‘I shouldn’t be here,’ she whispers, suddenly scared of what they are about to do. What has she been thinking? This is too soon, too sudden. Would she even be here if Sonya had not brought up the subject of his trip to Moscow? She does not know. She steps away from him. ‘I have to be up early tomorrow morning.’
‘You can sleep in the afternoon, can’t you?’
‘I suppose so.’ If he would only say it then it would all be fine. She would not feel so rushed. She holds her breath, shaking her head—no, she is thinking, no—but her feet are slipping out of her shoes, and now she is standing in front of him in her stockinged feet. He is watching her but still she hesitates, waiting for something.
Say it, she thinks. Please say it.
She should leave. What if she gets caught? She would get sent down from university in disgrace. She tries to move further away from him but the muscles in her feet will not obey instructions.
Leo takes a step towards her, his eyes fixed on her, and still she cannot move. She feels her hands twitching at her sides, and then, before she has quite made up her mind what to do, she finds that her fingers are trembling at the small metal clasp on the collar of her blouse, and as it falls open she knows that she is not going anywhere. She cannot. She wants to feel his body on hers, his naked skin against her own. She wants to run her hands along the furrow of his spine, to kiss his neck and his chest and wrap her legs around his waist. She wants him to be hers, utterly corruptible.
And she knows that once it is over she will want to cover herself up, her too-thin body delicate against the bulk of his. He will be grateful. He will look at her and kiss her, and then he will offer her his jacket as he smuggles her out of his room in the morning, and she will wish she could have stayed there for ever.
But she also knows, before any of this has happened, when she is still standing in front of him with her blouse open at the neck and her shoes kicked carelessly aside, that no, even after all of this, he still will not say it.
MONDAY, 11.52 A.M.
Special Branch report re: Tour of Russia (departure from Hay’s Wharf, London)
22 May 1938
The following is a list of passengers, all travelling on return tickets between London and Moscow, who left this port for St. Petersburg at 10.15 p.m. today sailing on the steamer Smolny, and who are believed to be members of a party of doctors, scientists and economists visiting Moscow on a tour:
. . . GALICH, Leo Borisovich, Jesus College, Cambridge University, Cambs; ticket no. 7941 . . .
GALICH is of Russian nationality and is currently studying for a PhD in economics at Cambridge University. He has recently purchased various books on Soviet economic policy, also some technical engineering works. He is believed at present to be visiting Moscow as part of a British delegation to an economics conference at the university, but if and when he returns his description is:
Born Leningrad, 20 May 1913, height 6ft 2ins, medium build, hair brown, eyes dark, complexion sallow, clean-shaven. Accent: Germanic. Excellent spoken and written English. We have one photograph which is to be found attached.
The photograph of Leo is produced from Ms. Hart’s slender briefcase and pushed across the table to Joan.
She holds it delicately at the corner while she puts on her reading glasses to squint at it. She has not seen it before. He is dressed in shorts and a white open-necked shirt, long socks and black leather boots. There is a cigarette balancing on his lower lip, smouldering carelessly, the crumbled ends charred and blackened.
Nick stands up and glances at the photograph over her shoulder. ‘So that’s him, is it?’ he asks with a note of curiosity in his voice, in spite of his policy of tactical indifference. ‘Comrade Leo. Off to Russia to prepare himself for the revolution.’
‘He was only going to a . . . ’ she stops, the word eluding her for a second, ‘ . . . a conference.’
Nick’s face registers surprise at Joan’s defensiveness. ‘I was joking.’
Ms. Hart ignores him, instead looking intently at Joan. ‘But he did think the revolution would come, didn’t he? He wanted it to happen.’
‘Yes, but . . . ’ Joan says and then stops. ‘Lots of people thought it was inevitable back then. If you’d suggested to any of them there wouldn’t be a revolution, they’d have said you had your head buried in the sand.’
‘Who exactly do you mean by “they”?’
‘Well, all of them. Leo, Sonya. The others at the meetings.’
‘William?’
‘I don’t know. We never spoke about it. Not directly.’
‘And you?’
Joan shakes her head. ‘I never joined. I was never a member.’
‘Of the Party?’
‘Of anything.’
‘I believe it was Communist International which was their affiliation, was it not?’ Mr. Adams asks. ‘Comintern.’
Joan shrugs but says nothing.
When it is clear that she is not going to expand on this, Mr. Adams leans towards her. ‘You wouldn’t be giving anything away. That was one of the few things we were able to elucidate from Sir William before he died.’ He fixes Joan with a stern look. ‘You must have been under some pressure to join. So why didn’t you?’
A silence.
‘Does it matter?’ Nick asks eventually, his voice impatient. ‘She said she didn’t join.’
‘Your mother’s political beliefs are not irrelevant to this case. It might help her if we can establish—’
‘I wasn’t convinced enough,’ Joan interrupts. ‘I didn’t agree with everything, and I didn’t like the idea of belonging to something that told me what I could think and what I couldn’t.’ She pauses. ‘I might have joined if they hadn’t all been so strict, but that’s always the way with any sort of club, isn’t it? There’s always a party line.’ She looks at Nick. ‘Like that tennis club your father wanted us to join in Sydney. It was the same there.’
Mr. Adams’ expression is one of mild disbelief. ‘I don’t think joining a tennis club is really comparable.’
Joan’s eyes flick to his. ‘You didn’t meet them.’
Nick inhales sharply. ‘But you didn’t join the Communist Party, did you? Or Comintern, or any of them?’
Joan looks at her son and sees in his expression that he is not just impatient. He is pleading with her. He thinks she is not taking this seriously enough. ‘No,’ she whispers.
The furrow in Nick’s forehead disappears and he nods his approval before turning to Mr. Adams. ‘There, see. She didn’t join. She wasn’t convinced enough. When are you going to realise that you’re wasting your time?’
‘Because we’re not, are we, Mrs. Stanley?’
A silence. Joan sits back in her armchair and presses her hand against her forehead. There is a burning sensation behind her eyes, as if the process of recalling such long-ago thoughts and emotions has a physical effect, and the pressure of her hand against her skin is momentarily cooling. No, she didn’t join, but that didn’t mean she didn’t think about it in those early days, especially in the face of the apparent indifference of her fellow students. The Newnham Hockey Team even went on a tour of Germany during the Easter holidays of 1939, in spite of it being quite clear what was happening to the Jews by then, but nobody else in the team raised any objections. It was only Joan who refused to partake in this jaunt to Frankfurt and Wiesbaden, thus putting an end to her hockey career which, truth be told, was stalling anyway, but she was astonished at the lack of support in college for her stance. Nobody else seemed to care all that much. Except Sonya.
She nearly joined then, but to a certain extent, she didn’t join because she didn’t have to. As Leo’s girlfriend, she held the privileged position of being able to come and go as she pleased without being obliged to adhere to the conventions of the group, calling the others ‘comrade’ and reading the set texts while never truly s
aying what she thought. She knew that, while she was sympathetic to many of their ideas, she was not quite able to match their certainty of purpose, their earnest togetherness, and so it was easier for her to remain on the outskirts, not really one of them but accepted all the same.
The second reason she didn’t join is more complicated, and is not one that she would have admitted to anyone at the time, or now for that matter. Refusing to join was simply a way of holding a small piece of herself back from Leo, because even then, before anything had really happened, she had somehow known this was necessary. She remembers how she used to feel when she was with him, succumbing to him, moulding herself around him—it was almost physical, that curling sensation across her back—and she found it disconcerting. It was not how she imagined herself to be. Not very scientific. But, then again, she had never been in love before. Perhaps that was just how it was supposed to feel.
‘For goodness’ sake,’ Nick says, breaking impatiently into the silence. ‘There’s no crime in having had a few leftie friends at university.’
‘We’re building up a picture—’ Ms. Hart begins once more, but she is interrupted by Nick, who has turned to Joan, struck by a sudden thought.
‘Did Dad know about this?’ he asks. ‘I don’t remember either of you ever mentioning politics when I was growing up.’
Joan glances at Ms. Hart and then looks down at her hands, folded carefully in her lap. She nods. ‘Of course,’ she says, her voice calm and level.
Ms. Hart makes a note of this. ‘I’d have thought, in the circumstances, he’d have wanted to know more.’
‘What circumstances?’ Nick asks sharply.
‘He knew enough,’ Joan says quickly. ‘He knew all he needed to know. I didn’t lie to him, Nick.’
Nick raises an eyebrow. ‘I hope not.’
Joan looks back at the photograph of Leo. She doesn’t know who took it or at whom he is looking, not at the camera but slightly to the side, but she recognises the expression on his face, his eyes concentrated behind the lenses of his glasses to give the impression that he is listening intently—which he probably is—while also being conscious of the camera, evident in the slight upturn of his lips, allowing just a hint of that unreadable, blameless smile.
He is back! He is back! He is back! She has prayed for this every night, every morning. It is nearly three months since she last saw him and in that time there have been letters, but not what you might call love letters exactly. They are more like inventories in which he lays out his itinerary of factory visits, hospital visits, details about the Moscow underground system, descriptions of nursery schools where all the children have hair cropped in exactly the same style so you can’t tell the girls from the boys, lists of collectivised farms . . . The list goes on and on.
The air here is fresher than any I have ever breathed, he writes. The central question of the modern world—poverty in the midst of plenty—has been solved, although not yet in its entirety as there are still some technical glitches. But it will come.
There is no mention of the night they spent together in any of his correspondence, although she thinks of it often enough: how he rolled himself on top of her in the morning, raising himself onto his elbows so that his whole body pressed against her. ‘Ah, my little comrade-in-arms,’ he had said, laughing at his own joke while bending down to kiss her neck, his penis thickening against her thigh. ‘Did it hurt much?’
She remembers how she burrowed her face into his neck, breathing in the smell of him, musty and sleepy, and whispered, ‘No, not much.’ And then she had paused, not knowing if it was the right thing to ask or not: ‘Did it hurt you?’
He laughed at this. ‘Of course not. Why would it hurt me? Silly girl.’
There was nothing she could say to that, and he had kissed her neck and breasts before getting up and carelessly tossing a shirt over to her to wear while she drank her tea before he smuggled her out of his college. Does that mean he has done it before? she wonders. And if so, with whom? The blonde girl in the pillbox hat? Possibly. Silly of her to imagine he hasn’t. He’s a man, after all, and he is older than her. She knows it’s different for men, biologically, even though the details of this were never covered in science lessons at school; probably it wouldn’t hurt them anyway. She doesn’t know and she cannot ask, because she does not want him to laugh like that again, and she can’t bring herself to mention it to Sonya.
She has worried about this while he has been away, wondering what it had meant, if it meant anything at all, how it would be between them when he got back. Did he think of her? Did he miss her? But she knows not to write such things to him. He would not know what to do with them. He would reprimand her and think her ridiculous, and so she refrains, adopting his letter-writing style in her replies to him: practical, unemotional, fact-based. It is an unsatisfying style, but she supposes that it is better than nothing. At least it means he is thinking of her.
But now he is back, and she can relax because the first thing he does after dropping off his bag is to climb through the window of the linen cupboard at Newnham College and stride along the corridor to her room as if he has absolute permission to be there. Which he doesn’t. If they were to be discovered like this, lying together in Joan’s narrow bed, the consequences would be disastrous. She knows the rules. If a man must come into your room for whatever reason, it must be with permission from the Head Porter and, in the words of the Senior Mistress of the College, at least one foot of each party must be kept on the floor at all times, a rule which Sonya dismisses as revealing more about the conservative habits of the college authorities than presenting any barriers to copulation, but Joan has not yet plucked up the courage to ask her how exactly this is the case. Perhaps she will find out for herself soon enough.
Joan sits up and tugs the curtain across the window behind them. It is almost dark. The shadows have slunk across the bed and her throat is dry. She gets up, steps over Leo’s crumpled jacket on the floor, his boots, his trousers, until she comes to the small washbasin next to the wardrobe. She hears him stir and looks around.
‘Jo-jo,’ he murmurs, rubbing his eyes and looking up at her. ‘It’s really you.’
She smiles. ‘Of course it’s me.’ She gulps down the glass of lukewarm water, and then returns to bed, sliding her legs under the sheets, feeling the bristly warmth of his body against her skin. Unexpected, somehow. She had not anticipated this amount of heat to come from Leo.
He rolls towards her and pulls her back down under the covers. ‘Do you know what I’d like now?’ he asks, his lips on hers and his hands slipping down towards her bottom.
She leans forward to kiss his neck. ‘I might have an idea.’
‘Roast beef. Potatoes. The lot.’
‘Oh,’ she says, disappointed. ‘And there I was thinking the gnawing sensation in your stomach was desire for me.’
He laughs. ‘It is. But I’m hungry too. The food in Russia was as bad as I remember it.’
And so there it is. He is back, and nothing has changed.
They go to a pub on the outskirts of Cambridge and order two roast dinners, playing ping-pong on the cracked green table next to the fireplace until the food arrives. Untypically for a foreigner, Leo approves of English food. He thinks hot buttered toast is the most delightful thing in the world, and he cannot understand why anyone would wish to taint the perfection of this with anything as garish as jam or marmalade or with something as foul as Marmite. But he wants more than toast now. He wants thick-sliced meat, crispy roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, stuffing, horseradish, carrots, turnips, pickled cabbage, and he wants all of it to be swimming in hot, thick gravy.
When their plates arrive, she picks out a selection of food from her plate to add to his. ‘Have some of mine.’
‘Don’t you want it?’ He does not stop eating while he speaks, but he pushes her offering back towards her.
‘N
o, no. You have it. I can’t eat all of it anyway. And you look hungry.’
He grins, and then spears some of her extra Yorkshire pudding onto his fork. ‘I am. Thanks, Jo-jo. My sweet little comrade.’
There it is, his old name for her, still there. She smiles. ‘What were you eating out there anyway?’
‘Oh, you know. This and that.’
What does that mean? She wants to know, she really does. She cannot imagine what he might have eaten.
‘More than most of the population anyway, that’s for sure.’
Joan frowns. ‘I thought you said . . . ’
He waves his fork. ‘I did. The problem is solved, theoretically.’ He glances back over his shoulder and then leans forward conspiratorially. ‘But I mentioned technical glitches, didn’t I?’
Joan nods.
‘Well,’ he says, and then pauses, seemingly trying to decide whether to confide in Joan or not. ‘You must promise never to mention this to anyone.’
‘Of course I won’t mention it.’
‘No, I mean it. You have to promise.’
Joan looks at him. She does not understand what could be so important but she sees that he wants her to say the words. ‘I promise,’ she says.
He nods. ‘They took me out to the countryside to see what collectivisation meant in practice for the majority of peasants. Most of the farms were pretty well run, but the food production figures they were submitting just didn’t seem to me to add up.’ He pauses and takes a sip of beer. ‘I mentioned this to one of the economists at the university, Grigori Fyodorovich. To be honest, I pestered him about it, and even got my thesis out to go through the figures with him until eventually he cracked.’ He pauses. ‘He told me something that he made me promise I would never link back to him. And I made him that promise. That’s why you must never tell anyone. It’s not my secret, or yours. It’s his.’
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