'Cemetery on a hillside among a lot of trees. Driver stays in the car. Raining. Not much, but he's worried about his awful suit.' He paused in contemplation of the driver. 'Mad ape,' he muttered.
But I had the feeling Barley was railing at himself and not the driver. I seemed to hear a whole self-accusing chorus in Barley, and I wondered whether the others were hearing it as well. He had people inside himself who really drove him mad.
Point was, Barley explained, that as luck would have it they had hit a day when the liberated masses were out in force. In the past, he said, whenever he'd been there, the place had been deserted. just the fenced-in tombs and the creepy trees. But on that September Sunday with the unfamiliar smells of freedom in the air, there were about two hundred fans crammed round the grave and more by the time they left, all shapes and sizes. Grave was knee-deep in flowers, Barley said. Offerings pouring in all the time. People passing bouquets over the heads to get them on the heap.
Then the readings began. Little chap read poetry. Big girl read prose. Then a filthy little aeroplane flew so low overhead you couldn't hear a thing. Then it flew back the other way. Then back the same way.
'Wang, wang!' Barley yelled, his long wrist whipping back and forth through the air. 'Wee-ah, wee-ah,' he whined through his nose in disgust.
But the plane couldn't damp the enthusiasm of the crowd any more than the rain could. Someone began singing, the punters took up the refrain and it became a knees-up. Finally the plane pushed off, presumably because it was low on fuel. But that wasn't what you felt, said Barley. Not a bit. You felt the singing had shot the little swine out of the sky.
The singing grew stronger and deeper and more mystical. Barley knew three words of Russian, and the others none. Didn't stop them joining in. Didn't stop the girl Magda from crying her eyes out. Or Jumbo Oliphant from swearing to God, through lumps in his throat, as they walked away down the hill that he was going to publish every word Pasternak had written, not just the film but the other stuff, so help me, and subsidise it out of his very own personal pocket as soon as he got back to his damask castle in the docklands.
'Jumbo has these hot flushes of enthusiasm,' Barley explained with a disarming grin, returning to his audience, but principally to Ned. 'Sometimes they don't die down for minutes on end.' Then he paused and frowned again and pulled off his strange round spectacles that seemed to be more an infliction than a help, and peered at everybody in turn as if to remind himself of his situation.
They were still walking down the hill, he said, and still having a good cry when this same little Russian chap came darting up to them holding his cigarette to one side of his face like a candle, asking in English whether they were Americans.
Once again Clive was ahead of all of us. His head slowly lifted. There was a knife-edge to his managerial drawl. 'Same? What same little Russian chap? We haven't had one.'
Unpleasantly reminded of Clive's presence, Barley screwed up his face in a renewal of distaste. 'He was the reader, for goodness' sake,' he said. 'Chap who'd read Pasternak's poetry at the graveside. He asked if we were American. I said no, thank God, British.'
And I noticed, as I supposed we all did, that it was Barley himself, not Oliphant or Emery or the girl Magda, who had become the appointed spokesman of their group.
Barley had fallen into direct dialogue. He had the mynah bird's ear. He had a Russian accent for the little chap and a Scottish woof-woof voice for Oliphant. The mimicry slipped out of him as if he were unaware of it.
'You are writers?' the little chap asked, in Barley's voice for him.
'No, alas. just publishers,' said Barley, in his own.
'English publishers?'
'Here for the Moscow book fair. I run a corner shop called Abercrombie & Blair and this is the Chairman Himself of Lupus Books. Very rich bloke.Be a knight one day. Gold card and bar. Right, Jumbo?'
Oliphant protested that Barley was saying far too much. But the little chap wanted more.
'May I ask then what were you doing at Pasternak's grave?' said the little chap.
'Chance visit,' Oliphant said, barging in again. 'Total chance. We saw a crowd, we came up to see what was going on. Pure chance. Let's go.'
But Barley had no intention of going. He was annoyed by Oliphant's manners, he said, and he wasn't going to stand by while a fat Scottish millionaire gave the brush-off to an undernourished Russian stranger.
'We're doing what everyone else here's doing,' Barley replied. 'We're paying our respects to a great writer. We liked your reading too. Very moving.- Great stuff. Ace.'
'You respect Boris Pasternak?' the little chap asked.
Oliphant again, the great civil rights activist, rendered by a gruff voice and a twisted jaw. 'We have no position on the matter of Boris Pasternak or any other Soviet writer,' he said. 'We're here as guests. Solely as guests. We have no opinions on internal Soviet affairs.'
'We think he's marvellous,' Barley said. 'World class. A star.'
'But why?' asked the little chap, provoking the conflict.
Barley needed no urging. Never mind he wasn't totally convinced that Pasternak was the genius he was cracked up to be, he said. Never mind that, as a matter of fact, he thought Pasternak quite seriously overpraised.That was publisher's opinion, whereas this was war.
'We respect his talent and his art,'Barley replied. 'We respect his humanity. We respect his family and his culture. And tenthly or whatever it is, we respect his capacity to reach the hearts of the Russian people despite the fact that 'he had the daylights hounded out of him by a bunch of bureau-rats who are very probably the same little beasts who sent us that aeroplane.'
'Can you quote him?' the little chap asked.
Barley had that kind of memory, he explained to us awkwardly. 'I gave him the first lines of "Nobel Prize". I thought it was appropriate after that foul aeroplane.'
'Give it to us now, please, will you?' said Clive as if everything had to be checked.
Barley mumbled, and it crossed my mind that he might actually be a very shy man.
'Like a beast in the pen I'm cut offFrom my friends, freedom, the sunBut the hunters are gaining groundI've nowhere else to run.'
The little chap was frowning at the lighted end of his cigarette while he listened to this, said Barley, and for a moment he really did wonder whether they had walked into a provocation, as Oliphant feared.
'If you respect Pasternak so much, why don't you come and meet some friends of mine?' the little chap suggested. 'We are writers here. We have a dacha. We would be honoured to talk to distinguished British publishers.'
Oliphant had only to hear the first half of this speech to develop a severe case of the bends, said Barley.jumbo knew all about accepting invitations from strange Russians. He was an expert on it. He knew how they ensnared you, drugged you,compromised you with disgraceful photographs and obliged you to resign your directorships and give up your chances of a knighthood. He was also in the middle of an ambitious joint publishing deal through VAAP and the last thing he needed was to be found in the company of undesirables. Oliphant boomed all this to Barley in a theatrical whisper that assumed the little stranger was deaf.
'Anyway,' Oliphant ended triumphantly,'it's raining. What arc we going to do about the car?'
Oliphant looked at his watch. The girl Magda looked at the ground. The bloke Emery looked at the girl Magda and thought there could be worse things to do on a Sunday afternoon in Moscow. But Barley, as he told it, took another look at the stranger and decided to like what he saw. He had no designs on the girl or on a knighthood. He had already decided he would rather be photographed in the raw with any number of Russian tarts than fully dressed on the arm of Jumbo Oliphant. So he waved them all off in Jumbo's car, and threw in his lot with the stranger.
'Nezhdanov,', Barley declared abruptly to the silent room, interrupting his own flow. 'I've remembered the chap's name. Nezhdanov. Playwright. Ran one of these studio theatres,couldn't put on his own plays.'
Walter spoke, his soaring voice shattering the momentary lull. 'My dear boy, Vitaly Nezhdanov is a laterday hero. He has three one-acters opening in Moscow just five weeks from now, and everyone has the most exotic hopes for them. Not that he's a blind bit of good, but we're not allowed to say that because he's a dissident. Or was.'
For the first time since I had set eyes on him, Barley's face took on a sublimely happy aspect, and at once I had the feeling that this was the real man, whom the clouds till now had hidden. 'Oh, now that's really great,' he said with the simple pleasure of someone able to enjoy another man's success. 'Fantastic. That's just what Vitaly needed. Thanks for telling me, he said, looking a fraction of his age.
Then once again his face darkened over and he began drinking his whisky in little nips. 'Well, there we all were,' he murmured vaguely. 'More the merrier. Meet my cousin. Have a sausage roll.' But his eyes, I noticed, like his words, had acquired a remote quality, as if he were already looking forward to an ordeal.
I glanced along the table. Bob smiling. Bob would smile on his death bed, but with an old scout's sincerity. Clive in profile, his face keen as an axe and about as profound. Walter never at rest. Walter with his clever head thrown back, twisting a hank of hair around his spongy forefinger while he smirked at the ornate ceiling, writhed and sweated. And Ned, the leader - capable. resourceful Ned - Ned the linguist and the warrior, the doer and the planner - sitting as he had sat from the beginning, to attention, waiting for the order to advance. Some people, I reflected, watching him, are cursed with too much loyalty, for a day could come when there was nothing left for them to serve.