The Unfortunate Englishman Read online

  Masefield thought hard if quickly about his next question.

  “So they are enriching uranium? And I did see a cyclotron?”

  “Do you really need me to confirm that? For all Putkin’s ducking and diving you surely worked that out for yourself? I’d be shocked if you hadn’t. Why else would they need a professor of transuranics on call? To be precise . . . they shipped more than twenty tons last year, and this year’ll it’ll top twenty-five. Quite enough to build more bombs and power more submarines and who knows, perhaps a bit left over to generate a few volts of electricity for the workers’ flats.”

  “And I thought the English were cynical.”

  §45

  Moscow

  The bar at the Muromets was full. Another rowdy group of Englishmen learning that there was always a vodka bottle that had to emptied.

  Tanya Dmitrievna had arrived. He had not seen her for three days. Not since she’d dropped her bombshell on a street corner in Zamoskvorechye. She chatted to the girl in charge of this week’s foreign trade mission, waved to the barman, and expressed faux surprise at finding Masefield there.

  “I was looking for you. You did not tell me when you were leaving.”

  Masefield found that, as ever, they could pursue a private conversation in the midst of a din.

  “Tomorrow as it happens. Is your friend also KGB?”

  “No more than me.”

  “You should have a standard form printed—English, drunk, harmless. Might save a lot of typing.”

  She reached out across the small table, placed her hand on top of his.

  “Perhaps. Now it is my turn to say I am sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “I should not have . . . I am searching for the word . . . so many to choose from . . . I should not have burdened you.”

  The hand squeezed his, and as she drew it back, his squeezed hers and held on to it.

  “Will you have dinner with me tonight? Here at the hotel.”

  She had come looking for him and still the invitation had taken her by surprise. The hand withdrew gently. The lips parted in a gap-toothed smile and unbidden to his brain came Glendinning’s “forget the teeth, her tits are pretty damn amazing.” And he wished he’d never heard the bastard say it, wished he’d not mentally stripped her. It felt like a betrayal. It was everything he wanted at that moment and still it felt like a betrayal.

  “Yes. So kind. Of course,” she said.

  So kind. He could see himself as less than kind. He could see himself in the dozen or so bladdered Englishmen as clearly as looking into a mirror. “The only one who wasn’t a drunken capitalist pig,” she had termed him. He’d been all three in his time . . . the strippers, the hookers, the paralytic piss-ups. Every instance a betrayal.

  “But,” she added, “perhaps I can show you somewhere better. A restaurant.”

  Restaurants, bars, even cafés were thin on the ground. Closed in the Stalin era. One consequence was open-air boozing, drunks sharing bottles of vodka in doorways, and stairwells that reeked of piss.

  “Unless, of course, you like the food here?”

  The food at the Muromets never varied—borscht, dumplings, ­offal . . . tail, hoof and ear . . . cuts of meat the English would feed to a dog . . . and a quivering dish of marrowbone jelly that looked and tasted like the world’s worst Turkish delight.

  “Well,” Masefield replied. “A change would be most welcome. Are we going far?”

  “We walk for perhaps twenty minutes. There is a good little restaurant in Malaya Bronnaya. Unless of course you wish to take a taxi.”

  “No,” Masefield said. “Happy to walk if you are.”

  “It is not so cold . . . sorry that sounds stupid . . . I mean not as cold as I have known it to be.”

  “And you have lived in Moscow all your life?”

  “Yes.”

  She led him north and west into Tverskaya, out of the Theatre District, across Tverskoy Boulevard and Pushkin Square.

  As they walked he told her of his venture into the working-class suburbs on his previous trip.

  “Why would you want to see that?”

  “Because she was there.”

  “I do not understand the phrase.”

  “Sorry . . . I shouldn’t be elliptical. Asked why he had climbed Mount Everest Sir Edmund Hillary replied, ‘because she was there.’ There’s even a story that when asked why he had married the Queen of England, Prince Philip also said ‘because she was there.’”

  “Is a joke, yes?”

  “Yes. A joke.”

  And not one she thought funny.

  “Are you sure you weren’t followed?”

  “Oh, I know I was followed.”

  “But you did nothing . . .”

  There was real apprehension in the blue eyes.

  “No. Please don’t worry. I’m a guest here. I behaved myself.”

  She said no more until they reached the restaurant. Nothing announced “restaurant.” No painted sign. No menu in the window. You knew it or you didn’t.

  The proprietor greeted her with glad recognition and a hug of affection. Seated them at a wooden table for two, flung a gingham cloth across it, and rattled off the menu.

  Tanya Dmitrievna said yes to everything, and then to Masefield, “They have no written menu. We have whatever he has cooked today.”

  Masefield knew exactly what he had cooked today and did his best to look blank as she told him of ukha, stroganoff, sweet blinis, kvass, and vodka. Knowing the words was but a fraction of comprehension. He’d never eaten any of the dishes. He’d drunk the vodka—he’d never eaten the food.

  Over the first shot of vodka he said, “If it’s not impertinent, Tanya Dmitrievna, how old are you?”

  “I am twenty-six.”

  “So you spent the war in Moscow?”

  “Yes.”

  “No . . . evacuation?”

  “My mother would not agree. My father was killed in 1942. At Stalingrad. After that nothing would make her leave Moscow.”

  “Is your mother still living?”

  “No, she died in 1957. All I have is my sister. Anfisa.”

  “Older?”

  “No. I am the elder . . . by ten minutes.”

  “Ah, twins. I am an only child.”

  “That is sad. I cannot imagine a life without my sister. We did every­thing together.”

  And so she told him of a childhood spent as one half of two, in the midst of the bloodiest war in history.

  He thought of his own war. Well fed (even though there never seemed to be enough of anything), warm (well, warmish), and never heard a shot fired in anger. A uniform, a ration book and all found. Tanya Dmitrievna had gone cold and hungry and lain awake at night listening to the sound of German artillery as the Wehrmacht came within five miles of Moscow when she was six years old, three weeks before Christmas 1941.

  England was an island. He had never felt more insular. And then the bridge appeared. She left nothing. Not a drop of soup, not a sliver of beef, not a crumb of pastry. Nor did he. And he knew that it was second nature to them both. He was ten years older than she was, and still they were children of the same war. To leave a clean plate. The social stigmata of the children of the war.

  §46

  Out in the street again, he took her hand and risked all.

  “Tanya Dmitrievna, would you come back to the hotel with me?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

  “You room is wired . . . microphones in the ceiling. Oh, don’t be alarmed. Every room at the Muromets is wired.”

  She had told him no, but she had not removed her hand from his.

  “My apartment is not.”

  “And where do you live?”

  With her free hand
she pointed to the upstairs window, two floors above the restaurant.

  §47

  He was a clumsy lover. Knowing this did not help much. Almost all his experience of sex had been with prostitutes, beginning in the army with the women who hung around the bases, and after a fallow, celibate time in Nottingham ascribed to failure of nerve, the women of the dark alleys and backstreets of Manchester.

  He had learnt nothing for the simple reason that a prostitute has nothing to teach a man. She wants nothing from him, other than to be paid for services rendered, and hence has neither the wish nor the means to teach him anything, and the rendition becomes a one-way process. So much so, that Masefield had long ago come to think of sex as a form of dissatisfaction and the male orgasm as a misnomer.

  Tanya Dmitrievna lay asleep with her head on his belly.

  He thought of the word she had used for sexual intercourse with Glendinning, whilst wishing he could block the idea of Glendinning and sex from his mind permanently . . . She had said she “enjoyed” him. He was not at all sure how this might have started out in her mind before uttered in English . . . наслаждаться, with its suggestion of relishing something sweet, or обладать with an idea of possession, at its crudest “to have him.”

  But he had enjoyed her, and would dearly love to know that she had enjoyed him. No power on earth would make him ask.

  Tanya Dmitrievna stirred.

  “How . . . ?”

  “About ten minutes,” Masefield replied.

  She unfurled, wriggled north in the direction of his head. Kissed him.

  “Thank you, Mr. Masefield.”

  Was she smiling? Almost too dark to tell. Was she taking the mickey?

  “My first name is Geoffrey.”

  “You have a second?”

  “Stephen, after my father.”

  “Ah . . . a patronymic . . . how very Russian. Geoffrey Stefanovich. I shall call you that from now on.”

  No, she wasn’t taking the mickey. She was teasing him. Women had never teased Masefield; they’d just hoicked up their knickers and taken his money.

  §48

  West Berlin

  Masefield felt less of an idiot this time. He had next to no idea what, if anything, on the rolls of film he took in Sillamäe would be of use. Would Radley know a cyclotron if he saw one? Should he point them out to him or leave it to the analysts back in London? But to be able to give Radley something that wasn’t the tourist take on Moscow, that was out of the city and better still in an industrial complex of the kind Burne-Jones had wanted him to get into . . . that was a step up, and it showed.

  “Jolly good show, Geoffrey,” Radley was saying as he sifted though the blow-ups. “They’ll take a bit of scrutiny, but I can tell you now, we’ve never got a man into a place like this before. Bound to be something. Has to be.”

  “It ain’t necessarily so,” thought Masefield, but he did not deny the possibility or decline what was obviously meant as a compliment.

  “Do you think you’ll have more contact with your professor pal?”

  Masefield could not think of a logical reason why he should but felt sure all the same.

  “Oh yes. And, Tom . . . could I ask you a question?”

  “Fire away, old man.”

  “Do we have a lot of men in Moscow?”

  “No. We did, but they’ve been rounded up like sheep. London would dearly love to know who sold them out. There’s a leak the size of a sewer somewhere. Fair to say, it’s one of the reasons we sent you in. No one knows about you. You have no connection to the embassy there. You’re Burne-Jones’s little secret. Not so much ‘our man in Moscow’ as ‘his man in Moscow.’”

  “So if there were anyone else doing what I’m doing . . . you know . . . trade mission as cover . . . in and out and so forth . . . ”

  “Oh, I’d know.”

  “Terence Glendinning?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  §49

  Derby, England: February 1961

  Home to Geoffrey Stefanovich Masefield was a Derby suburb—­Allestree, on the flat plain where the Derwent spilled out a few miles before it drowned its identity in the Trent. A short trolleybus ride and a far cry from his childhood in back-to-back Normanton. It was where you lived when, in the local parlance, you had “made a bob or two.” Masefield hated Allestree. It was managementville—a dreary, interwar development of large characterless houses, housing large characterless men and their large characterless wives—stalwarts all of the Rotary Club and the Townswomen’s Guild. It was his own fault. When his career took off, and he proved mortgageable, he suggested to his mother that he buy her a better house. He had thrown the remark away on the rash assumption she would say, “Nay lad, ah’ve lived in Normanton since ah were a lass an ah’ll die here.” Instead she had produced the glossy estate agent’s brochure of a four-bedroomed house in Ferrer’s Way, and once installed had embarked on a spree of hat-buying and a fruitless struggle to locate the letter h.

  It didn’t last. Within a year of assuming airs and graces, the bedrock of drudgery that had been her pre-suburban life caught up with her and she died worn out and bent, leaving Masefield alone in a house that was far too big in a suburb that was far too dull. The job, the travel that went with the job, had saved him. Home was merely camping out, a place to keep a change of clothes and a spare razor.

  Home once more, he picked up the spare razor, looked in the bathroom mirror, wiped away the film of moisture and contemplated, as every man must, his moustache. A moustache was not fate. A moustache was choice, and a poor one. A couple of strokes of the blade and it was gone.

  The following morning he drove his Austin A40 Somerset (convertible) into Derby, called at an optician’s and ordered contact lenses to replace his glasses. He knew no one who wore contact lenses. They were innovative, expensive, and fragile. For the first week they stung and his eyes felt painfully dry. They were worth every penny, every pinch of pain.

  If Burne-Jones approved, he would like to move to London. Burne-Jones might not approve; Derby, after all, might be part of his “cover.” The job itself was now just part of his cover. He had already used his additional salary from MI6, as he passed through London, to open an account with Foulkes and Fransham (Tailors) Ltd in Savile Row, and on his next visit would have the final fitting for his new suit.

  Few things pleased him quite so much as this self-transformation. He was, he mused, sloughing off the chrysalis. Standing in front of one of Foulkes and Fransham’s full-length mirrors, hair cut by Teasy-Weasy, moustache no more than a haunting of his top lip, suit in a pleasing dark blue chosen for him by Fransham himself, he looked through his new contact lenses at the man reflected and tried to see himself as Tanya Dmitrievna would. It occurred to him she might have liked the weaselly little man in the cheap suit, but how could she not like the new man? The weaselly man had not been Geoffrey Masefield, he had been the man waiting to become Geoffrey Masefield. He turned sideways. The suit was slimming. He might even be svelte. How could she not like the new man? He turned the other way, ran one hand down his belly, suppressing doubt. But try as he might it did not come naturally to him.

  §50

  Moscow: March 1961

  “Красавец.”

  He stumbled over the word. Had she called him “beautiful” or “handsome”? Were men ever “beautiful”? To ask what she meant would sustain the pretence, but to what purpose?

  Tanya Dmitrievna locked her hands behind his neck and said it again.

  “Красавец.”

  Then her lips moved to the rim of his left ear, her tongue darted into the shell and he didn’t care about precision in words any more. The gesture spoke louder.

  March nights in Moscow could be bone-chillers. He lay with Tanya wrapped around him squirrel-warm, heard the squeak of wheels or castors in the s
itting room and looked at his watch, the luminous hands just visible on the bedside table: 11:30 p.m.

  “Anfisa.” A whisper in his ear.

  “Eh?”

  “My sister.”

  “Your twin sister?”

  “I have no other.”

  “She lives here?”

  “Of course.”

  “What was the noise?”

  “A rollout. What you call a truckle bed. She sleeps next to me as a rule. But . . . ”

  “But what?”

  “The knickers on the doorknob. Our sisters’ code.”

  Tanya Dmitrievna buried her head in his side and he realised she was muffling giggles.

  She lifted her head.

  “Two’s company, as you say in English.”

  He declined to finish the aphorism.

  Around seven in the morning he heard the stairs door close, and the soft click of the lock. He was alone. He swung his legs off the bed, felt the bite of cold and wished he had a dressing gown.

  Tanya Dmitrievna had one, and stood in the doorway wrapped in it.

  “I have made coffee with the packet you have given me. Come. My sister has already left for work. And I shall not have long myself.”

  He pulled his shirt over his head, socks onto his feet, slithering along the lino to a kitchen no bigger than a closet—sat opposite her at the table, next to a cast-iron radiator slowly creaking into life.

  “What is . . . ?” she picked up the packet struggling with the words on the label . . . “Fortnoom and Mazzon?”

  “It’s London’s GUM.”

  “Ah, a place of privilege. Party members and visitors only?”

  “No. And I wouldn’t know which party . . . but it’s a poor comparison. London has lots of GUMs. Fortnum’s, Jacksons, Selfridges, Harrods, what have you.”

  She sipped at her coffee, grinned her gap-toothed grin at him.

  He said, “I haven’t got long either. I must get back to the Muromets.”

  The word seemed to dim her smile.

  “Is . . . is Glendinning there this time?”

  And the name dimmed his.

  “No, and he wasn’t last time. He did his deal last December.”