‘You think that’s the right choice?’
‘Yes.’
‘You may be right, but I don’t feel it’s our place to encourage her to have an abortion. Anyway, if we lean one way she’s highly likely to do the opposite.’
‘Well, we must encourage her to make a decision. And soon. Then we can plan.’
After they had eaten, Edward turned on the television while Marianne glanced at the day’s newspaper. Her attention was caught by a lengthy piece about Russia and Gorbachev’s new policy of perestroika. Marianne had been a compulsive reader of articles on the politics of the Soviet Union ever since she had left the country a dozen years earlier. She longed to return for a visit but did not dare – even if she had been able to obtain a visa, which did not seem likely. She was encouraged by what she read about the attitude of the new regime. At least now, she thought, those terrible photographs must have been forgotten.
The photographs had not been without their consequences. Six months after she had returned from Moscow, a middle-aged man had turned up at their south London flat. Introducing himself as a diplomat from the Soviet embassy he asked her, in his strongly accented English, whether she had now settled back into her life in England after her ‘interesting time’ in Moscow, and enquired as to the progress of her studies in Russian literature. After the pleasantries were over Marianne said, ‘So, what exactly have you come here for?’
‘Mrs Davenport,’ the man said, ‘we would be greatly honoured if you would write an article for publication about your time in Moscow.’
‘What sort of article?’
‘We have taken the liberty of preparing a draft,’ he replied, handing her several pages of typescript. Marianne started to read. The tone was not dissimilar to the ‘confession’ she had signed in Moscow, although it avoided any suggestion of a sexual liaison. It told the story of how she had been ‘tricked’ into helping Larry Anderson, a CIA spy, to gather material and how she had been persuaded to go to Georgia with him on ‘a spying mission’ and had been severely injured in an air crash. The article was part autobiographical thriller, part mea culpa for her involvement in espionage, but most of all an attack on her American spy master and his ‘CIA bosses’. The whole concoction was laced through with such lavish praise for life in the Soviet Union that she couldn’t help laughing.
‘No respectable journal would publish this – and even if they did, no reader would believe it. It’s completely over the top.’ Sensing that he didn’t understand her, she added in Russian, ‘It’s too obvious. Crude propaganda – no one would believe it.’
The man bowed his head. ‘I understand. You do not have to follow the wording precisely. Please submit to us a re-draft.’
‘What if I don’t want to do this?’ Marianne said, though she knew perfectly well what it was all about.
The man shrugged. ‘There might be consequences. Moscow has led me to believe that you will cooperate.’
For the next few weeks Marianne agonised over whether to do what they wanted. Several times she had come close to telling Edward that she was being blackmailed but she pulled back at the last moment, remembering how she had lied to his face only six months earlier and how relieved he had been to hear her denial. As the colonel had said, it’s one thing to suspect a past indiscretion – it’s another to see the gory evidence.
She didn’t feel any great compunction about being critical of Larry and his associates who had landed her in such an invidious position, but at the same time she did not want to be too offensive. Could there be some repercussions when she travelled to America, she wondered. Some adverse consequences to her parents?
In the end the whole process had become increasingly farcical. Drafts went back and forth between her and the Soviet embassy until eventually a text was agreed and, following instructions from the embassy, she duly submitted the article to the New Statesman, who promptly rejected it. Eventually the article was accepted by a small left-leaning journal in America where it lingered and died in the obscurity it doubtless deserved.
The photographs, however, remained with the KGB.
While Marianne no longer feared the ploys of Soviet propagandists, there were other consequences of her time in Russia which were less easy to forget. Her fractured pelvis had not healed well and she still walked with a noticeable limp – her war wound, as she called it; she knew now she would always walk with a limp and suffer recurring bouts of sciatica. Yet aside from the physical scars, her year in Moscow was now a well-ordered memory. In the security of her present life it seemed like a curious aberration; a time when she had lived dangerously – a high-octane existence bringing with it an intensity which would never be repeated. She had come close to catastrophe and nearly destroyed her marriage, but there was still some part of her which couldn’t quite wish for that year to be wiped from her past.
Perhaps that’s how soldiers feel, returning from a war, she thought, as she set off from her meeting at St John’s College towards the University Library the other side of the river. The sun had emerged suddenly after a heavy shower and was now reflecting off the wet road into Marianne’s eyes as she trudged down Trinity Street. Deciding to cut through the college, she turned into Great Court, marvelling, as she always did, how to walk through Great Gate was almost to enter another dimension; a space unreasonably large but at the same time enclosed and private – almost intimate – enhanced by the perfect positioning of the fountain with its slim ionic columns now glistening wet in the low November sun. Crossing Trinity Bridge, Marianne glanced back at the Wren Library, imagining Byron sitting in his silent marble contemplation.
‘Don’t go there – I won’t let you think like that,’ said Dorrie the following morning when she and Marianne sat over their morning coffee discussing the welfare of Marianne’s daughter. ‘You’re falling into that terrible cliché of “what did I do wrong?”; you haven’t done anything wrong. You have been an exemplary mother. No one could have been more loving and supportive than you.’
‘Perhaps too much?’
‘That’s ridiculous. Be positive. Izzy is a clever girl; whatever else she’s done, she hasn’t neglected her studies.’
Although several years younger than Marianne, Dorrie had become her closest friend. Having toyed with pursuing an academic career, Dorrie now taught English and drama at a secondary school in the city. Marianne would never forget her first sighting of Dorrie one warm afternoon in early summer as – with her flowing red hair and bare freckled arms – she tore about the stage, transporting Izzy’s class of twelve-year-olds into the mysteries of Wonderland. Marianne respected her unsentimental approach to life.
‘Have you talked to her yet?’ Dorrie asked.
‘Not yet.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘I’ve tried but there hasn’t really been a good moment…’
‘Don’t be so feeble, Marianne. Kids respond to straight talking.’
‘And you’ve had so many children.’
‘I may not have had children, but I see them every day. You are forgetting that teenagers are my life now. I had to spend half of yesterday trying to get some year ten girl in my English class to stop snivelling over a failed love affair. We’ve had our share of pregnancies too.’
‘OK, granted; you probably do know more about it than I do – except it’s different when it’s your own child… Anyway, you’re right, of course. I must force the issue. I do worry that this will screw up her studies.’