The Russian Interpreter

6

In the end Manning met Proctor-Gould by chance. He was walking past the Hotel National after lunch one day when a man with a large, lugubrious face came slowly out, gazing absently at the street with eyes as soft as a spaniel’s and pulling at his right ear. He was wearing a double-breasted blue blazer with brass buttons, some sort of institutional tie, and dark grey flannel trousers. His breast pocket was full of pens. His suède shoes were going shiny over the bulges made by the little toes, and there were odd threads of cotton adhering to the nap of the blazer. Manning was astonished. Why had no one mentioned that he was moonfaced? Or that one’s overall impression of him was one of seediness? But he did not doubt for a moment that it was Proctor-Gould.

As he drew level the sad brown eyes focused on him.

‘Paul Manning,’ said Proctor-Gould conversationally.

‘Gordon Proctor-Gould,’ said Manning.

They shook hands, as if they really were old friends, and had not seen one another for a month or two.

‘I’ve been trying to contact you,’ said Proctor-Gould. But you seem to be rather an elusive customer.’

‘Why didn’t you leave a note for me and tell me where you were staying?’

Proctor-Gould gave a wry chuckle.

‘I did think of it,’ he said. ‘The old brain will just about run that far. But let me confess, I thought I’d take the opportunity to meet some of your friends and find out a little about you.’

He looked at Manning, his eyes open humorously wide, inviting Manning to register some sort of humorous indignation in return. Manning felt that he would have been most at home in one of those conversations which consist in the leisurely exchange of heavy banter, like the desultory dialogue of long-range artillery. There was some sort of ponderous charm about him. Manning saw why people smiled when they thought of him.

‘Naughty of me, I know, Paul,’ went on Proctor-Gould, pulling at his ear again. ‘But one learns to make a few discreet inquiries about one’s potential business associates.’

‘I’m a potential business associate?’

‘I have a little proposition to put to you. Can you spare ten minutes now? We could talk about it over a cup of coffee.’

Manning nodded, and Proctor-Gould ushered him into the gloomy lobby of the hotel, where only the polished brass fitments and the pale suits of American tourists gleamed among the sombre pre-Revolutionary furnishings.

‘It makes a change to be dossing down in this place,’ said Proctor-Gould. ‘They usually put me in the Hotel Ukraine, miles from anywhere. I seem to be persona fairly grata with the authorities at the moment.’

They went up to Proctor-Gould’s room, a dark, lofty chamber on the third floor, furnished in the characteristic Imperial baroque, and looking out over the Kremlin. Proctor-Gould appeared to be not so much occupying the room as camping in it, like a rambler in some corner of the lawns at Versailles. An open suitcase lay on the floor at the foot of the bed, a tangled heap of possessions straggling out across the carpet. Suspended on plastic hangers from the dark furniture all about the room were wet shirts and socks, dripping into antique ornamental bowls or on to pages from Soviet newspapers.

‘I’m sorry about the laundry,’ said Proctor-Gould. ‘But I don’t trust the local washerwoman not to boil and beat my shirts to pieces. Sit down and make yourself at home.’

He rummaged in the suitcase, found a little aluminium camper’s kettle with a folding handle, and disappeared with it into the corridor. Manning sat down in an uncomfortable carved chair, with brass lions’ heads beneath his hands, and gazed about him, steeping himself in the profound melancholy of the room. On a table in the corner were stacked dozens and dozens of English books, all still in their dust-jackets. Manning put his head on his shoulder to read the titles. He made out Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, The Human Use of Human Beings, Philosophical Investigations, five copies of Lucky Jim, and seven copies of the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

‘I see you’re looking at my beads,’ said Proctor-Gould, coming back into the room holding the kettle, now steaming, at arm’s length.

‘Your what?’

‘My beads. Presents for the natives. I always bring a suitcase full of English books when I come over – they’re like gold-dust here.’

He felt under the clothes in his case again, and produced two stout plastic mugs. Inside a spare suède shoe he located a Woolworth’s apostle spoon, and beneath a pile of dirty socks the old familiar tin.

‘Do you mind Nescafé?’ he asked.

‘Delightful.’

‘I always bring it. Boiling water’s the only thing you can get without waiting in Russian hotels.’

Manning watched him lever open the lid with the apostle’s head, and perform all the rest of the soothing ritual. It took him back. It took him back to all the indistinguishable student lodgings in which he had sat, beneath mantelpieces lined with the annual programmes of university societies, and party invitations all written on identical At Home blanks as if they were impersonal communications from some university department responsible for party-giving. To evenings spent talking about women and grants to visit America, and consuming chocolate digestive biscuits and Nescafé, the body and blood of scholarship itself. Nostalgia touched him, and he felt pleased to be with another Englishman here amid the sad smells of Russia.

‘You’ll have to have it black, I’m afraid,’ said Proctor-Gould, though the liquid in the mug was more a kind of dark gravy brown. ‘There seems to be a milk shortage in the shops at the moment.’

‘Thanks,’ said Manning. ‘It’s nice to meet you at last. I hear we’re old friends.’

Proctor-Gould took his own mug and straddled comfortably with his back to the radiator, as if it were an open fire. He gazed benignly down at Manning.

‘We are, Paul,’ he said. ‘We are.’

‘Really?’

‘You don’t remember where we met?’

‘No.’

‘At John’s.’

‘John’s? John who’s?’

Proctor-Gould laughed. It was a snuffling laugh, the kind of noise one might have expected a bloodhound to make, if something about the scent had struck it as funny.

‘“John who’s?’” he repeated contentedly. ‘That’s good. I must remember that.’

‘I still don’t know.’

‘We were in college together, Paul.’

‘Oh, John’s.’

‘It’s not what he says,’ said Proctor-Gould, in great good humour. ‘It’s the way he says it. Anyway, I’ve been checking up. You were two years behind me. But I’m pretty sure I remember seeing you around in my last year.’

‘Now you mention it,’ lied Manning politely, ‘I rather think I remember seeing you.’

‘You had a room in Chapel Court, didn’t you?’

‘I didn’t, as a matter of fact.’

‘Ah. I probably just saw you walking through.’

‘That would explain it.’

‘But we must have seen one another in Hall, for example.’

‘Of course we must.’

It was presumably a John’s tie that Proctor-Gould was wearing. Now that Manning had a reference point against which to locate him, Proctor-Gould appeared even more curiously seedy. Double-breasted blazers and baggy grey flannels had gone out of fashion years before he and Proctor-Gould had arrived in Cambridge. Vaguely he visualized a Cambridge full of perambulating double-breasted blazers just after the war, with utility marks in their linings and ration books in their pockets.

‘Anyway,’ said Proctor-Gould, ‘I’m in business now. You see before you one of the bright young men you’re probably always hearing about who go out and develop trade with the Soviet Union.’

He smiled lugubriously, and pulled vigorously at his right ear – with his left hand this time, since he was holding the mug of Nescafé in his right. When he stopped, Manning noticed with a shock that his right lobe was visibly longer than his left.

‘What do you deal in?’ asked Manning.

‘Oh, pictures, fashions, musical instruments – all the little unconsidered trifles that no one else thinks of as coming from Russia. And people.’

‘People?’

‘Yes, quite a large proportion of my business is in people. I expect you’ll think that means I’m a theatrical agent?’

‘I can’t think what it means.’

‘It’s a conclusion a lot of people seem to leap to. But in fact I don’t touch the theatrical profession at all. I’m not a literary agent, either – that’s another common mistake people make. I don’t handle authors, in the normal sense of the word.’

Proctor-Gould gazed thoughtfully into the brown dregs of his Nescafé, as if brooding upon human error and delusion.

‘No, Paul,’ he said, ‘I deal exclusively in ordinary people – the more ordinary the better. And this is where I want you to help me.’