Murderers and Other Friends (33 page)

My father knew about Turville because a friend of his, a stained-glass artist, lived there over a butcher's shop. At the end of the war my first wife lived in the same cottage and I used to walk across the fields to visit her. The pub was then kept by a fat, winking, moustached rogue who could obtain anything for anybody and, in the time of rationing, had petrol on draught behind the saloon bar. Rationing also caused the death of the couple who kept the sweetshop. They couldn't understand the points system, which regulated the sale of chocolate bars and gob-stoppers to children, and were reduced to such a state of despair by this that a suicide pact seemed the only way out. The husband shot his wife and then himself, and the shop never reopened.

Later the village school was also condemned to death. Edicts went out from a local council closing a number of schools, inflicting long, exhausting bus journeys on the children and robbing the villages of youth and vitality. One of the last cases I did as a barrister was a fight to keep our village school open. The judge was charming, the vicar an anxious supporter; good sense and justice were on our side but bureaucracy triumphed. For many years the school was an empty shell, and the voices of children were no longer heard on the green. This, it transpired, was exactly how many of the wealthier inhabitants, who had moved to the country after the school's death, wanted it to be.

The school building belongs to the church, and the local clergymen thought it should be bought from the diocese and turned into a place where inner-city children might come for holidays, discover that bacon doesn't come from pink packages in Sainsbury's and something more of life and death in the countryside. What was suggested was that about a dozen primary school children should visit at a time with four adult minders. The bishop thought it an excellent idea, others of the clergy were enthusiastic; but this modest proposal, apparently so harmless and admirable, divided the village and the surrounding countryside more bitterly than anything since ship money and the Battle of Chalgrove Field.

Strangely it was the Cavaliers, some actors and certain barristers, together with older inhabitants who had pleasant memories of the school when it was alive, who favoured the plan. The Puritans from the city, perhaps anxious about the commercial value of their properties, were rigidly opposed to it and were deeply shocked when the vicar suggested that their views were not entirely consistent with Christian charity. Some of them had, after all, agreed to read the lessons in church.

We heard, by chance, of a character called Brother Jonathan who lived in the West Country and had run a similar holiday home for inner-city children. He had grown too old to continue running it and the money he had collected might, by the grace of God and the Charity Commissioners, be transferred to our school. Full of hope we found Brother Jonathan in his priory, which also served as the shop and post office in a West Country village. Part of the premises sold cornflakes, cheese, ham and postage stamps; the other represented the priory and had been consecrated. There the two monks of an Anglican order, Brother Jonathan and Brother John, who had periods of absence as a part-time schizophrene, conducted services, administered their charity and, judging by the smell which hung about the place, cooked a good deal of cabbage.

Brother Jonathan was one of six children of a London docker. He was a big man with strong hands and considerable charm. He'd had success with all sorts of people who needed help to get off drugs. The world also missed a talented tycoon when he took his vow of poverty, for he had managed to acquire a number of properties for his trust. He told us that holiday homes for children ran perfectly smoothly so far as the children were concerned, but you had to watch the adult minders carefully.

He seemed to be entirely in favour of transferring his funds to buy and run the Turville school for a similar purpose. So we were still optimistic when we left Brother Jonathan, but we had underestimated the Ironsides of the opposition. They fought a long and laborious campaign, voicing their objections to any charity which might have helped us; dropping, we suspected, a word or two in the ears of persons close to the Charity Commissioners. Brother Jonathan died unexpectedly and then Brother John died also. The West Country post office and village shop was bereft of monks. Our schemes were not approved and our troops were disconsolate. Paul had a number of inner-city children to stay in his vicarage; they required endless bowls of cereal and seemed most at home in the environment of the Wycombe supermarket, but they caused no disturbance at all.

I suppose there may still be some hope, but it seems likely that the diocese will sell the school and it will be turned into a desirable residence for a stockbroker or a person in public relations. There will be no sound of children to disturb the contemplation of the town dweller who, moving to the countryside, takes out summonses to stop cocks crowing, sheep baaing or guns being let off to scare birds off the crops. A heavy blanket of smothering silence will now fall upon our landscape, where the sounds of living have come to be seen as an intolerable nuisance.

In the grimmest days of tyranny, Jaraslova Moserova used to translate my books into Czech. She is small, bright-eyed, with a bell of grey hair and a face on which life and history have drawn lines which she shows as honourable scars. Apart from being a translator, she is a doctor who specialized in burns and an artist who drew illustrations for Rumpole.

During the bad old days she visited England for a medical conference. We drove round the village churches and pubs where I live and she was overcome by the sight of so much freedom. The regime she had to return to was unspeakably stupid, brutal and oppressive. She felt she was going back into a long tunnel with no particular sign of life at the end of it. At the end of our days together she was near to tears. Would we come to visit her in Prague? Would I telephone from time to time just to cheer her up? After a number of such calls I telephoned Jara to say that we were at last coming to Prague to visit her.

Czechoslovakia's bloodless, velvet revolution had taken place and Vaclav Havel had been transformed from prisoner to President. For Jara freedom was no longer a tourist attraction to be found in Henley-on-Thames. Yet her voice still sounded tragic as she said, ‘That is so sad.'

‘Jara, why is it sad?'

‘I shall not be here. I shall be in Australia.'

‘What are you going to be doing in Australia?'

She answered as though it were a minor inconvenience. ‘As a matter of fact I have just been made our ambassador.'

‘I thought for a long time before I accepted,' she said when we met for breakfast in a London airport hotel as she was about to step into the first-class cabin of the BA flight to Sydney. ‘I had to be careful before the revolution because of my job at the hospital. When the change came I stood as a deputy in the countryside, and I won the election. Then I was in the council and Mr Havel asked me to go to Australia.'

Her husband, a lawyer who had been reduced to painting bridges by the Communists, smiled at her proudly as they dissected their kippers. In Canberra, as an ambassador's spouse, he would have to sit with the Middle-Eastern wives drinking coffee and talking about shopping while his wife discussed affairs of state with their husbands. I said goodbye to Jara and saw her small figure disappear through the revolving hotel doors. At least the victory of the West had one indisputably good result. Her Excellency Jaraslova Moserova was off to represent her country in the southern hemisphere.

In Prague Jara's sister Boska, a gynaecologist who gets about 15p an hour for doing hysterectomies and Caesarian sections on the night-shift, made us welcome. She drove us through the eighteenth-century squares which look like sets for
Don Giovanni,
immaculately kept. ‘These houses are all lived in by ordinary families paying controlled rents,' she told us. ‘Now they're going to be given back to people who are living abroad and owned them long ago, before the war. I really don't know what will happen. Some of them will be pulled down to build hotels, and we don't want that.' We were on the way to call on Dr Ota Motelj, the chief judge of the Supreme Court, who was, so Boska told us, a great man for the ladies. She also told us that her son, a film editor who had been kept busy on Czech films that won international prizes, was now unemployed as no one had any money to put into films or plays. The National Theatre was empty and everyone stayed at home to watch American television. We passed an area of dark trees and bushes near the Central Station. ‘We call that Sherwood Forest,' Boska said, ‘because it's where the outlaws rob the men and rape the girls.'

The chief judge sat at the head of a long table where all the judges meet and confer. He was short, square-headed, with a deep, gentle voice, and he smoked with the energy and enthusiasm of someone who has to spend many hours in court, deprived of cigarettes. Outside was the place where the Communists carried out executions. Not far away is the street where a woman dissident was hanged; it now contains one of Prague's first sex shops. Dr Motelj talked of what seems to me a complete nightmare, the life of a lawyer under a long reign of terror.

‘The worst time was just after the Communists took over,' he said, ‘when they got rid of proper judges and the cases were decided by workers' committees. If you weren't one of the workers you had no hope at all, but if you were, you were bound to win. Things got a little better after a while, but now we have to get rid of a lot of old Communist judges. We are in desperate need of judges. Lawyers can earn about three times as much as judges now, so no one wants to take on the job.' I discovered that a Czech judge earns the equivalent of £250 a month, and I told Dr Motelj that an English High Court judge makes more than £6,000 a month. ‘I'm glad my judges cannot read English,' he said. ‘I would not like them to know that.'

After a morning in the law courts he drove us, at an alarming speed, to lunch. Menus are not enormously varied in Prague and conversations with waiters start with the simple question, ‘Pork meat or beef meat?' The chief judge told us his recent trip to Canada had been the first time he had ever been outside Czechoslovakia. ‘All the time the Communists were in power they said that, because I had defended in spy trials, I couldn't go abroad in case I betrayed the official secrets.' So the lawyer who risked his life in defending dissidents became a prisoner of the state. Then he thought of happier times in Ottawa. ‘I told them that in Prague we only had one woman Supreme Court judge, and she's not even beautiful! The newspapers said that I was a sexist. I am very proud of that. Does it mean that they found me sexy?'

When we had got to the coffee and the plum brandy I asked the judge what sort of society he would like to emerge finally from the velvet revolution.

‘I hope we keep a little Socialism. Just a little of it.'

‘What would have been the real difference, if we were sitting having lunch in this restaurant in the days of Communism?'

He thought, ground out a final cigarette and said, ‘Under the Communists, it would have been cheaper.' He was joking, of course.

I remember talking to an English general who admitted that when he'd heard Reagan say that the Berlin Wall should come down, he felt a few moments of pure fear. Now this unthinkable event has occurred and the West is deprived of the enormous comfort of feeling that we have an easily defined enemy.

Some people arrived from the frontiers,

And they said there are no longer any barbarians,

And now, what shall become of us without the barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

C.P. Cavafy summed up the bewildering situation in which the West finds itself. The Russians, like the Czechs, must have been equally puzzled to be suddenly landed with a free market economy without a market; and such western-style benefits as crime on the streets, pornography, unemployment and a newly formed Mafia, swollen by out-of-work KGB men, with even more dangerous habits than those of the fraternity in Palermo or New York.

I went back to Russia to see Emily, who was spending her third undergraduate year there to improve her Russian and take an acting course at the Moscow Arts Theatre.

It was the Russia of Boris Yeltsin, hero of the failed coup and the CNN news, enemy of the speaker Khasbulatov and the endlessly obstructive members of parliament. Moscow was now a capital city where Gumm, the great glass shopping arcade just off Red Square, which once specialized in fur hats and voluminous knickers, houses Benetton and Christian Dior and the Galleries Lafayette. ‘What sort of people,' I asked, ‘queue outside these shops?' ‘Mainly crooks, members of the Mafia and hard-currency prostitutes,' was the answer. In fact the sort of people who shop in such places all over the world.

Victory in the Cold War is so complete that the only currency worth anything on the streets of Moscow is the dollar. Pounds are derided, francs laughed to scorn, hold out a fistful of roubles and the gesture is ignored; but a few dollars will buy you huge pots of caviare, a fat goose to cook for a party of friends, any one of the eleven thousand prostitutes who now patrol the streets and bars, or many hours in the massage parlours which boast genteel names like The Welcome and The Prince of Wales. Forget the Peking Hotel where strangers in blue suits may be found on your bed eating pickled cucumbers out of a plastic bag. The Metropol, restored to its full art deco glory, is one of the most efficient hotels in Europe, with a first-floor restaurant so expensive that, having booked, I had to feign a heart attack in order to escape from it with any dignity. Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are now the names of the conference rooms in the hotel's business centre. Only a few hundred yards from its glittering entrance there is a flight of steps where elderly women are offering a single shoe for sale, others hold out a paperback or a bottle of mineral water in the hope of ready cash. Many people are sleeping on rubbish dumps or round the railway stations; the rouble and full employment collapsed at about the same time as the Berlin Wall.