The Russia House

by John le Carré

  Like old companions the three men silently surveyed the waterfront. A chain of naval ships straddled the harbour mouth, their rigging drawn in necklaces of lights.

  ‘Do you know, I’ve always dreamed there’d be one?’ Walter sang suddenly, talking out to sea. ‘I’m a God man at heart, I’m sure I am. Or else a failed Marxist. I always believed that sooner or later their history had to throw one up. How much science have you got? None. You wouldn’t. You’re that generation – the last of the arts virgins. If I asked you what a rate of burn was, you’d probably think I was talking about baking a cake.’

  ‘Probably,’ Barley agreed, laughing again despite himself.

  ‘CEP? Not a concept?’

  ‘Don’t like initials, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Circular-error-probable then. How’s that?’

  ‘Illiterate,’ Barley snapped, in one of his unpredictable fits of tetchiness.

  ‘Recalibrate? Whom or what do I recalibrate, and what with?’

  Barley didn’t bother to reply.

  ‘Very well, then. What’s the Big Motherfucker, familiarly known in circles as the BMF? That won’t offend your ear for English, will it? Nice Anglo-Saxon words?’

  Barley shrugged.

  ‘The BMF was the Soviet SS9 super rocket,’ Walter said. ‘It was wheeled out at a May Day parade in the dark years of the Cold War. Its dimensions were breathtaking and it was later credited with a notorious footprint. Also not a name to you? Footprint? Never mind, it will be. The footprint in this case was three huge holes in the Russian wastes, that looked like the pattern of the Minuteman silo group with its command centre. The argument was whether they were made by independently targetable warheads, and could the Sovs therefore hit three American silos at once? Those who didn’t want to believe they could called the footprints a fluke. Those who did upped the ante and said the warheads were for destroying cities not silos. The believers won the day and got themselves a green light for the ABM programme. Never mind their theory was discredited three years later. They squeezed through. I’m losing you, I see.’

  ‘You never had me,’ Barley said.

  ‘But he’s a fast learner, of course he is,’ Walter assured Ned contentedly across Barley’s body. ‘Publishers can get their minds halfway round anything.’

  ‘What’s wrong with finding out?’ Ned complained in the tone of a good man confused by smart talk. ‘That’s what I never understand. We’re not asking you to build the beastly rockets or push the button. We’re asking you to help us improve our knowledge of the enemy. If you don’t like the nuclear business, so much the better. And if the enemy turns out to be a friend where’s the harm?’

  ‘I thought the Cold War was supposed to be over,’ Barley said.

  At which Ned, in what appeared to be genuine alarm, exclaimed, ‘Oh my dear Lord,’ under his breath.

  But Walter showed no such restraint. Walter pretended to be indignant, and perhaps he was. He could be anything at any moment and often several things at once. ‘Cheap political theatricals and feigned friendships!’ he snorted. ‘Here we are, locked into the biggest ideological face-off in history and you tell me it’s all over because a handful of statesmen find it convenient to hold hands in public and scrap a few obsolete toys. The evil empire’s on its knees, oh yes! Their economy’s a disaster, their ideology’s up the spout and their back-yard’s blowing up in their faces. Just don’t tell me that’s a reason for unbuckling our guns, because I won’t believe a word of you. It’s a reason for spying the living daylights out of them twenty-five hours a day and kicking them in the balls every time they try to get off the floor. God knows who they won’t think they are ten years from now!’

  ‘I suppose you do realise that if you walk out on Goethe you’ll be leaving him to the Americans?’ said Ned on a practical point of information. ‘Bob won’t let him go, why should he? Don’t be fooled by those old Yalie manners of his. How will you live with yourself then?’

  ‘I don’t want to live with myself,’ said Barley. ‘I can’t think of anybody worse to live with.’

  A slate-coloured cloud slid across the red sunpath before shattering into fragments.

  ‘It comes down to this,’ said Ned. ‘It’s crude and un-English but I’ll say it anyway. Do you want to be a passive or an active player in the defence of your country?’

  Barley was still hunting for an answer when Walter supplied it for him, and with an air of finality that brooked no contradiction. ‘You’re from a free society. You’ve no choice,’ he said.

  The din of the harbour rose with the advancing daylight. Barley slowly stood up and rubbed his back. He seemed to have a permanent patch of pain there, just above the waistband. Perhaps it accounted for his slope.

  ‘Any decent Church would have burned you bastards at the stake long ago,’ he remarked wearily. He turned to Ned, peering down at him through his too-small spectacles. ‘I’m the wrong man,’ he warned him. ‘And you’re a fool for using me.’

  ‘We’re all the wrong men,’ said Ned. ‘We’re dealing with wrong things.’

  Barley walked across the grass, beating his pockets for his keys. He entered a side street and vanished from their view as Brock went softly after him. The house was a wedge, narrow on the street, broad at the back. Barley unlocked the front door and closed it behind him. He pressed the time switch and began climbing the stairs, keeping an even pace because he had a long way to go.

  She was a good woman and nothing was her fault. They were all good women. They were women with a mission to him, just as Hannah once had a mission to me – to save him, to straighten him out, to get his oh-so-many talents working in one direction, to help him make the fresh start that would get him clear of all the fresh starts he had made before. And Barley had encouraged her as he had encouraged all of them. He had stood beside them at the patient’s bedside as if he were not himself the patient but a member of the healing team. ‘So what shall we do about this poor old chap that will get him up and functioning again?’

  The only difference was, he had never believed in the remedy, any more than I had.

  She lay face down, exhausted and possibly asleep. She had cleaned the flat. As prisoners clean cells and the bereaved tend tombs, she had scoured the surface of a world she couldn’t alter. Other people might tell Barley he was too hard on himself. Women said it to him often. How he mustn’t hold himself responsible for both halves of every relationship that collapsed on him. Barley knew better. He knew the distance between himself and everything. In those days he was still the unequalled expert on his own incurability.

  He touched her shoulder but she didn’t stir, so he knew she was awake.

  ‘I had to go to the Embassy,’ he said. ‘People in London baying for my blood. I’ve got to go back and face the music or they’ll take away my passport.’

  He fished a suitcase from under the bed and began filling it with the shirts she’d ironed for him.

  ‘You said this time you weren’t going back,’ she told him. ‘You’d served your English stretch, you said. You’d done your time.’

  ‘They’ve put me on the early flight. There’s nothing I can do. There’s a car coming for me in a few minutes.’ He went to the bathroom for his toothbrush and shaving gear. ‘They’re throwing the whole book at me,’ he called. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’

  ‘And I go back to my husband,’ she said.

  ‘Stay here. Use the flat. Whatever. It’ll only take a few weeks. Then it’s done.’

  ‘If you just hadn’t said all that stuff we’d have been fine. I’d have been happy just having an affair. You should see your letters. Hear yourself.’

  Barley didn’t look at her. He was stooped over his suitcase.

  ‘Just don’t do it to anyone else,’ she said.

  That was as far as her calm could stretch. She began sobbing and was sobbing when he left, and she was still sobbing next morning when I pitched her some line and pushed a declaration form under her nose as I asked h
er how much he’d told her. Nothing. She blabbed out the whole story yet defended him to the death. Hannah would have done the same. Does it still, a surfeit of loyalty to this day, even though her illusions are destroyed.

  Three weeks were all that Ned and his Russia House people had to knock Barley into shape. Three weekends and fifteen days that didn’t start till five when Barley slipped away from his office.

  But Ned drove the job through as only Ned was able. Ned would have kept the trainers up all night and himself all night and day. And Barley, with the changefulness that was innate in him, swung and turned with every breeze, until he settled down and found a steady face and, as the day of his departure approached, a serious one as well. Often he seemed to embrace the entire ethic of our trade without demur. After all, he declared to Walter, was not seeming the only kind of being? Oh my God, yes! Walter cried, delighted – and not only in our trade! And was not the whole of man’s identity a cover? Barley insisted; and was not the only world worth living in the secret one? Walter assured him that it was, and advised him to take up permanent residence there before prices rose.

  Barley had loved Walter from the start, loved the fragility in him and, as I see it now, the transience. He seemed to know from the outset that he was holding the hand of a man who was on his way to the breaker’s yard. At other times Barley’s own face became as empty as the open grave. He would not have been Barley if he hadn’t been a pendulum.

  Most of all he took to the family atmosphere which Ned, with his instinct for the unanchored joe, assiduously tended – the chatty suppers, the sharing and being the star of the family, the games of chess with old Palfrey, whom Ned cunningly harnessed to Barley’s wagon to redress the disturbingly ephemeral influence of Walter.

  ‘Drop in whenever you’re in the mood,’ Ned told me, with a friendly pat.

  So I became Barley’s old Harry.

  Old Harry, give us a game of chess, damn you! Old Harry, why aren’t you staying for supper? Old Harry, where’s your bloody glass, man?

  Ned invited Bob sparingly and Clive not at all. It was Ned’s show, Ned’s joe. And he had a shrewd eye for Barley’s flashpoints.

  For the safe house Ned had chosen a pretty Edwardian cottage in Knightsbridge, an area of London where Barley had no connection. Clive winced at the cost but the Americans were paying so his fastidiousness was misplaced. The house lay in a cul-de-sac not five minutes’ walk from Harrods and I rented it in the name of the Ethical Research & Action Group, a charitable body I had registered years before and locked away for a rainy day. A cosy Service housekeeper named Miss Coad was placed in charge, and I duly swore her on to the Bluebird indoctrination list. The top-floor nursery was converted into a modest lecture room and, like the rest of the rooms, which were snug and well furnished, it was microphoned.

  ‘This is your home from home for the duration,’ Ned told Barley, as we showed him round. ‘Here’s your bedroom when you need one, here’s your key. Use the phone as much as you like but I’m afraid we’ll be listening, so if it’s private you’d do better from the box across the road.’

  For good measure, I had extended the Home Office warrant to cover the phone box too. Intense American interest.

  Since Barley and I were not long sleepers, we played our chess when the others had turned in. He was an impulsive opponent and often a brilliant one, but there is a calculating streak in me that he never possessed and I was more attuned to his weaknesses than he to mine. After all, I had read his file. But I still remember games where he saw a whole campaign at a glance and with three or four moves and a bellow of amusement forced me to resign.

  ‘Got you, Harry! Say you’re sorry! Hang your head!’

  But when we set them up again, I could feel the patience drain out of him. He would start to prowl and flick his hands around and let his mind take one of its journeys.

  ‘Married, Harry?’

  ‘Not so you’d notice,’ I replied.

  ‘Hell does that mean?’

  ‘I have a wife in the country. I live in the town.’

  ‘Had her long?’

  ‘Couple of lifetimes,’ I said carelessly, already wishing I had given him a different answer.

  ‘Love her?’

  ‘My dear chap!’ But he was staring at me, wanting to know. ‘From a distance, I suppose. Yes,’ I added grudgingly.

  ‘She love you back?’

  ‘I assume so. It’s some time since I asked her.’

  ‘Kiddywinks?’

  ‘A boy. In his thirties.’

  ‘Ever see him?’

  ‘A card at Christmas. Funerals and weddings. We’re good enough friends in our way.’

  ‘What’s he do?’

  ‘He flirted with the law. Now he makes money.’

  ‘Is he happy?’

  I was angry, which these days is unusual in me. Definitions of happiness and love were none of his damned business. He was a joe. It was my right to come close to him, not the other way round. But it was more unusual still that I should let my anger show. Yet I must have done, for I caught him gazing at me with concern, wondering no doubt whether he had accidentally touched upon some family tragedy. Then he coloured and swung away, looking for a distraction that would get us off the hook.

  ‘He’s not fighting it, sir, I’ll put it that way,’ a Mr. Candyman, specialist in the latest thing in body microphones, told Ned. ‘I won’t say he’s a natural but he does listen and my goodness he does remember.’

  ‘He’s a gentleman, Mr. Ned, which is what I like,’ said a lady watcher entrusted with teaching Barley the rudiments of streetcraft. ‘He’s got the brains and he’s got a sense of humour, which I often say is halfway to an eye.’

  Later she confessed that she had declined his advances in accordance with Service rules, but that he had successfully introduced her to the work of Scott Fitzgerald.

  ‘Whole thing’s a load of hocus-pocus,’ Barley pronounced raucously at the end of a wearying session on the techniques of secret writing. But he clearly enjoyed it, all the same.

  And as the day of reckoning drew nearer his submissiveness became total. Even when I wheeled in the Service accountant, a dreary stick called Christopher, who had devoted five days to an awed inspection of the Abercrombie & Blair books, Barley showed none of the rebelliousness I had expected.

  ‘But every last swine in publishing is broke, Chris old boy!’ he protested, pacing the pretty drawing-room to the rhythms of his own humming, holding his whisky glass wide while he dipped at the knees for the long steps. ‘The big fellows like Jumbo eat the leaves and we gnaw the bark.’ A German voice: ‘You hef your methods, ve hef ours.’

  But neither Ned nor I gave a cuss about every last swine. Neither did Chris. We cared about the operation and were haunted by the nightmare that Barley might go bankrupt on us in the middle of it.

  ‘But I don’t want a bloody editor!’ Barley cried, waving his long-suffering spectacles at us. ‘I can’t pay a bloody editor. My sainted aunts in Ely will pop their garters if I hire a bloody editor!’

  But I had already squared the sainted aunts. Over luncheon at Rules I had wooed and won the Lady Pandora Weir-Scott, better known to Barley as the Sacred Cow on account of her High Anglican beliefs. Posing as a Foreign Office Pontiff, I had explained to her in the greatest confidence that the house of Abercrombie & Blair was about to be the recipient of an under-the-counter Rockefeller grant to promote Anglo-Soviet cultural relations. But not a word, or the money would be whisked away and given to another deserving house.

  ‘Well I’m a bloody sight more deserving than anybody,’ Lady Pandora averred, spreading her elbows wide to get the last scrap out of her lobster. ‘You try running Ammerford on thirty thousand a year.’

  Mischievously, I asked her whether I could safely approach her nephew.

  ‘Not on your nelly. Leave him to me. He doesn’t know money from muck and he can’t lie for toffee.’

  The need to provide Barley with a minder seemed sudd
enly more pressing. ‘You advertised for him,’ Ned explained, brandishing a small-ad from a recent edition of the cultural press in Barley’s face. Old Established British Publisher seeks qualified Russian reader for promotion to editor, 25–45, fiction and technical, curriculum vitae.

  And on the next afternoon Leonard Carl Wicklow presented himself for interview at the much-mortgaged premises of Abercrombie & Blair of Norfolk Street, Strand.

  ‘I have an angel for you, Mr. Barley,’ boomed Mrs. Dunbar’s gin-soaked voice over the ancient intercom. ‘Shall I ask him to fly in?’

  An angel in bicycle clips, a webbing kitbag slung across his chest. A high angelic brow, not a worry on it, blond angelic curls. Angelic blue eyes that knew no evil. An angelic nose, so mysteriously knocked off course that your first instinct on meeting him was to reach out and switch it straight again. Interview him as you would anybody, Ned had told Barley. Leonard Carl Wicklow, born Brighton 1964, honours graduate, School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University of London.

  ‘Oh yes, you. Marvellous. Sit down,’ Barley grumbled. ‘Hell brings you to publishing? Lousy trade.’ He had lunched with one of his more strident lady novelists, and was still digesting the experience.

  ‘Well, it’s been kind of an on-going thing of mine for years, actually, sir,’ said Wicklow, with a smile of angelic enthusiasm.

  ‘Well, if you do come to us you certainly won’t on-go,’ Barley warned, bridling at this unprovoked assault on the English language. ‘You may continue. You may endure. You may even prevail. But you jolly well won’t on-go while I’m in the driving seat.’

  ‘Don’t know whether the bugger barks or purrs,’ he growled to Ned, the same evening back in Knightsbridge, as the three of us loped up the narrow stairs for our evening tryst with Walter.

  ‘He does both rather well, actually,’ said Ned.

  And Walter’s seminars held Barley in their thrall, a sell-out every time. Barley loved anyone whose hold on life was tenuous, and Walter looked as if he were in danger of falling off the edge of the world each time he left his chair. They would talk tradecraft, they would talk nuclear theology, they would talk the horror story of Soviet science that the Bluebird, whoever he might be, was inescapably heir to. Walter was too good a tutor to reveal what his subject was, and Barley was too interested to enquire.