by John Lawton
It reminded him of similar houses he had visited in London. The Soane House in Lincoln’s Inn. A house more interesting for itself than any of the junk of antiquity Old Soane had collected and stuffed into it from floor to ceiling. A house that seemed designed for living, inviting one always to sit down. The last thing one was expected to do. So it was here. He felt he wanted to sit in the chair where Tolstoy sat, to have the same view across the desk, to doodle on the same blotter, to look out of the same window as Tolstoy himself, to see a lamplit in the windows of the Troitsky house. It was all wired off against the invasive backside, just like Sir John Soane’s sitting room.
Tolstoy’s study was a small, pale green room on the mezzanine. His bicycle was propped outside the door, as though he’d parked it there only yesterday and nipped in for a quick scribble. The pervasive illusion of the preserved home – the big bug-in-amber – that the occupant was merely out for an hour, not long dead. His writing desk was a plain deal table, covered in green baize, at which the old man had worked by the light of a single candle. Just to the left of the desk was a group of framed photographs. Tolstoy in many of the poses made famous in the countless biographies. Young Count Tolstoy in his artillery uniform during the Crimean War. Old Count Tolstoy in peasant garb, the demonically forked beard, the great dome of his forehead. The reluctant husband standing with his dumpy, grumpy wife. The assembled sons of Lyev and Sonya Tolstoy – Sergéi, Ilyà, Lyev Jr, Andréi, Mikhàil – sat on a park bench sporting an array of moustaches and beards and winged collars, looking less like the sons of a writer, more like the board of a continental bank posing for the photographer. And shots of the great man and his disciples.
One was a pale print of four people, a little girl, two men – and a boy, stuck between the men, receiving the avuncular touch of Tolstoy’s hand upon his shoulder, and looking at the camera over the little girl’s head. It was dated 1877 and captioned ‘Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy with his daughter Marya, Rodyon Rodyonovitch Troitsky and unknown youth.’
Troy stared. His grandfather was just recognisable. A younger version of a man he had known only in extreme old age, a man who must have been over eighty when Troy was born. A tall man, seen here in his late forties, sporting a full, greying beard and looking much like his mentor Tolstoy. The unknown youth standing between the two men he knew at once. He looked to Troy to be no more than fifteen or sixteen, but the look in his eyes was far from young, the eyes of a man already more worldly, more calculating than the two old men he stood between, with their air of Christian innocence, their peasant clothing and their faux-paysan surrender to nature. It was his father Alexei Rodyonovitch.
He had never known Alex Troy surrender a damn thing. Never gave uphis gripon the solid world and its reality. Left it to his father to idle away time in philosophy and pamphleteering. He had grown upto take responsibility for a family which seemed beyond the practicalities of the Tolstoyan ethic; he had grown up to bale his father out time after time. His perception of a world turning itself inside out, and his ability to keep one twist, one turn ahead of it, had saved the old man, indeed the entire family from a chaos that passed comprehension, the turmoil that was the twentieth century.
The spook had lost her touch. She was standing far too close. She should not have followed him in if she meant to stay hidden. With fewer than a dozen people in the room he was bound to see her. He looked. There were three people between them. A couple so alike they had to be married thirty years – Nikita and Mrs Khrushchev, Charlie and Mrs Chaplin – and a tall, thin man. The man moved quickly away. She seemed not to notice. The couple fell to bickering and drifted off. She should have moved before they did. She had taken off her hat and was pretending to be interested in the photograph of Tolstoy in uniform. Troy could see her in profile. The face of a Russian Jew. Slightly hawkish, a neat curved nose, a mopof thick, shining black curls, bobbing springily on her fur collar. An impwith violet eyes.
‘’Tis women’s hair makes Moscow fair,’ Troy said softly.
She did not pretend she had not heard. She looked straight at him startled. Her violet eyes wide.
‘They told me you were English,’ she said, scarcely louder than a whisper.
‘I am.’
‘No Englishman would know such a phrase.’
True, it was a dreadful phrase, a corny old Moscow aphorism he had dredged upfrom a childhood memory, a phrase of his grandfather’s, for just this effect.
‘What else did they tell you?’
‘Not here.’
Her eyes darted from side to side. A passable impression of a scared rabbit.
‘Better here than in the street. Who else will be listening? I’m the one being followed, not you. And even if you were, they’d have enough sense to stay outside.’
‘Are you going to tell?’
Troy walked on and left her to stew.
§ 12
He did not care to be a tourist in a mythical town. It was the wrong way to see Moscow. The right way – the only right way – was in the stories and dreams of the old generation. The glinting, golden splendour of St Basil’s added nothing to his mother’s infrequently aired memories of a girlhood in the city; the monumental blocks of Lenin’s tomb, its strutting, green-clad, goose-stepping guards, added nothing to the endless, convoluted narrative of his father’s youth. You could, he thought, take a copy of Ulysses, a street mapof Dublin and have a good, if long, if pissed, day out in Dublin. You could take the Russia of family legend, any map of Moscow, and never find it in the stone and mortar of the Soviet Union. He should not have come.
All in all he was searching for a metaphor. If Beirut was what? What had he called it? The Britain of the black market? Then Moscow, Moscow . . . was Britain in the drab age, Britain in the late 1940s, when rationing had gone on far too long, when the nation was heartily sick of it, when the humour, and the glamour if ever there had been any, had gone out of spivvery, and the country was locked into its first, its only five-year plan. Moscow, Moscow was the result of endless, serial five-year plans, of well-intentioned drabness piled upon orderly, dreary, gut-shrinking austerity; the heartless devotion of serial monogamy. It was a monumental city of vast spaces, of stone plains and cobbled prairie, of width and breadth and vista, shaped to the division and the column and the battalion. And its people skulked at the edges, refusing the open space, huddled in the shadows, buried in the bottle, born to narrow lanes and dark alleys, born not to Red Square or any square, born to Lyàpin House and Protótchny Lane, born to life within the iron hand. No line of Kipling or Masefield, no skylining metaphor of light or air, would ever so transpose, would ever touch these depths. It was Blok, Aleksandr Blok, who had it right: ‘Russia . . . her strength compressed and useless in an iron fist.’
§ 13
It was dark when he got back to the Moskva. It had been dark since three thirty in the afternoon. Somewhere in the darkness, the violet-eyed imp traipsed after him.
Charlie was up. Up, in the bathroom, naked to the waist, braces dangling around his knees, chest hair grey bleaching out to white, pectorals as big as breasts, the sad, defeated slant of his nipples, spreading out like frying eggs. Up, and shaving, and singing to himself. Badly.
‘I got plenty o’ nuttin’ and worraworraglub plenty for me . . . got no slooshwhooshworra château-bottled claret, down to me last Savile Row trousers worraglubsloosh an’ bugger all’s plenty fo’ me.’
He glanced over his shoulder. Grinned at Troy through the mask of shaving foam and went scat.
‘Zabdabzabaddyboopshoop, boopshoop plenty fo’ me.’
The hot water suddenly ran cold. A pipe in the system heaved and groaned. Large beast in pain. Charlie stared at the ceiling as though asking heaven for an explanation. All Troy could see was the fresh plasterwork where microphones had been set to record their every syllable. He wished the spooks well with Charlie’s scat singing, and hoped they were familiar with the work of Ella Fitzgerald. Plenty of nothing could scarcely be more appropriate
.
‘Do you think all of Russia is going to turn out to be like a seaside boarding-house?’ Charlie asked.
‘Don’t ask me. I’ve never been here before.’
‘Skegness . . . Llandudno . . .’
‘You chose it. I didn’t.’
‘No hot water, baths by prior appointment, no spitting, no loose women in your room . . .’
They seemed to Troy to be having two conversations where there should have been one.
‘Should I be grateful for small mercies? The crap hotel has got to be marginally better than the state apartment. You know Guy’s in a crummy two-room flat in the suburbs with one of his boyfriends?’
‘You’ve heard from Burgess?’
‘Phoned me uptwo days ago. Pissed out of his brain. Rambling on about how much he missed England . . . You know what I’ll miss about England?’
All of it, thought Troy. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Marmite sandwiches. Who wouldn’t? But after Marmite butties I’ll miss the women – or rather the lovers – men and women. From the first to the last. Do you know who my first was?’
Of course Troy knew. They’d told each other everything.
‘Neville Pym. Blew me when I was twelve. In his study, when I should have been in the nets hitting sixes. The first time I came inside another human being and it was Neville Pym’s mouth. I can still remember how his teeth nipped. I thought I’d come for ever.’
On cue, the hot tapadded a short spurt of water to the greying scum in the basin. Charlie scraped away at his stubble, the rolls of fat around his midriff quivering at every movement of his arm.
‘And then that wet summer of ’29, when your sisters had me in the summerhouse, down by the river, in the middle of a downpour.’
As a teenager Charlie had boasted of this to Troy. Ever since, he’d mostly managed enough tact not to allude to it. Troy’s sisters never mentioned it. He knew why they’d done it. At fourteen going on fifteen, Charlie had looked divine. At nineteen, Sasha and Masha had been amoral vixens delighting in the seduction of a willing boy.
‘Sasha was bloody marvellous.’
And now, thought Troy, she was probably mad. Strung out just shy of alcoholism. Grim, bitter, miserable or ironically, insanely funny. Troy had had little time for an elder sister in his youth. At best Sasha had been a beautiful, inane nuisance. Now she turned up on him uninvited and propped up bars with him rather like a man, wanting for the first time to be a friend rather than a sister. Her husband had hanged himself two years ago and let her out of a loveless marriage. But she could no more play the widow than the wife.
‘And the last?’ Troy asked to steer the topic to its end.
Charlie pulled the plug.
‘Whore in Soho,’ he said sadly. ‘Knew I was home for the last time. Never done it. Odd that. All the times I could have had a Soho tart and I never had. So I did. Must have looked like classic punter, one of ’em leant out of a window and pinged me with a peashooter.
There I was, wondering, “How do you approach a whore? Do you haggle over the price?” Needn’t have worried. Like falling off a log.’
‘And?’
‘Awful,’ Charlie said. ‘Absolutely fucking awful. Imagine. I paid to be despised. I should be able to get that for free almost anywhere from now on, I should think. And you’re wrong, by the way.’
‘About what?’
‘I didn’t choose Russia. All my life I’ve heard people saying things like, “If you don’t like it here go and live in Russia.” Fatuous remark. It was England I was trying to change. Russia was doing very nicely without me. I was committed to an idea – a way of thinking, doing and being – not a country. What’s a country? A few arbitrary lines on a map.’
There was nothing, Troy thought, quite like a few days in Beirut – a long weekend with Mr Sykes and Monsieur Picot – to teach one the arbitrariness of lines on a map.
Charlie pulled his shirt on. From beneath its folds Troy heard, ‘What d’ye reckon to Russian women? Most of ’em look like Widow Twanky to me.’
‘Dunno,’ said Troy. ‘The one following us is a looker.’ ‘Is she still following us? Close enough to see her face? Good bloody grief. I must be losing my touch.’ Wrong tense, Charlie.
§ 14
They stepped off the street and into the moist heat of another caff. ‘Oh shit,’ said Charlie. ‘Here we go again. Pure hell with lino.’ ‘No,’ said Troy. ‘Look. Listen. It’s not the same sort of place at all.’
There was a large party seated at a refectory-length table. Half of them were women. They’d dressed up. There were candles and laughter and the smell of halfway decent cooking. Good God, there were tablecloths.
‘I think we might just have stumbled on a real restaurant.’
‘But they will serve booze, won’t they?’
Enough people were drinking it. One or two of the women even appeared to be drinking wine.
Troy half expected the waiter to tell him one needed to book six months in advance and show the Party card – but he didn’t. He showed them to a table by the window, plonked down a menu in front of them and left them to read it.
Troy peered out through the glass. The spook was there again, on the opposite side of the street.
‘Do you think it’s going to be edible?’ Charlie asked.
‘It may well be good. If you ask me the other lot at the long table are a birthday or engagement party or something very like.’
Charlie stared at them. ‘D’ye know, I think this is the first time I’ve heard Russians laugh.’
Troy knew this was not true. Gorki had laughed at the pair of them last night. But he knew what Charlie meant. This was fun, not scorn.
Troy ordered for both of them. Beef stew. It would probably be stewed shin, but what the hell. He ordered vodka for Charlie, and Moldavian red, ‘claret style’, wine for himself.
Faced with his first glass of the day, Charlie was suddenly wistful. Troy had expected him to knock back the first in a single gulp. For a moment he just stared into it.
‘The Russkis have given me a shortwave tranny,’ he said. ‘Want me to keep in touch with the goings-on back in Blighty. I turned on the BBC World Service while you were out. It’s official – I’m a defector. It was on the news. Woodbridge made another statement to the Commons. Woodbridge Statement Mark II .’
‘With much regret . . . sorely deceived . . . Her Majesty’s Government was no more aware of this than Mrs Buggins’ cat . . .?’
‘Something like that. Fuck ’im, say I. Cheers.’
He picked up his vodka and belted it back in one.
Troy could guess how Charlie felt. Damned.
He looked out at the spook again. She was stamping her feet like a London cabbie. He got up, opened the door and went across the street to her. She had her hands deepin her pockets, her face all but buried in her hat. She stared at him, motionless, her expression saying, ‘This isn’t happening – he isn’t doing this to me.’
‘You must be freezing,’ he said.
The spook looked to either side and told him to go away. Troy took her by the arm, so sharply she was almost knocked off her feet, and led her back to the restaurant. She pulled and struggled, but he won.
He asked the waiter to bring food for a third and sat her down at the spare chair between Charlie and himself.
‘Didn’t realise we had guests,’ said Charlie through his third vodka.
‘I don’t think she speaks English.’
‘I don’t care if she does. Doesn’t matter a damn. But you’re right. She’s a looker.’
The spook tried to rise from the chair. Troy pressed her back down, spoke quietly to her, persuaded her take off her hat and coat.
‘The harm’s done. If they’ve seen us, they’ve seen us,’ he said. ‘You might at least get a hot meal before you go back to the street.’
She said nothing. Troy poured Moldavian claret for the two of them. Against all expectation, it was first rate.
; Confronted with the meal, Charlie said, ‘What’s the brown porridge?’
‘Buckwheat kasha. Try before you moan.’
Charlie smiled after his first mouthful. ‘I suppose I could get used to it.’
The spook had an appetite. She ate in silence. Looking all the time from Troy to Charlie and back again, as Troy recounted for Charlie what Said Hussein had told him – how last autumn ‘something snapped in Mr Charlie’.
‘Good old Said. Sharpas a bloody razor. Of course, he’s right. It was a bad time. But it was the time, if you see what I mean. I’d far rather have seen it for myself than read about it in papers two days old.’
‘I don’t get it,’ said Troy. ‘Seen what?’
‘Oh God, did it really make so little impact on you Freddie? Could you not see the seams coming unstuck last autumn? I could. Poor bloody Vassall. Stupid, vain, greedy, innocent little prick. Set up, picked up and strung out to dry.’
Troy could not agree with this. Vassall, like Charlie, was a paid Soviet agent. As Assistant Private Secretary to the Civil Lord of the Admiralty, he had passed on documents to the Russians for several years. He had been arrested and tried last autumn. He was now serving eighteen years in prison.
‘He was guilty of treason, Charlie.’
‘He was set up. Trapped into it. Blackmailed because he was queer!’
‘Quite, said Troy. ‘By your side. Not the British.’
‘You still don’t get it, do you, Freddie? He was a nobody. Putting the poor little bugger on trial was . . . was . . . like tearing the wings off a butterfly. If who was rogering who wasn’t of such godalmighty concern to the English, the Russians would never have been able to blackmail him in the first—’
‘It’s illegal here, too, Charlie.’
