The Art of Deception

by The Art of Deception (retail) (epub)

  ‘To be here like this means nothing to you. You have been here all your life. You can’t imagine what it feels like.’

  She said nothing, judging shrewdly that he had been far more privileged under his system than she had under hers. He was leaning out now, Julian standing behind him, watching his back. She did not like heights.

  ‘But this is just the start. We want much more than this.’ He spread his fingers, as if to grasp the view by handfuls.

  ‘What do you want? Land? Property?’

  ‘Land? No. What would we want land for? Land is for peasants. And property? Yes, but that’s not the essential. No, you have to have what you can’t see. The invisible, the intangible, that’s what’s important.’

  ‘And what is it, the intangible?’

  ‘Knowledge, money, power. In Russia we got stuck. We thought that when we had caught up with railways and airplanes and space flights and combine harvesters, we had everything. We didn’t realise that while we were ruining ourselves to get these things, the world was moving into computers, telecommunications, star wars.’

  ‘This is a new focus for Russian mysticism,’ Julian said, folding her arms around herself, in her characteristic, self-embracing gesture. ‘The all-knowing, immanent power of the chip.’

  They slept that night in the uncurtained room and she woke in the early hours when he turned on all the lights to dress. Sleepily, she watched him shrugging on his jacket.

  “What’s the time?’

  ‘Six. I’m going to Moscow.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes, this morning, the nine thirty flight. I’ll be back in two weeks.’ He squatted on the floor by his brief case and threw a brown envelope onto the sheet beside her, where he had lain. ‘See what you can do by then.’

  She was already out of bed. ‘I’m coming to the airport with you.’

  So she did not open the envelope until she returned in midmorning, opening the door timidly like a new tenant, looking round the place in daylight, as if for the first time. In the centre of the bedroom, on the mattress heaped with bedclothes, lay the manila envelope.

  She lowered herself to floor level and picked it up, reflecting on what she knew of him. He was married. This, according to her theories, was inevitable. There Are No Unmarried Men in the World, was one of her axioms. He was forty-six years old, married for seventeen years, with a sixteen-year-old son. Formerly a civil servant (‘Everyone was a civil servant in the Soviet Union.’), he was now a banker.

  She lay on the unmade bed and sniffed the pillows, then rolled onto her back and held the envelope over her head. She knew what it must contain: its neat, brick shape betrayed it. She tore open the flap. Two sheaves slid out, each secured with a coarse rubber band. Each block was about five centimetres thick. She flexed the edges of both packs: one-hundred-dollar bills, one thousand in each, say. She put them down on her stomach, feeling their weight. The insulting connection was so simple and direct, sex, money, money, sex.

  When Anatoli returned, two weeks later, as he had promised, she had made a start; an office in one of the bedrooms was equipped with all the apparatus of communications, computer, fax, phones. She threw the two packs of dollars back at him.

  ‘What am I supposed to do with these? This isn’t stone age Moscow, you know. You can’t pay cash here, at least for the sort of things I’m thinking of.’

  He was unconcerned. ‘Sorry. I was in a hurry, remember. I thought you might need something to be going on with, while I was away. For food, you know.’

  ‘Food?’

  ‘OK, OK. You’ve got a bank account? I’ll transfer something to your bank account. No, even better, we’ll make you a company. You’re an interior designer, aren’t you? You’d better make yourself into a design company. Better for everything, trade discounts, VAT, the lot. I’ll get my lawyers to do something about it while I’m away.’

  When she was with him everything was a game that she took very seriously. She spent tracts of time planning what to wear, what to offer him to eat, whom to invite, where to go. He liked companionship, laughter, long meals, even longer discussions, music, stories. She collected anecdotes with which to amuse him, about the famous, the infamous and the unknown. She arranged his free time, concerts and dinners, expeditions and weekends away, as she arranged his first flat and then the next, with a concentration that came from total engagement in the project He never said what he wanted or what he liked. She had to create by instinct and terror. For she was sure that if she were ever wrong in judging his taste, it would be like a quarrel, in which unforgivable words are spoken.

  Did she ever wonder where it came from, all this money? In the first year she asked no questions. She was never again physically confronted with it after the first morning. He did not reclaim those two bricks of dollars and she put them away in a drawer. Occasionally, her fingertips scratched the surface of the envelope as she scrabbled for a scarf. She sometimes paused, thinking it was madness to keep cash in the house, but she could not bear to part with it. To hand the two blocks back to Anatoli was, symbolically, impossible, and to turn them into figures on a bank statement would also deny them their totemic status. She would think of ways she could conceal them in case of a burglary; but she had heard that burglars studied psychology nowadays and knew the instinctive hiding places that women use to conceal their jewellery, inside saucepans, wrapped in underwear, under the mattress.

  This money, excessive in the form of notes, was nothing to the sums that were expended in invisible form on redesigning and furnishing the new flat, on buying property in London, in Paris, in Cyprus. She did not let herself think about it, signing cheques without adding up the total. Her accounts, opened for her by Anatoli in her new corporate persona, swelled. In the past, she had never had enough money, even for food and clothes. Her desires, her standards of perfection, had always outstripped her means, even in the few periods when she had been relatively flush. She had never permitted herself to fall into debt. Control of spending was just another form of control, which she practised rigorously to allow herself the freedom from doing what other people did, from the drudgeries of work and marriage. Now that she had lost control of her emotions, she spent without counting the cost, without asking the price; but only ever for Anatoli.

  She gave him everything that she bought with his money, paying for it herself with her obsessive care in choosing. Every object that she acquired was invested with significance. He enjoyed her explanations of why a certain chair, bust, painting had been bought, not just because the object was beautiful in itself or fitted into the arrangement she was making, but because it had reference to him, his life and interests. Everything involved him, from the little Hepworth sculpture that she saw in a Christie’s catalogue and knew he had to have, to the Armani suit she bought in Sloane Street to wear for him. She collected and mounted photographs of him in great leather-bound albums. She began with the pictures of his London life. He found her recording of his doings, the creation of his life into a story, amusing and flattering, and brought more photos from Moscow, of himself when young, with eminent figures from the Soviet past, at Harvard, on his missions abroad, shaking hands with great men.

  He gave her everything and nothing. He would bring her tokens from his travels: Swiss chocolates, pots of caviar, bottles of brandy, all the things he liked himself, opening them for her with enthusiasm to consume within hours of his return, as part of the celebration of reunion. The blocks of dollars that she kept had a complex meaning for her; but even she, with her capacity for mythologising, could hardly turn them into gifts of love. So the sable coat had a significance quite apart from its value.

  It was in their second year together. They had already moved into the new apartment, had a well-established pattern of meetings and pleasures. He had arrived from Moscow unusually heavily laden, with a long rigid cardboard box, like a truncated coffin, sealed and bound with leather straps. He let her undo it, seated by the fire, watching her kneeling on the floor. Sh
e patiently worked at each layer of wrapping, expecting to find something for the apartment. She exaggerated her interest, because she could see that he was excited by what he had brought. She had no need, however, to simulate her astonishment when the final layer of paper was folded back to reveal the pelt, dark brown gleaming with gold, that lay beneath her fingers. She lifted it and it seemed to spring upwards into her arms, so that it was like holding a live, wild animal, whose silky coat trembled with nervous preparation to leap, to bite, to flee.

  He leaned back in his chair with satisfaction. ‘That’ll keep you warm in your cold English summers.’

  She remembered then the incident that must have given him the impulse to make the present Earlier in the year they had been invited to a grand wedding in the country. It was one to which Em and I had been asked, an invitation we had accepted and had had to cancel. Sholto had fallen out of a tree in the garden in Dorset and we had to take him to casualty to have his collarbone set. I brooded on how Julian and I had failed to meet then, what would have happened if we had.

  Anatoli called such invitations ‘seeing the natives’ and enjoyed his powers of attraction as an exotic Russian. For her, the day had been marked by the experience of going as a couple, an illegitimate one, to a smart wedding, by the ironies of listening to vows of fidelity and participating in a social rite of which she was the ultimate denial.

  It was early June and bitterly cold. As they stood outside the church for the ritual of the photographs, Anatoli had held her arm above the elbow and felt her shaking invisibly.

  ‘Why does no one dress properly in this climate? You should have put on something warm.’

  ‘What people usually wear in places like this is trousers, woolly socks and layers of sweaters all year round, but you can’t dress like that for a wedding. ’ Julian hated the country and only ventured into it for social occasions of high ornamental value.

  She did not know what had made the episode so memorable for him and produced that extraordinary present. Perhaps his social success, or her own, as undeniably the most beautiful and best dressed woman, unconventional in black, like a raven among the vegetation of straw hats, floral prints and pale blue tussore silk. He loved the sensation she created by her elegance, and the sable coat was a way of ensuring a shiver of English outrage wherever they went. Or perhaps he had decided, with none of the significance that she invested in things, to give her the coat, quite simply, to keep her warm.

  These stories about the blocks of dollars and the fur coat were typical of the way that Julian approached Anatoli’s money, in their first year together. There were, apparently, no questions in her mind, at first, about its sources or uses. Money and goods were not objective commodities, but signs of subjective states, communicating the flows of emotion. Their moral role was entirely affective and for her they had no other ethical base. I found this point of view terrifying and said so. We were walking in the park one afternoon when she told me about the money and the coat. She had lost a glove and I held her bare hand in mine, caressing it inside my coat pocket. She walked with her head down, watching her feet in their shining mahogany-brown boots.

  ‘I just assumed that everything was legal. After all, I met Anatoli through Barnaby, who is as respectable as a British banker can be. All the labels were correct. There was no reason to think they were not what they appeared. And I wanted to believe everything was as it should be. When your prejudices and your desires combine, you don’t go looking for what you don’t want to see. Isn’t that what you always say?’

  ‘Is he dead?’ I asked, brutally. It would explain a lot; it would ease a lot.

  ‘No.’ She took in her breath sharply. ‘No, he’s still alive. I’ve seen him, but not spoken to him. You still don’t understand, do you, why I’m telling you this? But you will.’

  19

  She wanted to know Anatoli, just as I wanted to know her. She made my task hard, for she was deliberately secretive. Anatoli was open, but unreflective. He did not like to discuss emotions, he lived and acted and that was enough. She had to understand his states of mind by watching his behaviour. He was not going to explain what he was feeling, for he did not examine his feelings for himself, still less talk about them to someone else.

  For interpretation she found help in Igor, who used to come to London too, though on a routine quite distinct from Anatoli’s. He would stay in a scruffy hotel in Bayswater and arrange to meet her at one of the small, noisy restaurants that she liked. He always carried a parcel from Anatoli to give an excuse for the meeting. She always mentioned seeing him, but she never revealed how long they spent together. It was from Igor that she gained her first insights into the relationships of the partners of the bank, and later of what they did. Even at this earliest stage, tensions lay between Anatoli and the Uzbek.

  ‘Tolya and Dyadya,’ Igor would say, holding his hand out palm down and tilting it to suggest instability. ‘Things are a bit nervous now. They don’t always understand one another. Old rivalries, you see.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘If you were Russian you’d understand. It’s a question of class. Our Anatoli now, your Anatoli you would say, he comes from a group which is not the same as the clan from which Dyadya comes.’

  ‘Where does Anatoli come from?’

  ‘He doesn’t come from anywhere. He’s there, on top, always has been. Even before the Revolution.’

  ‘His family were aristocrats? How could they have survived?’

  ‘No, not aristocrats. They were priests; you can tell by his surname. So they were never workers or peasants. His grandfather was a crony of Stalin’s. Vozkresensky is a famous name in Russia from the time of the war. It doesn’t have quite the stink of Beria or Yezhov, you’ll be glad to know. He was a sort of court joker, which helped him to survive, and survive he did, right through to the ’sixties. His father was a candidate member of the Politburo. So he’s had everything, all his life: big flats, cars with drivers, dachas near Moscow, trips abroad. He went to Harvard; that’s where he got his accent.’

  Igor never ate much. He preferred to smoke and drink. His arms formed a triangle over his untouched plate while he talked almost to himself. Julian, at the time, did not consider why Igor, too, was so interested in the personalities and social status of his two partners. She was too engrossed in learning what she could about Anatoli.

  ‘To live well here in the west, it takes serious money, you know that. In Russia, Anatoli got everything free, provided by the Communist party, one way or another. You didn’t need money if you belonged to the high nomenklatura, it all came to you by right. Anatoli’s family weren’t aristocrats before the Revolution. They were aristocrats afterwards.’

  ‘And Dyadya wasn’t?’

  ‘No, God, no. Dyadya’s hard to explain to anyone who didn’t live under the old system. He wasn’t high up in anything. I can’t remember what his position was supposed to be, an official in the Uzbek Trade Ministry, or it might have been Transport, but he never appeared in his office.’

  ‘Eat, Igor. I’ve finished.’

  Igor stubbed out his cigarette and picked up his knife and fork. He cut carefully into his steak, pierced it with his fork and laid it down on the plate. ‘This was how Dyadya earned his dough.’

  ‘What? Meat?’

  ‘A lot of it was food, but anything in short supply and that was everything. He was a fixer, on the big scale for the big guys. He could build you a private dacha with everything in it. You want a marble bathroom? You can have a marble bathroom. You want a jacuzzi? You can have a jacuzzi. He could get railway wagons full of building materials and have the rail schedule for the whole Soviet Union changed, if he wanted something.’

  ‘So why does all this mean that Dyadya and Anatoli are…’ She rocked her hand as Igor had done.

  ‘It’s the worker and the boss’s son to start with. Anatoli got where he is without trying and Dyadya worked his guts out.’

  ‘What’s it like, Anatoli’s fla
t in Moscow?’ She had to imagine people in their surroundings. Without their background they could not exist.

  ‘The flat. Yeah, well, I remember the first time I saw that flat, unbelievable. It’s right in the centre, near the Conservatoire, in a fucking palace. Each room is huge, bigger than an ordinary apartment. We had dinner, I remember, in a dining room. What’s so great about a dining room. Well, for a start, dining rooms don’t exist in Russia. You live and eat and watch TV and sleep and fuck in the same room. This dining room had a table for a board meeting; twenty people could sit around it, no problem. There was a tiled stove in the corner with blue and white faience and the cutlery was all silver. There was a maid, too, so she hadn’t cooked it. His wife, I mean.’ He exhaled and looked at her through the smoke. ‘You knew he was married?’

  ‘Were you hoping to cause trouble? Of course I knew. What’s that got to do with anything?’

  Igor ground out his cigarette and picked up his fork. This time he ate one mouthful, masticating with Gladstonian thoroughness.

  Julian said eventually, ‘What’s she like?’

  With satisfaction, Igor put down his fork and took up the packet of cigarettes. He lit another before saying, ‘Don’t kid yourself that Yelena Nikolaevna is a fat Russian babushka. She’s not beautiful, like you, but she’s smart.’

  ‘Smart, clever? Smart, attractive?’

  ‘Both. She’s blond; not a real one, a Russian blond. She’s clever. She used to work for one of the institutes, the Institute of Indian Studies, I think. They were more or less rest homes for the wives of the nomenklatura. But she was respected for what she did. She wasn’t lazy.’