Ник Харкуэй: Edie Investigates

He went in and ordered a cream tea, which turned out to be enormous, and was struggling with a second five-inch scone and a vast quantity of whipped cream when his anonymous driver came in and handed him an aged foolscap file with no departmental crests or Top-Secret stamps and the single word BARIKAD scrawled in black marker along the spine.

“Background, Tommy,” the driver said. “For your soonest consideration. Don’t leave it on a bus.”

Edie Banister had not been aware that she was watching the young man by the window. She had slipped into a kind of timelessness, a collision of past and present which had been occurring all too often recently, and her mind had been looking back and inwards rather than at the room. Meanwhile, though, some part of her had registered a new face in the Copper Kettle: a lanky, bilious creature who had obviously caught Mrs Mandel’s eye, because she positively covered his plate with extra goodies. Edie suspected the proprietress was something of a terror with a certain sort of male whose tastes ran to the Oedipal, but either this lad was not that sort or Mrs Mandel had accidentally overcooked the situation by giving him enough cream to choke a family of cats.

So she was surprised to find that her entire attention was focused—in a most elliptical and abruptly very professional way—upon the conversation now taking place between him and a stout, balding man with a boxer’s nose and the kind of suit which said he worked for a living: a one-time sergeant, Edie rather thought, or a chief petty officer—and now, by the keys in his closed fist, from which dangled the badge of an upmarket carmaker, driver to the bilious eater of scones.

Well, all right. A civil servant, with a driver to keep him out of trouble, though what trouble one might get into in Shrewton was hard to say. It did not necessarily mean there was anything of interest to her here. And yet, the watchful part of her had seen something already, or half seen it, and was clamouring for her to keep looking, to order another pot of sump water and persist in her cow-eyed gazing across the room as if she were a truly dotty old baggage. She reached into her handbag and fussed briefly, then tapped the lid of the pot significantly at Mrs Mandel and raised her eyebrows. Mrs Mandel, perhaps unused to people asking for refills, bustled over post-haste, just as the driver passed his master some sort of sheaf of documents whose very familiar anonymity made Edie yet more suspicious. She had seen files like that, had handled and even compiled them. She had been fired, ultimately, by a man who told her she was past her prime and signed his name to a paper held in just such a file. But there were, surely, many departments which used them, especially now, when British government ministers had developed the alarming habit of wandering around in front of the press brandishing highly confidential reports in transparent plastic envelopes. If only she had been closer, close enough to read whatever was written in black along the spine, or better yet to grab a glance over the young man’s shoulder. Child’s play, it would have been to the white fish girl. Not so now. Well, needs must.

Mrs Mandel’s heavy foot became improbably tangled in the handle of Edie’s venerable umbrella, and she staggered. She caught herself with both hands, which meant that the contents of her tray flew up into the air, and then—inevitably—down. Edie leapt backwards with a shrill bleat of “Oh, my stars and garters!” and everyone stared. Her table was a mess, a soupy muddle of torte and boiling tea. Mrs Mandel demanded loudly to know if she was all right, and Edie averred that she was, but what a shock, how terrible, and it was all her fault. Mrs Mandel became competitively stricken and abject, and Edie after a few rounds parlayed this into a new table and a new pot.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, reaching into her bag for a pair of wire-rimmed glasses she had found, broken, on the floor of a party in 1974 and never quite managed to throw away. “Would you mind if I—oh, dear, now I shalln’t be able to see anything at all, oh, my—would you mind if I sat just here? I don’t want to crowd you, of course.”

And when the young man smiled in great embarrassment and assured her that the table next to his own was exactly where she should sit, he would not dream of her going anywhere else, and the driver winced at this folly and buggered off, Edie was left able to let her perfectly good eyes wander. And understood at last what it was her subconscious had wanted her, needed her to know.

Across the back of the folder was the single word: BARIKAD.

It was the fashion in some Russian families, during the Soviet period—which Edie regrettably must acknowledge she remembers—to choose names for children which reflected their devotion to the socialist cause. A thousand young Bolsheviks were christened Revolution, Proletariat or Potemkin. But there was only one Barikad.

He had no patronymic, no other names at all. He was the iron man of Stalin’s secret research towns, out in the tundra between Moscow and the Pole. It was said he had transformed his nation’s old superstitions into a new science of the mind. In the stone white of the Russian winter, he built machines to empower his brain, ran current from hydroelectric dams through his bones and mortified his flesh, and achieved a species of transcendence. He had projected his aetheric body into the secret councils of other states. He could curse a man to death, cause sickness with his thoughts. He was the Party’s wizard, and armies and secret organisations and even parliaments went in fear of the Eye of Barikad.

Except finally it was all a lie: a brilliant, implausible, impossible campaign of disinformation to send Western scientists down blind alleys, seeking defences they would never find against attacks which did not exist. Millions of dollars, thousands of hours of research, US marines staring fixedly into the eyes of confused goats; psychic tests run on Celts in Wiltshire and Kerns in Brittany; years of divining, dowsing, spoon-bending and card-reading; Barikad was a fantasy, and he cost the West more money as a dream than he ever could have as a tangible truth. The man, yes, had been real. He had tortured himself on steel frames, drunk wormwood and spoken with spirits. And, predictably, he had died, cooked to cinders in the electric discharge of a turbine driven by the waters of a nameless river. His great engines were never built. The science outposts he supposedly constructed were just labour camps, bizarre make-work for the losers in Stalin’s games: Abkhaz and Ingush forced from the Caucuses, unwise poets, and Party members rash enough to remember yesterday’s promises. In their hundreds of thousands, the unwanted of the Soviet Union were made to disappear, spent as coin to persuade the beancounters in London and Washington of an enormous and uneconomic falsehood.

For a while, it worked.

The liner is terribly grand, and Edie’s wardrobe is made to match. She has learned in the last few weeks the fine points of fluttering, and faffing, and even—in spite of her considerable misgivings—simpering. She quite enjoys simpering. In the compass of the simper lies a vast and nuanced syntax of vapid communication which can mean anything from “Tell me more about your enormous investments” or “Not until after we’re married, Your Grace” to “Get lost, creepy, before I call a copper”. She has to acknowledge, too, that the cruise as a concept is not without charm. All the stultifying rules of sexual conduct which prevail in England seem to be left behind when the ship leaves the White Cliffs in its wake. Note to self . All the same, she’ll be glad when this mission is over and she can go back to her natural habitat.

She turns to the wall briefly as if to fuss with her hair and adjusts a part of her dress which is doing something she would generally expect only from a confident and somewhat risquée lover. These outfits have no shame.