As far as Randall was concerned Harry was another acquisition in the hobby he pursued behind the diplomatic front. Other men went duck-shooting, played golf, collected stamps or wallpapered their bedrooms when they wanted to escape and forget. When Randall wanted to dispel the images of his children which appeared at unguarded moments he indulged in a little spying.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was Saturday and Randall had the whole weekend off. He awoke at 7 a.m., depressed from some dream, and wondered how he would fill the two days; he awoke again at nine and knew. He felt almost gay and reflected that such changeable moods indicated instability. Poor material for intelligence work, or diplomacy for that matter.
In the evening there was a party at the British dacha to which he had been invited; he had not intended to go but in his present mood he thought he would. He looked out of the window and saw that it had stopped snowing: in the afternoon he would go cross-country ski-ing in the forest, take with him the new girl at the French Embassy whom he had met at a cocktail party the other night.
Elated with the prospects he put on his silk dressing gown, made coffee and took the Soviet papers back to bed to await the arrival of Anna, his maid.
All the papers, obeying a single Kremlin edict, carried editorials attacking the Chinese. Once the editorials had been reproving, the headmaster reprimanding the staff. Now the attacks were more bitter as Peking lambasted Kremlin policy and the Red Guard, the vengeful children of Mao, humiliated Russians in China. It would get worse, Randall knew: Krushchev had been right about Red China just as Churchill had been right about Russia. He felt that he was feeling the first shock waves of a cataclysm far greater than the October Revolution.
He read the articles carefully, looking up in a dictionary the words he didn’t understand. There were not many because his Russian was good. ‘The adventurist course being pursued by the People’s Republic of China is deplored by all the peace-loving nations of the world whose unswerving resolve is to end capitalist aggression currently manifest in Vietnam.’ That wasn’t strictly true, Randall thought; by ‘peace-loving nations’ the newspapers meant the Communist bloc and even while the papers were being printed, Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders were desperately trying to enlist support for their policy on China from some Eastern European countries who no longer considered themselves obliged to follow the Kremlin line.
At the moment Russia’s principal hope of emerging from the conflict with renewed prestige was the growing dissension inside China. Reports relayed to him from Washington indicated that opposition to Mao was stronger than anyone had publicly indicated.
But this Saturday morning Randall was in no mood for political analysis.
A key turned in a lock and he heard heavy breathing in the passage. ‘Anna,’ he called out in Russian, ‘I’m in here. I want ham and eggs and more coffee.’
The bedroom door opened and Anna’s polished, peasant face beamed round the corner. ‘The lift,’ she said. ‘Ah, that lift. Kaput. Always it is kaput. Those stairs, they are not good for me.’
Randall sympathised because Anna had to heave twice his weight up the stairs.
‘Sit down for a minute,’ he said. ‘Take the weight off your legs. Then get me my breakfast.’
‘Gaspadeen Randall is kind.’
‘I’m not kind,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you collapsing over my ham and eggs.’
‘Gaspadeen is kind,’ she said. She sat down breathing noisily as if she had just escaped suffocation.
Randall knew that his alleged kindness was merely lazy reluctance to force her to work. Anna and his wife had not got on together and he had recognised the faults on both sides. Anna was lazy and greedy and good-natured and his wife was intolerant. Once a small white Russian candy—a red currant coated with icing sugar—had rolled under the television set. His wife had told the children to leave it there to see how long it would remain; six months later it was still there, like a furry mothball, and it had become a legend and an infallible talking point at dinner parties.
Anna was good at dinner parties. She enjoyed serving the food in her blue uniform—the largest size in the Stockholm store where they had bought it but still on the small side for Anna—although his wife sometimes reprimanded her for pouring the wine incorrectly. She was not so enthusiastic about housework. She liked her mid-morning snack which she ate on arrival, she loved lunching on imported food—baked beans in particular—which other Russians could not buy, she was ecstatic about her tea during which she disposed of large slices of chocolate biscuit cake bought at the gastronom. In between the meals there was little time for work.
When his wife, who didn’t speak Russian, scolded her she forgot the little English she knew and stood breathing heavily, fat doll’s cheeks burning, mutely appealing to him as an ally. When, after his wife’s departure, he assembled the courage to rebuke her she always anticipated his anger: when he called her she emerged from the kitchen with a gift—a china mug painted with a bust of Lenin, a box of Russian biscuits which cracked your teeth if you didn’t dip them in your coffee. Randall suspected that she stored the gifts for the moments when she knew his accumulated wrath must break.
So dust gathered on the pictures and lamp shades and the cockroaches summoned their families to dinner in the kitchen. On the last occasion when he had determined to make a stand she had played a trump.
‘Anna,’ he said, ‘you and I have got to have a little talk.’
She smiled delightedly. ‘Gaspadeen Randall,’ she said. ‘It is good that you want to talk this day of all days.’
Randall felt his anger being diverted. ‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you for some time.’
She held up a dimpled hand. ‘Wait, Gaspadeen Randall.’ She went to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of red Russian champagne.
‘For God’s sake,’ Randall said. ‘What’s this in aid of?’
Anna beamed. ‘Today is my wedding anniversary,’ she said. ‘Today I have been married for twenty-five years to the best man in the Soviet Union. Now we must drink.’ She uncoiled the wire and the plastic stopper hit the ceiling.
‘Anna,’ Randall said, ‘there’s something I’ve got to talk to you about. It’s no good fobbing me off with a bottle of fermented Coke.’
The champagne fizzed in his crystal glasses. ‘First a toast,’ Anna said.
Randall shook his head ruefully. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You win. Here’s to you and your husband. May you live happily together for another fifty years.’
Anna began to speak in Russian because she knew that Randall spoke the language; not fluently but better than most Westerners in Moscow.
‘He is a very good man,’ she said. ‘We met here in Moscow in the war. I was a pretty girl then, not so plump.’ She paused ruminatively. ‘Sometimes I think I eat just a little too much. Anyway two days after we were married he went off to the siege of Leningrad. I didn’t see him again for two years. I didn’t think I would ever see him again. When he came back I had a little daughter for him. We were the lucky ones. Others were not so lucky.’ She refilled his glass. ‘Drink up, Gaspadeen Randall. It is not often I have the chance to treat you.’
Randall accepted defeat. He, the diplomat, acknowledged a superior tactician. What chance, he thought, did Western diplomats, with their mannered bargaining and inherited conventions, stand against such methods?
So the dust stayed and the cockroaches revelled in nocturnal luxury and Anna grew fatter and happier. And Randall was never sure whether the red champagne had been bought to celebrate her wedding anniversary—or retained as her ultimate weapon.
So now he waited patiently while she recovered her breath and then said: ‘Breakfast, Anna. Could I have it now?’
‘Of course, Gaspadeen Randall. As a matter of fact I’m feeling a little peckish myself.’
While she cooked the imported ham, singing ballads in a happy voice which had not aged, Randall shaved and examined in the mirror the gat
hering evidence of approaching middle age—needle-points of grey in the stubble, a deepening line from nose to mouth, flesh pouching beneath the chin. Randall feared old age and could never quite accept his years. Often his thoughts fled back to a childhood which had never been his, as if a small boy were beckoning him, a small boy standing in a field of corn. Cider juices ran in his mouth and he smelled the hay. He lingered there with the boy but never allowed himself to join the youth who sometimes beckoned on the threshold of the wasted years.
‘Gaspadeen Randall.’
‘Okay, Anna,’ Randall said. ‘I’m coming.’ He slapped aftershave lotion on his jaw and whistled, determined to hold on to the elation.
‘Please Gaspadeen Randall,’ Anna said in English. ‘Not to whistle. It is bad luck for you.’
‘One of these days I’ll come and whistle in your apartment,’ Randall said. He sat down at the table. ‘Then you’d be in trouble, wouldn’t you?’
Anna sat down to watch him eat. ‘Please,’ she said seriously, ‘never do that.’
She believed that it was bad luck to whistle indoors and that money would leave the house. Once he had whistled in a Russian scientist’s dacha and old women of whose existence he had not even been aware rushed from the kitchen imploring him to stop.
He drank some coffee and whistled a few more notes. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘it’s my money. If I want to whistle it away it’s my privilege.’
She breathed deeply and poured him more coffee. ‘You will be in to lunch?’
‘I reckon so, Anna. What’s on the menu?’
‘I thought you might like to start off with some borsch.’
‘And I thought you might think that.’
Anna’s soups bubbled all day on the stove. Fish soup, pea soup, chicken soup. But her speciality was borsch, thick and beetroot mauve, served with cream. She brewed it with two theories in mind: firstly that one saucepanful, with a few additions, would last all week; secondly that if Randall had a sufficiently large helping he would be unable to finish his main course and she would be able to finish it for him. Randall had given up trying to defeat the second theory.
‘And then your favourite—Chicken Kiev.’
It wasn’t his favourite. ‘That’ll be fine, Anna,’ he said.
She sighed with satisfaction because the borsch was already cooking and the chicken was cut.
Many diplomats believed that their maids’ duties included spying on them. They were all supplied by UPDK, a Government department which catered for the needs of all foreign residents in Moscow, and it was quite possible that they were expected to make their reports on their employers’ habits, views and guests. He found it difficult to believe that Anna, with her painted doll’s cheeks and lurid red hair, would ever report on him. If she did he liked to think that she did so reluctantly and as ineptly as she did the housework. Even so he had made sure that Anna was away when people like Harry Waterman visited him.
He also worked on the assumption, never proved, that the apartment was periodically searched. Other diplomats and correspondents swore that they had proved that their homes had been searched; but he felt that their conclusions were based on prior convictions and pride in their own detective work.
Often visitors from the States asked on the way into town from the airport: ‘Is your flat bugged?’ After they had made such remarks as, ‘I guess you can never tell what these sneaky bastards are up to,’ he said: ‘I’m not sure about the apartment but I’m darned sure this car is bugged.’
He picked up the phone and dialled the French Embassy. ‘I’d like to speak to a girl called Michele, please. She works at your embassy. I’m afraid I don’t know in which section.’
‘What is her other name, please? We have three Micheles.’ The woman’s voice was weary as if its owner was accustomed to identifying Micheles for anonymous male callers. ‘Three Micheles, two Françoises and a Nicole.’
Randall laughed. ‘What’s your name?’
The voice brightened. ‘Françoise,’ she said. ‘And yours?’
‘Randall. Luke Randall.’
‘Then I think I know the Michele you want.’ Randall wondered why.
Michele said: ‘Who is that?’
‘Randall. Luke Randall. We met the other night at a cocktail party.’
‘I remember,’ she said, ‘The big man with the sad face.’
‘You said you’d like to try cross-country ski-ing one day.’
‘Yes,’ said the girl. And, anticipating the next question: ‘But not today. I’m afraid I have an invitation already. Everyone is being so kind.’
I bet they are, Randall thought. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘The next time it stops snowing it’s a date.’
He hung up anxious to avoid further humiliation. But, he thought, a compulsive middle-ageing roué had to prepare himself for more and more refusals, or confine himself to older women.
He roamed restlessly around the flat while Anna caressed the table and bar with a cloth and emptied the ash-trays before retiring to the kitchen for her mid-morning snack.
The snub from the French girl made him think of all the people who were accustomed to such rejections, people born to loneliness. Good people who inherited shyness or drab exteriors masking deep and gentle ways which no one ever tried to discover. He was, he decided, becoming maudlin; approaching the masculine menopause. On an impulse he rang Elaine Marchmont.
She sounded surprised. ‘Hallo Luke. I haven’t made a mistake, have I? I’m not supposed to be working?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re not supposed to be working. I thought you might like to put on your skis and come out to the forest this afternoon.’
‘My,’ she said. ‘Who stood you up?’
By the time you were Elaine Marchmont’s age the shyness had turned to bitterness. ‘No one stood me up,’ he said. ‘I just thought we should both take a break. We’ve both got the day off and the snow’s stopped. It will have started again by tomorrow.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Come on Elaine,’ he said. ‘Quit playing hard to get.’
‘I was going round to the Youngs. It’s their boy’s birthday and they’re having a party.’
‘Tell them you’ve got measles.’
‘All right, I’ll tell them something.’
‘Okay, I’ll pick you up at two.’ He was surprised to feel how relieved he was that she had not turned him down.
‘Anna.’
‘Yes, Gaspadeen Randall.’ She emerged from the kitchen chewing energetically. ‘Get my ski clothes out and air them. Right now I’m going across the road to the Ukraine Hotel.’
‘But you’ll be back for lunch?’
‘I’ll be back for lunch,’ he said. ‘So keep your mitts off the Chicken Kiev.’
If there was no wind you were not immediately aware of the intensity of cold. But within five minutes the icy pain began to ache in the feet and face, nipping at ears and nose, spreading to limbs insufficiently clothed.
Standing at the entrance to the block, watching the children, Randall did not at first feel the cold. But he was experienced enough to know that it was there, sheathed and sharp. In a moment of bravado he had decided, despite Anna’s remonstrations, to leave his sealskin hat behind in the belief that he could reach the hotel before the cold mounted its assault.
The children were hosing an area of the playground to make a skating rink. The water curved through the air, splashed on the hard snow, started to spread, then froze. The older boys held the hose, occasionally shifting their aim so that other children sprawled on the ice howling for their mothers high up in the blocks. The militiamen, fur-hatted and heavy-booted, emerged from their huts, cigarettes warming their noses, and laughed hugely because there was not much else to laugh about.
Randall put the cheroot he had been smoking back to his lips and found that the wet butt had frozen. If the cold did that to a cheroot what was happening, subtly and inexorably, to his nose and ears? He set out for the ho
tel. It was only across the broad highway but to reach it he had to take the underground tunnel because you were only allowed to cross streets at authorised points.
The sidewalk had been scraped clean and was treacherously slippery. Children swaddled in felt and wool pointed at him in wonderment, their first encounter with a Western eccentric; their parents no longer bothered to look; they were absorbed with winter. Young men looked at him, wondering if they had enough money to offer to buy his clothes.
His ears were beginning to ache and his nose was numb. He walked through the white-tiled tunnel and up the steps the other side shouldering through the descending weight of felt, fur and cheap overcoats. Another hundred yards, up the steps to the hotel, through the heavy doors and he was in the spacious foyer as hot as a greenhouse.
Arabs and Africans, Eastern Europeans in pointed shoes that looked as if they were made from polished cardboard, Americans, British, Australians, Cubans and Koreans and North Vietnamese. Here they were, the non-resident foreigners of Moscow, buying, selling, holidaying, spying, negotiating, despairing.
They queued at the reception desks, they queued at the cashiers, they queued at the cable desk. They paid in dollars, pounds, roupees, lire; in currency, travellers’ cheques and coupons and, according to the Western businessmen, blood, sweat and tears. Whatever the time, there was always a queue, always a concourse of luggage, always an Indian or an Indonesian, sad and lost, sitting at one of the tables staring at a plane ticket.
The setting was palatial, like the marbled foyer of a museum, but there was a smell of poverty about it; the smell of foodstuffs carried in shoddy suitcases, stale clothes, cheap brilliantine. But it was still one of the best places in town for a haircut.
Randall climbed the staircase to the barbers. He sat beside an Italian, ruminatively fingering his side-burns, and a broad-faced little man who looked as if he might be Mongolian, awaiting the attentions of the women in white uniforms. The customers eyed each other suspiciously in case one of them tried to jump the queue.
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