John le Carré - The Russia House

I mounted the staircase apprehensively. I had declined the protective services of Brock, and Merridew's half-hearted offer of support. The stairwell was dark and steep and inhospitable and unpleasantly silent. It was early evening but we knew he was at home. I pressed the bell but did not hear it ring, so I rapped the door with my knuckles. It was a stubby little door, thickly panelled. It reminded me of the boat-housc on the island. I heard a step inside and at once stood back, I still don't know quite why, but I suppose it was a kind of fear of animals. Would he be fierce, would he be angry or over-effuslvc, would he throw me down the stairs or fling his arms round me? I was carrying a briefcase and I remember transferring it to my left hand as if to be ready to protect myself. Though, God knows, I am not a fighting man. I smelt fresh paint. There was no eyehole in the door, and it was flush against its iron lintel. He had no way of knowing who was there before he opened to me. I heard a latch slip. The door swung inward.

'Hullo, Harry,' he said.

So I said, 'Hullo, Barley.' I was wearing a lightweight dark suit, blue in preference to grey. I said, 'Hullo, Barley,' and waited for him to smile.

He was thinner, he was harder and he was straighter, with the result that he had become very tall indeed, taller than me by a head. You're a nerveless traveller, I remember thinking as I waited. It was what Hannah in her early days used to say we should both of us learn to become. The old untidy gestures had left him. The discipline of small spaces had done its work. He was trim. He was wearingjeans and an old cricket shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. He had splashes of white paint on his forearms and a smear of it across his forehead. I saw a step-ladder behind him and a half-whited wall, and at the centrc of the room heaps of books and gramophone reco.rds partly protected with a dustsheet.

'Come for a game of chess, Harry?' he asked, still not smiling.

'If I could just talk to you,' I said, as I might have said to Hannah, or anybody else to whom I was proposing a half-measure.

'Officially?'

'Well.'

He studied me as if he hadn't heard me, frankly and in his own time, of which he seemed to have a lot - much, I suppose, as on ' e studies cellmates or interrogators in a world where the common courtesies tend to be dispensed with.

But his gaze had nothing downward or shameful in it, nothing of arrogance or shiftiness. It seemed to the contrary even clearer than I remembered it, as if it had settled itself permanently in the far regions to which it used occasionally to drift.

'I've got some cold plonk, if that'll do you, he said, and stood back to let me pass him while he watched me, before he closed the door and dropped the latch.

But he still didn't smile. His mood was a mystery to me. I felt I could understand nothing of him unless he chose to tell it me. Put another way, I understood everything about him that was within my grasp to understand. The rest, infinity.

There were dustsheets on the chairs as well but he pulled them off and folded them as if they were his bedding. Prison people, I have noticed over the years, take a long time to shake off their pride.

'What do you want?' he asked, pouring us each a glass from a flagon.

'They've asked me to tidy things up,' I said. 'Get some answers out of you. Assurances. Give you some in return.' I had lost my way. 'Whether we can help,' I said. 'Whether you need things. What we can agree on for the future and so on.

'I've got all the assurances I need, thanks,' he said politely, lighting on the one word that seemed to catch his interest. 'They'll move at their own pace. I've promised to keep my mouth shut.' He smiled at last. 'I've followed your advice, Harry. I've become a long-distance lover, like you.'

'I was in Moscow,' I said, fighting hard to find the flow to our conversation. 'I went to the places. Saw the people. Used my own name.'

'What is it?' he asked with the same courtliness. 'Your name. What is it?'

'Palfrey,' I said, leaving out the de .

He smiled as if in sympathy, or recognition.

'The Service sent me over there to look for you. Unofficially but. officially, as it were. Ask the Russians about you. Tidy things up. We thought it was time we found out what had happened to you. See if we could help.'

And make sure they were observing the rules, I might have added. That nobody in Moscow was going to rock the boat. No silly leaks or publicity stunts.

'I told you what happened to me,' he said.

'You mean in your letters to Wicklow and Henziger and people?'

'Yes.'

'Well, naturally we knew the letters had been written under duress, if you wrote them at all. Look at poor Goethe's letter.'

'Balls,' he said. 'I wrote them of my own free will.'

I edged a little nearer to my message. And to the briefcase at my side.

'As far as we're concerned, you acted very honourably,' I said, drawing out a file and opening it on my lap. 'Everybody talks under duress and you were no exception. We're grateful for what you did for us and aware of the cost to you. Professionally and personally. We're concerned that you should have your full measure of compensation. On terms, naturally. The sum could be large.'

Where had he learned to watch me like that? To withhold himself so steadily? To impart tension to others, when he seemed impervious to it himself?

I read him the terms, which were somewhat like Landau's in reverse. To stay out of the United Kingdom and only to enter*with our prior consent. Full and final settlement of all claims, his silence in perpetuity expressed ex abundanti cautela in half a dozen different ways. And a lot of money to sign here, provided – always and only provided – he kept his mouth shut.

He didn't sign, though. He was already bored. He waved my important pen away.

'What did you do with Walt, by the way? I brought a hat for him. Kind of tea-cosy in tiger stripes. Can't find the damn thing.'

'If you send it to me, I'll see he gets it,' I said.

He caught my tone and smiled at me sadly. 'Poor old Walt. They've given him the push, ch?'

'We peak early in our trade,' I said, but I couldn't look him in the eye so I changed the subject. 'I suppose you heard that your aunts have sold out to Lupus Books.'

He laughed – not his old wild laughter, it was true, but a free man's laugh, all the same. 'Jumbo! The old devil! Conned the Sacred Cow! Trust him!'

But he was at ease with the idea. He seemed to take genuine pleasure in the rightness of it. I am scared, as we all are in my trade, of people of good instinct. But I was able to share vicariously in his repose. He seemed to have developed universal tolerance.

She'll come,,he told me as he gazed out at the harbour. They promised that one day she would come.

Not at once, and in their time, not in Barley's. But she would come, he had no doubt. Maybe this year, maybe next, he said. But something inside the mountainous bureaucratic Russian belly would heave and give birth to a mouse of compassion. He had no doubt of it. It would be gradual but it would happen. They had promised him.

'They don't break their promises,' he assured me, and in the face of such trust it would have been churlish in me to contradict him. But something else was preventing me from voicing my customary scepticism. It was Hannah again. I felt she was begging me to let him live with his humanity, even if I had destroyed hers. 'You think people never change because you don't,' she had once said to me. 'You only feel safe when you're disenchanted.'

I suggested I take him out for food but he seemed not to hear. He was standing at the long window, staring at the harbour lights while I stared at his back. The same pose that he struck when we had first interviewed him here in Lisbon. The same arm holding out his glass. The same pose as on the island when Ned told him he had won. But straighter, Was he talking to me again? I realised he was. He was watching their ship arrive from Leningrad, he said. He was watching her hurry down the gangway to him with her children at her side. He was sitting with Uncle Matvey under the shade tree in the park below his window. where he had sat with Ned and Walter in the days before his manhood. He was listening to Katya's rendering of Matvey's heroic tales of endurance. He was believing in all the hopes that I had buried with me when I chose the safe bastion of infinite distrust in preference to the dangerous path of love.