The Russia House

Barley, Barley, everyone his friend except Clive, who never once, to my memory, called him anything but Blair.

'Yes, do that, will you. Read it aloud,'said Clive, making an order of it, and Barley to my surprise seemed to think it a good idea. Sitting himself up with one jointless movement of his back, he arranged his torso in such a way that both the letter and his face were in the light. Frowning as before, he started reading aloud in a tone of studied mystification.

'My beloved Barley.' He tilted the letter and began again. 'My beloved Barley, Do you remember a promise you made to me one night in Peredelkino as we lay on the verandah of our friends' dacha and recited to each other the poetry of a great Russian mystic who loved England? You swore to me that you would always prefer humanity to nations and that when the day came you would act like a decent human being.'

He had stopped again.

'Is none of that true?' said Clive.

'I told you. I never met the hag!'

There was a force in Barley's denial that was not there before. He was shoving back something that was threatening him.

'So now I am asking you to redeem your promise, though not in the way we might have imagined that night when we agreed to become lovers. Total balls,' he muttered. 'Silly cow's got it all mixed up. I ask you to show this book to English people who think as we do. Publish it for me, using the arguments you expressed with so much fire. Show it to your scientists and artists and intelligentsia and tell them it is the first stone of a great avalanche and they must throw the next stone for themselves. Tell them that with the new openness we can move together to destroy the destruction and castrate the monster we have created. Ask them which is more dangerous to mankind: to conform like a slave or resist like a man? Act like a decent human being, Barley. I love Herzen's England and you. Your loving K. Who the hell is she? She's off her tree. They both are.'

Leaving the letter on the table, Barley wandered off into the dark end of the room, softly cursing, hammering his right fist downward on to the air. 'Hell's the woman up to?' he protested. 'She's taken two completely different stories and twisted them together. Anyway, where's the book?'He had remembered us and was facing us again.

'The book is safe,' said Clive, with a sideways glance at me.

'Where is it, please? It's mine.'

'We rather thought it was her friend's,'said Clive.

'I've been charged with it. You saw what he wrote. I'm his publisher. It's mine. You've no right to it.'

He had landed with both feet in the very ground we wished him not to enter. But Clive was quick to distract him.

'He?' Clive repeated. 'You mean Katya's a man? Why do you say he? You really are confusing us, you know. You're a confusing person, I suppose.'

I had been expecting the outburst sooner. I had sensed already that Barley's submissiveness was a truce and not a victory, and that each time Clive reined him in he brought him nearer to revolt. So that when Barley sauntered up to the table, leaned across it and slackly raised his hands, palms forward, from his sides, in what might well have been a docile gesture of helplessness, I did not necessarily expect him to offer Clive a sweetly reasoned answer to his question. But not even I had reckoned with the scale of the detonation.

'You have no damned right!' Barley bellowed straight into Clive's face, smashing his palms on to the table so hard that my papers bounced up and down in front of me. Brock came rushing from the hall. Ned had to order him back. 'That's my manuscript. Sent tome by my author. For my consideration in my good time. You have no right to steal it, read it or keep it. So give me the book and go home to your squalid island.' He flung out an arm at Bob. 'And take your Boston Brahmin with you.'

'Our island,' Clive reminded him. 'The book, as you call it, is not a book at all and neither you nor we have any right to it,' he continued frigidly and untruthfully. 'I'm not interested in your precious publishing ethics. Nobody here is. All we know is, the manuscript in question contains military secrets about the Soviet Union that, assuming they are true, are vital to the defence of the West. To which hemisphere you also belong - I take it, thankfully. What would you do in our place? Ignore it? Throw it into the sea? Or try to find out how it came to be addressed to a derelict British publisher?'

'He wants it published! By me! Not hidden in your vaults!'

'Quite,' said Clive with another glance at me.

'The manuscript has been officially impounded and classified as top secret,' I said. 'It's subject to the same restrictions as this meeting. But even more so.' My old law tutor would have turned in his grave - not, I am afraid, for the first time. But it's always wonderful what a lawyer can achieve when nobody knows the law.

One minute and fourteen seconds was how long the silence lasted on the tape. Ned timed it with his stopwatch when he got back to the Russia House. He had been waiting for it, even relishing it, but he still began to fear that he had hit one of those maddening faults that always seem to happen with recorders at the crucial moment. But when he listened harder he caught the grumble of a distant car and a scrap of girl's laughter carrying to the window, because Barley by then had thrown the curtains open and was staring down into the square. For one minute and fourteen seconds, then, we watched Barley's strangely articulate back silhouetted against the Lisbon night.Then comes a most frightful crash like the shattering of several windowpanes at once, followed by an oil gush,and you would suppose that Barley had staged his long-delayed breakout,taking the ornamental Portuguese wall plates and curly flower vases with him. But the truth is, the whole rumpus is only the sound of Barley discovering the drinks table and dumping three cubes of ice into a crystal tumbler and pouring a decent measure of Scotch over them, all within a couple of inches' range of a microphone that Brock with his characteristic. over-production had concealed in one of the richly carved compartments.

CHAPTER 4

He had made a base camp at his own end of the room on a stiff school chair as far away from us as he could get. He perched on it sideways to us, stooped over his whisky glass, which he held in both hands, peering into it like a great thinker or at least a lonely one. He spoke not to us but to himself, emphatically and scathingly,not stirring except to take a sip from his glass or duck his head in affirmation of some private and usually abstracted point of narrative. He spoke in the mixture of pedantry and disbelief that people use to reconstruct a disastrous episode, such as a death or a traffic accident. So I was here and you were there and the other chap came from over there.

'It was last Moscow book fair. The Sunday. Not the Sunday before, the Sunday after,' he said.

'September,' Ned suggested, at which Barley rolled his head around and muttered 'Thanks,' as if genuinely grateful to be prodded. Then he wrinkled his nose and fussed his spectacles and began again.

'We were knackered,' he said. 'Most of the exhibitors had got out on the Friday. It was only a bunch of us who hung around. Those who had contracts to tidy up, or no particular reason to get back in a hurry.'

He was a compelling man and he had centre stage. It was difficult not to attach to him a little, stuck out there on his own. It was difficult not to think, 'There, but for the grace of God, go!' And the more so since none of us knew where he was going.

'We got drunk on Saturday night and on the Sunday we drove out to Peredelkino in Jumbo's car.' Once again he seemed to have to remind himself that he had an audience. 'Peredelkino is the Soviet writers' village,' he said as if none of us had heard of it. 'They get dachas there for as long as they behave themselves. Writers' Union runs it on a members-only basis – who gets a dacha, who writes best in prison, who doesn't write at all.'

'Who's Jumbo?' said Ned – a rare interjection.

'Jumbo Oliphant. Peter Oliphant.Chairman of Lupus Books. Closet Scottish Fascist. Black belt Freemason. Thinks he's got a special wavelength to the Sovs. Gold card.' Remembering Bob, he tilted his head at him. 'Not American Express, I'm afraid. A Moscow book fair gold card, dished out by the Russian organisers, saying what a big boy he is. Free car, free translator, free hotel, free caviar.jumbo was born with a gold card in his mouth.'

Bob grinned too broadly in order to show the joke was taken in good part. Yet he was a large-hearted man and Barley had spotted this. Barley, it occurred to me, was one of those people from whom good natures cannot hide, just as he 'could not disguise his own accessibility.

'So off we all went,' Barley resumed,returning to his reverie. 'Oliphant from Lupus, Emery from the Bodley Head.And some girl from Penguin, can't remember her name. Yes, I can. Magda.How the hell could I forget a Magda? And Blair from A & B.'

Riding like nabobs in jumbo's stupid limo, said Barley, tossing out short sentences like old clothes from his memory box. Ordinary car not good enough for our Jumbo, had to be a damn great Chaika with curtains in the bedroom, no brakes and a gorilla with bad breath for a driver. The plan was to take a look at Pasternak's dacha which rumour had it was about to be declared a museum,though another rumour insisted that the bastards were about to pull it down. Maybe his grave as well. Jumbo Oliphant didn't know who Pasternak was at first but Magda murmured 'Zhivago' and Jumbo had seen the film, said Barley. There was no earthly hurry, all they wanted was a bit of a walk and a peck of country air. But Jumbo's driver used the special lane reserved for official roadhogs in Chaikas, so they did the journey in about ten seconds flat instead of an hour, parked in a puddle and schlepped upto the cemetery still trembling with gratitude from the drive.