The Russia House (50 page)

So the needle swung the other way for a while and Bluebird’s material was deemed genuine. But not for long.

‘This is what they
want
us to believe,’ a man of power cried.

So the needle swung hastily back to where it was before, because nobody wants to be made a fool of.

But Barley’s deal held. Katya did not lose her privileges, her red card, her apartment, her job or even, as the months went by, her looks. At first, it was true, the reports spoke of the pallor of widowhood, of an unkempt appearance and long absences from work. And clearly nobody had promised Barley that she would not be invited to make a voluntary statement about her relationship with the late Bluebird.

But gradually, after a becoming period of withdrawal, her ebullience reasserted itself and she was seen about.

And of Barley himself?

The trail went hot, then cold, then very cold indeed.

Formal letters of resignation, postmark Lisbon, were received by his aunts within a few days of the book fair and bore the marks of Barley’s earlier style – a general weariness of publishing, the industry has outgrown itself, time to turn his hand to other things while he still has a few good years ahead of him.

As to his immediate plans, he proposed ‘to lose himself for a while’ and explore unusual places. So it was clear that he was not in Russia any more.

Seemingly clear, that is.

And after all, he said so himself. So did the pretty girl in the Barry Martin Travel Agency, which has its offices in the Mezhdunarodnaya. Mr. Scott Blair had decided he would fly to Lisbon instead of back to London, she said. A courier from VAAP brought his ticket. She rewrote it and booked him on the Aeroflot direct flight, leaving on the Monday at 1120 hours, arriving Lisbon 1530, stopping Prague.

And somebody used that ticket. A tall man, spoke to nobody, a Barley to the life, or nearly. Tall like the man in the VAAP lobby perhaps, but we checked him anyway. We checked him all along the line and the line only stopped when it reached Tina, Barley’s Lisbon housekeeper. Yes, yes! Tina had heard from him, she told Merridew – a nice postcard from Moscow saying he’d met a lady-friend and they were going to take a holiday!

Merridew was profoundly relieved to learn that Barley had not, after all, returned to his patch.

Then over the next months a picture of Barley’s after-life began to form before it disappeared again.

A West German drug-smuggler while in detention heard that a man of Barley’s description was under interrogation in a prison near Kiev. A cheerful fellow, said the German. Popular with the inmates. Free. Even the guards gave him the odd grudging smile.

An adventurous French motoring couple returning home had been assisted by a ‘tall friendly Englishman’ who spoke some French to them when they were involved in a traffic pile-up with a Soviet limousine near Smolensk. Nobody was hurt. Six foot, brown floppy hair, polite, with a big laugh, and tended by these burly Russians.

And one day near Christmas, not long after Ned had formally handed over the Russia House, a signal came in from Havana reporting a Cuban source to the effect that an Englishman was under special detention at a political gaol near Minsk, and that he sang a lot.

Sang
? went the outraged signal back. Sang about
what
?

Sang Satchmo, came Havana’s reply. Source was a jazz fiend, like the Englishman.

And the text of Barley’s letter to Ned?

It remains a small mystery of the affair that it never reached the file, and there is no record of it in the official history of the Bluebird case. I think Ned hung on to it as something he cared about too much to file.

So that should be the end of the story, or rather the story should have no end. Barley in the judgment of the knowing was all set to take his place among the other shadows that haunt the darker byways of Moscow society – the trodden-out defectors and spies, the traded ones and the untrusted ones with their pathetic wives and pallid minders, sharing out their dwindling rations of Western treats and Western memories.

He should have been spotted after a few years, accidentally but on purpose, at a party where a lucky British journalist was mysteriously present. And perhaps, if times remained the same, he would be fitted out with some taunting piece of disinformation, or invited to throw a little pepper into the eyes of his former masters.

And indeed that was the very ritual that seemed to be unfolding when a flash telegram from Paddy’s successor reported that a tall sandy Englishman had been sighted – not only sighted, heard – playing tenor saxophone at a newly-opened club in the old town, one year to the day after his disappearance.

Clive was hauled from his bed, signals flew between London and Langley, the Foreign Office was asked to take a view. They did and it was unequivocal for once –
not our problem and not yours
. They seemed to feel the Russians were better equipped to muzzle Barley than we were. After all, the Russians had obliged before.

Next day a second telegram arrived, this time from fat Merridew in Lisbon. Barley’s housekeeper Tina, with whom Merridew had reluctantly maintained relations, had been instructed to prepare the flat for the arrival of her master.

But
how
instructed? asked Merridew.

By telephone, she replied, Senhor Barley had telephoned her.

Telephoned you where
from
, you stupid woman?

Tina hadn’t asked and Barley hadn’t said. Why should she ask where he was, if he was coming to Lisbon any day?

Merridew was appalled. He was not the only one. We advised the Americans, but Langley had suffered a collective loss of memory. They near as nothing asked us, Barley who? There is a public notion that services such as ours take violent retribution against those who have betrayed their secrets. Well, and sometimes it is true, they do – though seldom against people of Barley’s class. But in this case it was immediately clear that nobody, and least of all Langley, had any wish to make a shining beacon out of somebody they would greatly prefer to forget. Better to square him, they agreed – and keep the Americans out of it.

I mounted the staircase apprehensively. I had declined the protective services of Brock, and Merridew’s half-hearted offer of support. The stairwell was dark and steep and inhospitable and unpleasantly silent. It was early evening but we knew he was at home. I pressed the bell but did not hear it ring, so I rapped the door with my knuckles. It was a stubby little door, thickly panelled. It reminded me of the boat-house on the island. I heard a step inside and at once stood back, I still don’t know quite why, but I suppose it was a kind of fear of animals. Would he be fierce, would he be angry or over-effusive, would he throw me down the stairs or fling his arms round me? I was carrying a briefcase and I remember transferring it to my left hand as if to be ready to protect myself. Though, God knows, I am not a fighting man. I smelt fresh paint. There was no eyehole in the door, and it was flush against its iron lintel. He had no way of knowing who was there before he opened to me. I heard a latch slip. The door swung inward.

‘Hullo, Harry,’ he said.

So I said, ‘Hullo, Barley.’ I was wearing a lightweight dark suit, blue in preference to grey. I said, ‘Hullo, Barley,’ and waited for him to smile.

He was thinner, he was harder and he was straighter, with the result that he had become very tall indeed, taller than me by a head. You’re a nerveless traveller, I remember thinking as I waited. It was what Hannah in her early days used to say we should both of us learn to become. The old untidy gestures had left him. The discipline of small spaces had done its work. He was trim. He was wearing jeans and an old cricket shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. He had splashes of white paint on his forearms and a smear of it across his forehead. I saw a step-ladder behind him and a half-whited wall, and at the centre of the room heaps of books and gramophone records partly protected with a dustsheet.

‘Come for a game of chess, Harry?’ he asked, still not smiling.

‘If I could just talk to you,’ I said, as I might have said to Hannah, or anybody else to whom I was proposing a half-measure.

‘Officially?’

‘Well.’

He studied me as if he hadn’t heard me, frankly and in his own time, of which he seemed to have a lot – much, I suppose, as one studies cellmates or interrogators in a world where the common courtesies tend to be dispensed with.

But his gaze had nothing downward or shameful in it, nothing of arrogance or shiftiness. It seemed to the contrary even clearer than I remembered it, as if it had settled itself permanently in the far regions to which it used occasionally to drift.

‘I’ve got some cold plonk, if that’ll do you,’ he said, and stood back to let me pass him while he watched me, before he closed the door and dropped the latch.

But he still didn’t smile. His mood was a mystery to me. I felt I could understand nothing of him unless he chose to tell it me. Put another way, I understood everything about him that was within my grasp to understand. The rest, infinity.

There were dustsheets on the chairs as well but he pulled them off and folded them as if they were his bedding. Prison people, I have noticed over the years, take a long time to shake off their pride.

‘What do you want?’ he asked, pouring us each a glass from a flagon.

‘They’ve asked me to tidy things up,’ I said. ‘Get some answers out of you. Assurances. Give you some in return.’ I had lost my way. ‘Whether we can help,’ I said. ‘Whether you need things. What we can agree on for the future and so on.’

‘I’ve got all the assurances I need, thanks,’ he said politely, lighting on the one word that seemed to catch his interest. ‘They’ll move at their own pace. I’ve promised to keep my mouth shut.’ He smiled at last. ‘I’ve followed your advice, Harry. I’ve become a long-distance lover, like you.’

‘I was in Moscow,’ I said, fighting hard to find the flow to our conversation. ‘I went to the places. Saw the people. Used my own name.’

‘What is it?’ he asked with the same courtliness. ‘Your name. What is it?’

‘Palfrey,’ I said, leaving out the
de
.

He smiled as if in sympathy, or recognition.

‘The Service sent me over there to look for you. Unofficially but officially, as it were. Ask the Russians about you. Tidy things up. We thought it was time we found out what had happened to you. See if we could help.’

And make sure they were observing the rules, I might have added. That nobody in Moscow was going to rock the boat. No silly leaks or publicity stunts.

‘I told you what happened to me,’ he said.

‘You mean in your letters to Wicklow and Henziger and people?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, naturally we knew the letters had been written under duress, if you wrote them at all. Look at poor Goethe’s letter.’

‘Balls,’ he said. ‘I wrote them of my own free will.’

I edged a little nearer to my message. And to the briefcase at my side.

‘As far as we’re concerned, you acted very honourably,’ I said, drawing out a file and opening it on my lap. ‘Everybody talks under duress and you were no exception. We’re grateful for what you did for us and aware of the cost to you. Professionally and personally. We’re concerned that you should have your full measure of compensation. On terms, naturally. The sum could be large.’

Where had he learned to watch me like that? To withhold himself so steadily? To impart tension to others, when he seemed impervious to it himself?

I read him the terms, which were somewhat like Landau’s in reverse. To stay out of the United Kingdom and only to enter with our prior consent. Full and final settlement of all claims, his silence in perpetuity expressed
ex abundanti cautela
in half a dozen different ways. And a lot of money to sign here, provided – always and only provided – he kept his mouth shut.

He didn’t sign, though. He was already bored. He waved my important pen away.

‘What did you do with Walt, by the way? I brought a hat for him. Kind of tea-cosy in tiger stripes. Can’t find the damn thing.’

‘If you send it to me, I’ll see he gets it,’ I said.

He caught my tone and smiled at me sadly. ‘Poor old Walt. They’ve given him the push, eh?’

‘We peak early in our trade,’ I said, but I couldn’t look him in the eye so I changed the subject. ‘I suppose you heard that your aunts have sold out to Lupus Books.’

He laughed – not his old wild laughter, it was true, but a free man’s laugh, all the same. ‘Jumbo! The old devil! Conned the Sacred Cow! Trust him!’

But he was at ease with the idea. He seemed to take genuine pleasure in the rightness of it. I am scared, as we all are in my trade, of people of good instinct. But I was able to share vicariously in his repose. He seemed to have developed universal tolerance.

She’ll come, he told me as he gazed out at the harbour. They promised that one day she would come.

Not at once, and in their time, not in Barley’s. But she would come, he had no doubt. Maybe this year, maybe next, he said. But something inside the mountainous bureaucratic Russian belly would heave and give birth to a mouse of compassion. He had no doubt of it. It would be gradual but it would happen. They had promised him.

‘They don’t break their promises,’ he assured me, and in the face of such trust it would have been churlish in me to contradict him. But something else was preventing me from voicing my customary scepticism. It was Hannah again. I felt she was begging me to let him live with his humanity, even if I had destroyed hers. ‘You think people never change because you don’t,’ she had once said to me. ‘You only feel safe when you’re disenchanted.’

I suggested I take him out for food but he seemed not to hear. He was standing at the long window, staring at the harbour lights while I stared at his back. The same pose that he struck when we had first interviewed him here in Lisbon. The same arm holding out his glass. The same pose as on the island when Ned told him he had won. But straighter. Was he talking to me again? I realised he was. He was watching their ship arrive from Leningrad, he said. He was watching her hurry down the gangway to him with her children at her side. He was sitting with Uncle Matvey under the shade tree in the park below his window, where he had sat with Ned and Walter in the days before his manhood. He was listening to Katya’s rendering of Matvey’s heroic tales of endurance. He was believing in all the hopes that I had buried with me when I chose the safe bastion of infinite distrust in preference to the dangerous path of love.