Peculiar Ground
Page 35
‘Do you?’
‘Not really. Mr Gorbachev is a very brave and cunning man. But of course it can all go wrong. Everyone en poste in this part of the world keeps a bag packed.’
‘But why do you need me?’
‘We have to know he is the person he claims to be. And it’s safer for him. Because as far as our Russian friends know, you’re still one of their people. You’ll be his contact from now on. If he’s being followed, and he’s seen with you, then he can say he’s been running you all along.’
‘But I haven’t given them anything for decades.’
‘Not as far as you knew. But you have actually. Their messages to you have been intercepted, and replied to in suitable form.’
How many people am I? thought Antony. How many ‘me’s have I never met?
He made as though to say something. She was watching him carefully. She said, ‘We’ve been very lenient with you, wouldn’t you agree? There was always going to be a time when you had to make yourself useful. As I think my colleague told you at your first meeting, we are very, very patient.’
‘Why here?’
‘It was convenient.’ An upturning of her hands meaning ‘enough said’. She looked at her watch. ‘We’ll walk through the bar now. He will be sitting in the far corner to our left, facing us. We’ll go slowly. I’ll walk on your left so you can look at him while appearing to talk to me. Take as long as you need. He may or may not acknowledge you. It’s better if you make no response. When we are quite close I will stop and ask you something meaningless, so that you can turn towards me and get a further look. If you’re already sure just take my arm and we’ll walk on.’
And so they did. The man was big. The flesh of his face drooped off his skull. There were two people with him and he was listening to their conversation as though too tired to join in. It could have been the man with whom Antony had had a cryptic, pre-scripted conversation in a café in Bucharest thirty years before. It could just as easily not be. Antony had met lots of Russians who looked like that. Soulful and a bit seedy.
The woman put her hand on his arm, and said, ‘By the way, Magda would like to see you. Should I ask her to join us for dinner?’
Antony said seriously, and just a little louder than was necessary, ‘I’m always pleased to see the old lot.’ The man in the corner allowed his pale, bulging eyes to pass over him and as they did so Antony saw clearly that the man recognised him, and he thought that he knew him as well. He took the woman’s arm and they went on, uttering fake banalities, until they stepped out of the hotel’s front entrance and the woman found her car and drove away and Antony walked out onto the square where the rumps of the famous bronze horses could be seen looming above the wall, and there was something happening there. Shouting and the tremendous sloshing of water cannon in use.
Selim
Tick tick tick tick tick. I woke at first light and knew at once there was someone in the hut with me. Not that it needed any extrasensory cunning on my part. There was a noise. Tick tick tick tick.
I lay for a while in the dark. The ticking stopped. Resumed. There was also a shuffling. I went into the other room and there was a woman sitting at my writing table. An old woman, very bent. She was reading my scribblings. She looked straight at me and said, ‘I’d be glad of a cup of tea.’
I went to the bathroom, made myself presentable. Went to the kitchen, set out a tray. By the time I carried it in she had tidied up my papers and sat herself in the armchair. ‘I’m Mrs Slatter,’ she said. ‘I expect you’ve heard about me.’
I had. Brian Goodyear had recommended I meet her. He said she was a witch. I told her so, and I said, ‘They used to say that about my grandmother too.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘We’ll get on fine then.’ Her hands had a perpetual tremor. The ticking must have been her wedding ring – she wore no other jewellery – knocking on the table.
We talked. Or rather I talked. I told her everything I could remember about my grandmother. I felt more at ease than I had for a long time. I talked about coming to school in England, and Oxford, and about how I simply couldn’t believe that people could eat such disgusting food.
As I spoke I experienced it all again. I smelt my grandmother’s clothes, tasted the sweets she used to give me, saw again her wrinkled hands and the bangles she wore. I felt the freshness in the English air and the stuffiness in libraries where I studied. I talked about Sunita, and how we had all but resigned ourselves to childlessness. I told her my grandfather had advised me to take a second wife.
I told her about my panic. I said, ‘I hadn’t seen Nell for years and years, but I somehow thought she could save me.’ Mrs Slatter said, ‘There’s her blood on the floor beneath us. Under this. They couldn’t get it out of the rush matting, so Mr Underhill told Mrs R they needed lino in here.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Was she hurt?’ I imagined some childish accident. Mrs Slatter laughed and said, ‘No. No. Not that sort of blood. No harm done.’
When the sun was fully up I walked with her down to the big house where her granddaughter Holly was waiting with two toddling girls in the kind of dungarees that workmen used to wear. ‘Stay with Grammer,’ said Holly, ‘and Mum will be back for you at lunchtime,’ and she gave them each a squeeze before getting into her car. Mrs Slatter put her hand on my arm – it was leaf-light – and said, ‘You’ll be fine,’ and then she led the girls off down the stone-paved corridor to the kitchen. That repellent black dog struggled up off its cushion and waddled after her. I felt ridiculously envious of the children. I wanted to whine, ‘Take care of me too.’
*
Schabowski’s press conference was televised live. Immediately, all over East Berlin, people dropped whatever they were doing and went to the crossing points. Some of them carried bags. Most went just as they were – to see, simply to see. When Jamie arrived at the gate there was already a crowd. He got out his notebook and his tape recorder and began to ask questions. He found a woman in pale blue pyjamas under her anorak whose voice was improbably high-pitched. ‘I came like this,’ she said. She was proud of having run out without dressing. ‘I just couldn’t wait.’ All the time she was talking to him she was bouncing up and down, trying to make herself taller, trying to see over the people who stood between her and the crossing gate, trying to see over the wall.
People crowded round him. They wanted to make solemn declarations – the end of an era, the first taste of freedom, a night that changed history, the night they had waited for all their lives, the day the World War finally ended, the day Germany was reborn, a night they would never forget. Jamie didn’t note the platitudes. He noted their ages, and whether they had ever been West. Did they have relatives on the other side? Weren’t they afraid the guards might open fire? Weren’t they afraid this might be the beginning of a new war?
Most of them quickly got bored of talking to him. Waving at a camera was fun, but some of them had had more than enough of being recorded on tape. Only the woman in the pyjamas kept pogoing beside him, and telling him in her squeaky voice about how fast she’d run to get there, how much she hoped the gate would open. She said, ‘I worked in a laundry over there. If only I’d stayed with my friend that night. Twenty-eight years ago.’
Nell was only a couple of hundred feet away, on the other side. Jemima’s weight dragged her shoulders down. She found a railing she could hoist the baby onto, and there she stood, watching for something that had yet to happen. People jostled her, but then stopped to apologise. It was a polite crowd. Jemima slept. When the first Ossis came through, blinking, their faces bleached by the strident brightness of the searchlights, she thought of the labour room. The same ugly light, the same predominance of hard surfaces, metal and concrete, people all dressed alike in the same sort of blue, the same straining and straining at a narrow passage and then, at last, the arrival, from a place unknown and all but inconceivable, of a stranger.
By the time Jamie came she was done in. He walked straight up to her, as though he’d kno
wn all along where she was. He reached across the bulk of Jemima to embrace her, as he had done when Jemima was still in her belly. He said, ‘I’m so glad, I’m so glad, I’m so glad you saw it, you both saw it.’ She could feel the excitement coming off him. ‘I have to file,’ he said. But he wouldn’t let go of her. They were turning, dancing, clumsily joined. She said, ‘I love you.’ He probably didn’t hear her. He said, ‘Remember this. You’ve got to remember this.’ He kept saying it. She thought, He’s drunk, and then, No he’s elated. And she thought, We really do get on pretty well.
Later everyone said the Ossis looked like angels, with their blond hair permed into ringlets, but perhaps they were more like Adam and Eve issuing, naked and blinking, from the enclosure where an all-knowing God forbade them knowledge. They came through on foot, those first few hours. Later they came driving their identical white cars. The Wessis cheered and sang and hugged them, but they were a little cautious, a little withdrawn. Who’s to say, their stance implied, that what you have here is something for which we should reach out with yearning and that we should accept with joy?
Most of them, after a brief sortie, went back home.
Antony
In Prague, in 1972 or thereabouts, I went into a church. Gothic, black stone ribs and white distemper. I was interested in an altarpiece I thought I’d find in one of the side chapels, by a master with whom Altdorfer is said to have worked, but I didn’t get to see it that day. I was on my own. I nearly always travelled alone. Perhaps that’s why people whose business needed to be discreetly managed found me useful.
The church was silent when I walked in, letting the door slam behind me, but it wasn’t empty. Oh no. Every pew was full. Every paving-stone was hidden by people sitting on the floor. People of all ages, in working clothes. I found a stone ledge to perch on just as the soprano rose. They were singing Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor. ‘Et incarnatus est.’ And he was made flesh. Christian doctrine has tenets weird enough to defy the credulity of even the most devout – this is one of them – but the music etherealises it. I sat until the end, listening to the text’s promise of justice and consolation and death defeated, and to the offer made, and made good, by the music of transcendence, of the tranquillity of perfect form. No one fidgeted.
I’ve been thinking about that experience since the wall came down. That was the culture of Eastern Europe under communism. What did the Ossis find in the West, when they broke through their wall? Bananas, pornography, bigger cars. What were they given? Money to go shopping with. Shopping! Was it for this …?
No one else seems to feel as I do. Jamie said, ‘It’s not the West they want. It’s a better East. No more snooping. No more fear.’
Nell said, ‘A lot of the inmates in open prisons actually have more freedom of movement than they’d have on the outside. People who work all day, who are too poor to travel – is that freedom? But they’re still traumatised by imprisonment. The very idea of being shut in triggers depression.’
Nicholas said, ‘So you heard some Mozart in a church. Lucky old you. They have jolly good concerts in St Martin-in-the-Fields too, and the clergy here don’t endure endless harassment. You do know what’s been done to Christians in the Eastern bloc, don’t you?’
Benjie said, ‘I’ve got a friend who’s been buying up the Trabants as they come over. The Ossis can’t believe their luck when he tells them how many Deutschmarks he’s giving for them. And the Wessis adore them. A souvenir of Mauer-gefall, and jolly cheap on the road. You know they run on two-stroke?’
I did know, as it happened. That weekend in Berlin the area around the crossings reeked of lawnmower fuel. A whiff of summer gardens and of cosy tedium amidst all that chilly concrete, all that arc-lit overexcitement.
Guy said – Guy whose appetite had so dwindled he lived entirely on soups Flora made for him, and that Lil fed him in tiny sippets from the Meissen cocotte pots – Guy said, ‘Don’t underestimate bananas.’ And I thought, He’s right, I’ve never, ever been hungry, except on long drives when I forgot to stop for lunch. What do I know about the needs of the huddled masses?
Guy was a very clever young man.
*
Helen and Nicholas had lunch.
‘Last time I was here I saw Antony with his spymaster,’ she said, offhand. ‘Poor old Ant. I hope he’ll be off the hook now. So what did you have to tell me?’
‘I’m getting married.’
‘To Francesca?’
‘Of course.’
Helen sat back and crossed her arms and stared at the ceiling. Nicholas waited.
‘I’m just checking,’ she said, ‘but I’m not detecting any symptoms of heartbreak.’
Then she leant across the table and took both his hands and said, ‘In fact I think I can truly say I’m pleased.’ They smiled broadly at each other. ‘So now,’ she said, ‘when are you going to run that piece of Nell’s on prisoners’ power-structures? It’s really quite significant.’
*
It was weirdly hot, even in the kitchen whose stone flags, on winter days, sent shafts of icy chill up through the calves of those who stood upon them. Flora, cooking pheasants with apples in Mrs Duggary’s famous missionary-boiling pot, kept pushing her hair – striped grey now – back off her increasingly ruddy face.
‘Nicholas is bringing Francesca,’ said Flora.
Benjie said, ‘For people who refuse to commit themselves, those two have been together a hell of a long time.’
‘Ant thinks they’re secretly married.’
‘Why the secret?’
‘Who knows? He’s always been cagey, hasn’t he? And I think she rather likes masquerading as the superwoman who doesn’t need a prop and stay.’
Mrs Duggary, dipping grapes in syrup at the other end of the long table, said, ‘There’s enough women have to put up with being on their own, without those as has got husbands trying to pretend they can do without.’ Mrs D’s arthritis made her slow now, but in the kitchen she was still dictatorial. She said to Flora, ‘There’s some Calvados would go nicely in that. No one drinks it since Mr R went.’
‘Is Guy all right?’ asked Benjie. He was opening the red wine.
‘Holly’s with him,’ said Flora.
‘I talked to the doctor on his way out. He says he really needs hospital nursing now.’
They looked at each other. Unsayable things passed between them. Guy was their other one; their family.
There was a clatter and a murmur of voices off. ‘Well,’ said Benjie. ‘I’ll go and fetch Selim, shall I?’
‘Please. Take the torch.’
Benjie went out. It was a breathless night. Muggy and still and extraordinarily warm. As he walked through the gate into the pool garden he could see Selim silhouetted in the hut’s window. He was leaning his forehead on the glass. His hands were over his eyes. Benjie paused, and let the gate clang shut behind him. Selim straightened up at once and sat down at the table. When Benjie knocked, and opened, calling, ‘Only me,’ Selim was apparently absorbed in his writing.
‘Ready to come over?’ said Benjie.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Selim. He was fat, and his face had lost its mobility. ‘I’ll just …’
He went into the bedroom and came out swaddled in a big coat and a grey scarf. ‘You won’t need those,’ said Benjie. ‘It’s warm as a tart’s armpit out.’ Selim shrugged. He didn’t speak as they walked down through the shrubbery to the house. Benjie gave him the torch, but took it back when he saw how its beam wavered. Everyone knew how it scared Selim to walk between those dark bushes.
‘I was just saying to Flora,’ said Benjie, light as anything, ‘that if you’re staying much longer you really must move over into the house now winter’s here.’
Selim’s little laugh would have registered as insulting, had it not come from someone so evidently distressed.
Antony
You could tell that something freakish was happening from the moment we got off the plane. The air was clammy.
Nell drove. It was their rule. She had made Jamie swear he would never drive, unless she explicitly asked him to, when Jemima was in the car.
It was Flora’s idea to make our return a gala night – is there nothing that woman won’t use as a pretext for a party? – and invite a whole lot of the estate people to come in for a knees-up. Nothing wrong with that, but she really shouldn’t have asked Manny. And when he turned up with the crew she should just have showed them the door. But she owes them, I suppose. The work of a television presenter is so different from anything we’re accustomed to thinking of as a job that one has to keep reminding oneself that he is actually her boss.
Jamie had brought a chunk of wall home. The planes flying out of Berlin that month must have been carrying a lot of inordinately heavy luggage. Everyone had their bit of rubble. Mine is about the size and shape of a fig, a piece of concrete with a flash of lime-green paint on it. It fitted in my pocket. It still sits on my desk. But Jamie, who never had much of a sense of proportion, had lugged home a piece that was almost as large as his daughter. Flora had put it in the middle of the table, wreathed it with ivy and surrounded it with candles.
Everyone got quite raucous. Benjie’s plumpness has turned to old-man flab, but he’s still quite the twinkle-toes on the dance floor, and he still loves to get a singsong going around the piano. I went out into the hall at one point, and there above was Guy, sitting enthroned in the minstrels’ gallery, Holly, watchful, leaning over the railing beside him. He fluttered a hand. He looked older than I did.
Mark Brown had come with Manny. Once the intruding outsider, Mark is now triply in – Benjie’s collaborator, Flora’s competitor (his how-to TV shows are popular), Lil’s chosen escort around the private views. He and Francesca were giving us the ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’, their voices floating like smoke. All the songs that night were about exile and return, confinement and release. Benjie allowed them their dying fall and then segued straight into Joshua and Jericho and the wall coming tumbling down, and through the open door I saw Jamie dancing with his mother-in-law and Brian Goodyear gently helping old Mrs Duggary up and giving her a twirl.