wife Marsha said: ‘I was worried about you, Harry. I thought perhaps you’d been hurt in a fight. You do provoke people so.’
‘I don’t get hurt,’ Harry said. ‘It’s the others who get hurt. And as for your husband …’ he rounded on his mother-in-law ‘… the only reason he let me go was because he knew he’d be the laughing stock sobering up his own son-in-law. That and the fact that he was scared stiff of what you’d say.’
‘I would have been all for keeping you in,’ she said. ‘Best place for you if you ask me.’
‘No one is asking you. But the point is Leonid thought you would be angry if he kept me in and brought disgrace to the family. As it is I was never officially there. And the drunks won’t be able to spread gossip about me when they wake up in the morning.’
His mother-in-law was planted in front of the dead television set to which she seemed to address her remarks. She was eating small biscuits as hard as nuts from a box on the table beside her. She was grossly fat, Harry thought. Like most Russian women. A sexless lump of peasant stock.
‘What’s for dinner?’ Harry asked.
‘Strogonoff,’ said his wife. ‘I’m sorry, Harry, but it’s a bit dried up. You’re so late, you see.’
Harry was again reminded of the injustice of life. ‘Strogonoff,’ he said. ‘It’s always bloody Strogonoff. Can’t you cook anything else?’
‘I thought it was your favourite, Harry. You always said it was.’
‘Well it isn’t,’ Harry said. ‘Get me something else.’
‘Give him nothing,’ said his mother-in-law to the television set.
Marsha said: ‘There’s nothing else to eat. I made the Strogonoff especially for you. You’ve got to eat more now the cold weather’s coming.’
‘I suppose that means the borsch season’s starting,’ Harry said. ‘Bowls and bowls of bloody borsch.’
‘I’ll make other soups. You know you like the way I do them.’
Harry massaged his shrunken belly, wishing his fingers could reach the pain inside. ‘You know what I’d like?’ he said. ‘I’d like baked beans on toast. That’s what I’d like. And a great mug of decent tea. And a slab of Cheddar cheese to follow.’
Marsha said: ‘There’s a little bit of cheese and sausage left. I could cut them up with some salad.’
‘You don’t know what real sausages are like,’ Harry said. ‘Not real sausages.’ He undid his belt. ‘Anyway I’ll have a bit of cooked cheese.’
He sank back in his chair and examined the flat. It smelled of food and soap and the cologne he used to drown all odours. A bowl of plastic flowers stood on the table; in one corner of the room was a brass simova which was never used. Through a crack in the patched curtains he could see the snow on the window-sill. On the old cabinet, its surface fingered with black cigarette burns, stood a half-full bottle of Haig which he kept for Western visitors. But only the newcomers to Moscow came these days; they came once, said how much they had enjoyed themselves, and never came again.
He ate the cheese, cooked Georgian style, with exaggerated effort. ‘It’s like bloody chewing gum,’ he said. ‘Why can’t we get some decent cheese?’
His wife returned to the kitchen. He knew she was crying and he felt a little ashamed of himself for upsetting her. He followed her, uncertain whether to placate her or to continue the persecution. She was washing dishes. The tears slid down her cheeks and fell in the water.
‘Can I help you?’ he said.
She shook her head.
‘Are you going to sulk all night?’
‘I’m not sulking.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry I was a bit narked. It’s that old bitch in there.’
‘She’s my mother. Why can’t you be a bit nicer to her?’
The anger that rose and fell like a yo-yo these days bounced back. He had apologised and the gesture had been ignored. ‘I’ll do for her one of these days,’ he said.
‘Oh Harry,’ she said. ‘Oh Harry.’
‘Are you sorry you married me? A bloody Englishman?’
She put the dishes away. ‘It’s time to go to bed,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to get up in the morning.’
They turned down the sofa and made up the camp bed in the kitchen for Marsha’s mother.
After they had been in bed for half an hour Harry decided to make it up with his wife. He turned to her but she was asleep. Her tranquillity, her ability to sleep immediately after a crisis and her regular breathing fortified the poison in his mind. In the morning, he decided, he would ask some of his Western friends about the possibility of returning to Britain. After all he was British by birth.
The first few days of Richard Mortimer’s Russian experience surged swiftly past, time unheeded, appreciation at night dulled by cocktail and dinner parties. Everything was somehow as he had expected it, except the melting of the snow by day and the autumn fogs that blurred the afternoons and thickened the nights.
The embassy was as he would have expected it had he thought about it. Dignified and self-effacing outside; rich and brooding inside. Militiamen saluting and noting his new face at the gates and Kensington trees, just waiting there, with barks flaking and last leaves falling.
Across the river from the embassy stood the Kremlin. Stalin’s Kremlin in his mind. Mulled red walls embracing spires and domes, theatres, residences, halls, cathedrals. Stalin and the Kremlin: the names fused into an awesome entity. And here he was gazing upon it, working opposite it; he Richard Mortimer late of Dulwich, Cambridge and the Foreign Office. ‘I am here,’ he thought. ‘In Moscow. Beside the Kremlin.’
Inside the embassy the walls were made of dark carved wood. The building had been owned by a sugar baron in the days of splendour and poverty before such barons had fled or been put to the sword and all their sugar distributed among the people. On his first day there he saw a middle-aged man in grey walking down the broad stairs with his hands behind his back. The man looked at him without interest and vanished down the corridor, bright shoes treading lightly on the carpet.
One of the men at the reception desk said: ‘Your new boss.’
‘Was that the Ambassador?’
‘That was his nibs all right.’
Richard Mortimer hesitated. He wanted to what what the Ambassador was like, but he wasn’t sure how to conduct himself with the men at the desk. They treated him without deference, without familiarity. He imagined them describing him as ‘a cocky young bugger’ and flushed at the thought. ‘What’s he like?’ he asked.
‘He’s all right,’ they said.
The
