He watched the luminous hands of the traveling alarm clock, but could not make sense of the minutes. He hauled himself across the floor to his open suitcase and found the pills; from the frilled pocket at the back of the case he slid a bottle of Wild Turkey and unscrewed the cap.
The rough spirit gave him immediate relief, enough at least to enable him to crawl back to the bed.
He climbed in with infinite care, terrified that he might wake his sleeping wife and that she would not know him.
In the morning, James drove them to London Airport in his slow Rover. Mary, at Charlie’s insistence, went in the front with her father, while he sat stunned in the back, staring at the London streets that slid past his glazed eyes like painted cutouts on a stage. He had told her nothing of what had happened to him in the night.
Mary was so used to seeing him depart unwillingly on flights that she did not see anything unusual in his demeanor. Her father, apparently sensing some heaviness in the atmosphere, switched on the car radio, on which the Light Programme was playing Housewives’ Choice. He and Mary talked inconsequentially above the music.
“Could I borrow the car next week to go up to Norfolk?” she said. “It’s the end of term and I can surprise the children by picking them up myself, rather than have you meet them at Liverpool Street.”
Charlie’s head sank lower as the car traveled through the western suburbs; there was hardly any traffic on the Bath Road as they neared the airport. With frictionless dispatch, the car was parked, the bag unloaded and the three of them were in the departure lounge, ready to check in.
“Mr. van der Linden? My name’s Sheila Millward.” A young woman in a dark suit was shaking Charlie’s hand. “I’m from the Foreign Office. I’ve been sent to introduce you to your traveling companions. There’s a building inspector and three contractors.”
“Thank you,” said Charlie meekly, as she took him over to a group of four men carrying briefcases and heavy winter overcoats across their arms.
Mary stood with her father, watching as Miss Millward ushered Charlie through the procedures. They were almost two hours early, as instructed, and there was no one else checking in for Moscow. When his suitcase had been swallowed by the clunking conveyor, Charlie turned to face them, his head hung low, his body passive.
Mary swallowed and forced herself to smile. Miss Millward stood back tactfully to allow him to make his farewells. Charlie shook hands with James, then turned to Mary. She hugged him tightly and she smiled again, dry-eyed and encouraging, as she stood back.
“I love you,” Charlie muttered; or if those were not his words, Mary thought, they were something very like it.
He went with his group to the departure doors; he did not turn back as he vanished from sight.
In Regent’s Park Mary gave herself to comforting her father. What he needed more than anything else, it seemed to her, was someone to listen to him. Occasionally she forced him to talk about her mother, but it became clear to her that it was too soon for any sort of catharsis. He was evidently still hoping that time would show it to have been a macabre mistake and that Elizabeth would walk back through the front door and explain. Instead, Mary listened to him talk about the minutiae of daily life, some of which—those, presumably that Elizabeth had taken care of, such as housekeeping—seemed to surprise and distress him.
At night she liked being in her childhood room because it gave her some sense of continuity when every other element of her life seemed fractured. Frank in New York, Charlie in Moscow, Richard and Louisa in their drafty school and her mother … All had gone from her. She pulled the blankets and eiderdown over her shoulders and forced herself to think of better days, of sailing on the lake, of dancing in the Renshaws’ wooden cabin with the flush of wine and fire in her cheeks, swirling in the warmth of friendship and …
The telephone rang on the landing below with brutal urgency, and Mary was jerked from her half-sleep with a pounding heart. No matter how often experience told her they were wrong numbers or foreign inquiries, nighttime calls meant only panic to her.
She went down the cold stairs in her nightdress to see her father, in his dressing gown, hair disheveled, lifting the receiver. He nodded a few times and she tried to read his grave face. Richard had fallen from a window; Louisa had …
“It’s for you,” said James. “It’s someone from the Foreign Office.”
“Hello?”
“Mrs. van der Linden? I’m sorry to telephone you so late. My name’s Anthony Malbrook. I’m afraid we have a problem in Moscow. Your husband has had some sort of collapse and we need you to go and bring him home. It’s a matter of some urgency.”
“Collapse? What sort of collapse? Is he all right?”
“Medically, I understand, he’s not in any danger, though he needs expert treatment. However, his presence is a potential embarrassment. Our people are anxious that he should be got home as quickly as possible.”
“My God. Poor Charlie. Are you sure he’s all right?”
“There’s no flight tomorrow, but there’s one on Wednesday. We’ll need to get you a visa.”
“Do you promise me he’s all right?”
“All I can tell you, Mrs. van der Linden, is what I’ve been told by our people there, which is that medically there is no immediate danger, but that diplomatically it’s vital he be taken home. I’ll telephone if I have any more news and to give you details of your traveling arrangements.”
When Malbrook had rung off, Mary thought of more questions she wanted to ask him, but he had left no number. James laid his hand on her shoulder.
“He’s not well,” she said.
“I thought he looked pale.”
“No, it’s … He’s really not at all well. He hasn’t been for a long time. They want me to go and get him.”
“Well, that’s good. Then you can bring him back to London and we’ll have him properly looked after. You can all come and stay with me until he’s better.”
“Yes … yes, he’d like that.”
—
The following day Mary rang Frank in his apartment at eight o’clock New York time to tell him what had happened. He gave her the telephone number and address of his newspaper’s correspondent, Deke Sheppard, in Moscow.
“He’s a good man. If you need help of any kind or just someone to talk to, give him a call.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine. I’ve got return tickets for the two of us for Friday evening. I’ll be there less than two days.”
“Be careful, Mary.”
“Of course. What were you doing when I rang?”
“I was eating a bagel and reading the paper.”
“Is everything all right there?”
“Everything’s just fine. It’s all just the same.”
“And you can see the New Jersey shoreline? And over Little Italy?”
“Let me see, I’ll just walk across to the window. Yup, Jersey’s still there. The Bronx is up, the Battery’s down. Be good, Mary. For Christ’s sake be careful.”
On Wednesday Anthony Malbrook, a tall man with wiry, gray-flecked hair, called in person at the Regent’s Park house at eight in the morning to collect Mary in a black Riley. On the way through Hammersmith and Hounslow, he gave her instructions.
“You’ll be met at the airport in Moscow by one of the Embassy staff. It’s a first secretary called Michael Winterburn. He’s seen a photograph of you, so he knows what you look like. On no account must you talk to anyone else. Do you understand? Nobody. If for some reason Winterburn doesn’t turn up, you wait for an hour, then ring this number.” He passed her a card and some money. “Here are some dollars.”
“I’m not very good with public phones. Press Button A and all that.”
“I’m sure Winterburn’ll be there.”
“But how is he? Charlie, I mean. Have you heard any more from Moscow?”
“Not since last night. There was a disaster with accommodation. He was due to stay with the Andersons—I think you knew th
em in Tokyo. But on Monday night they had to get out of their house in a hurry. There was a bugging scare of some kind. Then all the children arrived back for the holidays and they couldn’t find him a bed. So they had to put him in the Hotel Ukraina. Do you know it?”
“By sight. But what exactly happened to him?”
“I understand that he collapsed at the Embassy, at a meeting. He was treated by the medical staff but he became difficult. There was some sort of scene in the lobby and then he refused to move from his hotel room. I’m afraid I really don’t know the details, but I’m sure they’ll fill you in at the other end.”
Mary nodded dumbly.
“You do understand, don’t you?” said Malbrook. “We don’t really like you to travel alone, but there’s no choice. Once you’re at the other end, no taxis, no lifts. Just wait for Winterburn.”
“I understand. Oh, my God,” said Mary. “I’ve just remembered something.”
The car was pulling up alongside the departures building.
“I was meant to be driving up to Norfolk to collect my children from school today. Will you telephone my father and ask him to ring the school for me? Explain what’s happened. They’ll have to put them on the train.”
“You could telephone from inside the building.”
“I’ll try. But would you mind doing it as well to make sure?”
“Very well.”
Malbrook waited while Mary checked in her suitcase, then escorted her to the passengers-only point, where she showed her boarding pass. She walked forward, stopped and turned.
Malbrook had pulled out a cigarette, on which he was inhaling with greedy relief. He raised a hand in farewell as Mary turned again and moved off toward the gate.
The plane was no more than half full, and Mary was able to sit by a window. It was a dark December day; the clouds were low and heavy over London. She watched the white lights at the wingtip blinking as the plane trembled on the runway before surging forward and heaving itself up into the gloom, causing fragments of foamy cloud to break and billow past the perspex at her cheek. After a few minutes, the Comet stopped rocking and steadied itself above the gray cumulus; the stewardess leaned over with a tray of drinks.
In her anxiety Mary had forgotten to bring a book. She had finished the newspaper in the departure lounge and was now reduced to examining her passport. This is all I am, she thought: a monochrome snap and a handful of dates. She had envisaged herself as someone in a situation of unprecedented complication, of mortal delicacy, but in fact when it came to “Special peculiarities, signes particuliers,” the verdict (the verdict of the eternal crash-examiners, the verdict of the uninterested, error-prone posterity that followed death) was: “NONE.”
She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but could not free her mind of the picture of Charlie unconscious on the great wooden staircase of the Embassy or vomiting in the upstairs dining room beneath the portrait of George V, which many puzzled Russian visitors, to the Ambassador’s delight, assumed to be a painting of the last tsar.
Two stewards came down the aisle with the heated dining trolley bearing salvers of liver and bacon or cod in parsley sauce and a large dish of peas and carrots from which they spooned a pile onto Mary’s plate.
“Would you care for some coffee, madam?”
Mary smiled, thinking of Charlie: liver with milky coffee … My God.
“Just a glass of water, thank you.”
After lunch she pulled her feet up beneath her and folded her coat behind her back as she tried to make herself comfortable across two seats. It was already growing dark outside, as the plane curtailed the day, powering itself eastward over the darkening earth, above the enslaved lands of Eastern Europe.
Mary felt aware of the Western world she trailed with her: Macy’s underwear against her skin; stockings from a ninety-nine-cent slot machine at Idlewild Airport in New York (a kindly woman had helped her with the coins and provided the nickel and four pennies of which she was short); two sweaters from Lord & Taylor; and the coat itself, the warmest she had, from B. Altman’s last spring sale. Would the immigration officials notice the label with distaste? Would she be arrested for flaunting illicit merchandise on the impoverished streets?
Her recollection of her brief stays in Moscow when Charlie had been posted there were unreliable. She had moved little outside the diplomatic vacuum on her visits; she had been so passionate to see her husband and so distraught to leave her ailing daughter, even in Elizabeth’s medical care, that she had noticed little about the mechanics of life in the Soviet capital. A maid cooked for them in the two-room apartment in Sadova Samotechnaya; Charlie brought back food and liquor from the commissary at the Embassy, where it had been delivered fresh from Stockmann’s in Helsinki. Mary had had no need to battle with the streets.
Yet, as the plane began its long descent, she felt now that she was going into the heart of enemy darkness. This was the place against which the vast and vigilant United States, by open politics and secret maneuver, fought with all its might; the people she knew in Washington, with their intellects and energies, their masters and doctorates and their billions of dollars, were bent to one overwhelming task, to protect the world from whatever fate was being concocted for it here, by men of no morality, men beyond reasoning, motivated only by a desire to impose their brutal system on yet more countries as they pushed both west and east; men whose missiles were more powerful, arms more numerous than the West’s and whose satellites were already orbiting the earth when poor America’s had crumbled on the launch pad.
The captain thanked them for flying with him, and Mary shook out her coat as she stood up. She put on a pair of socks that Charlie had left behind in London and slipped her feet into a wool-lined pair of her mother’s old boots. They were slightly too large for her, but with the extra socks they were warm enough.
She descended the wobbling steps that had been wheeled up to the fuselage, and on the final tread breathed in and dropped her weight onto Russian earth. She wrapped the coat round her against the wind as the passengers were escorted into the arrivals building, where bulbs of low wattage shed grudging light in the gray corridor.
Mary’s case was among the first to be wheeled in from the plane, and her relief was tempered by a spasm of anxiety; she was no longer protected by the procedures of traveling or the programmatic politeness of the airline staff. Once through the door, she was on her own.
The official in his glass box examined her passport at length, snapping the pages between his blunt, orange-tipped fingers. He glanced back and forth at Mary’s face; she saw him linger on the U.S. Immigration stamps (unaware, perhaps, of how bad-temperedly they too had been granted) and on the American visa with its magnanimous “INDEFINITELY” beneath the free-soaring eagle. He smacked a spare page with his Soviet frank and shoved the passport back. Mary replaced it in her purse and stepped through the gap.
The few people on the ill-lit concourse were manifestly Russian, bulkily dressed in cheap clothes, pale, downward-looking. Mary stood still and put down her case. The lack of any commerce gave the area a functional feeling; there was no pretense that the people were anything more than freight in transit. She looked at her watch; the plane was no more than a few minutes late and she had not been delayed unduly since landing.
She began to go through her pockets, looking for the card that Malbrook had given her, hoping for once that she would be able to make the telephone work, when she felt a hand lightly take her elbow and looked round to see a man in a striped shirt and patterned tie beneath a heavy overcoat. He introduced himself as Michael Winterburn, and Mary recognized the Embassy way of speaking: cultured, reassuring, lightly ironic—a little wry sanity, it suggested of itself, in a mad foreign world.
He took her suitcase and let her through the doors to the parking lot, where he opened a Volga saloon and put her bag in the boot.
“Hop in,” he said. “Jolly good of you to come at such short notice.”
“How is he?”
/>
“He’s all right, I think. The medic went to see him this morning and he’s looking forward to seeing you. Sorry it’s so cold. The ruddy heater doesn’t work properly.”
Mary rubbed her hands between her clenched thighs to warm them; she had forgotten to bring gloves. She was surprised that no British wives had made the trip out to welcome her; in her experience they were always swift to gather round and help. Their absence worried her; she felt that Charlie must have done something to place himself beyond the normal considerations of form and politeness that were so important to diplomatic life.
The Volga left the airport compound and headed through the light snow toward the city; there were few other vehicles on the road and only sparse lights in the dark countryside around them.
After a few minutes, Winterburn said, “When we get there, I’ll book you into the Ukraina, then I’ll pretty much leave you to it. As you know, the return flight is the day after tomorrow, and all we ask is that you keep a close eye on your husband. The Ambassador would like you to ring me tomorrow to let me know everything’s all right, and again on Friday before you leave. I’ll come and collect you in the afternoon.”
“I see,” said Mary. “So I just stay in the hotel room.”
“Well … It’s a little unfortunate that he’s in a hotel in the first place. As you know, there was a disaster at the Andersons’, where he was meant to stay. However, because the school holidays are starting they’re chock-a-block with children and there was just no room—no room at the inn. Luckily these building chaps were coming out so they’ve been able to stick together. We’ve also put one of our fellows in a room on the same corridor, just to keep an eye open, so everything’s fine.”
“But what exactly happened?” said Mary. “Why couldn’t he come back on his own?”
“He just refused to move. He was in a pretty shocking state. It’s a breakdown of some kind, I’m afraid. You were the only way we could get him out. And we really don’t want the press getting to hear about it. Relations are pretty strained with them anyway. It’s a big security risk for us. He’s a loose cannon. It’s bad enough having Burgess and people here.”
On Green Dolphin Street Page 31