Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

“Jack, what is this?” Sinha almost shouted. “Why have you come to my house dressed like a Punjabi bandit? Is this some stupid trick of your political police?”

McColl put a hand on the Indian’s shoulder. “No,” he said calmly. “I have come for your help.”

“But why this fancy dress, as you English call it?”

“Because it would be dangerous for both of us if I was seen visiting you. Even this is risky, but… well, I have no other choices.”

“I do not understand. Who is looking for you?”

“My own people. The ‘political police’ you were just talking about, I suppose.” It crossed his mind that using the same words to describe the Cheka and Five seemed less ludicrous than it would have a couple of months ago.

“But why?” Sinha wanted to know. “Why are your people after you? Have you stolen a polo trophy or something?”

McColl laughed. He was, he realized, really pleased to see Harry Sinha again. Whatever happened.

Sinha looked at him, then burst out laughing himself, and for a moment it felt as if the last twenty years had evaporated, and they were back in one of their college rooms, finding a shared hilarity in the farcical vagaries of Oxford life.

Could he tell his friend the whole story? McColl asked himself again. He could but he wouldn’t. Or at least not yet. It wasn’t just a matter of trust: Sinha would feel he had to tell others, to warn Gandhi, and who knew where that might lead? It would increase the danger to Sinha himself, and it would put both McColl’s and Caitlin’s freedom at risk. And, as McColl was prepared to admit to himself, it would take matters out of his hands. Somehow, deep down, absurdly or not, this had become an intensely personal business in so many different ways, between him and Brady, between Caitlin and Sergei, between her and himself.

“I can’t tell you much, Harry,” he said. “Only that I am not working for British intelligence anymore.”

“Then whom?”

McColl smiled inwardly at his friend’s perfect grammar and at the question. Who was he working for? Cumming? The dead Komarov? “Harry,” he said, “I know you want self-government.”

“More than that. Swaraj. Complete independence.”

“Okay. I can only promise that we’re on the same side and that if you knew the whole story, you would support me in what I’m doing. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be asking you for help.”

Sinha gave him a long, hard look, sighed, and finally smiled. “I believe you,” he said. “But how can I help?”

“I need to borrow a little money.”

“That presents no difficulty.”

“And I need somewhere to stay. In the Indian part of the city. For a week, perhaps two.”

“You are welcome here.”

“I have someone with me.”

“Oh…”

“A woman. I think it would be better, in the circumstances, to say she is my wife.”

“She is English?”

“American. But she has been living in Russia for the last three years.”

“Russia?” Sinha exclaimed.

“As a journalist at first, and since the revolution she’s been working for the Bolsheviks’ women’s department.”

“My God,” Sinha said. “How long have you known this ‘wife?’”

“Eight years. It’s a long story, and I hope to bore you with it later. But for the moment… well, the less you know, the better for you.”

Sinha shook his head, but more in amusement than disbelief. “I am pleased you came to me, Jack. But I am not surprised by all this. You were always—how do you say it?—the stranger at the feast? That is why you became my friend at Oxford and why you became a spy, and it seems to me most likely that this is why you finally came to realize that your empire is not worthy of you.”

“Perhaps,” McColl said, remembering what someone had told him once—that old friends were always the best mirrors.

“So when will you bring your wife here?”

“This evening, if that’s okay?”

“I will be waiting for you.”

Half an hour later McCollducked out of a busy street, passed through the narrow doorway of a serai, and walked across its inner courtyard. The proprietor’s wife looked up from her spinning wheel and gave him an uncertain smile—Pathans were not universally popular in Delhi. He wished her a good evening in Urdu and headed up the creaking stairs.

In their room two geckos were contemplating each other on the ceiling. Caitlin was out on the balcony, dozing on the mattress. He stood and gazed down at her, the hair half hiding the face he knew so well, the white cotton robe wound tightly around the body that never failed to arouse him.

Seven weeks had passed since that day beside the river, since Komarov’s death and their decision to continue the pursuit together. She was thinner now, browner, the lines of her face drawn a shade harder. He found it difficult to believe that he could ever love anyone else.

It had taken them more than a month to cross Afghanistan, eking out McColl’s emergency supply of silver coins. They had sometimes journeyed alone, sometimes with caravans, once even with a traveling cinema, rarely covering more than ten miles a day, but knowing that their quarry would be moving little faster. No one hurried in Afghanistan, a land where time was kept by the rivers and mountains, where humans still recognized forces greater than themselves. It had felt like time on loan from the rest of their lives, doing what humans had always done: eating, drinking, traveling, sleeping, and making love.

Then, one night in September, they had passed between the jaws of the Khyber with a Pathan caravan and seen the plains of the Punjab laid out below, a patchwork of greens fading into the east. Two evenings later they had boarded the train in Peshawar like people stepping back into civilization’s dream, with hardening faces, touches that felt merely physical, words that seemed bogged down in consonants.

Another three dawns had brought them to the Delhi station. McColl, turbaned and bearded, had walked out past a DCI man he recognized from 1915; Caitlin, tanned and veiled, had attracted even less attention. They had taken this room in a nearby serai. From its balcony they could see, in one direction, the station itself, forever smoke-signaling arrivals and departures, and in the other, looming above the ancient city, Shah Jahan’s Red Fort, stone at the heart of the British Empire.

McColl’s insistence that they rest for a day had less to do with physical need than his acutely felt reluctance to raise the curtain on the final act. That night, as they’d moved together in such effortless harmony, he’d had the sudden terrifying feeling that the two of them had crammed a lifetime’s love into only a couple of months.

And now the curtain was going up.

Until he met her, he had always thought people in love arranged their lives around that emotional fact. But Caitlin took the opposite view, that people should decide what they wanted from life and adjust their love lives to fit. This, she said, was what men did anyway, usually at the woman’s expense.

He could see her point, but…

He still had no idea whether or not she was going back to Russia or how he could live without her if she did.

As if in response to this thought, Caitlin opened her eyes. “Hello,” she said sleepily. For a moment she looked vulnerable, but the world soon took her back. She pulled herself up into a sitting position, her back against the balcony wall, and gave him a questioning look.

“Yes,” he told her. “We can stay with Harry. He’s expecting us in an hour or so.”

“I’ll get ready.”

Darkness had fallen by thetime they started the short journey across the city. Caitlin still felt uncomfortable—not to mention vaguely ridiculous—wearing the veil, although after a month of doing so, she supposed she should be used to the damn thing. It wasn’t just the political insult it reflected; the cloth itself felt physically restrictive, as if it stopped her from breathing properly.