‘But there is an issue, Wes. As you no doubt suspect, I read the letters that go back and forth between you and Elizabeth. You do so suspect?’
‘Yes,’ said Wes.
‘Better to suspect me. You won’t always be right, but more so than wrong. Now, in her last two letters she spoke of samizdat. So you know what that is, don’t you? Wes, what she is doing is dangerous. If she is detected, they will charge her and imprison her. For years. If she is arrested, we will know. And I will tell you. Russian prisons, Wes, very, very harsh. Warn her.’
‘I’m worried. She is a fanatic by nature. She is likely to be as crazy about opposing the Soviets as she was in supporting them.’
‘Wes, you have it right. She is indubitably crazy. But her craziness is about justice, at least. You will have noticed what is happening in the United States, with Senator McCarthy. That’s a craziness that is placed at the service of injustice. In America, your Elizabeth would have been locked up for twenty years, or even executed. My sceptred isle has already tested atomic bombs on your red soil, and the Soviets are not in the least interested. In any case, we are not in competition with the Russians. We merely wish to stay ahead of the French. If it comes to another Agincourt, an atomic bomb will be our English longbow. When you get to London, come into Scotland Yard and leave your address and the Scotland Yard people will get it to me. “Bill” will be adequate. And please to remember, Wes, that this conversation is bound by the terms of our agreement. I may well see you in London in a few months.’
Teddy Cunningham was a competent builder, but he needed instruction. Wes couldn’t leave him in charge of finishing the two houses and Max, his other brother, was busy elsewhere. Wes himself had completed Jolene’s sunroom, but he had to ask the owners of the two new houses for a two-month break. To have Wes Cunningham agree to build a house for you was a privilege and the owners, the O’Connors and Davises, were happy to allow Wes the time to do whatever he needed to do, go where he needed to go. (Russia? Really?)
In December 1954, Wes arrived in London and stayed, by arrangement, with a fellow Quaker, Professor Michael Kemp in a Georgian villa just off Russell Square. The professor, now retired, had taught at the London School of Economics, close to the British Museum. He had visited Almond Tree twice with his wife and stayed with the Cunninghams. His wife was now dead, and his eldest son had moved away. The huge house was home to the professor and his two younger sons. He gave Wes a room on the upper floor with a view down to the square, once the room of his eldest son, Japanese prints on the wall, left behind by the son, Spender, who’d had a passion for Asian art. The professor’s three sons, born in the late 1930s and early 1940s, had each been named after a poet—Spender, Auden and, a little awkwardly, Sassoon. The two boys were away visiting their aunt in Ottawa, so it was just the professor and Wes.
The professor’s wife, Marigold, Wes remembered as loquacious, the professor as a man who preferred to sit and listen, posing an occasional question. All that had changed. Perhaps it was the death of his talkative wife that had freed something in him, or the need to express certain views knowing that he was likely to be dead of cancer in two years, but he was full of opinions, the most alarming of which were to do with atomic war. He welcomed it. He said it would give the world a chance to start again, a clean new beginning. ‘Look at the people in the street, Wes. Their hearts and souls are exhausted. They have lost the capacity to honour life.’
Wes told him of his sister’s experience in Hiroshima. ‘She saw with her own eyes what an atomic bomb can do. I don’t want that for anyone. The many thousands of people who died had hopes and plans. They had children. And now my sister is nursing those left sick by radiation poisoning. A hundred thousand. I don’t think she believes that an atomic bomb leaves everything clean for a new beginning.’
Most days he left the house early and walked about London. He called at Scotland Yard to leave his address. The police officer he offered the address to said, ‘Bill? Who the bloody hell is Bill? Bill Bumfluff?’ He called another officer, more senior, who said, ‘I’ll take care of it.’
A letter came from Bill to the address off Russell Square. It enclosed Beth’s most recent letter. ‘Forward this on to your parents,’ said the note with the letter. ‘The page that is meant for them. Complex nonsense, isn’t it? I sometimes think I’ll take up dealing in stamps. I collect stamps, you know. Incidentally, if you happen to bump into Guy Burgess in Moscow, give him my regards. It could happen. We were friends before he flew the coop. You would know about Don McLean and Guy, would you not?’
Beth’s letter to him was wildly affectionate in the first paragraph. Then it concentrated on samizdat. ‘I’m writing out the poems of a wonderful poet, a woman who signs her work Radost, which is the Russian word for joy.’ And much more about Joy and her work.
He went each day to the British Museum, and to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. Saw all the sights. But he couldn’t give himself to tourism because his heart, each day, each hour, was coiled in longing for Beth. He had stayed in Almond Tree long enough to attend Franny’s wedding. He doubted there had ever been a more beautiful bride in the world, in a dress painstakingly sewn by her mother. Franny took him aside at the reception and said, ‘You could have had me.’ He didn’t know what to say, so he kissed her on the cheek and wandered away. And now he was where he was, gazing up at a huge Rubens canvas and yearning for Beth.
When the six weeks had passed, he called in to the Soviet Embassy and was shown to the office of a small, corpulent woman with greying hair permed in a helmet-like style that hadn’t been seen in Australia since the 1940s. She was not friendly.
‘Here is your visa. It is for two weeks. You must obey all the laws of the Soviet Union.’
‘Two weeks. I requested one month.’
‘Two weeks. You are for seeing your friend. She cannot leave Moscow. Two weeks is enough for Moscow. You will stay at Gorki Hotel. It is near to where your friend is living.’ He left with his two weeks.
Two days later he flew from London to Vienna, then after a six-hour delay, to Moscow. He took a grubby state taxi with a damaged gearbox to the Gorki Hotel on Nicolskaya Street and checked into a room the size of an auditorium with a single bed against one wall. He had sent a telegram from Vienna to tell Beth where he was to stay, and at six in the afternoon, after the end of her working day, she burst into his room without knocking, smothered his face in kisses, stripped him of his clothes, and herself, and bustled him into the single bed. She didn’t allow him to get the condoms from his suitcase. She barely gave him time to recover between sessions before renewing lovemaking and clung to him with such force that he winced with pain, but without protesting.
‘Are you really here? I mean really here? I’ve wanted you and wanted you. You have to do this every day, every, every day. Except when I’m showing you about. First we’re going to the Pushkin Museum because it’s open late. But darling, I still have to work. They won’t give me any time off. You have to stay here in bed all day while I’m working just waiting for me. Reading a book or something. Did you bring Middlemarch? Good. You have to read it to me from where we stopped. I’ll tell you something. I want to get pregnant. You see what’s happened? I’m crazier than Franny. Was she beautiful in her wedding dress and was it low-cut, her tits all over the place I bet? Well you can’t marry her because you’re going to marry me. Me! Whisper when you talk, darling, they’re listening.’
The experience of Beth whispering to him with her lips against his ear was exquisite, and her body clasped to him so that her pulse beat against his flank was like a language being spoken each to the arteries of the other. Bizarrely, Bill’s friend Guy Burgess popped into his head. He asked in a whisper if Beth had met him.
‘Burgess?’ She laughed. ‘Yes, I met him at a reception for a field marshal who was retiring and had asked for me to be there because he liked foreign girls. I was a big disappointment, I think. Guy wanted to know about the cricket and I didn’t kn
ow anything and he liked dirty jokes and I didn’t know any so he told me a whole lot of filthy jokes of his own and I laughed but I hated them. The field marshal wanted to sleep with me but I said no, of course, but he followed me around the whole evening, squeezing my behind. Grotesque.’
‘And if he hadn’t been grotesque?’
‘You mean if he was young and handsome like you? Well I’d have let him enjoy me in the broom closet. You wouldn’t have minded, my darling?’
‘I would have had to kill him. Going against the teachings of my faith.’
‘Would you, dearest? Would you have killed him?’ She tickled his ribs. ‘For me? How romantic. Until they hanged you.’
She introduced him to Oleg and Bessie and showed him where she worked on the samizdat. Oleg and Bessie had put together a beautiful dinner, a stew with rice said to have originated in Afghanistan, and even produced some American wine from California they’d been saving for an occasion like this. After dinner, Wes drew from his shoulder bag two 78 records he’d purchased in a second-hand record shop near Foyles in London. He’d been advised that one by Robert Johnson and the other by Louis Armstrong were blues classics. They’d almost been confiscated at Moscow customs but after a fight between three customs officers, the most senior, who appeared to revere Louis Armstrong, prevailed and the 78s were allowed to enter the Soviet Union. When Bessie saw the gift she screamed and jumped up and down, threw her arms around Wes and kissed him on the mouth. She said in English, which she spoke well, ‘I bless the ground you walk on, beloved comrade.’ They sat and listened to both records. The music was alien to Wes but left Bessie, Oleg and Beth ecstatic.
Beth had to be back at her apartment by eight, and so she was, with Wes. The cops didn’t mind men visiting the apartments, or staying the night, but with Eva there, it was impossible to make love. Eva said, ‘You can fuck her, I don’t mind.’ Wes kissed Beth and they parted. It would be six o’clock the following day, after Beth’s day’s work finished, before they could meet up again. She asked him if he had any American dollars, and he did. ‘Bring them with you tomorrow. I have a plan.’
Wes’s huge room at the Gorki was silent at night. Hardly any traffic noise, no sirens. He was in the bed in which he had made love to Beth again and again. He could smell her body, and it kept him awake. Smiling. God in your heart was an inventor. He used the materials at hand. Beth waved to Wes that day in Almond Tree, and from Wes’s response He made something that had years in it. The tinsel lilies, the beach daisies, the sheepskins for Russia posters, the long road to the Gorki—all imagined by God, down to Louis Armstrong and Robert Johnson.
In Russia, a US dollar was paper gold. The police on duty on the ground floor of Beth’s apartment were prepared to sign her out for the night, ‘to attend a sick relative’ for ten US dollars, which Wes handed over without subterfuge. They walked to Oleg and Bessie’s apartment and before eating anything went straight to bed in the spare room. This time, they used condoms, at Wes’s insistence. ‘Beth darling, you can’t get pregnant now. You know that.’ Outside, Louis Armstrong played. Then Billie Holiday. Bessie called out in English: ‘Please! We’re starving!’
They went each night to Oleg and Bessie’s, but kept the lovemaking until later, after dinner, after the blues, after Beth had completed an hour of samizdat, after responsibility. Wes gave Bessie and Oleg a thousand rubles to cover the cost of the extra food. Beth was never permitted to cook, since she didn’t know how. Once dinner was over, and conversation (a third world war) and the blues, the apartment was hot; the one thing that could be relied on was the heating.
Beth no longer spoke of her pride in Russia’s nuclear weapons, but of her fear of them. Bessie, in spite of years of trying, had not yet become pregnant, and now had to ask herself if she should be thinking of children when the total destruction of the world was a genuine possibility. Wes told them of his sister Patty’s experience in Hiroshima. ‘She and her Japanese husband had a child, even though they’d been living with radiation in their bodies for eight years. She’s pregnant again now. I admire her courage, her and her husband, Kado. They could easily move away from Hiroshima. But that’s where their work is, thousands of sick people, sick babies. She thinks that’s where God wants her to be, and if she wants a baby, that’s where it has to be born.’
‘God?’ said Bessie. ‘He made the people who made the bomb too, no?’
Wes didn’t answer. But he might have said that God had nothing to do with the bomb; that God only hopes that human inventiveness will find a better destination. That God despairs, in the same way as us, and has no power to intervene.
Wes, free to wander about Moscow while Beth was at work, walked along ordinary streets, looking at ordinary people, none of whom seemed capable of smiling. The older buildings were attractive enough, maybe in need of a coat of paint and some close attention to the woodwork. The newer buildings, three-storey concrete blocks, were unwelcoming. Down one narrow street he found a boy of about sixteen working alone on the construction of the upper half of a red brick wall that had been destroyed, perhaps in the war. The boy, probably an apprentice, was attempting to split bricks in half with a mallet and a cold chisel, and having no success. Wes watched for a few minutes then suggested to the boy in sign language that he allow him to have a go. The boy shrugged and stepped back from the bricks. Wes knelt down with the cold chisel and hammer and cut a shallow groove on the four sides of the brick at the exact halfway point, then mounted the brick on another, put his knee on the grooved brick and struck it with the mallet. The brick broke along the groove perfectly. He gave the boy to understand that he would break as many half-bricks as were needed for the wall, and the boy indicated that he didn’t know. Wes stood back and judged the number of half-bricks that would be required, then set to work and fashioned twenty half-bricks. The boy was delighted and shook Wes’s hand vigorously. Wes then helped the boy make mortar of the right consistency, cleaned his hands on a rag and said goodbye. The boy said: ‘America?’ Australia, said Wes. ‘Ah, Australia,’ said the boy. ‘Good!’ It was the one English word he knew.
On Beth’s day off, she came to the Gorki at eight in the morning with bread and cheese and she and Wes made love until midday. She made him sing ‘The Water Is Wide’ and had him read from Middlemarch. ‘Can this be our life? Making love and reading and singing?’
‘What about the people, Beth?’
‘The people can make love and sing and read, too.’
He laughed, and she sat up in bed abruptly and looked down at him.
‘Don’t make fun of me.’
‘I’m not. But it’s funny, the change in you. Once the people were your idols.’
‘And now it’s comical that I’m a bad communist.’
She threw back the covers and climbed out of bed, picked up her clothes from the floor and went to the shower, the only modern feature of the huge room. It was a round glass cylinder with bright new stainless-steel taps that worked in a complicated way. She didn’t close the bathroom door. She emerged naked and dried herself in front of Wes, watching him all the time. And dressed herself. ‘My modesty has gone, thanks to you. Have a shower and get dressed. I’m angry with you.’
She took him, unspeaking, to the visitors’ entrance to Red Square at the Kutafya Tower and then past three- and four-storey buildings until they reached an area in front of the home of the Supreme Soviet. She turned to him and said: ‘I once danced here. I sang “The Red Flag” and people applauded me. I was a good socialist then. But I fell in love, Wes. You made me a bad socialist, so don’t laugh at me.’ She was sobbing by this time. Tourists stopped and stared at her as Wes held her in his arms. Soldiers stopped too, and puzzled over her tears. One called out: ‘English?’ Wes said, in the Russian he’d been taught by Bessie, ‘No, we are Australians.’ Three of the soldiers came forward and embraced them both. One sang a ragged version of the opening of ‘Waltzing Matilda’.
‘This, an Australian taught to me.’
> Beth took him outside the Kremlin walls again, and showed him St Basils. ‘Wacky, isn’t it? We’re not going inside. It’s extremely ornate and very depressing. Just the opposite of your faith. That lovely simplicity.’
Wes paid ten dollars each evening for permission for Beth to stay out all night at Bessie and Oleg’s apartment. They ate dishes that did not vary much from one evening to the next. The Californian wine was finished after two nights, but then there was vodka, which knocked Wes out after one glass so that he had to be put to bed. After that he avoided the vodka. Beth could throw down one glass after another and became merrier the more she drank. She had Wes sing English folk songs, and also recite ‘Mulga Bill’s Bicycle’, translating it for Oleg, whose English was scratchy. Beth asked Wes if he knew ‘The Man from Snowy River’. He did, all of it, and after some brandy, stood and recited it, in a halting way, with Beth translating. This was likely the first time the poem had been recited in the Soviet Union.
On the second-last evening, Beth insisted that all four of them sit in a circle on the floor while she revealed a plan. Beth and Bessie and Oleg threw down vodka from small glasses, while Wes sipped from a glass of brandy, which he seemed able to tolerate. Judging by the stern expression on Beth’s face, this was serious.
‘Now, we three are Marxists, or have sympathy for Marx. But it was spoilt. This is not Marx, it’s totalitarianism. It’s terror. Right?’
Bessie and Oleg nodded. ‘It’s shit,’ said Bessie.
‘So we have to resist. With samizdat. By getting the truth to the people. Wes, I want you to take Joy’s poems back to Australia then send them to a Russian language publisher in Paris, so that they can be published and hundreds of copies, thousands, can be smuggled in and sold in secret. It’s been done before.’
Wes raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s going to get this Joy lady into a lot of trouble.’
The Bride of Almond Tree Page 15