‘Charlie,’ supplied Ruth. ‘Charlie Rogers.’ She paused, wondering whether to make the point. Deciding to, she said, ‘That’s what it is. Friendship.’
‘Oh,’ said Blair. Conscious of the difficulty between them he said, ‘You’re looking good, Ruth.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘You too.’
‘Apart from this – if there can be anything apart from this – how have you been keeping?’ he said.
‘OK.’
‘How was Thanksgiving, with your folks?’
‘Paul played up,’ she said. ‘Now I probably know why: we stayed over a few days and he wouldn’t have been able to get anything.’
‘Jesus!’ said Blair again, exasperated: there was only going to be one conversation between them, however hard they tried. ‘Everything is going to work out OK,’ he said, another repetition. ‘You’ll see.’
‘I wish I could be sure,’ said Ruth. For a moment her control slipped and before she could stop herself she said, ‘I wish I could be sure of so many things.’
Ann decided that the problem was a personal one. She considered that she was only peripherally involved and it was certainly none of Brinkman’s business, friendly though they were, and so she said simply that Blair had returned to Washington for a sudden family reason.
‘Hope everything’s all right,’ he said. It was feasible but unlikely, Brinkman decided. It was obviously a recall to Langley, for something involving the leadership changes. But what? It would have to be something pretty dramatic, to take him all the way back to America. He was surprised, in passing, that they hadn’t evolved a better excuse, abrupt though the departure had obviously been.
‘I’m sure it will be,’ she said. ‘But it’s meant an upset.’
‘What?’
Ann smiled, pleased with her secret. ‘I know it’s your birthday and I got tickets for the new Bolshoi production and I planned it as a surprise, for the three of us to go.’
‘What a nice thought,’ said Brinkman.
‘Now Eddie won’t be able to make it, of course,’ she said. ‘But there’s no point in wasting all the tickets, is there?’
‘None at all,’ agreed Brinkman. ‘We’ll make a party out of it.’
Ann wondered what Betty Harrison’s reaction would be, when she found out. It would be better if she didn’t.
The rioting that occurred in Emba and in Poltava and Donetsk – which by bitter irony had been quickly stopped by rushing the first arrival of the Canadian and American wheat to both provinces – was published in one of the widest circulating zamizdat in Moscow. Sokol flooded the city, rounding up the known dissidents and seizing as many copies as he could but from his informants he knew he didn’t get them all and that the stories were around the capital. The summons was very quick, coming from Panov.
‘Precisely what we didn’t want,’ declared the KGB chairman, without any preliminaries. ‘Speculation abroad is irrelevant. And inevitable. But the Politburo declared against the stories circulating internally. You knew that.’
Sokol knew many things. He knew that the conversation was being recorded, for Panov’s defence if any purge began. But worst of all Sokol knew that if it had reached Politburo level then he was failing in the very objective towards which he had set out, bringing himself to the notice of the rulers in a favourable light. Conscious of the recording, he said, ‘We’ve quelled the unrest in Kazakhstan. And Ukraine.’
‘I’m not interested for the moment in two of the republics. I’m interested in the famine being known and talked about here, in Moscow. And the fact that it is in two separate republics being known as well. That was another assurance you gave me: that you’d contained the spread, from one to another.’
‘All the best-known dissidents are under detention.’
‘Which the Western press, which feeds off them, will report and because they already know thanks to the American announcement of the famine will interpret correctly as the connection. This is emerging into a full scale crisis. And I don’t mean the crisis of people starving. I mean the crisis here, within this building.’
‘The wheat and grain shipments are on stream now. I believe I can contain it.’
‘If you don’t,’ said Panov, in open threat, ‘others will.’
Chapter Thirteen
Blair showered and shaved and changed but still felt cotton-headed. Ruth suggested he try to sleep but he decided against it, not imagining it would be possible despite the aching tiredness. She prepared meatloaf, needing something quick and knowing it was one of his favourites anyway and he tried to eat it – appreciating her effort – but that wasn’t easy either, because he was full of events and airline food. Each tried to over-compensate, urgently beginning conversations – sometimes in competition with each other – and stumbling either into conversational cul-de-sacs or just as abrupt stops, each urging the other to lead. The only positive talk was how they would proceed when the boys came home, after Ruth confessed she hadn’t warned them of their father’s return, for fear that Paul might run to avoid the confrontation. Like so much else – everything else – Blair found it difficult to conceive that his son might try to run away from him. After the difficult meal Blair called each of the counsellors to arrange the required appointments, putting himself at their schedule convenience and thanking both for the help and consideration they had already shown. Still at the telephone he hesitated about calling Langley and decided against it. Instead, still with time to occupy and not wanting to crowd Ruth by his presence, because he was aware of her discomfort, he strolled into the bedroom that the boys shared, gazing around, trying to remember. Very little seemed the same; he supposed it had to be more than two years, nearer three, since he’d been here, actually in the house. It was bound to have changed. Everything was neat, like the rest of the house and like the rest of the house he guessed that it was Ruth, not the boys. There were a couple of junior pennants against a wall and on another, facing it, some advertising posters of a pop group he’d never heard of. Near the bed he guessed to be John’s, because there was a ratty, dirtied-by-love fur dog on the pillow, guarding whatever secrets were beneath, were what appeared from where Blair stood to be some perfectly made-up model kits. Beside Paul’s bed was a baseball bat and a catcher’s mitt; the mitt seemed new and Blair wondered if that was how the boy had spent the twenty dollars he’d sent for his birthday. On the bureau which divided the two beds there was a picture of them both, with Ruth smiling in between. Blair’s own photograph was framed on the wall, squinting into the sunlight from the open terrace of the Continental Hotel in Saigon, his first overseas posting, when he was still young and the American involvement in Vietnam was comparatively new and no one had realise what sort of war it was going to turn out to be. How was this war going to turn out to be? he wondered.
Blair turned at the sound behind him. Ruth had changed, like he had. It was a severe, businesslike suit, the sort of suit to wear to interviews or special meetings – which he supposed this was – and she was carefully made up, not overly so, but properly, as if she had considered that, too.
‘They’ll be home soon,’ said Ruth. ‘Jane Collins has the car pool today: she lives just opposite.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I’m scared, Eddie.’
‘So am I,’ he confessed.
They walked unspeakingly back into the main room and he said, ‘They’ll see the car I rented.’
‘It won’t mean anything.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘Can I get you anything? Coffee or a drink or something?’
‘No thanks.’ There was a silence and then Blair said, ‘Do you really think he might have run rather than face me?’
‘I don’t know, not really,’ admitted Ruth. ‘I just spend my time trying to imagine everything that could happen and then doing things to prevent it.’
Poor Ruth, he thought. Poor innocent, trusting, decent Ruth who’d never deserved anything bad and got shit, from every direction.