John le Carré - The Russia House

It was plush and perhaps he thought Clive owned it. It would certainly have been Clive's taste, for Clive was only middle class in the sense that he was unaware there was a better taste. It had carved thrones and chintz sofas and electric candles on the walls. The team's table, which could have sat an entire Armistice ceremony, stood in a raised alcove lined with sprawling rubber-plants in Ali Baba jars.

'Why didn't you go to Moscow?' Clive asked without waiting any longer for Barley to settle. 'You were expected. You rented a stand, booked your flight and your hotel. But you didn't show up and you haven't paid. You came to Lisbon with a woman instead. Why?'

'Would you rather I came here with a man?' Barley asked. 'What's it got to do with you and the CIA whether I came here with a woman or a Muscovy duck?'

He pulled back a chair and sat down,more in protest than obedience.

Clive nodded to me and I did my routine number. I rose, I walked round the preposterous table and set the Official Secrets Act form in front of him. I drew an important pen from my waistcoat pocket and offered it to him with funereal gravity. But his eyes were fixed on a spot outside the room, which was a thing that tonight and in the months that followed I noticed in him often, his way of looking beyond the present company into some troubled private territory of his own; of bursting into noisy talk as a means of exorcising ghosts that no one else had seen; of snapping his fingers without cause, as if to say, 'That's settled then,' where, so far as anybody else knew, nothing had been proposed in the first place.

'Are you going to sign that thing?' said Clive.

'What do you do if I don't?' Barley asked.

'Nothing. Because I'm telling you now,formally and in front of witnesses, that this meeting and everything that passes between us is secret. Harry's a lawyer.'

'I'm afraid that's true,' I said.

Barley pushed the unsigned form away from him across the table. 'And I'm telling you that if I feel the urge I'll paint it on the rooftops,' he said with equal calm.

I resumed my place, taking my important pen with me.

'You seem to have made a pretty good mess of London, too, before you left,' Clive remarked as he returned the form to his folder. 'Debts everywhere. No one knowing where you are. Trails of weeping mistresses. Are you trying to destroy yourself or what?'

'I inherited a romantic list,' Barley said.

'What on earth does that mean?' said Clive, unabashed by his own ignorance. 'Are we using a smart word for dirty books?'

'My grandfather made a corner in novels for the housemaid. In those days people had housemaids. My father called them "Novels for the Masses" and continued the tradition.'

Bob alone felt moved to offer solace. 'God damn it, Barley,' he cried, 'what's so wrong with romantic literature? Better than some of the horse manure they put out. My wife reads the stuff in bucketfuls. Never did her any harm.'

'If you don't like the books you publish, why don't you change them?' Clive asked, who never read anything except Service files and the right-wing press.

'I have a Board,' Barley replied wearily, as if to a tiresome child. 'I have Trustees. I have family shareholders. I have aunts. They like the old safe lines. How-to's. Romances. Tie-ins. Birds of the British Empire.' A glance at Bob. 'Inside the CIA.'

'Why didn't you go to the Moscow audio fair?' Clive repeated.

'The aunts cancelled the match.'

'Will you explain that?'

'I thought I'd take the firm into audio cassettes. The family found out and thought I wouldn't. End of story.'

'So you ran away,' said Clive. 'Is that what you normally do when somebody thwarts you? Perhaps you'd better tell us what this letter's about,' he suggested and, without looking at Barley, slid it along the table to Ned.

Not the original. That was in Langley, being tested for everything from fingerprints to Legionnaires' disease by the unchallengeable forces of technology. A facsimile, prepared to Ned's meticulous instruction, down to the sealed brown envelope marked 'Personal for Mr. Bartholomew Scott Blair, urgent', in Katya's hand, then slit with a paper knife to show it had been opened along the way. Clive handed it to Ned. Ned handed it to Barley. Walter scrabbled at his scalp with his paw and Bob looked on magnanimously like the nice guy who had donated the money. Barley shot a look in my direction, as if he had appointed himself my client. What do I do with this? he was asking with his glance. Do I read it or do I chuck it back at them? I remained, I hope, impassive. I didn't have clients any more. I had the Service.

'Read it slowly,' Ned warned.

'Take all the time in the world, Barley,' said Bob.

How often had we all of us not read the same letter during the last week? I wondered, watching Barley examine the envelope front and back, hold it away from him, hold it close, his round spectacles raised like goggles to his forehead. How many opinions had they not listened to and discarded? It was written in a train, six experts in Langley had pronounced.,In bed, said three more in London. In the back of a car. In haste, in jest, in love, in terror. By a woman, by a man, they had said. The writer is left-handed, right-handed. Is someone whose script of origin is Cyrillic, is Roman, is both, is neither.

As a final twist of the comedy, they had even consulted old Palfrey. 'Under our own copyright law the recipient owns the physical letter but the writer owns the copyright,' I had told them. 'I don't imagine anyone will take you through the Soviet courts.' I couldn't tell whether they were worried or relieved by my opinion.

'Do you recognise the handwriting or not?' Clive asked Barley.

Poking. his long fingers into the envelope, Barley finally fished out the letter - but disdainfully, as if still half expecting it to be a bill. Then paused. And removed his quaint round spectacles and laid them on the table. Then turned his chair and himself away from everyone. And as he began to read, his face buckled into a frown. He finished the first page then glanced at the end of the letter for the signature. He turned to the second page and read the rest of the letter clean through. Then he read the whole of it over again in one run from 'My beloved Barley' to 'Your loving K.' After which he clutched the letter jealously into his lap with both hands and craned his trunk over it so that by design or accident his face was hidden from everyone and his forelock hung down like a hook and his private prayers stayed private to himself.

'She's potty,' he pronounced into the blackness below him. 'Certifiably, totally barmy. She wasn't even there.'

Nobody asked, who's she ? or where's there ? Even Clive knew the value of a good silence.

'K short for Katya, short for Yekaterina, I take it,' piped Walter after a further wait. 'The patronymic is Borisovna.' He was wearing a crooked bow tie, yellow, with a brown-and-orange motif.

'Don't know a K, don't know a Katya, don't know a Yekaterina,' Barley said. 'Borisovna ditto. Never screwed one,never flirted with one, never proposed to one, never even married one. Never met one, far as I remember. Yes, I did.'

They waited, I waited; and we would have waited all night and there would not have been the creak of a chair or the clearing of a throat while Barley ransacked his memory for a Katya.

'Old cow in Aurora,' Barley resumed. 'Tried to flog me some art prints of Russian painters. I didn't bite. Aunts would have blown their corks.'

'Aurora?' Clive asked, not knowing whether it was a city or a State agency.

'Publishers.'

'Do you remember her other name?'

Barley shook his head, his face still out of sight. 'Beard,' he said.

'Katya of the beard. Ninety in the shade.'