A great house-cleaning had taken place inside his mind, comprising quite humble details as well as grand themes. Because, as Barley had recently observed, it was in humble detail that grand themes wrought their havoc.
The clarity of his view amazed him. He peered round him, took a turn or two, sang a few bars. He came back to where he was, and knew that nothing had been left out.
Not the momentary inflection of uncertainty in her voice. Or the shadow of doubt flitting across the dark pools, of her eyes.
Or Goethe's straight lines of handwriting instead of wild scrawls.
Or Goethe's cumbersome, untypicaljokes about bureaucrats and vodka.
Or Goethe's guilty dirge about the way he had treated her, when for twenty years he had treated her however he had damn well felt like, including using her as a throwaway delivery-girl.
Or Goethe's callow promise to make it all up to her in the future, so long as she'll stay in the game for the time being, when it is an article of Goethe's faith that the future no longer interests him, that his whole obsession is with now: 'There is only now!'
Yet from these spindrift theories that were most likely nothing more than theories, Barley's mind flew effortlessly to the grandest prize of his clarified perception: that in the context of Goethe's notion of what he was achieving, Goethe was right, and that for most of his life Goethe had stood on one side of a corrupt and anachronistic equation while Barley in his ignora nce had stood on the other.
And that if Barley were ever called upon to choose, he would rather go Goethe's path than Ned's or anybody else't, because his presence would be urgently required in the extreme middle ground of which he had elected himself a citizen.
And that everything that had happened.to Barley since Peredelkino had delivered the proof of this. The old isms were dead, the contest between Communism and capitalism had ended in a wet whimper. Its rhetoric had fled underground into the secret chambers of the grey men who were still dancing away long after the music had ended.
As to his loyalty to his country, Barley saw it only as a question of which England he chose to serve. His last ties to the imperial fantasy were dead. The chauvinist drumbeat revolted him. He would rather be trampled by it than march with it. He knew a better England by far, and it was inside himself.
He lay on his bed, waiting for the fear to seize him, but it wouldn't. Instead, he found himself playing a kind of mental chess, because chess was about possibilities, and it seemed best to contemplate them in tranquillity rather than try and sort through them when the roof was falling in.
Because if Armageddon didn't strike, there was nothing lost. But if Armageddon did, there was much to save.
So Barley began to think. And Barley began to make his preparations with a cool head, exactly as Ned would have advised if Ned were still holding the reins.
He thought till early morning and dozed a bit and when he woke he went on thinking, and by the time he strode cheerfully into breakfast already looking round for the fun of the fair, there was an entire section of his head that was given over full time to thinking what the fools who do it describe as the unthinkable.
CHAPTER 14
'Oh come, Ned,' said Clive airily, still elated by the wizardry of the transmission. 'The Bluebird's been ill before. Several times.'
'I know,' said Ned distractedly. 'I know.' And then. 'Maybe I don't mind him being ill. Maybe I mind him writing.'
Sheriton was listening chin in hand, as he had been listening to the tape. An affinity had grown up between Ned and Sheriton, as in an operation it must. They were handling the transfer of power as if it had happened long ago.
'But my dear man, that's what we all do when we're ill,* Clive exclaimed in a misjudged demonstration of human understanding. 'We write to the whole world!'
It had never occurred to me that Clive was capable of illness, or that he had friends to write to.
'I mind him handing chatty letters to mysterious intermediaries. And I mind him talking about trying to bring more materials for Barley,' Ned said. 'We know he never normally writes to her. We know he's security conscious to a fault. Suddenly he falls ill and writes her a gushing five-page love letter via Igor. Igor who? Igor when? How?'
'He should have photographed the letter,' said Clive. becoming disapproving of Barley. 'Or taken it off her. One or the other.'
Ned was too wrapped up in his thoughts to give this suggestion the contempt it deserved.
'How could he? She knows him as a publisher, That's all she knows him as.'
'Unless the Bluebird told her otherwise,' said Clive.
'He wouldn't,' Ned retorted, and returned to his thoughts. 'There was a car,' he said. 'A red car then a white car. You saw the watch report. The red car went in first, then the white car took over.'
'That is pure speculation. On a warm Sunday the whole ofMoscow takes to the countryside,'said Clive knowledgeably.
He waited for a reaction but in vain, so he returned to the subject of the letter. 'Katya didn't have any problems with it,' he objected. 'Katya's not crying foul. She'sjumping forjoy. If she didn't smell a rat, and Scott Blair didn't, why should we - sitting here in London, doing their worrying for them?'
'He asked for the shopping list,' said Ned, as if still hearing distant music. 'A final and exhaustive list of questions. Why did he do that?'
Sheriton had finally stirred himself. He was flagging Ned down with his big paw. 'Ned, Ned, Ned, Ned. Okay? It's Day One again, so we're jumpy. Let's get some sleep.'
He stood up. So did Clive and so did 1. But Ned stayed doggedly rooted where he was, his hands clasped before him on his desk.
Sheriton spoke down at him. With affection, but with force as well. 'Ned, just hear me, Ned, okay? Ned?'
'I'm not deaf.'
'No, but you're tired. Ned, if we bad-mouth this operation one more time, it will never come back. We are going with your man, the one you brought to us in order to persuade us. We moved hell on earth to get this far. We have the source. We have the appropriation. We have the influential audience. We are within pissing distance of filling gaps in our knowledge that no smart machines, no electronic heavy breathers, no Pentagon Jesuits can get within light years of. If we keep our nerve, and Barley does, and Bluebird does, we will have landed a bonanza beyond the dreams of the most accomplished fantasists. If we stay in there.'
But Sheriton was speaking with too much conviction, and his face, for all its pudgy inscrutability, was betraying an almost desperate need.
'Ned?'
'Hearing you, Russell. Loud and clear.'
'Ned, this is no longer a cottage industry, for Christ's sake. We played big, now we have to think big. You don't get bigger than this. Presidential findings are not an invitation to doubt our own good judgment. They are in the way of being orders. Ned, I really think you should get some sleep.'
'I don't think I'm tired,' said Ned.
'I think you are. I think everyone will say you are. I think they may even say Ned was very bullish for the Bluebird until the big bad American wolf came and took his joe away. Then all of a sudden the Bluebird was a very iffy source. I think people are going to say you are tired as hell.'
I glanced at Clive.
Clive too was looking down at Ned, but with eyes so cold they chilled my blood. Time to move you on, they were saying. Time to measure. you for the drop.
Both Henziger and Wicklow kept a close eye on Barley that day and reported on him frequently, Henziger to Cy by whatever means they used, Wicklow by way of an irregular to Paddy. Both attested to his high spirits and relaxed manner, and in differing language to his sovere,ignty. Both described how at breakfast he had enchanted – a couple of Finnish publishers who were showing interest in the Trans-Siberian Railway project.
'They were eating out of his hand,' said Wicklow, providing an unconsciously comic picture of breakfast, but at the Mezh anything is possible.
Both recorded with amusement Barley's determination to act as their tour-guide when they reached the permanent exhibition site, and how he obliged their taxi to drop them at the end of the grand avenue so that, as first-time pilgrims from the world of capitalism, they could make their first approach on foot.
So the two professional spies strolled contentedly through the wet autumn sunshine with their jackets over their shoulders and their joe between them while Barley favoured them with his own eccentric guided tour, extolling the 'late Essoldo period' architecture and the 'Revolutionary Rococo' gardens. He doted on the immense ornamental pool and its golden fish spewing jets of water at the rumps of fifteen naked golden nymphs, one for each of the Socialist republics. He insisted that they dawdle at the white-pillared love bowers and temples of delight - whose portals, he pointed out, were dedicated not to Venus or Bacchus but to the fallen goddesses of the Soviet economy – coal, steel and even atomic energy, Jack!
'He was witty but he wasn't high,' reported Henziger, who had already taken fondly to Barley in Leningrad. 'He was damn funny.'
And from the temples Barley marched them up the triumphal avenue itself, the Emperor's Ride, perhaps a mile of it and heaven knows how broad, celebrating the People's Achievements in the Service of Mankind. And surely no vision of popular power was ever portrayed in such despotic images! he proclaimed. Surely no revolution had so perfectly enshrined everything it had set out to raze to the ground! But by then Barley had to bellow his irreverences over the din of the loudspeakers, which all day long pour floods of self-congratulatory messages on to the -heads of the benighted crowds below.