Legacy (11 page)

‘If you’re interested,’ she added.

‘Oh yes.’

He struggled on, hoping to pick up clues by her responses. She was referring to a discussion they’d had months ago about a friend of hers who might sell his flat in the fashionable Boltons
area between Chelsea and Kensington. It would be at the very limit of what Charles could afford but he had to buy it, she had told him then. It was ridiculous that he threw all his money away on
rent when it could go into a mortgage that would get him on the property ladder. Happy in her small house in Battersea, a timely purchase, she pursued opportunities for her brother with a zeal that
touched him, but which he never matched. He would get round to it one day, he told himself, and went on thinking about cars.

‘He’s not sure exactly what the price will be but if you’re definitely interested he won’t put it with agents until you’ve seen it, so you’d be able to get it
for less because he wouldn’t have to pay the agent’s commission,’ she said.

‘Tell him I am, definitely.’

‘You haven’t seen it yet.’

‘I don’t need to. You have. I trust your judgement. But I must go now.’

‘The other thing is James,’ she said, reverting to her small voice.

She was no longer sure that her engagement was a good idea but was unable, or unwilling, to say precisely why. Charles interrupted to say that he would call round after his dinner. She urged him
not to, unless he really wanted. By the time he put the phone down he had ten minutes to get to Waterloo. He ran out of the flat and jumped in the Rover.

He need not have. For half an hour he sat alone at his upstairs corner table, circling cars in
Exchange & Mart
which he had no intention of buying. Most of the time he watched the
door, the stairs and the people at nearby tables, regretting his choice of somewhere inconvenient to the Soviet Embassy and not easy to find. At least there was no one he recognised from the
office, though that should not have been a problem since they were not supposed to acknowledge each other in public. It was apparently fairly common for Russians not to turn up for meetings, nor to
offer apologies or explanations afterwards unless asked.

Viktor appeared, unobtrusive and smiling, during one of the brief periods when Charles was not looking. ‘I am sorry to be late. I was trying hard to find the restaurant. I was looking in
the streets behind the Old Vic but then I remembered you had said the Young Vic. And then I found it. I am sorry.’

His grey suit looked cheap and did not fit well, his silver tie was thin and too tightly knotted and the cuffs of his white shirt slightly frayed. His charm apart, it was hard to see him as a
plausible wealthy Finnish businessman. They talked at first of Oxford acquaintances and then of their own lives since, without either probing deeply. Hookey had warned that most communist officials
of any nationality would answer one question, and generally a second, but would shy away at three in a row. Viktor asked few questions and so, anxious that the dinner should not appear too much an
interview, Charles volunteered whatever of himself he felt might reasonably have been asked. He did, however, establish that Viktor was a member of the Party.

‘We like Party members,’ Hookey had said, with a smile. ‘For one thing, people often can’t get valuable access unless they are. The Party controls everything, including
the KGB and the military, although at the higher levels they’re all interpenetrated. It’s the whole
nomenklatura
business. For another thing, a good deal of information is
distributed internally via the Party cells during their interminable meetings and if you can penetrate one cell you can sometimes discover a lot about what’s going on in the rest of the
hive.’

The only subject to which Viktor returned unprompted was Charles’s bachelorhood. ‘You have never met anyone you wanted to marry?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘No one?’

‘There was one girl – well, two, I suppose – I could imagine marrying, but not yet.’

‘My wife has her work to do in the embassy but she misses our child.’

‘And Chantal?’ Charles wanted to ask, but it was too soon. The marriage theme had potential, since Viktor’s interest in Charles’s uxorial state was perhaps a concealed
way of talking about his own, but he needed help with the menu. His English was easily good enough but he was reluctant to decide, gratefully following wherever Charles led. The house red, leek and
potato soup and steak and chips seemed likely to appeal more to him than the less familiar Spanish or Mexican dishes. Charles kept trying to imagine the diffident, cautiously friendly man across
the table as the ardent lover Claire described, the man who dared both to love and deceive her and to deceive his wife and his security authorities. Also, surely, himself, where she was concerned.
But the only moment of unease was when Charles asked, with a casualness that sounded unconvincing to his own ears, whether Viktor had had to get permission to meet. He knew the answer but asked in
order to see where the subject might lead.

Viktor’s blue-grey eyes were steady but watchful. ‘Of course I asked for permission. It is practice for a diplomat.’

‘Was it difficult?’

‘Should it be difficult? It is normal for officials to meet.’

‘I just wondered whether our knowing each other already made it more or less difficult.’

‘It made no difference, I think.’

The noisy group some tables away became suddenly noisier. Charles remarked on them. Viktor looked across. ‘Two of the men are German.’

‘Do you speak German?’

Viktor nodded slowly, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. This was the nearest he had come, Charles realised, to answering any question with a straightforward yes or no. Either he answered with a
question of his own, or he made a statement. Charles suspected he might himself have succumbed to what Hookey had warned against, the professional vice of being too focused, too direct in leading
the conversation. Too much concentration on questions you wanted answering, or on answers you sought without wanting to ask, could mean that you were never relaxed enough to listen. He was in
charge of the conversation, which was as the training urged, but sensed that his determination might reduce what he was in charge of to something that merely fitted his preconceptions. Viktor, who
had asked almost nothing, remained somehow free.

‘I read German better than I speak it,’ he resumed, still nodding to himself. ‘Recently I read a German novel, Thomas Mann’s
Doktor Faustus
. It is a very great
novel but very bourgeois and therefore not well known in my country.’ He smiled. ‘Do you know this book, Charles?’ Charles did not.

‘It is for me the greatest exposition of the Faust theme. I am fascinated by that, you see, and I have read every example, I think, even your own Christopher Marlowe’s in Elizabethan
English. But Mann’s is the greatest for our century. Is it also in English? Are you allowed to read it?’

Charles smiled at the teasing. Viktor spoke on the Faust theme and its appeal for him throughout coffee, with an energy and conviction far removed from his earlier diffidence. Charles was happy
to relinquish his sense of directing and controlling their meeting until afterwards, when they stood outside on the pavement, still talking, and he had to decide whether to offer Viktor a lift back
and how far to push for the next meeting. ‘Your aim should be to come away with an agreement to meet again,’ Hookey had said. ‘That’s all. A date might be a push too far. Be
easy with him. Try to find a reason for meeting again, apart from liking each other’s faces. One that he can give to his own people. Part on easy terms.’

‘Let me give you a lift back,’ Charles said.

‘May we walk?’ Viktor buttoned his raincoat.

‘Well, yes, but it’s quite a long way.’

‘I mean, around here. I am ignorant of this part of London and should like to see the river which must be very near. Also, I should like to continue our very interesting
conversation.’

‘So should I. Let’s walk.’ Briefly, Charles felt himself to be on the receiving end of a too-directed passage of conversation, but brushed the thought aside. He led the way
along a back street parallel with the railway, then under one of the railway arches where a small workshop rebuilt old Citroén Light Fifteens. There followed terraced streets of
nineteenth-century railway workers’ cottages, one of the quiet secrets of central London, still undiscovered and with only one or two houses renovated. There were corner shops and a pub, a
quiet, pleasantly dingy place of faded brown and cream paintwork which Charles used during his few solitary lunchtimes. They crossed Stamford Street and headed slightly downstream of the new
National Theatre, along partly cobbled streets which shone with recent rain. Then they were among dark abandoned warehouses, overgrown bomb sites and temporary car parks now decades old. The river
was very near but it was not clear whether there was a way to it through the warehouses. Charles spotted a dark narrow alley between two tall crumbling buildings which appeared to lean dangerously
towards each other. At the end of the alley he could see the lights of the far bank of the Thames. ‘The river’s this way.’

They stumbled in the alley over unseen rubble. The end was dark up to head height and he feared a wall, but as they got closer he could see steps. ‘Up here,’ he said, with
unjustified confidence.

Viktor chuckled behind him. ‘This is a good place for murder, Charles.’

‘We wouldn’t be the first, I daresay.’

From the top of the steps they had a full view of the river. It was low tide and the lights of the far bank were reflected in the pools and glistening mud of the littered foreshore. A set of
wooden steps, rickety and partly rotted, led down to it. They could see and hear the traffic on the Embankment but where they stood, only a couple of hundred yards away, was darkness and
dereliction, with grass and weeds growing from blackened brickwork and a large rusty iron derrick and platform projecting ominously above them. It was the foreshore that, differently configured,
Shakespeare would have known. Trusting to Viktor’s fondness for literary reference, Charles remarked on it.

Viktor nodded. ‘May I ask your opinion, Charles, as to whom you believe to be the most typical English writers? Not the most famous, or the best, but the most typical.’

Charles pondered aloud. Chaucer? Ben Jonson? Dr Johnson? Jane Austen? Trollope? Scott, the Scottish voice of English romanticism about Scotland? Galsworthy? Wells?

‘Yes, yes,’ said Viktor eagerly. ‘You are confirming my theory. You see, I never before had the chance to ask an English person about this question. My theory is that the
greatest writers – Shakespeare, of course, Milton or Dickens – are often not the most typical, even if they are chosen to be representative. They are different. This is true for all
nationalities. People regard the greatest writers as essential and typical but they are not both. They speak for all mankind, not only for part of it. People say Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are
typically Russian but they are not. Of course, they could not be anything but Russian – they are essentially Russian – but they are not typical. Chekov or Gogol are more typical. It is
the same for some people who are not writers. We might regard them as typically English or Russian, and they may be essentially so, but they are also more than that. They are for all the
world.’

The last phrase echoed from Charles’s lectures. It was an old story, at least as old as Lenin, the Soviet communist appeal to international brotherhood, the implicit link with the
emotional tradition of Christianity. National divisions are destructive and obsolescent. Help us to help mankind. Tell us your country’s secrets. It had worked powerfully on western liberal
intellectuals, Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’, and had been deployed to great effect ever since in the recruitment of agents throughout the world.

Viktor’s expression of the sentiment in this context indicated, he thought, how it permeated their culture. ‘Shall we take a chance and go down?’ He pointed at the rotten
wooden steps.

‘I will go where you go, Charles.’

There was enough light to pick a way between pools, driftwood, plastic containers, old iron, bottles, bits of rope, fridges and bicycle frames. No boats moved on the river and in its eerie
isolation the foreshore felt years rather than yards away from the public life of the city. The incoming tide lapped incessantly and a rat scuttled from beneath an empty milk crate back to the
darkness of the river wall. Charles had read that you were never more than about three feet from a rat in London. Maybe it was six feet, or sixty.

He was not concentrating. Viktor had said something about Charles’s father but it could not have been what Charles thought. ‘I’m sorry?’

Viktor stood beside the Thames, the lights showing one side of his pale face. He was turned towards Charles and speaking slowly. ‘I have been asked to tell you that we owe you, your mother
and your sister many thousands of pounds for the work your father did for us. Of course, he never told anyone and it is a surprise for you and your family. He was one of the Englishmen we were
talking about. A patriot for mankind, for all the world, not only for his own country. He did not want money from us but we kept it for him, all that we would have paid him for his years of work.
It is in Moscow. We honour our debts and we would like you and your family to have it. We think your father would have liked that. But we must discuss with you how to get it to you, since we do not
wish to get you into trouble, in your official position. This is what I have been asked to say to you, Charles.’

A breeze had got up and the water lapped more rapidly. The rat, or another, crept back to the crate. Charles stared at the ripples. Of all the questions he might have asked, he chose the one
that felt most safely academic. The office would like it. ‘Who asked you to say this?’

‘Our people in Moscow.’

‘Your people?’

‘Yes, Charles. My people are like your people.’ His tone was gentle.

‘How do you know that?’