‘Okay. It’s like seeing a damned ghost — it may scare you, but it can’t affect your life in any way. Just suppose whole squadrons of flying saucers landed, and we were up to here in little green men. It still wouldn’t affect our inner lives one bit.’
‘You think not? Would you say that as you scavenged through the ruins of London?’
‘What I mean is, some people are toppled into misery by what may seem minor factors. Others triumphantly survive the most terrible tragedies and come up smiling. Like some of the characters in Solzenhitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.’
They drank, exchanging more idle remarks. Kaye asked about the conference, and Squire gave him a brief account of the Rugorsky affair.
‘Sounds pretty hairy!’ Kaye exclaimed. ‘Was the guy flying back to Moscow today?’
‘Yes. I bought him a drink and a meal at Rome airport before we went our separate ways. Kchevov was with him, keeping close, so I had to stand him a meal too. Rugorsky was naturally cagey, because he was not absolutely sure that his friend was unable to understand English. Otherwise he was calm. He was convinced that he was going back to Moscow to face absolute destruction. He didn’t think he would see his wife — who’s in Leningrad — again.’
‘Can we do anything from this end?’
‘We can and will send letters, stressing his international importance. D’Exiteuil will help too; he has powerful friends in government, and the French, as you know, exert a bit of a pull in Moscow. But fraudulent currency transactions are a criminal offence.’
‘Guys who defraud criminals are not necessarily themselves criminal.’
‘A point of view it would be rather difficult to sustain in a Moscow court of law… Someone, probably Solzenhitsyn, spoke of the lack of character among men in the West, and the corresponding stature of so many characters in the USSR under that oppressive system. Of course, the remark is one of prejudice and can have no statistical validity, but I thought of it when parting from Vasili. He is a terrific guy. Good to have in a slit trench with you when the shit’s flying.’
‘Not so good on a cliff edge.’
Squire looked down at the worn carpet and rubbed his knees.
‘You know what I was thinking in Rome airport? He and I between us could have clobbered Kchevov in the toilets, and tied him up like a mummy with strip towels. Then I could have brought Vasili back here. The uncertainties over Pippet Hall deterred me — that’s my excuse. He would have been safe there for a while, and then we could have found him somewhere a bit more secure, in Canada, or the good old US of A.’
‘You’d have been mad. Would he have played along?’
‘Oh, probably.’ Squire looked at his watch. ‘He did his share of toilet-fighting as a young man, I’m sure… He’ll be in Moscow by now, poor sod. I feel like a worm for doing nothing.’
‘But he did try to knock you off?’
‘Maybe.’
They drank in silence for a while. Kaye rose and ambled about the room. Something in his bearing told Squire that he disliked the flat with all its shabbiness, and felt caged within it; layers of time in a Paddington room held less appeal for the American than the thicker strata of an old Greek palace.
With surprising force, amounting almost to anger, he turned suddenly on his heel to look down at Squire, who sat in a worn cane chair. ‘So here you are, lurking in a seedy flat in Paddington. I don’t understand, Tom — this must be some brand of British behaviour that eludes me. What the hell goes on?’
‘It was so damned uncomfortable at the Travellers’. My room was half the size of this. It made sense to move here.’
Kaye tugged his moustache down over his mouth. ‘You know what I mean. You don’t belong here. This isn’t your thing. Is it the mid-life crisis, have you got a black woman stashed away in the jakuzzi, or are you in search of God?’
‘Come on, Marsh, there are other explanations for living in Paddington. And there’s nothing wrong with this flat. I’ve always imagined that if anyone goes looking for God they can find him easily — he’s only an image in the mind. Do you know, one of the most interesting places we went to while we were making the TV series was the Tin jar National Park in Sarawak. We visited a cave where there were some paintings made over forty centuries ago — you may remember it from the first episode, ‘Eternal Ephemera’. There was a whole wall covered with paintings of hands, hands facing palms outward, hundreds upon hundreds of them.’
‘I remember. You sent Deirdre a postcard of it. What about it?’
‘I often think of that wall. It may be the earliest human painting that survives. Those hands aren’t making supplications to God. In all religions, people making a supplication to God turn their palms either upwards, unconsciously indicating thereby that God resides in their skulls, in the uppermost part of their anatomy, or else inwards, thereby unconsciously acknowledging that he is an inward quality.
‘Those hands were extended outward, in supplication to other men. It’s a pity that throughout human history God has got in the way of that gesture. Even as I say it, I become aware that Rugorsky would perhaps relish the perception. I can’t get him out of my mind.’
After a moment’s thought, he asked,’ Do you believe in God when you’re doing one of your digs?’
‘Never. I believe in history and logical deduction. And any palms I saw outstretched to me in Greece, or on Milos, belonged to beggars.’
Silence came between them again. Squire looked at the shabby carpet, Kaye stared into his glass. At last, Kaye cleared his throat, a look of discomfort on his brown capacious face.
‘Well, er, I’d better tell you what I’m here about, Tom. I’m here in the thankless role of peacemaker.’
‘Thanks.’
‘It was June of last year that you and Teresa fell out, right? That’s fifteen months. A long time. Your friends feel that if the two of you don’t team up again soon, you’ll never make it. So we’ve agreed to get together and try to push. I couldn’t have some more whisky, could I?’
He stood up as Squire gestured to the bottle.
‘Switch the light on too, will you? It’s getting a bit dark. What makes you think I any longer want Teresa to come back?’
‘Cigarette?’
‘I’ve got my own.’ He reached into the open suitcase and fished out a half-empty packet of ‘Drina’ cigarettes. He lit one without offering the packet to Kaye, who smoked his own.
‘You’ve caught the habit? Those things’ll kill you, you know that? I’ve figured out that you do want Teresaback. Just one look at this apartment convinces me. I’ve heard of a hair-shirt economy but this is ridiculous. The famous Tom Squire dossing in some dump in Paddington, for Christ’s sake? The gesture is too ostentatious, too obvious. You’re punishing yourself, Tom, you’re displaying your sores.’
‘It’s cheap here. I can get my hair cut in the basement.’
‘Don’t be difficult. Things are difficult enough. Teresa wants to come back to you.’
‘That’s a decided policy change. Has her lover-boy deserted her?’
‘That’s what’s difficult. Yes. He has. And she’s broke. But that’s not her primary motivation for wanting a reunion.’
Squire smoked the Yugoslav cigarette and waited for Kaye to continue.
‘Look, Tom, I know that she doesn’t want to come back just because the Jarvis guy walked out on her. She loves you. You hurt her pride, that’s all, and she had to show how independent she can be.’
‘She’s always known how independent she can be.’
‘You know what I mean. Hell hath no fury and all that.’
‘Marsh. She was not scorned. I know I upset her with the Laura affair, but I never deliberately insulted her feelings. She then set out to make me feel as bad as possible. She succeeded.’