The Russia House (20 page)

Then Barley himself was distracted while he tried in his passable if clotted French to explain to a tall Palestinian that no, he was afraid he was
not
a member of the Peace Group, old boy, and alas
not
the manager of the hotel either, and he doubted very much whether there was one.

Wicklow, who had observed these events from halfway up the staircase, reported later that he had never seen an overt encounter better done.

As actors Barley and Katya were dressed for different plays: Katya for high drama in her blue dress and old lace collar that had so taken Landau’s fancy; and Barley for low English comedy in a pinstripe suit of his father’s that was too short for him in the sleeve, and a pair of very scuffed buckskin boots by Ducker’s of Oxford that only a collector of bygones could have regarded as still splendid.

When they met they surprised each other. After all they were still strangers, closer to the forces that had brought them here than to one another. Discarding the impulse to give her a formal peck on the cheek, Barley found himself instead puzzling over her eyes, which were not only very dark and full of light at the same time but heavily fringed, so that he couldn’t help wondering whether she was endowed with a double set of eyelashes.

And since Barley on his side wore that indefinably foolish expression which overcomes certain Englishmen in the presence of beautiful women, it was Katya’s suspicion that her first instinct on the telephone had been right and he was haughty.

Meanwhile they were standing close enough to feel the warmth of each other’s bodies and for Barley to smell her make-up. The Babel of foreign languages continued round them.

‘You are Mr. Barley, I think,’ she told him breathlessly and laid a hand along his forearm, for she had a way of touching people as if seeking to assure herself that they were real.

‘Yes indeed, the same, hullo, well done, and you’re Katya Orlova, Niki’s friend. Wonderful you could make it. Masterpiece of timing. How are you?’

Photographs don’t lie but they don’t tell the truth either, Barley was thinking, watching her breast rise and fall with her breathing. They don’t catch the glow of a girl who looks as though she’s just witnessed a miracle and you’re the person she’s chosen to tell first.

The restless crowd in the lobby brought him to his senses. No two people, however purposefully united, could have survived for long exchanging pleasantries in the centre of that turmoil.

‘Tell you what,’ he said, as if he had had a bright idea on the spur of the moment. ‘Why don’t I buy you a bun? Niki was determined I should make a fuss of you. You met each other at that fair, he tells me. What a character. Heart of gold,’ he continued cheerfully as he led her towards the staircase and a sign that read ‘Buffet’. ‘Salt of the earth. A pain in the neck as well, of course, but who isn’t?’

‘Oh Mr. Landau is a
very
kind man,’ she said, speaking much as Barley was for the benefit of an unidentified audience, but sounding very persuasive nevertheless.

‘And reliable,’ Barley called approvingly as they gained the first-floor landing. Now Barley too was for some reason out of breath. ‘Ask Niki to do a thing, he does it. In his own way, it’s true. But he does it and keeps his thoughts to himself. I always think that’s the sign of a good friend, don’t you?’

‘I would say that without discretion there can be no friendship,’ she replied as if quoting from a marriage book. ‘True friendship must be based on mutual trust.’

And Barley while responding warmly to such profundity could not fail to recognise the similarity of her cadences to those of Goethe.

In a curtained area stood a thirty-foot food counter with a single tray of sugar biscuits on it. Behind it three bulky ladies in white uniforms and helmets of transparent plastic had mounted guard over a regimental samovar while they argued among themselves.

‘Sound judge of a book too, in his own way, old Niki,’ Barley observed, stretching out the topic as they took up their places before the rope barrier. ‘
Bête intellectuelle
, as the French say. Tea, please, ladies. Marvellous.’

The ladies went on haranguing each other. Katya stared at them with no expression on her face. Suddenly to Barley’s astonishment she drew out her red pass and snarled – there was no other word for it – with the result that one of them detached herself from her companions long enough to yank two cups from a rack and slap them viciously on two saucers as if she were breech-loading an old rifle. Still furious, she filled a huge kettle. And having with further signs of rage unearthed a modern box of matches, she turned up a gas ring and dumped the kettle on it before returning to her comrades.

‘Care for a biscuit?’ Barley asked. ‘
Foie gras
?’

‘Thank you. I ate cake already at the reception.’

‘Oh my God. Good cake?’

‘It was not very interesting.’

‘But nice Hungarians?’

‘The speeches were not significant. I would say they were banal. I blame our Soviet side for this. We are not sufficiently relaxed with foreigners even when they are from Socialist countries.’

Both for a moment had run out of lines. Barley was remembering a girl he had known at university, a general’s daughter with skin like rose petals who lived only for the rights of animals until she hurriedly married a groom from the local hunt. Katya was staring gloomily into the further end of the room where a dozen stand-up tables were placed in strict lines. At one of them stood Leonard Wicklow sharing a joke with a young man his own age. At another an elderly
Rittmeister
in riding boots was drinking lemonade with a girl in jeans and throwing out his arms as if to describe his lost estates.

‘Can’t think why I didn’t offer you dinner,’ Barley said, meeting her eyes again with the feeling of falling straight into them. ‘One doesn’t want to be too forward, I suppose. Not unless one can get away with it.’

‘It would not have been convenient,’ she replied, frowning.

The kettle began chugging but the war-hardened women of the buffet kept their backs to it.

‘Always so difficult, performing on the telephone, don’t you think?’ Barley said, for small talk. ‘Addressing oneself to a sort of plastic flower, I mean, instead of a human face. Hate the beastly thing personally, don’t you?’

‘Hate what, please?’

‘The telephone. Talking at a distance.’ The kettle began spitting on the gas. ‘You get the silliest ideas about people when you can’t see them.’

Jump, he told himself.
Now
.

‘I was saying the very same thing to a publishing friend of mine only the other day,’ he went on, at the same jolly, conversational level. ‘We were discussing a new novel someone sent me. I’d shown it to him, strictly confidentially, and he was absolutely knocked out by it. Said it was the best thing he’d seen for years. Dynamite, in fact.’ Her eyes fixed on his own and they were scaringly direct. ‘But so
odd
not to have any sort of picture of the writer,’ he continued airily. ‘I don’t even know the chap’s name. Let alone where he gets all his information from, learnt his craft and so forth. Know what I mean? Like hearing a bit of music and not being sure whether it’s Brahms or Cole Porter.’

She was frowning. She had drawn in her lips and seemed to be moistening them inside her mouth. ‘I do not regard such personal questions as appropriate to an artist. Some writers can work only in obscurity. Talent is talent. It does not require explanations.’

‘Well I wasn’t talking so much about explanations, you see, as about authenticity,’ Barley explained. A path of down followed the line of her cheekbone but unlike the hair on her head it was gold. ‘I mean,
you
know publishing. If a fellow’s written a novel about the hill tribes of Northern Burma, for instance, one’s entitled to ask whether he’s ever been south of Minsk. Specially if it’s a really important novel, which this one is. A potential world-beater, according to my chum. In a case like that, I reckon you’re entitled to insist that the writer should stand up and declare his qualifications.’

Bolder than the others, the senior lady was pouring boiling water into the samovar. A second was unlocking the regimental cash box. A third was scooping rations of tea into a handscale. Searching in his pockets Barley came up with a three-rouble note. At the sight of it the woman at the cash box broke into a despairing tirade.

‘I expect she wants change,’ Barley said stupidly. ‘Don’t we all?’

Then he saw that Katya had put thirty kopeks on the counter and that she had two very small dimples when she smiled. He took the books and bag. She followed him with the teacups on a tray. But as they reached their table she addressed him with an expression of challenge.

‘If an author is obliged to prove that he is saying the truth, so also is his publisher,’ she said.

‘Oh, I’m for honesty on all sides. The more people put their cards on the table, the better off we’ll
all
be.’

‘I am informed that the author was inspired by a Russian poet.’

‘Pecherin,’ Barley replied. ‘Looked him up. Born 1807 in Dymerka, province of Kiev.’

Her lips were near the brim of her cup, her eyes down. And though he had plenty of other things on his mind, Barley noticed that her right ear, protruding from her hair, had become transparent in the evening light from the window.

‘The author was also inspired by certain opinions of an Englishman concerning world peace,’ she said with the utmost severity.

‘Do you think he would like to meet that Englishman again?’

‘This can be established. It is not known.’

‘Well the Englishman would like to meet
him
,’ said Barley. ‘They’ve got an awful lot to say to each other. Where do you live?’

‘With my children.’

‘Where are your children?’

A pause while Barley again had the uncomfortable sensation of having offended against some unfamiliar ethic.

‘We live close to the Aeroport metro station. There is no airport there any more. There are apartments. How long are you staying in Moscow, please, Mr. Barley?’

‘A week. Any address for your apartment?’

‘It is not convenient. You are staying all the time here at the Hotel Odessa?’

‘Unless they chuck me out. What does your husband do?’

‘It is not important.’

‘Is he in publishing?’

‘No.’

‘Is he a writer?’

‘No.’

‘So what is he? A composer? A frontier guard? A cook? How does he maintain you in the style to which you are accustomed?’

He had made her laugh again, which seemed to please her as much as it did him. ‘He was manager of a timber concern,’ she said.

‘What’s he manager of now?’

‘His factory prefabricates houses for rural areas. We are divorced, like everyone else in Moscow.’

‘What are the kids? Boys? Girls? How old?’

And that put an end to laughter. For a moment he thought she would walk out on him. Her head lifted, her face closed and an angry fire filled her eyes. ‘I have a boy and a girl. They are twins, eight years old. It is not relevant.’

‘You speak beautiful English. Better than I do. It’s like well water.’

‘Thank you, I have a natural comprehension of foreign languages.’

‘It’s better than that. It’s unearthly. It’s as if English had stopped at Jane Austen. Where did you learn it?’

‘In Leningrad. I was at school there. English is also my passion.’

‘Where were you at university?’

‘Also in Leningrad.’

‘When did you come to Moscow?’

‘When I married.’

‘How did you meet him?’

‘My husband and I knew each other from childhood. While we were at school, we attended summer camps together.’

‘Did you catch fish?’

‘Also rabbits,’ she said as her smile came back again to light the whole room. ‘Volodya is a Siberian boy. He knows how to sleep in the snow, skin a rabbit and catch fish through the ice. At the time I married him I was in retreat from intellectual values. I thought the most important thing a man could know was how to skin a rabbit.’

‘I was
really
wondering how you met the author,’ Barley explained.

He watched her wrestle with her indecision, noticing how readily her eyes reflected her changing emotions, now coming to him, now retreating. Until he lost her altogether as she stooped below the level of the table, pushed away her flying hair and picked up her handbag. ‘Please thank Mr. Landau for the books and the tea,’ she said. ‘I shall thank him myself next time he comes to Moscow.’

‘Don’t go. Please. I need your advice.’ He lowered his voice and it was suddenly very serious. ‘I need your instructions about what to do with that crazy manuscript. I can’t fly solo. Who wrote it? Who’s Goethe?’

‘Unfortunately I have to return to my children.’

‘Isn’t somebody looking after them?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Ring up. Say you’re running late. Say you’ve met a fascinating man who wants to talk literature to you all night. We’ve hardly met. I need time. I’ve got masses of questions for you.’

Gathering up the volumes of Jane Austen she started towards the door. And like a persistent salesman Barley stumbled at her side.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Look. I’m a lousy English publisher with about ten thousand enormously serious things to discuss with a beautiful Russian woman. I don’t bite, I don’t lie. Have dinner with me.’

‘It is not convenient.’

‘Is another night convenient? What do I do? Burn joss? Put a candle in my window? You’re what I came here for. Help me to help you.’

His appeal had confused her.

‘Can I have your home number?’ he insisted.

‘It is not convenient,’ she muttered.

They were descending the wide staircase. Glancing at the sea of heads Barley saw Wicklow and his friend among them. He grasped Katya’s arm, not fiercely but nevertheless causing her to stand still.

‘When?’ he said.

He was still holding her arm at the bicep, just above the inside of the elbow where it was firmest and most full.

‘Perhaps I shall call you late tonight,’ she replied, relenting.