long ago,' he remarked wearily. He turned to Ned, peering down at him through his too-small spectacles. 'I'm the wrong man,' he warned him. 'And you're a fool for using me.'

'We're all the wrong men,' said Ned. 'We're dealing with wrong things.'

Barley walked across the grass, beating his pockets for his keys. He entered a side street and vanished from their view as Brock went softly after him. The house was a wedge, narrow on the street, broad at the back. Barley unlocked the front door and closed it behind him. He pressed the time switch and began climbing the stairs, keeping an even pace because he had a long way to go.

She was a good woman and nothing was her fault. They were all good women. They were women with a mission to him, just as Hannah once had a mission to me - to save him, to straighten him out, to get his oh-so-many talents working in one direction, to help him make the fresh start that would get him clear of all the fresh starts he had made before. And Barley had encouraged her as he had encouraged all of them. He had stood beside them at the patient's bedside as if he were not himself the patient but a member of the healing team. 'So what shall we do about this poor old chap that will get him up and functioning again?'

The only difference was, he had never believed in the remedy, any more than I had.

She lay face down, exhausted and possibly asleep. She had cleaned the flat. As prisoners clean cells and the bereaved tend tombs, she had scoured the surface of a world she couldn't alter. Other people might tell Barley he was too hard on himself. Women said it to him often. How he mustn't hold himself responsible for both halves of every relationship that collapsed on him. Barley knew better. He knew the distance between himself and everything. In those days he was still the unequalled expert on his own incurability.

He touched her shoulder but she didn't stir, so he knew she was awake.

'I had to go to the Embassy,' he said. 'People in London baying for my blood. I've got to go back and face the music or they'll take away my passport.'

He fished a suitcase from under the bed and began filling it with the shirts she'd ironed for him.

'You said this time you weren't going back,' she told him. 'You'd served your English stretch, you said. You'd done your time.'

'They've put me on the early flight. There's nothing I can do. There's a car coming for me in a few minutes.' He went to the bathroom for his toothbrush and shaving gear. 'They're throwing the whole book at me,' he called. 'There's nothing I can do.'

'And I go back to my husband,' she said.

'Stay here. Use the flat. Whatever. It'll only take a few weeks. Then it's done.'

'If you just hadn't said all that stuff we'd have been fine. I'd have been happy just having an affair. You should see your letters. Hear yourself.'

Barley didn't look at her. He was stooped over his suitcase.

'Just don't do it to anyone else,' she said.

That was as far as her calm could stretch. She began sobbing and was sobbing when he left, and she was still sobbing next morning when I pitched her some line and pushed a declaration form under her nose as I asked her how much he'd told her. Nothing. She blabbed out the whole story yet defended him to the death. Hannah would have done the same. Does it still, a surfeit of loyalty to this day, even though her illusions are destroyed.

Three weeks were all that Ned and his Russia House people had to knock Barley into shape. Three weekends and fifteen days that didn't start till five when Barley slipped away from his office.

But Ned drove the job through as only Ned was able. Ned would have kept the trainers up all night and himself all night and day. And Barley, with the changefulness that was innate in him, swung and turned with every breeze, until he settled down and found a steady face and, as the day of his departure approached, a serious one as well. Often he seemed to embrace the entire ethic of our trade without demur. After all, he declared to Walter, was not seeming the only kind of being? Oh my God, yes! Walter cried, delighted - and not only in our trade! And was not the whole of man's identity a cover? Barley insisted; and was not the only world worth living in the secret one? Walter assured him that it was, and advised him to take up permanent residence there before prices rose.

Barley had loved Walter from the start, loved the fragility in him and, as I see it now, the transience. He seemed to know from the outset that he was holding the hand of a man who was on his way to the breaker's yard. At other times Barley's own face became as empty as the open grave. He would not have been Barley if he hadn't been a pendulum.

Most of all he took to the family atmosphere which Ned, with his instinct for the unanchored joe, assiduously tended - the chatty suppers, the sharing and being the star of the family, the games of chess with old Palfrey, whom Ned cunningly harnessed to Barley's wagon to redress the disturbingly ephemeral influence of Walter.

'Drop in whenever you're in the mood,' Ned told me, with a friendly pat.

So I became Barley's old Harry.

Old Harry, give us a game of chess, damn you! Old Harry, why aren't you staying for supper? Old Harry, where's your bloody glass, man?

Ned invited Bob sparingly and Clive not at all. It was Ned's show, Ned's joe. And he had a shrewd eye for Barley's flashpoints.

For the safe house Ned had chosen a pretty Edwardian cottage in Knightsbridge, an area of London where Barley had no connection. Clive winced at the cost but the Americans were paying, so his fastidiousness was misplaced. The house lay in a cul-de-sac not five minutes' walk from Harrods and I rented it in the name of the Ethical Research & Action Group, a charitable body I had registered years before and locked away for a rainy day. A cosy Service housekeeper named Miss Coad was placed in charge, and I duly swore her on to the Bluebird indoctrination list. The top-floor nursery was converted into a modest lecture room and, like the rest of the rooms, which were snug and well furnished, it was microphoned.

'This is your home from home for the duration,' Ned told Barley, as we showed him round. 'Here's your bedroom when you need one, here's your key. Use the phone as much as you like but I'm afraid we'll be listening, so if it's private you'd do better from the box across the road.'

For good measure, I had extended the Home Office warrant to cover the phone box too. Intense. American interest.

Since Barley and I were not long-sleepers, we played our chess when the others had turned in. He was an impulsive opponent and often a brilliant one, but there is a calculating streak in me that he never possessed and I was more attuned to his weaknesses than he to mine. After all, I had read his file. But I still remember games where he saw a whole campaign at a glance and with three or four moves and a bellow of amusement forced me to resign.

'Got you, Harry! Say you're sorry! Hang your head!'

But when we set them up again, I could feel the patience drain out of him. He would start to prowl and flick his hands around and let his mind take one of its journeys.

'Married, Harry?'

'Not so you'd notice,' I replied.

'Hell does that mean?'

'I have a wife in the country. I live in the town.'

'Had her long?'

'Couple of lifetimes,' I said carelessly, already wishing I had given him

a different answer.

'Love her?'

'My dear chap!' But he was staring at me, wanting to know. 'From a distance, I suppose. Yes,' I added grudgingly.

'She love you back?'

'I assume so. It's some time since I asked her.' .

'Kiddywinks?'

'A boy. In his thirties.'

'Ever see him?'

'A card at Christmas. Funerals and weddings. We're good enough friends in our way.'

'What's he do?'

'He flirted with the law. Now he makes money.'

'Is he happy?'

I was angry, which these days is unusual in me. Definitions of happiness and love were none of his damned business. He was a joe. It was my right to come close to him, not the other way round. But it was more unusual still that I should let my anger show. Yet I must have done, for I caught him gazing at me with concern, wondering no doubt whether he had accidentally touched upon some family tragedy. Then he coloured and swung away, looking for a distraction that would get us off the hook.

'He's not fighting it, sir, I'll put it that way,' a Mr. Candyman, specialist in the latest thing in body microphones, told Ned. 'I won't say he's a natural but he does listen and my goodness he does remember.'

'He's a gentleman, Mr. Ned, which is what I like,' said a lady watcher entrusted with teaching Barley the rudiments of streetcraft. 'He's got the brains and he's got a sense of humour, which I often say is halfway to an eye.'

Later she confessed that she had declined his advances in accordance with Service rules, but that he had successfully introduced her to the work of Scott Fitzgerald.

'Whole thing's a load of hocus-pocus,' Barley pronounced raucously at the end of a wearying session on the techniques of secret writing. But he clearly enjoyed it, all the same.

And as the day of reckoning drew nearer his submissiveness became total. Even when I wheeled in the Service accountant, a dreary stick called Christopher, who had devoted five days to an awed inspection of the Abercrombie & Blair books, Barley showed none of the rebelliousness I had expected.

'But every last swine in publishing is broke, Chris old boy!' he protested, pacing the pretty drawing-room to the rhythms of his own humming, holding his whisky glass wide while he dipped at the knees for the long steps. 'The big fellows like Jumbo eat the leaves and we gnaw the bark.' A German voice: 'You hef your methods, ve hef ours.

But neither Ned nor I gave a cuss about every last swine. Neither did Chris. We cared about the operation and were haunted by the nightmare that Barley might go bankrupt on us in the middle of it.

'But I don't want a bloody editor!' Barley cried, waving his long-suffering spectacles at us. 'I can't pay a bloody editor. My sainted aunts in Ely will pop their garters if I hire a bloody editor!'

But I had already squared the sainted aunts. Over luncheon at Rules I had wooed and won the Lady Pandora Weir-Scott, better known to Barley as the Sacred Cow on account of her High Anglican beliefs. Posing as a Foreign Office Pontiff, I had explained to her in the greatest confidence that the house of Abercrombie & Blair was about to be the recipient of an under-the-counter Rockefeller grant to promote Anglo-Soviet cultural relations. But not a word, or the money would be whisked away and given to another deserving house.

'Well I'm a bloody sight more deserving than anybody,' Lady Pandora averred, spreading her elbows wide to get the last scrap out of her lobster. 'You try running Ammerford on thirty thousand a year.'

Mischievously, I asked her whether I could safely approach her nephew.

'Not on your nelly. Leave him to me. He doesn't know money from muck and he can't lie for toffee.'

The need to provide Barley with a minder seemed suddenly more pressing. 'You advertised for him,' Ned explained, brandishing a small-ad from a recent edition of the cultural press in Barley's face. Old Established British Publisher seeks qualified Russian reader for promotion to editor, 25-45, fiction and technical, curriculum vitae.

And on the next afternoon Leonard Carl Wicklow presented himself for interview at the much-mortgaged premises of Abercrombie & Blair of Norfolk Street, Strand.

'I have an angel for you, Mr. Barley,' boomed Mrs. Dunbar's gin-soaked voice over the ancient intercom. 'Shall I ask him to fly in?'

An angel in bicycle clips, a webbing kitbag slung across his chest. A high angelic brow, not a worry on it, blond angelic curls. Angelic blue eyes that knew no evil. An angelic nose, so mysteriously knocked off course that your first instinct on meeting him was to reach out and switch it straight again. Interview him as you would anybody, Ned had told Barley. Leonard Carl Wicklow, born Brighton 1964, honours graduate, School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University of London.

'Oh yes, you. Marvellous. Sit down,' Barley grumbled. 'Hell brings you to publishing? Lousy trade.' He had lunched with one of his more strident lady novelists, and was still digesting the experience.

'Well, it's been kind of an on-going thing of mine for years, actually, sir,' said Wicklow, with a smile of angelic enthusiasm.

'Well, if you do come to us you certainly won't on-go,' Barley warned, bridling at this unprovoked assault on the English language. 'You may continue. You may endure. You may even prevail. But you jolly well won't on-go while I'm in the driving seat.'

'Don't know whether the bugger barks or purrs,' he growled to Ned, the same evening back in Knightsbridge, as the three of us loped up the narrow stairs for our evening tryst with Walter.

'He does both rather well, actually,' said Ned.

And Walter's seminars held Barley in their thrall, a sellout every time. Barley loved anyone whose hold on life was tenuous, and Walter looked as if he were in danger of falling off the edge of the world each time he left his chair. They would talk tradecraft, they would talk nuclear theology, they would talk the horror story of Soviet science that the Bluebird, whoever he might be, was inescapably heir to. Walter was too good a tutor to reveal what his subject was, and Barley was too interested to enquire.

'Control?' Walter the ultimate hawk shouted at him indignantly. 'Can you honestly not distinguish between control and disarmament, you ninny? Defuse world crisis, did I hear? What Guardian bilge is that? Our leaders adore crisis. Our leaders feast on crisis. Our leaders spend their lives quartering the globe in search of crisis to revive their flagging libidos!'

And Barley, far from taking offence, would crane forward in his chair, groan and clap and bay for more. He would challenge Walter, leap to his feet and pound the room shouting 'But – hang on, damn you – but!' He had the memory, he had the aptitude, as Walter had predicted. And his scientific virginity yielded at the first assault, when Walter delivered his introductory lecture on the balance of terror, which he bad contrived to turn into an inventory of all the follies of mankind.

'There's no way out,' he announced with satisfaction, 'and no amount of wishful dreaming will produce one. The demon won't go back in its bottle, the face-off is forever, the embrace gets tighter and the toys cleverer with every generation, and there's no such thing for either side as enough security. Not for the main players, not for the nasty little newcomers who each year run themselves up a suitcase bomb and join the club. We get tired of believing that, because we're human. We may even con ourselves into believing the threat has gone away. It never will. Never, never, never.'

'So who'll save us, Walt?' Barley asked. 'You and Nedsky?'

'Vanity, if anything will, which I doubt,' Walter retorted. 'No leader wants to go down in history as the ass who destroyed his country in an afternoon. And funk, I suppose. Most of our gallant politicians do have a narcissistic objection to suicide, thank God.'

'Otherwise no hope?'

'Not for man alone,' said Walter contentedly, who more than once had seriously considered taking Holy Orders rather than the Service's.

'So what's Goethe trying to achieve?' Barley asked another time, with a hint of exasperation.

'Oh, save the world, I'm sure. We'd all like to do that.'

'How save it? What's his message?'

'That's for you to find out, isn't it?'

'What's he told us so far? Why can't I know?'

'My dear boy, don't be so childish,' Walter exclaimed petulantly, but Ned stepped quickly in.

'You know all you need to know,' he said with a calming authority. 'You're the messenger. It's what you're equipped to be, it's what he wants you to be. He's told us that a lot of things on the Soviet side don't work. He's painted a picture of failure at every level - inaccuracy, incompetence, mismanagement and, on top of that, falsified test results sent to Moscow. Perhaps it's true, perhaps he's made it up. Perhaps somebody made it up for him. It's a beguiling enough story as it stands.'

'Do we think it's true?' Barley persisted stubbornly.

'You can't know.'

'Why not?'

'Because under interrogation everybody talks. There are no heroes any more. You talk, I talk, Walter talks, Goethe talks, she talks. So if we tell you what we know about them, we risk compromising our capacity to spy on them. Do we know a particular secret about them? If the answer is no, then they know we lack the software, or the device, or the formula, or the super-secret ground station to find it out. But if the answer is yes, they'll take evasive action to make sure we can't go on watching and hearing them by that method.'

Barley and I played chess.

'Do you reckon marriage only works from a distance then?' he asked me, resuming our earlier conversation as if we had never abandoned it.

'I'm quite sure love does, I replied with an exaggerated shudder, and quickly moved the subject to less intimate paths.

For his last evening, Miss Coad prepared a salmon trout and polished the silver plate. Bob was commanded, and produced a rare malt whisky and two bottles of Sancerre. But our festivities caught Barley in the same introspective mood, until Walter's spirited Final Sermon rescued him from the doldrums.

'The issue is why,' Walter trilled suddenly, his cranky voice flying all over the room, while he helped himself to my glass of Sancerre. 'That's what we're after. Not the substance, but the motive. Why? If we trust the motive, we trust the man. Then we trust his material. In the beginning was not the word, not the deed, not the silly serpent. In the beginning was why? Why did she pluck the apple? Was she bored? Was she inquisitive? Was she paid? Did Adam put her up to it? If not, who did? The Devil is every girl's cover story. Ignore him. Was she fronting for somebody? It's not enough to say, "Because the apple is there." That may do for Everest. It may even do for Paradise. But it won't do for Goethe and it won't do for us and it certainly won't do for our gallant American allies, will it, Bobby?'

And when we all burst out laughing he squeezed his eyes shut and raised his voice still higher.

'Or take the ravishing Katya! Why does Goethe pick on her? Why does he put her life at risk? And why does she let him? We don't know. But we must. We must know everything we can about her because in our profession the couriers are the message. If Goethe is genuine, the girl's head is on the block. That's a given. If he's not, what does that make her? Did she invent the stuff herself? Is she really in touch with him? Is she in touch with someone different and if so who?' He thrust a strengthless forefinger at Barley's face.' Then there's you, sir. Does Goethe think you're a spy or doesn't he? Did other people tell him you were a spy? Be a hamster. Store every nugget you can get. God bless you and all who sail in you.'

I discreetly filled another glass and we drank. And I remember how in the deep quiet we distinctly heard the chimes of Big Ben floating up the river from Westminster.

It was not till early next morning when Barley's departure was only hours off that we granted him a limited sight of the documents he had so stridently demanded in Lisbon -Goethe's notebooks, re-created in facsimile by Langley under draconian conditions of secrecy, down to the thick Russian board backs and line-block drawings of jolly Soviet schoolkids on the covers.

Silently accepting them in both hands, Barley became pure publisher while the rest of us watched the transformation. He opened the first notebook, peered at the gutter, felt the weight and flipped to the back, seeming to work out how long it would take him to read it. He reached for the second, sliced it open at a random page, and seeing tightly-written lines pulled a face that as good as complained that the script was single-spaced and hand-written.

Then he ranged across all three notebooks at once, puzzling his way from illustration to text and text to literary effusion, while he kept his head stiffly backwards and to one side, as if determined to reserve his judgment.

But I noticed how, when he raised his eyes, they had lost their sense of place, and appeared to be fixed on some far mountain of his own.

A routine search of Barley's Hampstead flat conducted by Ned and Brock after his departure revealed no hard clues to his state of mind. An old notebook in which he was accustomed to make his jottings was found in the litter of his desk. The last entries looked recent, the most apt was probably a couplet he had culled from the later work of Stevie Smith.

'I am not so afraid of the dark nightAs the friends I do not know.'

Ned conscientiously entered it on the file but refused to make anything of it. Name him a joe who didn't get butterflies in his stomach on the eve of his first run.

And on the back of an old bill tossed into the wastepaper basket Brock came on a quotation which he eventually traced to Roethke, and which for his own dark reasons he only mentioned weeks later.

'I learn by going where I have to go.'