‘Wallings. HM Customs & Excise.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, Mr Wallings, but I have three or four other calls to make after Slough. Then I’m going home. I don’t really see how you can expect to follow me around all day.’
‘I don’t,’ said Wallings, smartly.
‘Is it VAT?’ asked Michael. ‘I don’t even have my books here. Why don’t you make an appointment with my secretary; then I can make sure that we can be ready for you.’
‘Ah, but you’re going to Moscow tomorrow.’
‘Yes. Only for ten days, though. Surely Her Majesty can wait until then.’
‘Sorry,’ said Wallings, with a smile.
‘Well, this is quite ridiculous,’ said Michael. ‘You can’t possibly come to Slough with me. Now listen, Mr Wallings, I’m late. Go into the office there and ask to speak to Janice. She’ll fix something up for you.’
‘Security,’ said Wallings.
‘I beg your pardon?’ It was beginning to drizzle now, and Michael held his coat-collar close together.
‘Security,’ Wallings repeated. ‘National security.’
‘You mean you’re not really Customs & Excise at all?’
‘General drift,’ said Wallings. Then he nodded at the car. ‘Shall we…?’
Slowly, Michael opened up the car, and reached across the front seat to unlock the passenger door for Wallings. Wallings climbed in with an appreciative nod, took off his hat, and promptly fastened up his seatbelt. Michael closed his door, and started up the engine. The windscreen wipers groaned a rubbery complaint across the speckled glass.
‘Didn’t mean to spring it on you,’ said Wallings. ‘Would have come earlier, you know, but nobody told me you were going out.’
Michael drove through the back streets. Wallings said, ‘Which way do you usually go? Mitcham, Putney, Mortlake, Kew?’
‘That’s it,’ said Michael. He was beginning to feel uncomfortable and irritated, and anxious, too. He had never liked any intrusion in his life; never liked anybody telling him what to do. That was why he had left Sperry Guidance Systems when he was 27, and started up in computerized toys with his best friend John Bishop. That had been four years ago: four years of worry and work and near-bankruptcy, but at least all the decisions, right or wrong, had been theirs, all the late hours had been worked for their own benefit, and not for the lordly dismissal of a departmental manager who sniffed at their work as if they should never have bothered. Now they had two popular computer games on the market. Robot Crisis and King Dinosaur, and they were going to the Moscow Toy Fair tomorrow with the intention of launching a computerized spelling instructor for Russian schoolchildren called Tovarish!
Four years of self-employment had left Michael thinner, with a spray of grey hairs on the left side of his head, but he felt that he was better-looking when he was half a stone underweight, and so did Margaret. He was just six feet tall, narrow-faced, with dark brown eyes that Margaret had described as ‘perpetually hurt’. That was presumably why Corinna and Doris thought he was ‘ever so sensitive’. That, and the fact that he wore National Health spectacles to read. He was aware that he was becoming old-fashioned in the way he dressed (pastel-coloured Ben Sherman shirts with button-down collars, and charcoal-grey slacks); and he was also aware that his tastes in music and food and cinema were slowing down towards early middle-age. (ELO, spaghetti Bolognese, and Woody Allen). But what did you do about it? Dress like a punk? Go out and buy Wham albums, and eat hamburgers every evening?
There was little enough room these days for the young and the desperately fashionable, let alone Michael’s generation – all those bewildered refugees from the early 1970s, who had been born two years too late to enjoy the boom of the 1960s, and two years too early to be accepted as members of the new tribes of the 1980s. There was nothing more dispiriting than having reached maturity in between eras. That was part of the reason he had taken up computers. A frantic bid to catch up; a frantic try to get ahead of the game. It hadn’t really worked, though, not socially. He still liked ELO and ate spaghetti Bolognese. His mother had bought him a Hostess platewarming trolley for Christmas, and he was embarrassed whenever he thought of it. Owning a platewarming trolley was only two stages away from retiring to Bournemouth and wondering whether anybody would come to your funeral.
They drove through Thornton Heath, a dreary valley of cut-rate furniture shops and tyre-fitters and small supermarkets, congested with red double-decker buses and builder’s vans. It was raining much harder now, and the windscreen of Michael’s Granada was beginning to fog up. Wallings said, ‘The news’ll be on in a moment. Eleven o’clock.’
Michael switched the radio on. The news was the same as usual. Russia had at last agreed to return to the nuclear disarmament talks in Vienna; although Soviet forces continued to mass in East Germany and Poland as part of Warsaw Pact exercises. The pound had fallen against the dollar to a new low. A farmworker had lost his leg in a baling-machine and crawled half a mile with it to seek medical help.
‘Seems like a new detente,’ said Wallings, switching off the radio without being invited.
‘As long as they place an order for my spelling-machines, I don’t honestly care,’ Michael told him.
‘There’s actually something we want you to look at,’ Wallings remarked, off-handedly.
‘What do you mean? Where?’
‘In Moscow, of course.’
Michael drew up behind a bus, and waited while its passengers embarked. Rain drummed on the roof of the car with sudden fury.
‘You don’t mean spy?’
‘No, of course not. Goodness me, spy. But since you and your pal know something about guidance systems, and computers, well, we thought that you could be useful.’
Michael rubbed at the back of his neck. ‘Who’s we? MI6 or something?’
Wallings laughed; although it was more like a shout than a laugh. ‘You’ve been watching The Professionals,’ he said. ‘Either that, or you’ve been taking the Sunday Times too seriously. No, no. This is purely commerce. Department of Trade and Industry. The Russians have built a new guidance complex, that’s all, out by the Central Airport. All we want you to do is take a look at it. Just externally, no risk. You don’t have to break in, or anything like that. Just cast an eye over it, and tell us what you think.’
They had reached Streatham now. Michael turned left towards Streatham Common and Tooting. The rain began to ease, and a garish yellow sunlight could be seen through the clouds. ‘You can’t learn much about any kind of electronics installation from the outside,’ he told Wallings.
‘You can’t; but we have people who can.’
‘Then why don’t you send them to look at it?’
‘No cover, old man, not like you. No legitimate reason for being there. The Russians would pick them up in a minute.’
Michael drew up at the traffic signals. ‘I really think the answer has to be no,’ he told Wallings. ‘I don’t want either of us to end up arrested. Come on, we’ve both got families. We don’t need to take risks like that. And what would we say if they caught us? “Oh, we just fancied taking a look at your brand-new guidance complex”?’
‘We’d tell you what to say,’ said Wallings. He sounded rather testy now.
‘Well, I’d rather not say anything. I’d rather not do it all. Thanks all the same, but no thanks.’
‘Oh,’ said Wallings, as if Michael’s refusal were a very unpleasant surprise.
‘Why “oh”?’ said Michael.
‘It creates a problem, that’s all, your saying no.’
‘Well, it might do; but it’s not my problem. I’m only going there to sell electronic games. I never liked James Bond anyway.’
That last remark was supposed to be a joke, but Wallings look it in very bad part. He kept brushing the top of his green suede hat, and bulging his upper lip so that his white moustache prickled up. ‘I did expect some cheery co-operation,’ he said.
Michael blew the horn at a black b
oy on a bicycle, wavering around in front of him on Tooting Broadway, but the boy was wearing headphones, and couldn’t hear him. ‘Very dangerous, that,’ remarked Wallings, irritably.
They had reached the north end of Garratt Lane before Wallings said anything more. The rain had started again, and Wandsworth looked drowned. A man stood on the corner with rain pouring from the peak of his sodden cap in a steady stream, his hand-rolled cigarette extinguished, staring at nothing at all. Wallings said, ‘If you won’t agree to take a look at the guidance complex, you see, we can’t let you go.’
‘What did you say?’ Michael asked him. He didn’t quite understand what Wallings meant.
‘I said, we can’t let you go. Can’t have chaps going to Russia if they don’t show one hundred per cent patriotism. Who knows what might happen.’
Michael savagely pulled the Granada over to the side of the road, and tugged up the handbrake. ‘Now, listen here,’ he said, furiously. ‘What the hell is this all about?’
‘Thought you would have understood, old man. Helping one’s country, that’s what it’s all about. You didn’t have to join the Army, did you? You would have had to, in Russia. Eighteen years old, and they would have you marching and drilling and digging tank-pits and cleaning out toilets with your toothbrush. Didn’t have to suffer anything like that, did you? Nor will you, because other chaps are prepared to do what you won’t do. All we’re asking is that you get on the Moscow metro, ride a few stations north, and then go for a walk. You don’t have to carry cameras, you don’t have to make any drawings. Just keep your eyes open. Now, that isn’t hard, is it? Nor dangerous, either.’
‘This is unbelievable,’ Michael raged at him.
‘Well,’ sniffed Wallings, ‘you either go to Moscow and do it, or else you don’t go to Moscow at all.’
‘I’ve spent two years and seven thousand pounds developing Tovarish!’ Michael snapped.
Wallings began to smile again. ‘Precisely,’ he said. ‘Pity to throw the whole lot in the dustbin, just because you’re feeling rancorous.’
Michael stared at the raindrops spattering the windscreen. He couldn’t believe that any of this was real. But a policeman was slowly approaching him from the other side of the junction, and so he shifted the Granada into gear, and pulled away from the curb.
‘Jesus,’ he said to himself.
*
He returned home that evening exhausted. He turned the Granada into their steeply-sloping driveway in Sanderstead, and sat in front of the wheel feeling the back of his shirt sticky with sweat. His beard was beginning to grow, too, and felt irritatingly prickly. At last he climbed out of the car, and retrieved his briefcase from the back seat, and walked up the four crazy-paving steps that led to the front door.
He and Margaret had lived here for six years now, two-thirds of their married life. Before this, it had been a modern flat in Basingstoke, so that he could be close to the Sperry guidance factory at Edison Road. But this was a small mock-Tudor semi-detached, with leaded windows and fir trees in the garden, and a fish-pond. There had once been a gnome, fishing in the pond, but as soon as they had moved in, Michael had knocked off its head with a five-iron. He didn’t seem to be capable of doing spontaneous things like that any more.
Duncan’s bedroom light was on. Michael opened the front door, and there was a warm smell of cooking. Chicken casserole, probably. He set his briefcase down on the patterned carpet, and closed the door behind him, unusually firmly. Margaret’s voice called from the kitchen, ‘Mike? Is that you?’
‘I hope so,’ he said. He walked through to the kitchen, and there she was, smiling and piping out fresh cream on to two glass dishes of chocolate-flavoured Angel Delight. A pretty, dark-haired girl, with wide appealing eyes and a snubby nose. A little more suburban-looking now than she had been when he first met her; her hair was bobbed in a flicked-back Princess-Diana style, and her blue eyeshadow looked as if it had been issued by the national society for making all primary-school mothers glamorous. Not erotic any more; but that was probably because he was dog-tired. He kissed her, and she said, ‘mmmm,’ and he said, ‘What’s cooking?’
‘Poulet,’ she told him. It was a standard routine between them.
‘That’s funny,’ he replied. ‘It smells exactly like chicken.’
‘Hard day?’ she asked. She finished piping the cream, and put all the dirty dishes in the sink. ‘Duncan’s waiting for you, if you want to go up and say goodnight.’
He nodded. For some extraordinary reason, he felt a lump in his throat, as if he were about to burst into tears. But he managed to smile, and say, ‘Fine. Yes, I’ll go up.’
She followed him to the foot of the stairs. ‘You’re all packed, except for your shaving things.’
‘Oh, thanks. You’re an angel.’
‘I do wish you’d buy yourself some new underpants.’
‘What, in Russia? We could probably all go camping in the smallest pair they make over there.’
‘You know what I mean. Marks and Sparks do some quite nice brief ones.’
He blew her a kiss. ‘For you, anything. Let me just say goodnight to Duncan.’
Duncan, dark-haired, tired-eyed, was sitting up in bed reading the Topper annual. On the walls of his small brown-wallpapered bedroom were dozens of cut-out pictures of warplanes. They hadn’t managed to get around to decorating Duncan’s bedroom yet, especially after all the money they had had to spend on new gas central heating.
‘How are you?’ Michael asked him.
‘Okay. I got ten in maths today.’
‘You’re a genius. Here, time to settle down now.’
Duncan snuggled into his duvet. ‘Is there time for a story?’
‘I’m sorry, not tonight. Mummy has supper ready, and I have to get up first thing tomorrow.’
Of course, he thought, as he leaned over his son and kissed him, it was always possible not to go at all. He had no idea what Moscow would be like, apart from a few horror stories that Alan Taylor had told him about waiting for hours for a meal, even at the so-called ‘international’ restaurants, and the restrictions on travelling anywhere outside Moscow. But it was ridiculous to be frightened. Why should he be frightened? Wallings had assured him that taking a look at the new guidance complex wasn’t going to be dangerous.
Mind you, they had probably told Greville Wynne, too, that spying wasn’t going to be dangerous.
Supper was waiting downstairs on the Hostess trolley, there were avocadoes for starters. Margaret said, ‘I hope you don’t mind. I opened the wine.’ Michael nodded, and kissed her forehead, and poured them each a glass of Sainsbury’s Liebfraumilch.
‘I saw Sally today,’ said Margaret, eating neatly. ‘You remember Sally Hutchinson?’
Michael ate his avocado without tasting it. In his mind, he was already on that metro ride north to the Central Airport. Wallings had even told him the stations. Sverdlova Square, Gorkovskaya, Mayakovskaya, Byelorusskaya, Dinamo, Aeroport. Margaret said, ‘Are you all right? You look tired.’
On News At Ten that night, which they watched in the sitting-room, with Margaret sitting on Michael’s lap, Alistair Burnett said that the huge Soviet manoeuvres in East Germany were being regarded by Western experts as nothing more than ‘sabre-rattling’, in order to give greater significance to the disarmament talks in Vienna.
A Foreign Office spokesman with a wrinkly forehead said, ‘In fact we regard these exercises as a sign of the Soviet Union’s concern that the discussions in Vienna should be really effective. I have to say that we are encouraged by them, rather than alarmed.’
Michael and Margaret went to bed at eleven o’clock. Margaret set the Teasmade for 7:15. Michael’s suitcase stood by the wardrobe as a reminder that tomorrow was the day. Margaret snuggled up close to him in bed, and said, ‘I hope it isn’t too awful. Russia, I mean.’
‘I’ll bring you back one of those fur hats.’
He kissed her. He slipped his hand inside her nylon nightdress,
and caressed her small breasts. They made love in silence, while the springs of the bed went squonk, squonk. Up above the head of the bed was a reproduction of Renoir’s Le Moulin de la Galette.
Michael dreamed that night that he was having an argument with Wallings. Then he was riding on a brightly-lit, echoing metro train; but the doors of the train refused to open, and he was unable to get out. He knew that he had travelled a long way past Aeroport station, and that he was in serious trouble.
Wallings said, ‘You’re sweating. What’s the matter?’.
He opened his eyes. Margaret was propped up on one elbow, looking at him, although he couldn’t see her face in the darkness.
‘I had a dream, that’s all. Overtired, I suppose.’
She kissed him. Far away, a train echoed its way southwards along the main line that led to Purley, Coulsdon, and all the clustered dormitory communities where London’s clerks and office managers now lay sleeping, or worrying, or making love to their wives. Michael lay for a long time with his eyes open, and thought God, is the world really so dangerous?
Three
It had been drizzling all morning in Zossen-Wünsdorf, and when Marshal T.K. Golovanov arrived at the headquarters of the Western Strategic Direction in his huge black Volga limousine, three officers came running out with large multicoloured golf umbrellas, to protect him from the wet.
The marshal made a point of ignoring them. A soldier who had fought with Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovskiy at Kursk, during the Great Patriotic War, scarcely had need of multi-coloured golf umbrellas to protect him from the weather. ‘Learn to love the foulest of storms, and the bitterest of blizzards,’ he often told his subordinate officers. ‘Bad weather has saved Russia more than once; it will save her again.’
The headquarters at Zossen-Wünsdorf was a lichen-streaked concrete building, surrounded by lines of bedraggled linden trees. Marshal Golovanov crossed the puddly yard, and as bulky as he was, quickly and athletically mounted the wet stone steps that led up to the main entrance. He was followed closely by his military aide. Colonel Lev Chuykov, and his newly-appointed secretary. Major Valentin Grechko; and they were followed in turn by the three dithering officers with their multi-coloured golf umbrellas.
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