by Simon Mawer
I hesitated uncertainly, wondering if my silly game were over. Where had she gone? Into some shop, or one of the cinemas that lined the street? I’d not seen the moment of disappearance. It had happened as a double-decker bus passed between us. Perhaps she had even climbed aboard and been swept away towards Piccadilly while I was stranded on the far bank.
Dodging through the traffic, I gained the other side. I may have lost her but now I knew something about her, that she might on another occasion appear at Cambridge Circus coming from, where? Holborn, probably. And that if I lay in wait at one of the bookshops I might be able to run her to ground. I peered into the foyer of a theatre, wondering whether she might have gone in to buy tickets.
And then, from immediately behind me, she said my name. ‘Sam?’
I don’t know whether to mark it as a question or as a statement because she didn’t phrase it as either one or the other but rather an amalgam of the two, giving a faint upward intonation of uncertainty at the end. ‘It is you,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t sure.’ She stood there on the pavement jostled by the crowd but quite indifferent to it. There was a pallor to her face, and a hint of relief.
‘I wasn’t sure it was you either,’ I said, mendaciously.
‘But now you know.’
‘It’s good to see you.’
She didn’t quite accede to that. ‘I thought you might be stalking me,’ she said. ‘It’s quite frightening, having a stalker follow you, d’you know that? A relief to discover it’s Sam.’
‘I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have wanted to frighten you.’
‘I’m sure you wouldn’t. But what on earth are you doing in London? Goodness, how you’ve grown up. You must be—’
‘Nearly twenty.’
‘Nearly twenty. And doing …?’
‘National Service at the moment. I’m …’ I hesitated. We never really knew how to refer to it. Was it meant to be some kind of secret? But there was no hint of secrecy about the Joint Services School for Linguists where I was enrolled as an officer cadet. We always assumed that we were doing what it said on the box – an official interpreters’ course. ‘I’m learning Russian, as a matter of fact.’
‘Russian? How remarkable.’ She considered me for a moment, head slightly on one side, almost as though she was measuring me up. ‘Look, I’m meeting someone for lunch—’
‘Oh, please …’ I moved away.
‘No, don’t go.’ She put her hand out and touched my arm. ‘Perhaps you’d like to join us? You see, the man I’m meeting is a Russian.’
‘A Russian?’
‘Yes, a real, live Russian. So you’ll be able to practise on him. And I’ll … well, I think a chaperone might be useful. Gorshkov – that’s his name, Comrade Gorshkov to those who know him well – is something at the embassy. We’ve worked together, visits of orchestras to London, that kind of thing; but I think this lunch may be intended to mix business with pleasure.’
Did I look blank?
‘I think he might want to get into bed with me,’ she explained blithely, pushing the door open and leading the way into the restaurant. ‘Oh, do I call you Sam or do you want to be Samuel these days?’
I hurried to catch up with her. ‘Some people call me Samuel but I don’t like it.’
‘Then “Sam” it will be.’
The restaurant was a palace of faded, baroque elegance attempting to imitate a Parisian restaurant of the belle époque period. Now it’s a multimedia entertainment centre, whatever that means, but then it was all wall mirrors and plush banquettes and marble-topped tables. We found the Russian already installed at a corner seat, examining the room from the perspective of a dry martini. He was a stout man with sly eyes and a domed forehead that shone in the light from the chandeliers. There was something lizard-like about his look, as though he was suspicious of everything about this strange country. At Marian’s appearance he leaped up and greeted her effusively; but his face fell when he understood that I was to join them.
‘Sam is an old family friend,’ Marian explained, as if that justified everything. ‘And he speaks Russian.’
The man frowned. ‘Russian?’
‘I’m learning the language,’ I said, in Russian. ‘But I can only manage simple conversations at the moment.’
Suspicion hung around Comrade Gorshkov like a dirty smell. ‘Are you a spy, then?’ He laughed but it wasn’t really a joke. He really wondered whether it might be true. As the waitress came and took our order he even looked round to see if anonymous men in raincoats and trilby hats might be watching from nearby tables. But there was nothing in the London lunchtime crowd that attracted his suspicion. We talked a bit, about Pushkin, about Gogol. Dead Souls. When I expressed admiration for the poet Anna Akhmatova he smiled uncertainly. I loved Akhmatova, for her aristocratic looks, for her irregular lifestyle (would I ever dare to behave like that?), and for that bitter-sweet early poetry that I could grasp even with my stunted Russian. But this was in that awkward period after Stalin’s death but long before Khrushchev’s speech at the 1956 Party conference. Apparatchiks like Gorshkov didn’t know what to think about either her or Pasternak, the last two pillars still standing amid the wreckage of Russian literature. ‘She is being allowed to publish again, I believe,’ I told him in case he hadn’t heard. ‘Maybe you could invite her over here.’ For a few ridiculous seconds I saw a possible coup – Anna Akhmatova brought out from obscurity, brought to London and shown to the West for what she was, one of the poetic wonders of the world. And I might get the opportunity to fall at her feet.
Gorshkov made a small gesture of helplessness. Musicians were easy because musical notes were devoid of political import. So Marian’s organisation could bring over any number of orchestras and dance troupes but the idea of Akhmatova being shipped over to meet the poets of the West – Eliot, say, or Auden – was, for the moment, still beyond consideration.
The talk shifted away from such awkward matters to the conference that Marian was organising. Scientists for Peace, it was to be entitled. She would have J. D. Bernal and J. B. S. Haldane from Britain, and Joliot-Curie and Pelletier from France, assuming that Joliot’s visa application wasn’t refused as it had been previously. The Soviet Union would supply some suitable stooges. He didn’t use the word stooge – I did.
‘You are not being helpful,’ he said reproachfully.
‘Well, Haldane and Bernal are hardly representative of the British scientific world. Both of them are card-carrying members of the Communist Party.’
Marian smiled. I remember that smile with fondness. The smile of collusion.
‘Does that make them any less great scientists?’
Well, no, it didn’t. I had to admit as much.
‘So there you are,’ he said triumphantly.
Eventually the ordeal was over and the Russian – cultural attaché, Marian had called him – signalled for the bill. To my relief she chipped in on my behalf while he paid for the two of them with the ill grace that came from having to make an investment that had clearly not paid off.
‘I think you saved my life,’ Marian said as we watched the man depart. ‘What do you think? Would he have invited me back to view his Socialist-Realist etchings if you hadn’t been here?’ She lit a cigarette and blew smoke towards the ceiling as though blowing the man away. ‘So tell me about your language school. It sounds like one of those places we trained at during the war. Are you going to become a spy?’
I laughed at the idea. ‘You sound like your Russian friend. It’s only language training. No one in Britain speaks Russian, that’s the problem. Not like French or German. So they need to train people up.’
‘For when we go to war.’
‘The Cold War is hot enough for me.’
‘And do you enjoy the course?’
‘It rescued me from square-bashing. In fact, it’s rather like university. Lots of learning but lots of laughs as well.’
She nodded thoughtfully, smoking and watching me. ‘Are you being h
onest with me, Sam?’
‘Honest?’
‘You were following me, weren’t you?’
I felt awkward under her gaze. ‘I happened to see you.’
‘And no one put you up to it?’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
But she didn’t say. There was just that gaze, the level regard of her dark eyes. I remembered something I’d overheard my mother say to my father: ‘You know what Marian told me?’
My father’s reply had that tone of faint weariness that he adopted whenever Marian’s name came up. ‘What did she tell you?’
‘She told me that she had once killed two men. Shot them. Can you believe it?’
‘No,’ he’d replied.
Somehow, subject to her steady gaze, I believed it with all my heart. Only gradually did she lower the twin weapons of her eyes and allow the conversation to move to other things. We talked of my parents – ‘I must get in touch with Judith. We haven’t met up for ages’ – of what she was doing that involved meeting with Russian functionaries. Some charity that wants to bring peace to the world, was how she described it. ‘We all want to bring peace to the world, don’t we? Some of us with doves and olive branches, others with missiles and bombs. Which one will work? I wonder.’
I glanced at my watch. ‘Look, I really must be going. I’ve got a train to catch.’
‘I’ve got to take a cab. I’ll drop you off.’
So we climbed into the back of a taxi together. It was curiously intimate, to be closeted with her in the back of the cab, enveloped by her scent. She looked at me with that direct gaze again. ‘You’ve changed, Sam. The boy has become a man.’
I felt myself blushing. ‘It happens.’
‘When was the last time I saw you?’
‘I don’t remember,’ I said; but I remembered exactly. She’d been in Oxford visiting her parents and had come round for supper one evening. I’d been a tongue-tied sixteen-year-old with ambitions to go to Cambridge to read history. She had exhorted me not to do what everyone else did but to find my own path, as though going to Cambridge might be something not altogether admirable.
‘It must be a couple of years ago now,’ she said. ‘These days I just don’t get to Oxford as much as I’d like …’
We were stuck in traffic on the Tottenham Court Road. Muttering something about it being worse than the bloody blitz, the driver turned off into backstreets. Marian peered out of the window. ‘I used to live round here. Awful digs in Chitty Street. I called it shitty and it was.’ She turned to me. ‘Perhaps we should do this again. What do you think?’
‘What, exactly …?’
‘Meet up for lunch. It was fun, despite Comrade Gorshkov. I mean, he won’t be there the next time, I promise you that. How often do you come up to town?’
‘Some weekends I’m free …’
‘I can’t do next. But after that … What do you enjoy doing? A gallery, how about that? Alan loathes galleries. The National. We could do the National.’ She seemed excited at the idea.
‘The Tate,’ I suggested. ‘There’s an exhibition opening next month. Modigliani …’
She looked at me reproachfully. ‘All those elongated nudes showing their pubic hair?’
I tried not to be fazed by her outspokenness. I’d hardly ever uttered the phrase ‘pubic hair’ and certainly never in polite company. The very word pubic seemed freighted with too many hidden meanings and implications. Marian was sitting there in her blue summer frock as light as gossamer and she had pubic hair, just down there, between her thighs. The thought made me shift with discomfort. ‘I think it’s mainly drawings, and some sculpture.’
‘Very well, the Tate it is.’ She took out a pocket diary and wrote my address and phone number. I felt youth sloughing off me like a skin being shed.
The taxi emerged from the side streets onto the Euston Road and drew to a halt outside the station. She looked at me with an expression of faint amusement. ‘We go back a long way, don’t we, Sam?’
‘I suppose we do,’ I replied.
‘From a little boy spying on me in Sussex …’
‘Before that, even.’
‘Broken collarbones. The wounded cartwheeler.’
Behind us someone hooted. The cabbie called over his shoulder, ‘You getting out? I can’t stay here all day.’ As I opened the door Marian leaned across and kissed me, those two kisses, deux bisous, one on each hot cheek. I climbed down reluctantly, the last vestiges of adolescence still clinging to my coattails. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ she called.
I got back to Cambridge to a cold and narrow bed filled with fantasies. In the successive days Marian occupied my mind in both fact and fiction, as well as in those carefully wrought fantasies of possibility that occupy the spaces in between. It seemed weeks later, so many that I had almost abandoned hope, when a card came through the post. In a rather childish, rounded script it said no more than, Strange meeting. Sorry for the delay. What about the 15th? The Tate? 12.30? She’d signed off with a little pair of kisses, those bisous that seemed to carry her accent and her scent; and her initials MW. A neat inverted symmetry.
Cтранная Bстреча, Strannaya Vstrecha, Strange meeting is, of course, the title of a well-known poem by Anna Akhmatova. Strange meeting by the Neva’s banks, it begins, and tells of someone – although it isn’t clear who; the poet’s hopes, perhaps – drowning among the creaking and cracking ice floes of the winter river. I wondered at the time whether Marian knew that. When I turned the card over I found myself looking at the Millais painting of Ophelia drowning.
Norton
Marian and David Absolon met. I can’t fit the precise dates of reports in her file into the approximate calendar of my memory, but during that time, in those days, they met. They met in various places: in a pub in Richmond, at the botanical gardens in Kew, sometimes in a café in Charlotte Street not far from her old digs. ‘Shitty Street,’ she told him and he laughed.
By now the source had a codename. NORTON. The motorbike or the Eliot poem? She didn’t know. A name plucked out of the air by a faceless bureaucrat in the intestines of the Soviet security world. NORTON, not yet burnt. At one of the first meetings Absolon handed her a tiny camera, a Minox the size of a PEZ mint dispenser. ‘What the hell do I do with this?’ Ned demanded when she showed it to him. But once they’d got onto technicalities, talk of focal length and aperture number – terms Absolon had made her learn over a pint of beer and a flabby steak and kidney pie in a pub in Kilburn – Ned’s interest was awoken. ‘It’s much safer than carrying papers around,’ she explained. ‘All they need is the film cartridge. They’ll see to the rest.’
Thus she was the go-between, the link, the person walking the tightrope between Ned’s cottage in the Berkshire countryside and the terrace house in Bayswater where Absolon lived. She moved along, keeping balance, with no safety net beneath her. At a meeting with Fawley in a safe house in Pimlico she explained her progress. ‘Absolon has fallen into the honey trap and he’s feeding greedily,’ she told him. Her words seemed to have some kind of effect. She saw his eyes widen slightly, his pupils dilate. Was he imagining greedy feeding – her legs open and Absolon at the trough? ‘Does that satisfy you or do you want more details?’
But the remainder of his bland face, the confessor’s face, remained impassive. ‘It cannot be easy for you,’ he said.
‘Oh, it’s easy enough, believe me. What’s not easy is moving from having an affair with him to suggesting he might betray his country. He believes in the Communist system, whatever its shortcomings. It’s never easy to overcome belief, is it?’
He gave that little pinched smile she had come to know so well. What, she wondered, did he believe in? King and Country? Or the wife and children in the little house in Surbiton? Or perhaps the ineffable God of Anglicanism, pavilioned in splendour, girded with praise and voting Conservative? She could only guess about him and yet he knew almost as much about her as would a father confessor. He knew her present an
d her past, the schoolgirl she had once been and the adulterous woman she was now, her life and her loves. ‘You must show extreme caution, Marian,’ he warned. ‘They will be suspicious. They’ll watch you both like jackals. And be careful of your own emotions. The dangers aren’t only from outside.’
But what did he know of emotions? What did he know of the breathless anticipation, the awful compulsion that was like a burgeoning disease, assuaged only by Absolon’s presence, the pivotal moment about which her whole world spun, memory and anticipation all focused onto the one moment of union? No amount of watching could understand that; and anyway, there were no watchers, no one across the street or among the bushes or in a parked car down the road. ‘With Absolon I want to be left alone,’ she had insisted. ‘I know what I’m doing and I’m not in any danger. And don’t forget, he’s a professional. Any hint that either of us is under surveillance and he’ll be out of here in an instant.’