Authors: Jonathan Coe
Thomas looked at them both in turn. It seemed they were genuinely curious to know what he thought. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘This is how it appears to me.’ He drew deeply on his cigarette, then plunged on: ‘Tony – Mr Buttress – has been working at the British pavilion, giving technical advice on the replica ZETA machine and other exhibits. Increasingly, he’s been getting friendly with Mr Chersky of the newspaper
Sputnik
. I dare say you people have somehow been listening to their conversations and getting concerned about it. Tony is a bit of a radical, in his unassuming British way. Supports CND, votes Labour, that sort of thing. And now, it would seem, his socialist instincts have got the better of him, and Mr Chersky has persuaded him to go over to the other side. He’s taken the designs of the machine, and for all I know the replica itself, and handed them over to the Soviets and right now he’s quite probably sitting in their embassy telling them everything he knows.’ Thomas paused for breath, and looked to them both for confirmation. ‘Well, am I right?’
Mr Radford glanced at his colleague. ‘What do you think, Wayne?’
‘I’d say he’s had a pretty good shot at it. I’d give him two out of ten for effort.’
‘Plus another point for ingenuity, would you say?’
‘Why not, old man? No harm in being generous.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Thomas. ‘Are you saying that I’ve got it all wrong?’
‘From start to finish, I’m afraid.’
‘Not even close.’
Thomas let out an impatient sigh. ‘So what
is
going on? Could you please tell me why I’ve been dragged out here?’
‘Well,’ said Mr Wayne, pausing only to tap a morsel of ash from the end of his cigarette onto the wild grass at his feet, ‘let’s start with your friend Tony. Mr Buttress and his famous machine. Where to begin, with that one? As I’m sure he’s told you – or you read in the papers – a few months ago the head of the ZETA programme in the UK, Sir John Cockroft, announced a huge breakthrough. I’m no scientist – I don’t know the details – maybe Mr Radford can help out on this point . . .’
‘Not me, old man,’ said Mr Radford, shaking his head sadly. ‘Wouldn’t have a clue.’
‘Well – apparently – I don’t know – but back in January Sir John claimed that his team had been observing these things – what are they called? – neutron bursts, and they’d been happening in the sort of numbers you might expect when there was a thermonuclear reaction. Would that be fair, would you say?’
‘Search me. Didn’t even get School Certificate in science.’
‘Well, that’s my spin on things, anyway. Nuclear fusion. Announced
to the press in January, and generally considered to be the biggest feather in the cap of British science since the Lord knows when. Three cheers for brave Sir John, and yah boo sucks to the Russians, while we’re at it. And so your mob in Baker Street suggest they mock up a replica of the machine and show it off at the British pavilion. Jewel in the crown of British research, and so on. Which is all done, with a certain amount of secrecy – enough to make sure that nobody gives away the finer points of how the thing actually works. With me so far?’
Thomas nodded.
‘All right. So here we all are in Brussels, having a jolly good time at the fair, pulling together, selling Britain to the rest of the world as hard as we can, and all the rest, and meanwhile back at home Sir John and his team of eggheads are still hard at it, tinkering away with their beloved machine and carrying out more and more tests. And earlier this week – guess what? Another discovery. Another breakthrough. Only it’s not quite so exciting this time. They’ve found out something new about the ZETA machine, something no one was expecting.’
‘Yes?’ said Thomas.
‘Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.’
Mr Wayne allowed these words to sink in, while he lit himself another cigarette. Neither Thomas nor Mr Radford was inclined to say anything.
‘Seems the announcement in January had been much too optimistic, and this burst of neutrons, or whatever it was, was just some sort of coincidence, just a perfectly ordinary by-product of the experiments. Egg on face all round, of course. And there was the offending machine on display, in the middle of the British pavilion in Brussels, with your pal Mr Buttress on hand to tell all and sundry what a terrific invention it was and how it was going to solve mankind’s energy problems for the next few centuries. Well, the chaps at home weren’t going to put up with that for long. Yesterday morning an urgent call came through from Whitehall telling him to pack the whole thing up and bring it home, pronto. Which is exactly what he did.’
‘So he’s gone? Back to London? And he’s not coming back?’
‘Afraid not,’ said Mr Wayne. ‘Still, look on the bright side. You’ve got that cabin to yourself now.’
‘Every cloud has a silver lining, and all that,’ Mr Radford agreed.
Thomas was silent for a long while. He was so confused that it became difficult, now, to phrase even the simplest question.
‘So . . . I don’t follow . . . if none of this has anything to do with Tony, or Mr Chersky . . . what does it have to do with me?’
‘It has everything to do with Mr Chersky,’ said Mr Radford. ‘Mr Chersky, and Miss Parker.’
‘Emily?’ said Thomas, more surprised than ever.
‘Yes indeed.’
‘The girl from Wisconsin.’
Mr Radford leaned towards him. ‘What do you
know
about her, exactly?’
‘What’s your impression?’
‘What do you make of her?’
‘How does she strike you?’
Thomas blew out his cheeks. ‘I don’t really know. Lovely girl, of course. Highly attractive. Apart from that, I hadn’t given her much thought.’
‘Well, it’s about time you did.’
‘It’s about time you started giving a bit more thought to her, and a bit less thought to Anneke Hoskens.’
Thomas stared from one man to the other, utterly out of his depth.
‘Emily Parker,’ Mr Wayne explained slowly and emphatically, ‘is in love with Andrey Chersky.’
‘How on earth do you know that?’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, you’ve seen all the equipment we’ve got up there. We know everything that’s going on at the fair.’
‘But she’s Tony’s girl. At least she has been for the last few weeks.’
‘That might be what you think. And it might be what
he
thinks. But we know differently. She’s been meeting Chersky in secret. Much more often than she’s been seeing Mr Buttress.’
‘All right,’ said Thomas, taking this in slowly. ‘What of it? A young American girl falls for a handsome Russian journalist. They have a . . . fling in Brussels. So what? What difference does it make?’
‘Andrey Chersky is not a journalist,’ said Mr Radford. ‘He’s a high-ranking officer in the KGB.’
‘And Emily Parker,’ Mr Wayne continued, even before Thomas had properly been able to absorb this new information, ‘is not just any American girl. Her father, Professor Frederick Parker, is one of the world’s foremost experts in the field of nuclear research.’
‘Nuclear weapons research, that is.’
After a moment, Thomas stood up. He walked away from the bench and towards the shade of the oak trees. Mr Wayne and Mr Radford watched him, wordless and impassive. He paced between the trees for a minute or two, until he had finished his cigarette, the stub of which he then crushed under his foot. When he came back to join them, he had a new note of resistance in his voice.
‘Even if what you tell me is true,’ he said, ‘I don’t see why it has anything to do with us.’
‘Us?’ said Mr Wayne.
‘Us. The British. This is a matter for the Americans and the Russians, surely. The best thing would be for us to keep well out of it.’
Mr Wayne and Mr Radford looked at each other, and then both laughed.
‘My dear fellow, it isn’t as simple as that.’
‘Things don’t work like that any more.’
‘We’re all in it together, these days.’
‘You have to take sides.’
‘Look at it this way.’ Mr Radford stood beside Thomas, and gestured towards the quaint old house in the distance. ‘You’ve seen what’s going on here. Who do you imagine is paying for all that? Whose equipment do you think we’re using? We don’t get it for nothing, you know. They expect something in return.’
‘They expect favours.’
‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.’
‘Share and share alike.’
‘All right,’ said Thomas, after giving this some thought. ‘But why me? Where do I come into it?’
Now it was Mr Wayne’s turn to stand up and start pacing.
‘Miss Parker,’ he explained, ‘is a very emotional girl. As I’m sure you’ve noticed. Excessively romantic, you might say. Highly strung.’
‘She is an actress, after all,’ Mr Radford chipped in.
‘She’s come to Belgium, it seems, hell-bent on having a European romance. First it was your friend Tony. Then she lost interest in him and set her sights on Chersky. The point is . . . well, we think she can easily be diverted.’
‘Diverted?’
‘Yes. All she needs is someone to take her mind off this Russian chap. Another object for her affections.’
‘A good-looking fellow, preferably – like yourself.’
‘Me?’ said Thomas. ‘Good-looking?’
‘Oh, come on, don’t be modest.’
‘Don’t try to deny it.’
‘There’s a touch of the Gary Coopers about you, you know.’
‘A spot of the Dirk Bogardes, I would have said.’
‘So, do you see what we’re driving at?’
‘Do you get our drift?’
Thomas saw what they were driving at, at last. He didn’t know whether to be horrified or flattered. At the moment, indeed, he felt a combination of the two.
‘You’re proposing,’ he faltered, ‘that I . . . that I, as it were, should attempt to
lure
Miss Parker away from Mr Chersky?’
‘In a nutshell, yes.’
‘As a matter of some urgency.’
‘Urgency? Aren’t you being a tad over-dramatic? I mean, I assume you wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble if it wasn’t important to you, but . . .’
Mr Wayne took his arm. ‘Look, old boy, we don’t bandy words like that around without any reason. We’ve got to do something about this.’
‘Our information,’ said Mr Radford, ‘is that this silly girl is ready to follow her Soviet sweetheart to Moscow just as soon as he says the word.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really.’ Mr Wayne snorted, in a way which suggested to Thomas that his response to the predicament was, chiefly, one of resigned irritation. ‘And you know where that would leave us, don’t you? In a nice old pickle!’
A private room
SMERSH is the official murder organization of the Soviet government. It operates both at home and abroad and, in 1955, it employed a total of 40,000 men and women. SMERSH is a contraction of ‘Smiert Spionam’, which means ‘Death to Spies’. It is a name used only among its staff and among Soviet officials. No sane member of the public would dream of allowing the word to pass his lips.
The headquarters of SMERSH is a very large and ugly modern building on the Sretenka Ulitsa. It is No. 13 on this wide, dull street . .
.
Thomas was reading these words two days later, sitting up on his bed in the cabin at the Motel Expo, killing the half-hour before he was due to go for dinner with Anneke. He had bought his hardback copy of
From Russia with Love
the day before, at an English-language bookshop on Rue Sainte-Catherine in central Brussels.
He found the passage troubling, to say the least. Were things really so ruthless in the Soviet Union? He could hardly believe that anyone as witty, ingratiating and hospitable as Mr Chersky could be
party to such matters. It was tempting to dismiss Ian Fleming’s novels
– which were beginning to enjoy a considerable vogue in Britain – as pure fantasy. And yet, at the same time, he appeared to be writing with great authority. Hadn’t he worked in military intelligence himself? Thomas seemed to remember an article about him in one of the newspapers which had gone into his background. Quite a considerable personal experience of espionage, apparently. So there was a good chance that the man knew what he was talking about.
He had read enough, for now. There was no point worrying, or even thinking too hard, about what he was getting himself into, because he had committed himself to helping Mr Wayne and Mr Radford in their tortuous scheme, and there could be no backing down. Why he’d agreed to it was difficult to say. There had been an appeal to his vanity, certainly: it was pretty flattering, after all, that someone should want to cast him as the bait in a romantic mousetrap. If they really saw him as that sort of fellow – the irresistible romantic hero type – who was he to argue? But he was also, to some extent, acting upon a residual, unexpected sense of patriotism: Thomas had been more than dimly conscious, these last two days, of a certain heroic glow at the thought that he was stepping up to the wicket now that his name had been called, and doing his bit for Queen and country. And then there was also the bonus (although he would never have admitted this to himself) that a number of hours, or perhaps even days (or perhaps even nights) spent in Miss Parker’s company was far from being an unpleasant prospect.
He put the book face down on his continental quilt and continued to think, staring up through the skylight at the idly drifting summer clouds. Altogether it was going to be a very delicate affair. First of all, he would have to choose his words carefully when telling Anneke what he had been asked to do.
Mr Radford and Mr Wayne had, to his surprise, shown considerable tact when approaching this side of things. They fully understood the difficulties of his situation. Thomas must, they said, explain everything to Anneke fully and clearly. She was a lovely girl: naive, guileless and entirely trustworthy. They had given her a careful vetting, of course, but there was nothing in her family background to cause any alarm. Given the closeness of the friendship (they put it no stronger) that had developed between Thomas and Miss Hoskens over the last few weeks, they felt that he only had one honourable course of action: to tell her the whole truth about Mr Chersky, Miss Parker, and the important task he had agreed to undertake, so that she might understand why, for the time being, he would be spending so much time in the American girl’s company. It was not going to be an easy conversation, they realized that: but they implored him to be candid, to answer all her questions, to conceal nothing from her. To behave like a gentleman, in other words. They suggested that he talk to her over dinner; and made a booking in Thomas’s name, for this purpose, at Praha, the restaurant of the Czechoslovakian pavilion – generally considered to be the best restaurant on the Expo site, and one which Anneke herself had expressed a special interest in visiting.
So much for Miss Hoskens. Mr Wayne and Mr Radford had been less tactful, he thought, in dealing with the other matter he had raised: the question of Sylvia. At first they had misunderstood him. On no account, they cautioned, should he mention to Miss Parker that he had a wife and child back in London. That would be a grave mistake. And if she already knew about this, through her conversations with Mr Buttress, Thomas should invent a pretty convincing story to explain it away. Tell her that you’re separated, they said. Tell her that the marriage broke down some time ago, that you never see her, that there isn’t the smallest prospect of a reconciliation. Thomas listened to this advice, and agreed that he would follow it, but then explained that he had been thinking of a different problem altogether. He was a married man, after all, and was not sure that, even in the execution of this important mission, he would be prepared to betray his wife, physically, with another woman.
Mr Radford and Mr Wayne had exchanged embarrassed glances. This question, it seemed, lay well outside their area of expertise.
‘Well, look, that’s entirely down to you, you know.’
‘We can’t very well help you with that one.’
‘These are deep waters, after all.’
‘Deep waters. Dangerous currents.’
‘All we would say is . . .’
‘Well, the pleasures of married life . . .’
‘. . . which we know you are awfully keen on . . .’
‘. . . they haven’t exactly held you back, so far, have they? . . .’
‘ . . . they haven’t seemed to weigh very heavily with you . . .’
‘ . . . in your relations . . .’
‘ . . . your dealings, we should probably say . . .’
‘ . . . with Miss Hoskens.’
‘Don’t misunderstand us, of course . . .’
‘. . . don’t take offence . . .’
‘. . . but our impression is . . .’
‘ . . . that you seem to play . . . pretty fast and loose . . .’
‘ . . . have a fairly flexible interpretation, as it were . . .’
‘ . . . of the rules and regulations, and all that.’
‘On top of which . . .’
‘ . . . moreover . . .’
‘. . . your good little woman back in Tooting . . .’
‘ . . . from what we understand . . .’
‘. . . not that we want to spread gossip, or anything like that . . .’
‘. . . or sow the seeds of mistrust, Heaven forbid . . .’
‘. . . but there does seem to be a small possibility . . .’
‘. . . if our information is correct . . .’
‘. . . that she and your next-door neighbour . . .’
‘. . . are becoming pretty . . . intimate . . .’
‘. . . taking that word in its broadest sense, of course . . .’
‘. . . in your absence.’
Mr Radford and Mr Wayne had delivered themselves of these sentiments with an air of great discomfort, and then left Thomas alone for several minutes to ponder them. At the end of which, his feelings on the subject were no less conflicted than before. And even now, he found himself quite unable to see his way out of the moral labyrinth into which the bizarre developments of the last few days seemed to have led him.
He picked up the book again. How would James Bond have acted in this situation, he wondered? It seemed to Thomas, from everything he already knew about him, that the differences between himself and Fleming’s hero were probably too great for any meaningful comparison. There was no way that Bond, for instance, would ever have got himself tied down to married life in Tooting, with a nine-to-five office job and a baby daughter, up to his ears in bills, domestic chores, nappies and gripe water . . .
He sighed and got up from the bed. In just a few days’ time he was supposed to be going back to London for the weekend: his first trip home, away from the fair. He already sensed that it was not going to be an easy visit. No wonder that he looked forward, with a certain nervous pleasure, to tonight’s dinner with Anneke, and after that the rendezvous with Emily Parker that had been arranged for two evenings’ time.
The last two days at Expo 58 had been declared Czech National Days: Czech films had been shown in the cinemas, Czech music performed in the concert halls, and bookings at the already popular Restaurant Praha had reached a record high. When the doorman admitted Thomas and Anneke at nine o’clock that evening, the buzz of conversation in the restaurant was uncomfortably loud, and there did not seem to be a single place free at any of the thirty or forty tables.
This, however, was merely the less exclusive of the two main dining areas: the Restaurant Pilzen. A waiter escorted them briskly between the crowded tables towards a door at the rear. Perhaps, then, Thomas thought, we have been booked a table in the Restaurant De Luxe: in which case, Radford and Wayne were really pushing the boat out on their behalf. But even on this point he was mistaken: for he and Anneke were ushered reverently into a private room, containing only one table, dominated by an enormous silver vase filled to overflowing with flowers, and laid out with a variety and volume of cutlery which suggested that this was going to be a very long meal.
‘Sir – madame,’ said the waiter, showing them to their seats. He then presented them with two menus, in stiff white card thickly embossed with gold lettering, and withdrew from the room discreetly, leaving them in a situation of far closer intimacy than either of them had been expecting.
Anneke looked at Thomas shyly, her eyes round with surprise, and the first thing she said was: ‘Can you afford all this?’
Now, perhaps, would have been a good moment to say that the bill was in fact being picked up by a little-known department of the British government; information which would have led on, naturally enough, to the difficult subject which Thomas was obliged to broach with her this evening. And indeed, he almost said it. Almost, but not quite. Instead he gave a worldly smile – one might almost have called it a smirk – and murmured: ‘Of course.’
Neither of them had ever had a meal quite like this before. Finding themselves unable to choose from the menu, even using the English translations, they asked the
maître d’
to make a selection for them. The courses came in rapid succession, in dauntingly large portions: but every taste sensation was so unfamiliar, and so delightful, that they made much better headway than they would have thought possible. There was beef tartare
Kolkovna
, served with garlic toast; a clear beef soup called
hovězí
polévka
; wonderfully savoury pancakes (
bramboráky
); a lamb hock braised in red wine, served with rosemary potatoes; a beef stroganoff; chocolate soufflé; apple strudel; and more pancakes to finish – this time with cream yoghurt and
blueberries. They began the meal with a bottle of sparkling
Bohemian
Sekt, and were then offered a deliciously sweet Gewürztraminer, followed by a rich, plummy Pinot Noir from Moravia. Finally, they drank brandy from giant snifter glasses, which had been specially designed, the waiter told them, to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the famous Moser glassworks. The designer, he said, had classified humanity into six different types and created six unique snifters to express them. Thomas’s was called the Long Face; Anneke’s, the Slim Lady. The brandy warmed them both with a deep, satisfying liquid flame.
As for the conversation which accompanied their meal, that too was free-flowing, if a little one-sided. Thomas did not have a huge experience of talking to women. A meal out with Sylvia, for instance, would typically be punctuated by long, difficult silences, as the two of them quickly exhausted every topic and struggled to dredge up new ones. And at work, there was a strict but unspoken orthodoxy which required that Thomas took lunch with his male counterparts rather than the secretaries. It was a new experience for him, that evening, to be addressed by someone like Anneke in such a spontaneous, confiding way: telling him stories of her family life, her wayward elder brother and over-protective father; explaining how, from a very early age at school, it had become obvious to everybody that she had a gift for learning languages; how as an infant, she used to pore over the leather-bound atlas they kept at home, and how she had never lost her fascination for foreign countries or eagerness to travel, although so far she had been no further south than Paris, or further north than Amsterdam. Thomas chipped in occasionally, usually to make more general remarks: wasn’t it interesting, he observed, that despite the acknowledged excellence of Britain’s public schools and grammar schools, it was still hard to find an Englishman capable of speaking a foreign language when he went abroad for a holiday? But he could not help noticing, at such moments, that Anneke was not really concerned to discuss what he would have called the broader picture. She liked to talk about things from a personal, subjective point of view, so for the most part all he could do was listen; drifting off, occasionally, to wonder how and when he was going to broach the sensitive topic of Emily, and his strange new assignment.
Still on the subject of her yearning for travel, Anneke at one point asked him: ‘So, you never got to see the pavilion of the Belgian Congo?’
‘Not yet, no. I was planning to visit some time in the next few days.’
‘But you can’t,’ she said. ‘They’ve gone home.’
‘Who’s gone home?’
‘The natives from Africa. Hadn’t you heard?’
‘What happened?’
‘Well, I read in the newspaper that they were complaining about the way that some of the visitors were treating them. They were sitting all day in their straw huts, working on their . . . native crafts, and so on, and apparently some of the people were shouting bad things at them, and sometimes they were trying to –’ (she giggled) ‘– feed them bananas, and things like that. They said they were made to feel like animals in a zoo. So now most of them have gone home and the huts are empty.’ Anneke frowned. ‘I thought there was something wrong about it, the first time I went there. It felt somehow . . . not kind, making them sit and work like that while all the Europeans just stood and watched.’