Proctor-Gould was frowning at him.
‘What do you think you’re up to, Paul?’ he whispered.
‘Got the general sense of it,’ muttered Manning defensively.
‘You were speaking English. Do you realize that?’
‘Gordon, I wasn’t!’
‘You were.’
‘Was I?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh God.’
He hurriedly tried again in Russian, and the speech continued. But the more he translated, the more obsessed he became with his lapse, and the insight it had given Proctor-Gould into his standards of accuracy as an interpreter. And the more he worried about that, the less he heard or remembered of what Proctor-Gould was saying, and the more he had to improvise. It was like a nightmare in which his appalled gazing back at each last disaster brought him blundering into the next.
Now Proctor-Gould was taking up the four books from the table one by one and presenting them.
‘For Professor Rubeshchenskaya,’ Manning heard himself translating, ‘a small memento from her friends in the department at Edinburgh…. For Sasha Zaborin, a volume of his beloved Schubert songs from his old pupils Michael Sloane and Trevor Westland…. For Dean Korolenko, a bound volume of the Proceedings of the Institute of Civic Studies, from the Director and staff of the Institute … And lastly …’
But for whom the last volume was destined Manning didn’t quite catch. He was in the process of descending from the remoteness of the sky into a chair which had somehow appeared to catch him.
‘You’ll feel better sitting down,’ said a gentle, anxious voice. Manning could see Sasha’s thin, wind-blown hair somewhere at the edge of his field of vision.
‘Come over a bit funny,’ he said.
‘You’ll be all right.’
‘Making a fool of myself.’
‘Russian hospitality. It happens to everyone.’
Events became confused, as if in another world. Manning had an impression of applause, of glasses clinking, of laughter. At some stage the chairs were pushed back. People were moving about. Faces bent over him.
‘Hallo,’ he said to them, smiling.
One of the faces was Korolenko’s.
‘Your friend Lippe,’ it seemed to be saying, ‘is ill. She was found in the street. She was taken to the First City Hospital.’
‘Thank you,’ said Manning.
More faces. People leaving the room. Other people coming into the room. Manning caught a glimpse of Proctor-Gould. Old Gordon seemed to be in a bad way as well. Two men in overcoats were holding his elbows. His face was very white.
Then arms were placed under his own armpits, lifting him to his feet, helping him towards the door.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Very kind. Bit tricky at the moment.’
He swivelled his head to see who it was helping him. Not anyone he knew. Two men in overcoats. Friends of friends, perhaps.
Outside the door in one of the great marble corridors of the university, he saw Sasha. He was talking to another man in an overcoat, looking over the man’s shoulder and frowning anxiously at Manning.
‘Sorry, Sasha,’ said Manning.
Farther on down the corridor Konstantin was hovering.
‘Sorry, Kostik,’ said Manning. ‘Ashamed to be seen by you in this condition. I truly am.’
Konstantin shook his head and waved his hand deprecatingly.
‘Never kept our appointment,’ said Manning. ‘Sorry, Kostik.’
Konstantin was left behind. They were going down a broad staircase. People were staring. Manning’s feet muddled up the edges of the stairs, tumbling over them inertly. He felt infinitely sad and ashamed.
‘Sorry,’ he told the men who were holding him. ‘God, I’m sorry!’
He began to cry.
Outside the night was blessedly cool and dark. Down, down the unending flight of ceremonial stairs to the roadway. He was being put into the back of a car. Then the car was full of silent men in overcoats, smelling of scent and cigarettes and sweat.
‘Put his head down,’ said one of them, as the car accelerated across the piazza. ‘He’s going to be sick.’
37
Manning’s acclimatization to captivity was softened for him; on the first day the prison took its place as one more of the after-effects of drunkenness – intimate, timeless, and unreal. By the second day it already felt natural, and indeed inevitable.
There seemed to be no one else in his section of the prison. From the little exercise yard where he was taken for an hour each morning he could sometimes hear the noises of human activity – a shout, someone laughing, a bucket scurring along a stone floor. But he saw no one except the warders who unlocked him and brought him his food. The food was not very much worse than it had been in the Faculty canteen. He was still wearing his own clothes, though his belt, tie, watch and money had disappeared, and the laces had been removed from his shoes. Someone had fetched a few of his belongings and placed them in his cell; he had his own toothbrush and his own shaving tackle, though the blades had gone. Each morning he was unlocked and allowed to slop along in his unlaced shoes to the ablutions at the end of the corridor – a lavatory without a seat or a door, and a sink with a cold tap and a block of hard, cheese-coloured soap. The duty warder fitted one of his confiscated blades into the razor for him, and waited while he made his toilet. All he lacked was a towel. By some administrative oversight, none of his own towels had been included with his belongings, and none was issued by the prison, so that he was forced to dry his hands on his one spare handkerchief, which quickly became sodden.
His sense of isolation and unrelatedness was increased because he did not know where the prison was. He was fairly certain that it was not the Lubianka, where foreign prisoners were usually taken. The outside of the Lubianka was like a large office block, and people said the cells were underground. His own cell was on the first floor, and so far as he could see from the exercise yard the building was more like some sort of old-fashioned penitentiary. He was not even sure that he was still in Moscow. The car ride had seemed to last an eternity. All he could remember about it was being repeatedly, shamefully sick.
He asked the warders who came to unlock him, or to inspect him through the peep-hole, where the prison was, but they never answered. He asked them if Proctor-Gould was in the same prison. They ignored that, too. He asked them what he was charged with. He asked to see someone from the British Embassy. He asked for paper to write to his mother. He asked for a towel. The warders went on with what they were doing as if they had not heard. The questions began to sound foolish even to Manning.
He wondered if the Embassy knew about their arrest. Unless the police had notified them, he thought probably not – at any rate, not yet. There was no one who could have told them. Sasha or Konstantin might have been prepared to, but Russians would not normally be able to communicate with a Western embassy. It was possible, anyway, that Konstantin had been arrested himself at the end of the Faculty dinner. As if from a dream Manning could remember him standing in a corridor … shaking his head at something Manning was saying….
Proctor-Gould’s disappearance would soon be noticed, of course, even if his own was not. Manning tried to remember if he had mentioned any appointments with Embassy people, or with people who might be expected to inform the Embassy if he failed to turn up. Proctor-Gould had too many links and contacts for his absence to go unremarked for more than a day or two at most. Then the Embassy would take action. It was the sort of job they would give to Chylde, who used to invite Manning to his parties. Manning tried to imagine Chylde taking action. He pictured Chylde’s face, all pink and smooth, and heard Chylde’s voice, humbly distributing the alms of his benevolent interest to all those less fortunate creatures in the world who through some unfortunate deficiency of taste, education, nationality, or character had not been selected for the British Foreign Service. It was not an entirely reassuring thought.