Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow (11 page)

‘It's not like it was only here,' Rubin continued.
‘Did you know that they were queueing for it in Japan, the Chinese have a mission in London right now trying to buy and a half dozen of them new little countries in Africa that never had it before are clamouring for it? Shortages all over and me sitting on three 'undred and eighty million rolls.'

‘Blimey!' ejaculated Mrs Harris, unable to form a concept of such a mountain, ‘then why don't you sell it to them?'

‘That's what they sent for me for,' Rubin replied. ‘I'm the only firm that's got it. The Ministry of Supply winkled us out, but the Minister of Purchase doesn't like Jews and won't okay the tab. The big boys in the government don't want to know and are letting 'em fight it out, and I'm stuck 'ere.'

The ever practical minded Ada asked, ‘Why don't you scarper and sell it to somebody else?'

‘Can't,' snapped Rubin. ‘They've picked up me – my passport.'

Mrs Butterfield gave a little shriek and cried, ‘See, Ada, I told you what they were like.'

Ada, torn between calming her friend's ever present fears and not denying Mr Rubin said, ‘But they've got to give it back to you …'

Rubin snorted, ‘Not them. We're in Russia, ladies, where anything can 'appen. I'll give you an example. They had their own factory where they made their own rolls – enough to supply the big cities anywhere. Well, the bloke that managed it was
expecting a big shipment of paper allocated to him by the Supply boys. It never got to 'im.'

‘What 'appened?'

‘The chappie that runs the big greeting card syndicate got to somebody in the bureau first and diverted the load to his own factory. So now they've got a couple of billion greeting cards and no tissues. You know what they did? They shot the first feller for failure to deliver his quota. The other one got the Gold Medal of the Soviet Economy.' And as the two women just stared uncomprehending he concluded, ‘I know, shot the wrong man. But like I'm telling you, this is Russia. They figured the first guy was dumb to let himself be 'ijacked and the second smart to have whipped the consignment. But greeting cards ain't what you need when …'

‘I think we'd better be going,' put in Mrs Butterfield. ‘The guide said she'd be taking us to dinner.'

‘Just one more little drinkie then first,' urged Mr Rubin. ‘Everybody flies on three engines today.' His face was somewhat flushed since, although he had poured in a seemly manner for his two guests, he had been having his by the half tumblerful. Having replenished, he raised his glass and said, ‘To paper!' and took a large gulp.

At which point, to add to Mrs Butterfield's fears and tremors, something seemed to burst inside the little man at the word he had just pronounced. The pupils of his eyes enlarged behind the lenses of his
glasses and his moustache suddenly seemed to stiffen and sprout straight out from his upper lip.

‘Paper!' he shouted, ‘blasted, bloody, blooming paper! There ain't enough of it to go round. Everybody wants paper! You can't buy it, you can't find it and there won't be enough trees left to make it. You know what your
Express
and
Evening Standard
and all them newspapers you read every day and throw away use up? Two million tons! Where's it all to come from? Buyers by telephone, and telegraph. Everybody's after us for paper, paper, paper. You know how many million people have been taught to write letters that never wrote 'em before and put 'em in envelopes with stamps? And you know what they write 'em on and what the envelopes and stamps are made of? Paper!'

By now too, his bushy hair was standing up straight as he became completely carried away by his subject: ‘Wrapping paper! Greaseproof paper! Wallpaper! Paperbacks! Paper towels! Nobody blows 'is nose into a good old-fashioned 'andkerchief any more. No, you got to blow it into paper what comes from those poor blinking trees. I tell you there ain't no end to it! Blotting paper, legal paper, lining paper, paper napkins, paper cups and plates, postcards, calendars, election broadsheets, advertising throwaways, billboard posters! Paper hats on New Year's Eve!'

Mr Rubin suddenly seemed to run either out of
breath, or of paper, he appeared to collapse slightly, but hung on to his glass and glared at his two guests almost balefully, increasing Mrs Butterfield's tremors, and even slightly alarming Mrs Harris due to the sudden change in him, though she had never known a gentleman in drink that she couldn't handle.

Rubin inflated himself with another gulp of gin and air. ‘Do you know what's going to happen?' he shouted. ‘There ain't going to be any more paper in a few years more. Not a scrap. And what's old Sol Rubin going into? I got it all worked out and me lines laid. There'll be plenty of clay left. Ceramics, porcelains,' he paused a moment to give import to the forthcoming secret of success in the future. ‘
Biddies
! Nobody'll be able to get along without one.'

Mrs Butterfield, baffled, repeated, ‘Biddies?' but Mrs Harris, who laboured amongst the gentry, twigged. She said, ‘I know. Only Lady Dant calls them “B-Days”, like we said D-Day in the war.'

There was a stiff rap on the door which then opened without anyone replying to it, revealing the dead-tree figure of their guide. Behind her at her desk loomed Mrs 'Orrible. It was a depressing sight.

The guide said, ‘Ah, so you are here. Did I not say to you to stay in your room until I come?'

Mrs Harris was not tiddly, but just nicely relaxed.
She replied, ‘Did you now, dearie? I suppose we must 'ave forgot. Me memory ain't what it used to be.'

Mr Rubin waved. ‘Come in! Come girls and have a drink.' He waved the gin bottle. ‘Plenty more where this came from. I'm the fair-haired boy until those stupid bastards can make up their minds whether they want to dicker with me or not.'

The two Russians exchanged glances in which there was both anger and bafflement. Whatever was being cooked up by the KGB with regard to the two Englishwomen and instructions with regard to same, this scene was not included.

The guide finally said, ‘Is not time for drinking. Is time for eating. Come, I take you. Good Russian dinner.'

Violet said, ‘Maybe we'd better, Ada,' and then to Rubin, ‘Thanks ever so.'

Ada added, ‘It's been a treat and we're much obliged. I 'opes as you makes out wiv the you-know-what.'

Mr Rubin waved them out of the door. ‘It's been a pleasure. See you around sometime. I might be 'aving another look at His Nibs in his box over there to cheer me up.'

The exit was managed with fair dignity.

When they returned upstairs after their meal their guide was still with them. Another Cerberus was at the desk, Madame 'Orrible apparently having
gone off duty. She was a nondescript Russian woman and merely handed over the key silently. Madame Praxevna Lelechka, who to Ada and Violet had become ‘Auntie Praxie', hung about to Mrs Harris's annoyance. She had sat at their table during dinner talking a great deal in what was obviously a direction to be ‘friendly' with tourists, but Ada hadn't been sure that in some manner they weren't also being pumped.

‘Come,' said the guide, ‘I take you.'

Ada said, ‘Maybe we ought to 'ave a Seeing Eye Dog, too.'

The guide stared, ‘Eye seeing dog?'

‘To 'elp us find the way to our room.'

Praxie let that one go and led the way down the corridor. As they neared their number, a man popped out of the service door further down and then hurriedly popped back but not before Mrs Harris had seen him as well as something else. Auntie Praxie had seemed to stiffen momentarily.

They reached the door and Mrs Butterfield unlocked it. Auntie still hung about. Something that Mrs Harris did not understand but which she had felt as a kind of growing irritation snapped and she asked, ‘You sleeping with us, dearie? That'll be a fair treat but no extra charge I'ope.'

The guide said impassively, ‘I just like to see everything all right for you.'

‘Everything will be tickety-boo.'

‘I come in the morning and show you breakfast. Sleep nice.'

They entered their quarters. Mrs Harris's eyes did a hundred and eighty degrees about the room like the sweeping of a lighthouse beam. She said, ‘Well at least the maid's been 'ere, turned the beds down and done a bit of tidying up. They've learned something. It's been a day, 'asn't it? I can do with a bit of shut-eye.'

This slightly useless chatter she continued for another moment or two in order to distract Mrs Butterfield from what Ada had noticed almost as soon as she had entered the room and hoped that her friend would not. The premises and their belongings had been thoroughly and meticulously searched.

It was only then that she realized what had been biting her ever since their arrival. They had been under constant watch, never left alone for a minute except for their temporary escape into the dispensary of Mr Rubin.

She pressed her hand to her side and felt the reassuring crackle of Mr Lockwood's letter to Liz. But it was reassuring no longer. Was Violet right and there was really some danger connected with it? Was that why Liz had not been there? Had she, Ada, got herself involved in something better left alone? Was Liz already in trouble? She was remembering the photo and Mr Lockwood's expression. A feeling of sadness rather than fear pervaded her.

However, the discovery that they were being shadowed was disturbing, sufficiently so that she removed the letter from its hiding place on her person and while Mrs Butterfield was wrestling with the bathroom amenities Ada took certain precautions with regard to the missive and returned it to her handbag.

Mrs Butterfield in blessed innocence of what was going on appeared at the bathroom door. She said, ‘The water's 'ot now. Scalding. From all the taps.'

The next day Mrs Harris and Mrs Butterfield with the rest of the visitors were swept away on the inflexible and inexorable routine of Package Tour Number 6A. The guide had duly appeared to lead them to breakfast, the chambermaid had been about, so had a man in a raincoat. When the tourist party was assembled at the entrance to the hotel to board the bus Ada's sharp eyes and powers of observation plus the warning of the discovery of the search the night before led her to an examination of their fellow travellers. Two of them were a man and a woman she had not seen before, and there was a subtle distinction in the cut of their clothes which just wasn't right for foreigners. Were these then watchers? And if so what on earth were they being watched for?

Almost for a moment she was tempted to excuse herself, go back to her room and do what Violet had bidden her so long ago: tear up the letter if that was what it was all about and flush it down the loo, until she remembered that the loo didn't flush. But there was something else that prevented this and that was the thought that perhaps somehow and in some way before her return she might yet encounter Liz, by accident even see that lovely melancholy face somewhere in a crowd.

Marvelling, they paraded across the cobbled stones of the Disneyland of Red Square dwarfed by the breathtaking giantism of the walls, towers and cupolas.

They gawked dutifully at the Czar's cannon which was so huge that it couldn't shoot the three-foot calibre cannonball for the power needed to move this mass would have blown up half the Kremlin, and they were also suitably impressed by the Czar of Bells which had never been rung since its two hundred tons' weight had broken the eighteenth-century scaffolding and knocked a piece out of it big enough to let the tourists wander around inside.

Mrs Harris said, ‘What good are they if they don't work?'

Mrs Butterfield said, ‘Just as well they don't. They'd blow your ears off if they did. But they make nice decorations.' And then she added, ‘Ain't them churches fancy? We got nothin' like them at 'ome.'

‘They don't work either,' Mrs Harris remarked. ‘Leastwise not any more.' She was aware that the odd-pair-out who had seemed just that much slightly off-beat to be real tourists were always managing to be close behind them within listening distance wherever they went. Circling the square, the fabulous coloured, turban-topped pile of St Basil's Cathedral just out of the line of fire of the modern touch of the stainless steel statues of missiles of the peace-loving Muscovites, they traipsed past the Gum state department store which didn't look like a store but like a palace, the 3,200 room Hotel Rossia which didn't look like a hotel but like a store, were dizzied by one Technicolor cathedral after another throwing their bulbous towers into the Russian sky. Ultimately they approached the
pièce de résistance
of the morning's tour, the Tomb of Lenin, strangely squat and square built after all the curves and peaks of churches and towers, a solid low edifice of red basalt with a single band of black marble across the front bearing the name Lenin in Cyrillic lettering with above it balconies cut from Ukrainian granite.

As though it were bleeding internally it trailed a long dark line of figures, patient men and women in rough, lumpy clothes who had been standing for hours waiting to get in.

The guide said, ‘We will now go and visit the tomb of the great Lenin, our most glorious hero.
Because you are tourists you will be permitted to go in before the others. You will please go quietly and after you have paid your respects, move along for many people are waiting.'

‘Cor,' said Mrs Harris, ‘do they do this every day?'

‘Yes, Madam, even in the winter.'

Violet said, ‘ 'Oo did she say it was?'

‘Lenin. 'E's the one made the revolution. They got 'im buried 'ere, but you can 'ave a look at 'im.'

They filed through the entrance porch between two immaculately gleaming soldiers standing on guard with bayonets fixed and then down a flight of stairs by barely enough light to see.