The Russia House (9 page)

‘Hullo. Come on in,’ said Ned pleasantly, opening the huge scrolled door.

‘Well I’ll be off, won’t I,’ said Merridew. ‘Marvellous, terrific.’ Still burbling covering fire, he scampered back to his car before anyone could contradict him. And as he did so the second car cruised by like one good friend who has seen another to his doorstep on a dangerous night.

For a long moment, while Brock stood off observing them, Ned and Barley appraised one another as only Englishmen can who are of the same height and class and shape of head. And though Ned in appearance was the very archetype of quiet British self-command and balance, and in most ways therefore the exact reverse of Barley – and though Barley was loose-limbed and angular with a face that even in repose seemed determined to explore beyond the obvious – there was still enough of the other in each of them to permit a recognition. Through a closed door came the murmur of male voices, but Ned made as though he hadn’t heard it. He led Barley down the passage to a library and said, ‘In here,’ while Brock stayed in the hall.

‘How drunk are you?’ Ned asked, lowering his voice and handing Barley a glass of iced water.

‘Not,’ said Barley. ‘Who’s hijacking me? What goes on?’

‘My name’s Ned. I’m about to move the goalposts. There’s no telegram, no crisis in your affairs beyond the usual. No one’s being hijacked. I’m from British Intelligence. So are the people waiting for you next door. You once applied to join us. Now’s your chance to help.’

A silence settled between them while Ned waited for Barley to respond. Ned was Barley’s age exactly. For twenty-five years, in one guise or another, he had been revealing himself as a British secret agent to people he needed to obtain. But this was the first time that his client had failed to speak, blink, smile, step back or show the smallest sign of surprise.

‘I don’t know anything,’ said Barley.

‘Maybe we want you to find something out.’

‘Find it out for yourselves.’

‘We can’t. Not without you. That’s why we’re here.’

Drifting over to the bookshelves, Barley tilted his head to one side and peered over the top of his round spectacles at the titles while he went on drinking his water.

‘First you’re commercial, now you’re spies,’ he said.

‘Why don’t you have a word with the Ambassador?’

‘He’s a fool. I was at Cambridge with him.’ He took down a bound book and glanced at the frontispiece. ‘Crap,’ he pronounced with contempt. ‘Must buy them by the yard. Who owns this place?’

‘The Ambassador will verify me. If you ask him whether he can manage golf on Thursday, he’ll tell you not till five o’clock.’

‘I don’t play golf,’ said Barley, taking down another volume. ‘I don’t play anything actually. I’ve retired from all games.’

‘Except chess,’ Ned suggested, holding out the open telephone directory to him. With a shrug Barley dialled the number. Hearing the Ambassador, he gave a raffish if rather puzzled smile. ‘Is that Tubby? Barley Blair here. How about a spot of the golf on Thursday for your liver?’

An acid voice said it was engaged till five o’clock.

‘Five won’t do at all,’ Barley retorted. ‘We’ll be playing in the dark at that rate – bugger’s rung off,’ he complained, shaking the dead receiver. Then he saw Ned’s hand on the telephone cradle.

‘It isn’t a joke, I’m afraid,’ said Ned. ‘It’s actually very serious.’

Lost once more in his own contemplations, Barley slowly replaced the receiver. ‘The line between actually very serious and actually very funny is actually very thin,’ he remarked.

‘Well let’s cross it, shall we?’ said Ned.

The talk behind the door had ceased. Barley turned the handle and walked in. Ned followed. Brock stayed in the hall to guard the door. We had been listening to everything over the relay.

If Barley was curious as to what he would face in there, so were we. It’s an odd game, turning a man’s life inside out without meeting him. He entered slowly. He took a few paces into the room and stopped, his long arms dangling wide of his sides while Ned, halfway to the table, made the all-male introductions.

‘This is Clive, this is Walter, and over here is Bob. This is Harry. Meet Barley, everyone.’

Barley scarcely nodded as the names were spoken. He seemed to prefer the evidence of his eyes to anything he was being told.

The ornate furniture and the coppice of vulgar indoor plants interested him. So did an orange tree. He touched a fruit, caressed a leaf, then delicately sniffed his thumb and finger as if assuring himself that they were real. There was a passive anger about him that went ahead of finding out the cause. Anger at being woken, I thought. At being singled out and named – a thing Hannah said I always feared the most.

I also remember thinking he was elegant. Not, God knows, by virtue of his shabby clothes. But in his gestures, in his faded chivalry. In his natural courtesy, even if he resisted it.

‘You don’t run to surnames, by any chance, do you?’ Barley enquired when he had completed his inspection of the room.

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Clive.

‘Because a Mr. Rigby called on my daughter Anthea last week. Said he was a tax inspector. Some bilge about wanting to adjust an unfair assessment. Was he one of you clowns?’

‘By the sound of him I should think he probably was,’ said Clive, with the arrogance of someone who can’t be bothered to lie.

Barley looked at Clive, who had one of those English faces that seemed to have been embalmed while he was still a boy king, at his hard clever eyes with nothing behind them, at the ash beneath his skin. He turned to Walter, so round, wispy and amused, a teased-out Falstaff of the richer common rooms. And from Walter his gaze moved on to Bob, taking in the patrician scale of him, his greater age, his avuncular ease, the browns he wore instead of greys and blues. Bob was lounging with his legs stretched out, one arm flung proprietorially over a chair. Gold-framed half-glasses peeked from his handkerchief pocket. The soles of his cracked mahogany shoes were like flat-irons.

‘Barley, I am the odd man out in this family,’ Bob announced comfortably in a rich Bostonian drawl. ‘I guess I am also the oldest and I don’t want to be sitting here under a false flag. I am fifty-eight years old, God help me, I work for the Central Intelligence Agency, which as you probably know is based in Langley in the state of Virginia. I do have a surname but I will not insult you by offering you one because it surely would not be much like the real thing.’ He raised a liver-spotted hand in leisurely salute. ‘Proud to meet you, Barley. Let’s have fun. Let’s do some good.’

Barley turned back to Ned. ‘Now that
is
jolly,’ he said, though with no detectable animus. ‘So where are we all off to? Nicaragua? Chile? Salvador? Iran? If you want a Third World leader assassinated, I’m your man.’

‘Don’t rant,’ Clive drawled, though ranting was about the last thing Barley had been guilty of. ‘We’re as bad as Bob’s lot and we do the same things. We also have an Official Secrets Act, which they don’t, and we expect you to sign it.’

At which Clive nodded in my direction, causing Barley to take proper if belated notice of my existence. I always try to sit a little apart on these occasions and I was doing so that night. Some residual fantasy, I suppose, about being an Officer of the Court. Barley looked at me and I was momentarily disconcerted by the animal straightness of his stare. It somehow did not fit our untidy portrait of him. And Barley, after running his eye over me and seeing I know not what, undertook a more detailed examination of the room.

It was plush and perhaps he thought Clive owned it. It would certainly have been Clive’s taste, for Clive was only middle class in the sense that he was unaware there was a better taste. It had carved thrones and chintz sofas and electric candles on the walls. The team’s table, which could have sat an entire Armistice ceremony, stood in a raised alcove lined with sprawling rubber-plants in Ali Baba jars.

‘Why didn’t you go to Moscow?’ Clive asked without waiting any longer for Barley to settle. ‘You were expected. You rented a stand, booked your flight and your hotel. But you didn’t show up and you haven’t paid. You came to Lisbon with a woman instead. Why?’

‘Would you rather I came here with a man?’ Barley asked. ‘What’s it got to do with you and the CIA whether I came here with a woman or a Muscovy duck?’

He pulled back a chair and sat down, more in protest than obedience.

Clive nodded to me and I did my routine number. I rose, I walked round the preposterous table and set the Official Secrets Act form in front of him. I drew an important pen from my waistcoat pocket and offered it to him with funereal gravity. But his eyes were fixed on a spot outside the room, which was a thing that tonight and in the months that followed I noticed in him often, his way of looking beyond the present company into some troubled private territory of his own; of bursting into noisy talk as a means of exorcising ghosts that no one else had seen; of snapping his fingers without cause, as if to say, ‘That’s settled then,’ where, so far as anybody else knew, nothing had been proposed in the first place.

‘Are you going to sign that thing?’ said Clive.

‘What do you do if I don’t?’ Barley asked.

‘Nothing. Because I’m telling you now, formally and in front of witnesses, that this meeting and everything that passes between us is secret. Harry’s a lawyer.’

‘I’m afraid that’s true,’ I said.

Barley pushed the unsigned form away from him across the table. ‘And I’m telling you that if I feel the urge I’ll paint it on the rooftops,’ he said with equal calm.

I resumed my place, taking my important pen with me.

‘You seem to have made a pretty good mess of London, too, before you left,’ Clive remarked as he returned the form to his folder. ‘Debts everywhere. No one knowing where you are. Trails of weeping mistresses. Are you trying to destroy yourself or what?’

‘I inherited a romantic list,’ Barley said.

‘What on earth does that mean?’ said Clive, unabashed by his own ignorance. ‘Are we using a smart word for dirty books?’

‘My grandfather made a corner in novels for the housemaid. In those days people had housemaids. My father called them “Novels for the Masses” and continued the tradition.’

Bob alone felt moved to offer solace. ‘God damn it, Barley,’ he cried, ‘what’s so wrong with romantic literature? Better than some of the horse manure they put out. My wife reads the stuff in bucketfuls. Never did
her
any harm.’

‘If you don’t like the books you publish, why don’t you change them?’ Clive asked, who never read anything except Service files and the right-wing press.

‘I have a Board,’ Barley replied wearily, as if to a tiresome child. ‘I have Trustees. I have family shareholders. I have aunts. They like the old safe lines. How-to’s. Romances. Tie-ins. Birds of the British Empire.’ A glance at Bob. ‘Inside the CIA.’

‘Why didn’t you go to the Moscow audio fair?’ Clive repeated.

‘The aunts cancelled the match.’

‘Will you explain that?’

‘I thought I’d take the firm into audio cassettes. The family found out and thought I wouldn’t. End of story.’

‘So you ran away,’ said Clive. ‘Is that what you normally do when somebody thwarts you? Perhaps you’d better tell us what this letter’s about,’ he suggested and, without looking at Barley, slid it along the table to Ned.

Not the original. That was in Langley, being tested for everything from fingerprints to Legionnaires’ disease by the unchallengeable forces of technology. A facsimile, prepared to Ned’s meticulous instruction, down to the sealed brown envelope marked ‘Personal for Mr. Bartholomew Scott Blair, urgent’, in Katya’s hand, then slit with a paperknife to show it had been opened along the way. Clive handed it to Ned. Ned handed it to Barley. Walter scrabbled at his scalp with his paw and Bob looked on magnanimously like the nice guy who had donated the money. Barley shot a look in my direction, as if he had appointed himself my client. What do I do with this? he was asking with his glance. Do I read it or do I chuck it back at them? I remained, I hope, impassive. I didn’t have clients any more. I had the Service.

‘Read it slowly,’ Ned warned.

‘Take all the time in the world, Barley,’ said Bob.

How often had we all of us not read the same letter during the last week? I wondered, watching Barley examine the envelope front and back, hold it away from him, hold it close, his round spectacles raised like goggles to his forehead. How many opinions had they not listened to and discarded? It was written in a train, six experts in Langley had pronounced. In bed, said three more in London. In the back of a car. In haste, in jest, in love, in terror. By a woman, by a man, they had said. The writer is left-handed, right-handed. Is someone whose script of origin is Cyrillic, is Roman, is both, is neither.

As a final twist of the comedy, they had even consulted old Palfrey. ‘Under our own copyright law the recipient owns the physical letter but the writer owns the copyright,’ I had told them. ‘I don’t imagine anyone will take you through the Soviet courts.’ I couldn’t tell whether they were worried or relieved by my opinion.

‘Do you recognise the handwriting or not?’ Clive asked Barley.

Poking his long fingers into the envelope, Barley finally fished out the letter – but disdainfully, as if still half expecting it to be a bill. Then paused. And removed his quaint round spectacles and laid them on the table. Then turned his chair and himself away from everyone. And as he began to read, his face buckled into a frown. He finished the first page then glanced at the end of the letter for the signature. He turned to the second page and read the rest of the letter clean through. Then he read the whole of it over again in one run from ‘My beloved Barley’ to ‘Your loving K.’ After which he clutched the letter jealously into his lap with both hands and craned his trunk over it so that by design or accident his face was hidden from everyone and his forelock hung down like a hook and his private prayers stayed private to himself.

‘She’s potty,’ he pronounced into the blackness below him. ‘Certifiably, totally barmy. She wasn’t even there.’