Three marriages. He contemplated this extraordinary feat as the elevator shot him skywards. Three divorces in ascending order of bitterness.
Kate - well, Kate, that hardly counted, they were students, it was doomed from the start. She had even sent him Christmas cards until he moved to New York. And Irma -she at least had got her passport, which was always, he suspected, the main point of the exercise. But Margaret -poor Margaret - she was pregnant when he married her, which was why he married her, and no sooner had one boy arrived than the next was coming, and suddenly they were stuck in four cramped rooms off the Woodstock Road: the history teacher and the history student who between them had no history. It had lasted twelve years - 'as long as the Third Reich,' Fluke, drunk, had told an inquiring gossip columnist on the day that Margaret's petition for divorce had been published. He had never been forgiven.
Still, she was the mother of his children. Maggie. Margaret. He would call poor Margaret.
The line sounded strange from the moment the operator got on to the international circuit, and his first reaction was, Russian phones! He shook it hard as the New York number began to ring.
'Hello.' The familiar voice, sounding unfamiliarly bright.
'Its me.
'Oh.' Flat, suddenly; dead. Not even hostile.
'Sorry to ruin your day.' It was meant to be a joke, but it came out badly, bitter and self-pitying. He tried again. 'I'm calling from Moscow.
'Why?'
'Why am I calling or why am I calling from Moscow?'
'Are you drinking?'
He glanced at the empty bottle. He had forgotten her capacity to smell breath at four thousand miles. 'How are the boys? Can I talk to them?'
'It's eleven o'clock on a Tuesday morning. Where do you think they are?'
'School?'
'Well done, dad.' She laughed, despite herself.
'Listen,' he said, 'I'm sorry.
'For what in particular?'
'For last month's money.
'Three months' money.'
'It was some cock-up at the bank.'
'Get a job, Fluke.'
'Like you, you mean?'
'Fuck you.'
'All right. Withdrawn.' He tried again. 'I spoke to Adelman this morning. He might have something for me.
'Because things can't go on like this, you know?'
'I know. Listen. I may be on to something here -''What's Adelman offering?'
Adelman? Oh, teaching. But that's not what I mean. I'm on to something here. In Moscow. It could be nothing. It could be huge.'
'That is it?'
There was definitely something odd about the line. Kelso could hear his own voice playing back in his ear, too late to be an echo. 'It could be huge, 'he heard himself say.
'I don't want to talk about it on the phone.'
'You don't want to talk about it on the phone -''I don't want to talk about it on the phone.'
- no, sure you don't. You know why? Because it's just more of the same old shit -'
'Hold on, Maggie. Are you hearing me twice?'
'- and here's Adelman offering you a proper job, but of course you don't want that, because that means facing up -'
Are you hearing me twice?'
'-to your responsibilities -'
Quietly, Kelso replaced the receiver. He looked at it for a moment, and chewed his lip, then lay back on the bed and lit another cigarette.
STALIN, as you know, was dismissive of women.
Indeed, he believed the very notion of an intelligent woman was an oxymoron: he called them 'herrings with ideas' Of Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, he once observed to Molotov, 'She may use the same lavatory as Lenin, but that doesn't mean she knows anything about Leninism. 'After Lenin’s death, Krupskaya believed her status as the great man's widow would protect her from Stalin's purges, but Stalin quickly disabused her. 'If you don't shut your mouth, 'he told her, 'we'll get the Party a new Lenin's widow.'
However, this is not the whole story. And here we come to one of those strange reversals of the accepted wisdom which occasionally make our profession so rewarding. For while the common view of Stalin has always been that he was largely indifferent to sex - the classic case of the politician who channels all his carnal appetites into the pursuit of power - the truth appears to have been the opposite. Stalin was a womaniser.
The recognition of this facet of his character is recent. It was Molotov, in 1988, who coyly told Chuyev (Sto sorok beseds Molotovym, Moscow) that Stalin had always been attractive to women In 1990, Khrushchev, with the posthumous publication of his last set of interviews (The Glasnost Tapes, Boston) lifted the curtain a little further. And now the archives have added still more valuable detail.
Who were these women, whose favours Stalin enjoyed both before and after the suicide ofhis second wife? Some we know of There was the wife of A. I. Yegorov, First Deputy People's Commissar of Defence, who was notorious in Party circles for her numerous affairs. And then there was the wife of another military man - Gusev - a lady who was allegedly in bed with Stalin on the night Nadezhda shot herself There was Rosa Kaganovich, whom Stalin, as a widower, seems for a time to have thought of marrying. Most interesting of all, perhaps, there was Zhenya Alliluyeva, the wife of Stalin’s brother-in-law, PaveL Her relationship with Stalin is described in a diary which was kept by his sister-in-law, Maria. It was seized on Maria's arrest and only recently declassified (F45 01 Dl).
These, of course, are only the women we know something about. Others are mere shadows in history, like the young maidservant, Valechka Istomina, who joined Stalin’s personal staff in 1935 ('whether or not she was Stalin's wifeis nobody else's business, 'Molotov told Chuyev), or the 'beautiful young woman with dark skin' Khrushchev once saw at Stalin's dacha. 'I was told later she was a tutor for Stalin's children, 'he said, 'but she was not there for long. Later she vanished. She was there on Beria's recommendation. Beria knew how to pick tutors.
'Later she vanished...'
Once again, the familiar pattern asserts itself it was never very wise to know too much about Comrade Stalin’sprivate lift. One of the men he cuckolded, Yegorov, was shot; another, Pavel Alliluyev, was poisoned. And Zhenya herself his mistress and his sister-in-law by marriage - 'the rose of the Novgorodfields'- was arrested on Stalin’s orders and spent so long in solitary confinement that when eventually she was released, after his death, she could no longer talk - her vocal cords had atrophied...
HE must have fallen asleep because the next he knew the telephone was ringing.
The room was still in semi-darkness. He switched on the lamp and looked at his watch. Nearly eight.
He swung his legs off the bed and took a couple of stiff paces across the room to the little desk next to the window. He hesitated, then picked up the receiver.
But it was only Adelman, wanting to know if he was coming down to dinner.
'Dinner?'
'My dear fellow, it's the great symposium farewell supper, not to be missed. Olga's going to come out of a cake.'
'Christ. Do I have a choice?'
'Nope. The story, by the way, is that you had a hangover of such epic proportions this morning you had to go back to your room and sleep it off'
'Oh, that's lovely, Frank. Thank you.'
Adelman paused. 'So what happened? You find your man?'
'Of course not.
'It's all balls?'
Absolutely. Nothing in it.
'Only - you know - you were gone all day -'
'I looked up an old friend.'
'Oh, I get you,' said Adelman, with heavy emphasis. 'Same old Fluke. Say, are you looking at this view?'
A glittering nightscape spread out at Kelso's feet, neon banners hoisted across the city like the standards of an invading army. Philips, Marlboro, Sony, Mercedes-Benz... There was a time when Moscow after sunset was as gloomy as any capital in Africa. Not any more.
There wasn't a Russian word in sight.
'Never thought I'd live to see this, did you?' Adelman's voice crackled down the receiver. 'This is victory we're looking at, my friend. You realise that? Total victory.'