Blood Red, Snow White (17 page)

“You’re right of course,” I said. “It’s just that it’s the individual who suffers. People like you. And Moura.”

Lockhart nodded.

“Guess who made exactly the same point to me about a week ago,” he said. “Peters, of the Cheka. Yes, I know it’s crazy. But it’s true.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“I know. I know. But let me tell you this about Peters. He may be a ruthless killer, but then he does extraordinary things. One day near the end he came into my cell. He announced that it was his birthday, but said that since he preferred giving presents to receiving them, he had brought me a present. He opened the door and called down the corridor and Moura came in. Nothing else could have been a better present. Peters wouldn’t leave us on our own, but sat on my chair and began to reminisce, in the way that you do on your birthday. He talked about his life as a young revolutionary. He’d been locked up, tortured and so on, but I wasn’t really listening. My heart was in my mouth, because Moura, who was standing behind Peters, did an incredibly dangerous thing.

“She’d been standing fiddling with the books I’d been allowed to have. She caught my eye, and then pulled a piece of paper from the top of her dress. She slid it into the top book on the pile. If Peters had seen…”

“What did you do?”

“I nodded to Moura, ever so slightly, to show I understood,” Lockhart said. “And then. My God! She hadn’t seen me, so she took the paper out and repeated the performance. I started nodding like an epileptic. Somehow Peters was too lost in his story to notice me.

Shortly after, he stood up and took Moura away again. I waited for them to go then rushed to the book to find the note. Six words, that was all. ‘Say nothing. All will be well.’”

“She risked her life to put your mind at rest,” Evgenia said. “How great is love!”

Lockhart smiled, but it was a sad smile.

The story did not have a happy ending.

He told us of his final days in the cell. Of his release. He’d been given two days to pack and leave. He told us of his final evening with Moura, and as he did so, my heart bled for him. Under the table, I held Evgenia’s hand as Lockhart told us how he’d had to tell Moura he was leaving, and how dignified she’d been.

“I understand.”

That was all she’d said.

He knew he would never see her again.

We were all silent. The waitress came and cleared our plates, brought us coffee, which Lockhart clung to as if it were a lifeline. Evgenia excused herself and went to the bathroom. Lockhart stared into the deep brown swirls of coffee in his cup.

“Do you know,” he said after a while. “The most ridiculous thing of all. At the end, after Peters told me he was going to let me go. He offered me a job. Can you believe that? He wanted me to become a Bolshevik.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“And do you know what, Arthur? I was bloody tempted. Just to be able to stay. With her.”

10

I SHALL NEVER FORGET LOCKHART’S STORY.

Nor what he told me before he left for home, for England.

What he told me in the Finland bar and that night in Stockholm showed that the Bolshevik claims about him were not unfounded. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t heard him say it, but it seems that in his last few months in Moscow, he had changed his mind about the situation in Russia.

Whenever I had spoken to him before, he would always agree with me about the British policy toward the Bolsheviks, but behind the scenes, he was doing what his government wanted him to do. He’d secretly been collecting money from the rich White Russians, money that was being used to fight the Bolsheviks. He said he’d been lucky that the Cheka were as stupid as they were terrifying, or they’d have found a lot more evidence to use against him. The night they burst into his flat he had the coded book he’d once shown me in his pocket. It was obvious he was going to be searched, and in desperation he asked to use the toilet before they took him away. They agreed but wouldn’t let him close the door. A guard stood with his back to him, and Robert did the only thing he could think of. Page after page of the incriminating note book he used as toilet paper, and if he hadn’t, then maybe he’d never have left the Kremlin alive.

*   *   *

I saw him off at the station.

“I’ve had enough of the spying game,” he said. “It’s no way for men to be.”

“What will you do?” I asked.

“Go back to England and try to repair my ruined career. And my marriage, too, if I can. But first I’m going home. To Scotland. Home for me is where the rivers run north.”

*   *   *

I wrote in my reports about what Lockhart had told me. Not everything of course, but what I knew I was supposed to say. I told of the Red Terror, and the Cheka, and Lenin’s recovery.

And I continued to write my stories, though deep down I still felt I wanted to write something for children. I was sick of revolution, and of the adult world. Children go on and on, and the thought of Tabitha’s easy happiness made me want to write a simply stunning book for children like her.

*   *   *

Then, one day in November, the war ended. We heard the news straightaway; it spread like wildfire across the city in a matter of moments. That evening I walked by myself down to the bay and lit a pipe.

I’d been sent some good black tobacco by Gardiner at last, and I puffed away furiously to keep out the cold. In seconds I was taken home. I was in the snug at the Hark to Melody, drinking beer with old friends, long since dead. Then I was talking to charcoal burners in the woods above Coniston Water, and then on the mining train to Millom.

So the war was over. I thought of the doorman and his daughter.

How many times had she asked me her question? How many times had I answered it; soon, soon. But of course, I realized abruptly, the war was not over in Russia, not yet. There were still battles to be fought.

I smoked some more.

Russia had got under my skin, I knew, but despite everything it had failed to change me. I was the same man I was all those years ago when I ran away to escape from Ivy.

And yet, as I stood watching the ships slip from the harbor in Stockholm, and followed the glow of their taillights as they drifted between the low line of rocky hills, out to the Baltic, and then to Russia, a lump stuck in my throat and I was overwhelmed by a desire to follow them.

11

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR,
it may just come true. The world war may have been over, but peace had not spread everywhere. There was war still in Russia, civil war, and if Evgenia and I thought we were free of it, we were mistaken.

Stockholm was flooded every day with refugee White Russians, bringing with them stories of the horrors of the Bolsheviks, of Cheka reprisals, and of starvation and cholera. Pressure was growing on all sides for the Swedes to expel the Bolshevik delegation from their city and, early in the new year, they did.

Vorovsky and his whole party would return to Moscow, and Evgenia with them; since Britain’s borders remained firmly closed to her.

*   *   *

I had a choice; go home to England without her, or follow her back to Russia, into its red heart.

I thought of Robert, saw his face as he spoke of leaving Moura behind, and knew that there was only one way open to me.

That’s when I went to see Wyatt at the Legation, and talked of his silly plan once more, and that’s how I became S76, British agent, and headed for Moscow.

12

IT WAS A LONG AND EPIC TRAIN JOURNEY
and with every mile my fear grew. The coaches rattled like the rhythm section of a jazz band drunk on its own beat, and though Evgenia slept, I could not. All I could find was fear. It had seemed so easy to become S76 in Stockholm, and be drilled in an agent’s methods, but now it was real, and we were approaching the lions’ den. What if I’d been watched by Bolshevik spies? What if they already knew about me? I felt as if the word was written in inch high letters on my forehead.

Spy.

*   *   *

Our first night back in Russia my dreams were not easy ones.

Towers rose on all sides, the great onion domes of St Basil’s, in all their various many-colored patterns. At first I admired them, then horror grew in my chest as the towers multiplied and pressed in around me, growing so high the sky was obliterated. The ground fell away beneath me and I tumbled like Alice into a space that had no end. I woke, panting in the dark, and sleep was hard to come by after that. When finally it did return, I was assailed by more and more bizarre dreams and woke early, having dreamed I’d been riding around Red Square on Trotsky’s back, while unseen assassins fired potshots at me from their Mausers.

But my worries were unfounded, and though Trotsky was wary of me, and evidently thought I was a spy, I was rescued by Lenin himself, who told Trotsky not to be so suspicious of an old friend of the Bolsheviks.

*   *   *

I spent a harmless couple of months preparing material for the
Daily News
, and for the Secret Intelligence Service, too, of course, though it was pretty anodyne stuff.

Life settled down; for form’s sake Evgenia went to live with her mother and sister, who had moved to Moscow, and got a new job in the Department of Education.

We fell into an everyday routine.

One day, two American journalists came to see me, asking that I accompany them on a mission to London with a set of Bolshevik peace proposals. Bullitt and Steffens had been sent from Washington to gather information about Russia. Having done so, they seemed to think that the Allies would listen to them more seriously with my firsthand experiences to back them up.

I agreed to go. It would be a good chance to go home for the first time since before the October Revolution. I could see Tabitha, Mother, and the Lakes. Evgenia was safe, and happy, and I had no fear of any difficulties in getting back into Russia; I was in favor with both the Bolsheviks and some of the British authorities, at least.

Evgenia was unsure about me leaving at first, but I explained that I wouldn’t be gone long, and that if the peace proposals were listened to, the war in Russia might end, too.

“All right,” she said, at last. “All right, but Arthur, one day I want us to be together. For always.”

I nodded, and pulled her into my arms.

“I know,” I said. “One day. Soon. We’ll find a way to be together. We’ll find a way.”

*   *   *

So I left Moscow, and traveled with the Americans across Finland and Sweden and Denmark and eventually to England, though if I had known then what was going to happen, I would never, ever have left Evgenia.

13

TABITHA.

What a superb child. On the way back to England with the Americans I thought of little else but her. What would have happened to my daughter since I had last seen her? How much would she have changed in eighteen months? I remembered that previous visit clearly, every moment of it. It was back when Russia had been about to throw herself into the second Revolution of 1917, though I knew nothing of it at the time.

What did Tabitha say, that day?

What did she do?

Yes! She ran out of the gate the moment she saw me.

“Daddy!” she cried, and flung herself at me.

“You’re so tall!” I said, laughing.

“Daddy!” she said, moaning, “why do all grown-ups say that?”

“You’re right. I’m a bad grown-up and I won’t say it again. Ever.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

That was one promise to Tabitha I kept. Though there were others, whispered into the dark air above her sleeping head, that I did not.

*   *   *

At tea she gazed at me as if I was a creature from another world, and to be honest I felt like one. I was intensely aware of the triangle between the three of us. I wanted so much for Tabitha to like me, not to hate me for going away, but I didn’t want to do anything to upset Ivy, who was in as good a mood as I could remember.

After tea Tabitha pulled out a penny whistle and begged me to play her favorite tune, “The Lincolnshire Poacher.”

I obliged, and obliged twice more, until finally I suspected Ivy’s patience might be wearing thin.

“Think what you’d like to do tomorrow,” I called softly as Ivy took her upstairs.

“I will!”

*   *   *

I sat and watched the fire for a long time, my mind drifting pleasantly, until finally Ivy came back down.

“She seems happy,” I said, idly.

“She is happy, Arthur,” Ivy replied.

“Yes, of course,” I said quickly. “I only meant…”

“What?”

“Well, of course I don’t see her so very much.”

“No.”

“It’s just that she seems to cope with it all. Very well. With my not being here.”

Ivy looked at the fire, her face showing no emotion.

“She wasn’t yet three when you went. She doesn’t know any different.”

She was silent and I knew I had been rebuked. I opened my mouth, then shut it, deciding to take my punishment without complaint. It would be better that way. For everyone. And besides, deep down I knew she was right.

There was a long silence.

“I’ll go and tuck her in,” I said, and before Ivy could reply, I hurried up the stairs.

I knocked quietly on Tabitha’s door, which stood slightly ajar. Getting no reply I pushed the door gently on its hinges and stole into the darkened room. I could hear Tabitha breathing deeply and dared to rest on the edge of her bed. I listened to her snuffles for a while, then put my hand out and stroked her head.

“Daddy might be coming home,” I whispered. “Would you like that?”

I left the words hanging in the air, wondering if they would find their way through her sleep and into her dreams.

*   *   *

The evening passed easily enough, and Ivy chatted about this and that. By the firelight I thought she looked as beautiful as when we’d first met, in London, all those years ago. We’d had fun then. It was a wild time, bohemian and poor, but happy. When did it go wrong? We’d been through a lot together. There’d been the libel trial, when I was sued over the biography of Wilde I’d written. I won, but the pressure had been enormous.