Red to Black f-1

by Alex Dryden

  ‘Might you have married me if your father hadn’t wanted you to?’ he asked me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’

  He looked pleased.

  ‘Why haven’t you married?’ I asked him. ‘You should be married. You’re the marrying type.’

  ‘What does that mean!’ he protested, and then he laughed easily. ‘Anyway, you can talk.’

  ‘One day I want to settle down at Barvikha,’ I said, ‘with four children and a good Russian husband.’

  ‘You’d better get on with it, then,’ he said. ‘You’ll be over the hill.’

  I punched him on the shoulder and caught him right on the nerve and he bent over in pain hugging his shoulder.

  ‘Thank God I didn’t marry you,’ he said through gritted teeth.

  Later we were sitting very close on the porch, facing each other on two stools, elbows on our knees and each cradling a bottle of beer. I saw a gleam of tenderness and excitement in his eyes.

  ‘I’ve always liked you, Vladimir,’ I said.

  I saw he couldn’t speak. Then he looked down, unable to hold my eyes.

  ‘You’re the only woman I’ve ever asked to marry me, that’s the truth, Anna,’ he said. ‘I never wanted to marry anyone else.’

  I put my hand on his arm and he looked up.

  ‘Maybe…?’ he said, and he let the question hang in the air.

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ I replied.

  For our remaining days at the Forest, we shared a bed and I told him that when this was all over, we should get married. I don’t know if this was the cruellest lie I’ve ever told in my life. I don’t know, because I don’t know what his motives were, whether he was genuine or whether he was one more hook they wanted to plant in me before I went to Finn. I trusted nobody. Why should I? We were in the Forest and I was being prepared to find the thing the Patriots most wanted to find, the enemy within. But for my purposes, it suited me for them to believe I was committed to Russia and that Vladimir was my personal route home.

  On the last night at the Forest, lying in bed, I told Vladimir I loved him.

  ‘I’ve never told any man that before,’ I said.

  I don’t know if we were both play-acting, or if it was just me. All I know is that, a few days before my rendezvous with Finn, I’d told another man I loved him, and I’d never told Finn that.

  On a hot day at the end of September, I was summoned to Patrushev’s dacha, to the north of Moscow and across the lake from the dacha where Putin entertains world leaders. When I arrived in the car that Patrushev had sent, I saw that it was a meeting to be attended only by Patrushev, myself and Vladimir. I justified my great lie by the presence of Vladimir on that day. If he were so far on the inside, then how could I ever trust that his feelings for me were genuine either?

  Patrushev made a stirring speech at the dacha about my importance to my country and the crucial role I had to play.

  ‘And we’ll keep an eye on your grandmother for you,’ he said. ‘I know how much you care for her.’

  It was the usual threat. Despite my training, my job, my father and heritage, despite my visible attachment to Vladimir, they knew the only place my heart had always been, with Nana.

  When it was time to leave, Patrushev stood and we toasted Russia. He took me by the shoulders and looked at me with his penetrating eyes.

  ‘Remember, Colonel,’ he warned me, ‘his only interest in you is to use you. All the rest is fake.’

  Vladimir came to the airport with me and we–or was it just I?–made a great false show of hugging and kissing each other.

  22

  AFTER MORE THAN A YEAR without contact between Finn and me, our reunion held all the anticipation–principally the fear and doubts–that any lover would have felt in the same position.

  How would we feel about each other now, I wondered, away from the familiarity of the surroundings where our intimacy had grown? Was our affair a thing of a particular time and place? Would the spark between us still exist? Would it need rekindling?

  Too much expectation risked disappointment, too little risked failing to rise to the occasion and, perhaps, missing the moment, the opportunity, for ever.

  I felt awkward and out of place at the airport in Marseilles, coming through the sliding glass doors beyond Immigration. There were groups of my fellow Russians already brimming with enthusiasm for a summer holiday away from Moscow’s more anxious heat. My own arrival brought me face to face with a task that now seemed impossible: to love Finn and satisfy my masters.

  I didn’t see Finn at first. And then something drew my gaze towards a figure leaning against a car rental desk by the exit. He was reading a newspaper and it covered most of his face. Between us was a throng of taxi drivers and private chauffeurs holding cards with names on them.

  I looked idly across the airport’s concourse and wondered who was from the Forest here, who had travelled with me on the plane, and where they were placed in the hall now.

  The reason I didn’t see Finn at first was because he’d almost completely changed. He was very tanned and hadn’t shaved for several days. His hair was long, down to his shoulders, and he’d dyed it a sort of dirty blond. He was wearing a light blue canvas jacket and jeans and, I was startled to see when he flicked the newspaper over briefly, he had no shirt under the jacket. Around his neck I saw a necklace of blue stones, lapis maybe. It was his feet I finally recognised. He wore a pair of old deck shoes with paint on the left shoe. I remembered them from his flat in Moscow.

  In a split second our eyes met and then he looked away, still holding the newspaper. He walked with measured swiftness in the opposite direction and exited through automatic glass doors into the azure heat. I didn’t follow him but exited through other automatic doors straight ahead of me. We found ourselves thirty yards apart, on the pavement where the taxis and buses pulled up. We were separated by travellers, their luggage, drivers, porters and airport staff. There was a convenient pandemonium of greeting, and the loading of vehicles.

  From the corner of my eye I saw Finn walk quickly across the road, dodging cars, and I followed parallel, keeping the thirty yards between us. Madly, I was briefly irritated in the heat that he wasn’t carrying my heavy case.

  I saw him weave into a car park. I watched him look around lazily, behind and in front, and automatically made the same scan myself to see if anyone on foot was tailing either of us. For me in the crush, it was impossible to know, but he seemed to be clear. I saw him flick a switch on a bunch of keys and the lights on a white Renault flashed. I stopped on the far side of the slip road.

  He got into the car, reversed out and drove slowly down the slip road towards me. I watched to see if other cars did the same. He stopped the car and threw open the passenger door and one of the rear doors. I manhandled my case on to the back seat and stepped in beside him.

  I had forgotten it would be like this. Because it was Finn I was meeting, I was unprepared for it. His first words to me were matter-of-fact.

  ‘What’s behind?’

  ‘A dark blue BMW about twenty yards away and a white Mercedes behind that.’

  ‘Ahead?’

  ‘Green Peugeot and a taxi.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said, and grinned straight into my heart.

  We drew up at the automatic barrier and there were queues at all the barriers on either side. Finn put the parking card into the machine and the barrier rose. Before he accelerated through, he slid a thin metal card into the machine’s slot. We drove under the barrier, I saw him watch it fall in the mirror behind us, and then he grinned. The blue BMW couldn’t get the machine to accept its own parking card and was trying to reverse out, but there were at least four cars behind it. We drove out to the sound of angry horns.

  ‘There’ll be at least one ahead,’ Finn said. ‘They’re watching you, not me.’

  ‘There,’ I said.

  A green Peugeot was pulled over on to the grass fifty yards away and as we passed, it slip
ped on to the road behind us.

  ‘Look out for others,’ Finn said.

  We turned westwards out on to the motorway. I watched in the side mirror for what was behind us, the green Peugeot and whatever else might be following. Finn drove fast so that when, some twenty minutes after we’d left the airport behind us, he suddenly pulled up on the hard shoulder, I was jolted forwards.

  ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, looking in the mirror.

  The green Peugeot overshot by forty yards or so and swerved on to the hard shoulder also.

  ‘There they are,’ Finn said.

  I saw the passenger talking into a phone.

  Traffic passed us, but no one else stopped. I was watching the green Peugeot ahead of us further down the hard shoulder when Finn slammed his foot on to the accelerator and we surged backwards for thirty yards and then he slammed the gear lever into first and swung the wheel down to the left and on to a motorway works entrance that was so concealed I hadn’t seen it.

  We left the motorway in a squeal of tyres and crashed on to a dusty track that led to a quarry-like bowl full of road-making machinery.

  Finn drove through this apparent dead end and out of the other side on to another dust track that led back in the direction we’d come from. I looked behind and saw the green Peugeot racing backwards along the hard shoulder.

  Finn drove at breakneck speed for about a mile. I looked behind and saw dust kicking up far away as the green Peugeot finally found its way out of the quarry behind us.

  The track we were on led back under the motorway and joined a small country road. Finn turned on to it and headed back again in the direction we’d been travelling on the motorway.

  There was a distance of half a mile to the car behind and its occupants couldn’t have seen which way we’d turned on to the country road. Finn accelerated and drove so fast I hardly noticed what we were passing. We turned off again twice, on to two more single-track country roads like the first one. When he was finally satisfied he had lost our tail, he slowed and turned off on to another dust road that led out southwards over a great expanse of dead, flat, bleak saltpans that stretched for miles in either direction.

  There was no other traffic, not even the occasional slow farm vehicle we’d overtaken on the side roads. Finn drove the car out of sight into a gully and we waited, not speaking.

  When we came back up on to the track he drove very slowly and on the grass edges, so that the dust didn’t kick up. We must have driven for another twenty minutes on this winding track across the old, disused saltpans. And then I felt rather than saw the sea. We were so low that the dunes ahead obscured the view.

  We seemed to be heading nowhere in a salt-and-sand desert. But when we finally reached the dunes and Finn pulled up behind them, I saw there was a dilapidated wooden shack, obscured from the road. It was a campers’ restaurant, open only in the summer, which contained a few drifting adolescents sitting at rickety tables. Beyond the wooden structure of the restaurant were two more rickety wooden buildings, small shacks erected in a chaotic, haphazard fashion and constructed from what looked like bleached driftwood. Finn cut the engine and looked at me.

  ‘Fancy a swim?’ he said and grinned again. We got out of the car. ‘And I think it’s about time I carried your case,’ he said.

  We walked across hot sand–I’d kicked off my shoes–past the restaurant and up to the second of the two shacks built at an angle to the sea. We still haven’t touched each other, I thought. The door to the shack was unlocked and Finn pushed it open with his foot and threw the case down. Then he took off his jacket and his jeans to reveal a pair of faded blue floral swimming shorts. He ran down the beach and into the sea, not stopping until the water became too deep and he fell forwards into it.

  He looked round when he’d come up from under the surface and shouted.

  ‘Come on, it’s beautiful.’

  I changed and joined him.

  That was how it was, our first meeting in over a year. Finn never said hello. He didn’t kiss me. He never asked me how the flight was, if I was tired, what my departure from the Forest had been like. It was as if I’d just come back from a visit to the shops, rather than that we hadn’t seen each other for over a year.

  And all this suited me, I realised. Everything I’d half prepared in my mind before our meeting, and that was so inadequate, faded away, and with it went all my awkward anxiety.

  We drink beers sitting in the sand, swim again, and then go to bed in an extremely uncomfortable wooden structure that Finn tells me is the bed. Later we eat out at a table in the sand in front of what Finn insists is the restaurant as the sun starts to sink into the sea.

  There is only fish, Finn informs me. The owner of the shacks is a Hungarian who came over in 1956 after the uprising against the Russians there failed. He’d taught himself to be a fisherman. Back then, when these things were still possible, he’d built the shacks illegally, constructed from driftwood in this isolated place where few people wanted to come and which he’d never left.

  He is now seventy-odd years old, Finn tells me, and whatever there is for lunch every day depends on what he’s caught that morning.

  ‘I didn’t tell him you were Russian, by the way,’ Finn says. Finn has a curious, self-deprecating and ultimately deceitful habit of apologising for who he is and expecting others to as well. In Moscow, when anyone asked him if he was English, he would always say, ‘I’m afraid I am.’ It was a peculiarly English deceit, I thought.

  ‘This is just about the only spot for nearly fifty miles that hasn’t been developed at all,’ Finn says. ‘They can’t build on the saltpans. There’s nothing at all in either direction for several miles. To the left you eventually come to Marseilles’ industrial wasteland.’

  I can see the ugly belching smokestacks in the distance.

  ‘To the right there’s a tourist beach, empty of buildings, three miles along from here. Sometimes you see someone who’s walked it but not often and they don’t do it a second time. It isn’t a pretty place except when you look out to sea.’

  ‘Fast work to find it in three days,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, you didn’t give me much warning, Rabbit.’

  But of course Finn has known the place for years. I find later that the Hungarian, whom Finn introduces as Willy, has some connection to the Service. At any rate Finn persuaded Willy to throw out some hippies from our shack when he received my message that I was coming.

  ‘We’ll be fine here for a while,’ Finn says later. ‘And this place is always here when we need to get away.’ And then, on our first night for fourteen months, he finally falls asleep with his arm around my stomach. I lie and watch the stars and listen to the thin-lipped waves that slip quietly on to the edge of the sand. Some gypsy music is playing from a hippy tent further down the beach. It is as if we’ve never been apart; as if we’ve known each other long before we ever met. It is the same as it was.

  For nearly three days we say nothing about the reason I’m here and slowly the burden of it recedes. Finn ensures that we concentrate just on ourselves. We talk a lot about the distant past, about where we’ve come from, things that aren’t recorded in Finn’s file we kept at the Forest, things we never knew. And I respond with little stories of my own upbringing. It is like the games we used to play in Moscow, teasing each other with what we knew about the other, except that these are revelations, background that neither of us knew before, and we aren’t taunting each other with them any more.

  Finn tells me one evening how he was recruited, or at any rate how they made the initial moves towards his eventual recruitment. He speaks about the past, as we all often do, as if it is something from another life altogether and he was another person then. And I suppose, in Finn’s case more than most, he was another person back then.

  ‘At the beginning of my second year at Cambridge, I was invited to supper by a gay French professor who drank much too much whisky,’ Finn says on this evening, and a smile plays around his eyes at the me
mory. ‘I remember on one occasion he chased me round his flat begging me to allow him to beat me with a hardback copy of Balzac’s Passion in the Desert.

  ‘I didn’t particularly want to accept his invitation to supper. But I was flattered to be asked, even though the reasons for it were fairly obvious. He was always inviting pretty men to his rooms. And I was always easily flattered, Anna,’ Finn says, looking into my eyes so that I see right through them. ‘Even alcoholic pederasts with only one thing on their minds had the power to flatter me in those days, as long as I sensed there was the prospect of mixing with those in high places, or of lifting myself away from my past, or of getting away from myself as I knew me.

  ‘I was hugely impressed by the fantasy of Cambridge as it seemed to me then, and always in my mind I referred back to the commune in Ireland to reassure myself of how far I’d come. I was always looking for something and expecting to find it in the admiration of others. I needed people to be interested in me. So I accepted his invitation and went to high table at Magdalene College on a wet Friday evening, as usual looking for someone or something to tell me who I was.

  ‘There was a full table, about twenty or so of us, and afterwards we went to the French don’s rooms for a bottle or two of port. In our party there was the professor of Philosophy from Oxford, Freddie Ayer, the playwright Tom Stoppard, a Russian specialist from London University, the French don and me.

  ‘The sixth person was Adrian. I remember Freddie Ayer and Tom Stoppard talked for nearly an hour about how far away from earth the Virgin Mary would be now if she’d been travelling at the speed of light. It was bizarre, funny, exciting, stupid, and, most of all, different. It was my fantasy of how university life should be.

  ‘As usual I wanted to be like the people I was with. But all of them, not one individually. I thought I could piece myself together with bits of everybody, like a jigsaw. As usual I wanted to be everybody and felt nobody. I’ve always been good at being whatever the person I’m talking to at the time wants me to be. They like that, in the Service.’