‘I think he said it was…’ A twiddle of the fingers. ‘Ben! I think it was Ben!’
‘Ben!’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re saying he’s just been here?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s been here before, hasn’t he?’ He remembered she had met him more than once at Scythian Gold when he and Joe were both still working for RGD. He had also once brought him here to her flat in Inchbald Terrace. ‘Okay, so he came here. Why?’
‘I didn’t recognise him at once.’ She had her back to him as she filled an electric kettle. ‘A hot drink, that’s what you need. He had a beard and I couldn’t really see him properly when he was at the front door. I’d only just got back, you see, and had hardly had time to take my coat off. I suppose he’d been waiting for me.’ She switched on the kettle and got two mugs from a cupboard. ‘Tea, okay? Yes, well, he didn’t stay long. No more than ten minutes. And it was his idea to go out the back way. I said it would be wet. And muddy.’ She pointed to Joe’s shoe in demonstration. ‘I think he was frightened, you know.’
‘Frightened?’ He ran his tongue round his lips, tasting their dryness in recognition of his own nerves. ‘I think I can understand that. Why did he want to find me?’
‘He said something rather vague about having more work for you.’
He grunted. ‘Right. Did he say what kind?’
‘As I said, he wasn’t here long. He said he’d been to Courtier Street, but been told you weren’t there. So he came here because at least he’d been here before. Oh, but he left something! I forgot about that! I put it in the hall. He’s really strange, isn’t he? A very strange man. Just a minute, I’ll get it.’
She returned with some tightly folded paper that, when unfolded, contained a message in large print.
‘Typical of him!’ Joe showed her the message and quickly refolded the sheet of paper and stuffed it into his damp jacket.
‘Well, what’s it mean?’
He smiled at her perfectly clear and sensible question. ‘Code.’ He sneezed suddenly. ‘It’s code. A typically silly code. With him everything has to be coded!’
‘So what’s it mean?’
‘It means it was Ben. That’s the most important thing.’
‘You ought to get out of those wet clothes!’ she said. It was an order rather than a request.
‘Let me explain why he’s like that. It’s simply that anyone who lived and breathed the world of the Soviet Union at its most ideologically rigorous always resorted to codes of some kind to tell the honest truth. I think Ben has resorted to the same thing here. That’s why.’ He sneezed again. ‘Look, I’ve got to explain.’
‘Joe,’ she insisted, ‘get out of those wet clothes! I’ll find you something to put on.’
******
It was not easy to explain. Boris Krestovsky had been strange, there was no denying it. Joe remembered very clearly the occasion when his friend Boris had made the strange confession that he wished to become English, to ‘disappear into England,’ as he put it. The remark seemed odd even as he said it.
They had become friends at RGD, Joe as translator, interpreter, lobbyist with excellent qualifications, Boris as researcher, systems analyst, statistician, who had qualified originally as an archivist but had found that research into the origins of Bolshevism did not enjoy top priority in post-Communist Russia. It was a friendship based on the sorts of affinity that can spring up between people who suddenly discover the right chemical match of need and opportunity. Boris was the older by ten or more years. He sought and needed the friendship with Joe, because as a married man his marriage had been childless and not very happy. Consequently he’d formed an attachment to another woman in Moscow and when this went sour he’d more or less volunteered for the temporary appointment that brought him to London.
A very private man, with marked reclusive tendencies, the one thing that most pleased him was the opportunity to share his delight in the least accessible aspects of Russian culture with someone who understood and shared the need. Russian poetry was a principal focus of their attention for the simple reason that it could only be accessed through the language. So once or twice a week they’d meet and talk. It would be talk on all manner of things, including all the problems and tribulations of Boris’s past life. Eventually and inevitably it would involve Russian poetry. The brilliance of Pushkin’s classical simplicity, the richness of Pasternak’s imagery, the splendours of Mandelshtam and the wry lyricism of Blok. These were the cornerstones of their discussions. Until, quite suddenly, it took a new and eccentric form.
Boris had a reasonable command of English, but it never matched Joe’s. In addition, though, to excited discussion of poetry, Boris needed Joe’s expertise for some extremely secret purpose. At first there were no more than intimations, remarks whispered covertly behind cupped hands as if there were listening devices concealed in the pocket of Joe’s shirt or in the glass of vodka on the rocks that usually accompanied their talk. It all concerned, as Joe readily guessed despite the Byzantine complexities of Boris’s remarks, his longstanding research as an archivist. He had apparently stumbled on a new and unexpected source of information. ‘Our V. I. will never be the same again,’ he whispered. ‘Who?’ Joe whispered back in a vodka-blurred sense that he was being deliberately misled. And it was at this point that their discussions took a new and eccentric form.
‘Joseph, my friend, do me a favour, always call me Ben, will you.’
The sentence had actually been spoken in heavily accented English while Joe was sitting in the lounge of the flat he had shared previously before renting the Courtier Street studio. What the hell was this? The only way to react was to treat the matter as a symptom of breakdown. ‘Of course I’ll call you Ben,’ he said. He hardly dared ask what Boris meant because he knew how touchy he could be on certain questions. He gazed at his friend. The claim was elaborated:
‘I wish to be born in Surbiton, my friend. I wish to become completely English.’
To be born in Surbiton, ‘queen of the suburbs’, might endow an English heritage, true; whether it could make him completely English was another matter. Although this was Joe’s tactful response, Boris was not going to be deflected from his purpose by such facetiousness. He had decided to become completely English and that was that. He was to be Ben Leyton.
It took more than one evening of vodka, beer chasers and copious zakuski to concoct a background for Ben Leyton, the Surbiton-born English boy. To Joe the project was a huge joke. To Boris, a.k.a. Ben, it was nothing of the kind. For the first and only time in his life Joe glimpsed at first hand the extent to which a Marxist-Leninist upbringing could brainwash someone into so many fixed assumptions. The precise degree of bourgeois heritage, even down to the supposed class instincts, the background, the exact income of his supposed parents, their political affiliations, their taste in clothes, their reading matter, what they watched on television, et cetera, et cetera, became the subject of lengthy and serious debate between them over a great many weeks until Joe began to lose heart. Eventually a kind of biography emerged. Ben’s father was to have been a schoolmaster at a comprehensive who eventually retired as headmaster, while his mother had worked for many years as a doctor’s receptionist and now did voluntary work in a charity shop. He was to be an only child, born into a pre-war 1930s home, educated at Kingston Grammar School and enjoying family holidays in Dorset and, later, on the Costa del Sol. He was to have received a degree in computer sciences at what became the university of Kingston, et cetera, et cetera. He’d been a keen cricketer and had proved himself a useful left-handed off-spinner. This fictitious renown on the cricket field led Boris/Ben to hug Joe drunkenly, swear everlasting friendship, swallow the last of his vodka and dash out into the rainy night determined to discover the nearest cricket ground and then familiarise himself with the game by reading every copy of Wisden he could find from start to finish.
The makeshift biography broke down at the point when Ben Leyton wanted to meet a
nd marry an English girl. Joe insisted that there had to be a Moscow period in Ben Leyton’s background, otherwise there was no way of explaining the strong and unalterable Russian accent. It was decided that he would have spent several years in Moscow teaching English, that supposedly accounted for the acquired accent, but it was frankly difficult to be sure how much of his ostensible background as a Surbiton-born English boy had survived the Russian experience. Still, it was with this biographical background that the English Ben Leyton was launched into society with Joe’s aid by being taken to visit his parental home shortly before his father’s death, to Jenny’s flat, to cricket matches, to a Pall Mall club, to a range, in short, of suitably English venues, only for the whole ridiculous escapade to end with Ben’s brief sojourn at Scythian Gold where Joe had last seen him in one of the so-called ‘private’ rooms and been told, sotto voce, that he had to promise to translate something very secret when it was eventually passed to him.
******
‘As I told you,’ Joe said, ‘that’s why. It’s how he wanted things to be. I really don’t know what he’s got for me to do. I mean…’
‘You’ve been a bit of a Frankenstein, haven’t you?’
‘He’s not a monster,’ Joe protested instantly.
She laughed. ‘No, but he’s strange. You’ve got to admit he’s strange.’
‘I know he can’t be mistaken for being really English.’
‘He’s not English at all!’ she cried. ‘You may have assembled the parts but you’ve not got the accent or the mannerisms. He’s a monster in that sense. He’s probably a lovely monster. But didn’t Frankenstein reject his monster?’
He was faced by the remains of their supper on the coffee table in front of him. Re-assembling the parts of a dead meal was clearly futile. His Frankenstein role had been about as fruitless.
‘Oh, no!’ Jenny added. ‘Of course, your monster’s a good monster! He wants to find his creator! That’s why he came tonight, isn’t it?’
He grinned at the absurdity of it. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘I thought so,’ she said with a big sigh. ‘Well, I’d better go and see how dry your clothes are.’
She was up and away into the bedroom. A good monster, he thought, wanting to find his creator. Silly. His gaze settled on the marble fireplace with Dutch tiles surrounding a gas fire that was in front of him. Somewhere, distantly, there was the sound of vehicles on wet roads. It roused him enough to look round. He stared at the elaborate plasterwork coving between wall and ceiling of her sitting room and two giant plaster roundels from which brand-new and rather pretentious chandeliers were suspended. The ceiling height was a tacit reminder that the original Edwardian fittings had no doubt been intended to provide gaslight. Recently renovated as it had been over the last couple of weeks, the room had a slightly surprised feel about it, as if the newness of the paintwork were exaggerated by the heat of the gas fire.
‘No,’ she shouted, ‘they’re still wet! Come and see!’
He was relieved not to have to explain any more about Boris – sorry, Ben Leyton. What’s more, he was beginning to feel quite tired. So he joined her outside what had originally been a dining room but was now converted into a bedroom with the addition of an en suite that tended to accentuate the height of the ceiling. She was standing in a theatrical circle of bright pink light from the red shade of a bedside lamp next her bed and dressing table. This gave her the appearance of being isolated in the darkness as in some remote outer space from which her laughter and gestures were magnified by distance.
‘Look,’ she cried, pointing to the en suite bathroom, ‘you can see how wet your things are! And in that dressing gown of mine, you look oh-so-sweet, don’t you!’
He quickly confirmed to himself that his clothes, hung out to dry as they were on a line over the bath, were still too damp to wear.
‘So they are, aren’t they?’
He agreed.
‘In that case,’ she said, ‘we’ll have to wait till they get dry.’
‘Of course!’
He entered the bedroom darkness and she gave a soft laugh as he drew her to him and kissed her firmly on the lips. Pressed against his, her body felt neat and exciting. There it was, then – reunion, like recovery from illness, like amazed recognition of two selves made one in the magical simplicity of an embrace. The smell of her hair and the feel of her shoulders were brief overtures to her own instant readiness to match his closeness by putting her arms round him and leaning against him until suddenly, with a sniff and a laugh, she announced a little severely ‘Oh, that’s my old scent you’re wearing! Get it off!’ and began pulling her old dressing gown off his shoulders.
She had never been a passive lover. She may have liked him to make the first moves, but if love was to be made, she was as efficient in it as she was in her work. That had always been their routine. It was ‘Race you!’ or ‘Quick! Quick!’ Now she literally undraped him with the sort of negligence she might have shown for an outfit discarded in a dress shop fitting room, kissing him lightly on the back of the neck as she did so and pushing him towards the bed. The bedside lamp was extinguished and in an instant her dexterous quick change into nakedness was so expert he hardly realized it until her skin was pressed up against his in the cold sheets and suddenly they were ravenous for each other.
‘Yes,’ she whispered.
It was the only password he needed. No foreign country to be entered, no visa. Her body’s freedom was offered with eager grace. They raged in a joyful return of familiar habits of loving, body to gasping body. Then the paradigm from ecstasy to exhaustion quickly brought them to stillness, silence and the verge of sleep with nothing to disturb them beyond the distant vague rumble of an outside world and the steady, ubiquitous hush of falling rain.
After what must have been sleep, he felt the tap of her finger on his shoulder. She was looking at him.
‘I tried to get in touch, you know.’
He could just discern her profile. ‘I know.’
‘Why didn’t you call me back?’
‘After I left RGD I had to get a new smartphone and another number. I thought I told you.’
‘Oh, you did, yes! Sorry, I should’ve… Yes, I should’ve… Oh,’ she said quickly, ‘Joseph Richter, do you love me?’
The question was like a blow to his stomach. He was so surprised he could not deny what it meant and any delay in responding would be an insult.
‘Of course I love you. We love each other, don’t we?’
It was too glib, he knew, and in saying it he was admitting his failure to make the commitment she expected of him and the promise he ought to give. There was silence between them. He knew a gulf of mistrust was beginning to open and he would somehow have to close it. She lay beside him, waiting quietly, so quietly he knew it amounted to a form of scolding. For a couple of minutes he stared up at the high ceiling vaguely criss-crossed from time to time in the darkness by lights from distant passing trains. Then he licked his lips and spoke up at the ceiling.
‘I’m an out-of-work ex-PR man with some knowledge of gas technology, poor networking gifts and no solid future, let alone a permanent one, except the dubious promise of translation work on, er, something so silly and supposedly secret I may even have endangered your security in mentioning it. Who would want to get hitched to someone like that?’
‘Chapeau! as the French say.’ He turned his head and saw she was staring at him, the brightness of her eyes concentrated in two points of light. ‘You really want to feel martyred, don’t you? You’ve always been one for that sort of hang-up.’
The irony smarted. ‘True.’
‘Pique,’ she said, ‘and male pride. That’s more like it.’
She could call it pique, he supposed, but the deeper reason was impregnably beyond her reach because he was uncertain about it himself.
‘Not really pique.’ He shook his head in the darkness. ‘Pride, yes. Allow me that much machismo. You looked me up once on that website. No
background, you know, no public school, a bit Russian on my mother’s side, a bit too independent, no real patience with all the protocol and rites of passage. No funds. Not an ideal qualification for commitment, is it?’
‘That’s far too silly!’ She roared the words out quite angrily and thumped him lightly on his chest. Then she flung herself face downwards in apparent annoyance. ‘Anyhow, you know how small it makes me feel! I’m not really a career girl at all. I was, perhaps, yes. A year ago I was.’ She reached out suddenly and switched on the bedside lamp, turning towards him on one elbow and looking at him. She swept auburn hair from her face and started winding a corner of the sheet round her right forefinger. ‘But I’ve been thinking a lot.’ She paused and momentarily closed her eyes before taking in a deep breath and saying: ‘I’ve been thinking, you know, about what’s happened ever since… ever since I was silly enough to fall for you, you high-minded, out-of-work idiot!’
Aware she had confessed too much, she resumed her old position flat on her back and stared upwards in demonstrative defiance of whatever he might do or say. He studied the profile of her face. It glowed with the pinkish parchment softness of the bedside lampshade. The smooth contour of her forehead led to the prominence of her eyebrow, a straight nose, pink lips and firm chin. The whole, cradled in the shimmer of her auburn hair, was made irresistibly beautiful and lovable for him by its intense, rather childish stillness. He traced the profile lightly with one finger and she began to smile.
‘I’d love it to be forever, Jenny.’
‘Okay, okay, so…’ She seized hold of his hand. ‘When exactly, you out-of-work idiot?’
‘When I’ve got some proper work. And when, you know…’
‘When what?’
‘When I can be sure you won’t be off to New York or somewhere on the next flight out of Heathrow.’
She let go of his hand. ‘Yes.’
It was all she said. He waited for her to say something else but all she did was stare upwards for several moments with her mouth open.
Mr Frankenstein Page 7