David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

But Valentine wasn’t waiting for an answer. He slipped away leaving his cricketing metaphors ringing in Paul’s ears. Telling Paul to ‘play up’ was all very well but he was beginning to feel like a rabbit at the wicket, a tail-ender put in before he was ready, and with the other side closing in all around him.

Paul remained at the rail for some time after Valentine had gone. The steamer had now taken to pitching and yawing in the face of the bow-on swell, rather like a child’s rocking horse champing at the bit to get going but forever restrained by its static rockers. He fumbled for a cigarette and spent three matches trying to light it in the wind. He recalled the old trench warning about snipers and lighting three cigarettes from the same match and wondered if three matches on the same cigarette counted.

After a while he walked around the deck, circulating first one way then the other. He didn’t want to go below. It was stuffy down there and Pinker would be in the cabin full of his mundane chatter. The Russians, Korbelov and Solokov were in the saloon, so that was out too. To believe they might be Kell’s assassins seemed eccentric in the extreme given that they weren’t trying to hide what they were, but he supposed one shouldn’t eliminate the double-bluff. After all Valentine, as Darling, was passing himself off as some sort of civil servant which — in a way — was just what he was. At least Valentine seemed to have drawn the short straw this time: Pinker was far preferable to Pater. Paul might have to put up with Pinker’s luggage cluttering up their cabin but at least he wasn’t underfoot like Pater, forever communing with his God. Paul wondered who’s soul the man was praying for, his fellow beings’ or his own? If he was anything like the chaplains Paul had come across in the army, Pater was probably more concerned for his own skin — or the spiritual equivalent — than the men’s. They had only ever seemed comfortable with the enlisted men when they were dead; or at some irretrievable point close to it.

Looking at the overcast sky Paul realised it had been some years since he had given much thought to his own soul. With death all around he had usually been more concerned with staying alive than with thoughts of what there might lie beyond. Granted, under a bombardment he had chanted ‘God, oh God’, as often as the next man. But that had been not so much a request for help as a simple incantation which, had it any possibility of working, was as good a thing to mutter to oneself as anything else. After the enforced religiosity of his childhood — mostly in the care of priest-ridden servants — he had found that, with age, secular considerations had obtruded. To the extent where he could now speculate that if he still had a soul by this time it had probably shrivelled through inattention to the size of a walnut. Or some equally compacted object, impervious anyway to half-forgotten religious ritual.

His mother still followed the Russian Orthodox faith, if in later years he suspected rather more through social behaviour than religious mores. She had entered that church upon her marriage — or whatever form of conjunction she and his father had undergone. On arrival back in London she had even chosen a house for its proximity to an Orthodox church, to facilitate, he assumed, her growing desire born of recent widowhood for holy renewal. His as well as hers, as it had turned out. She had dragged him — religiously, he supposed one could say — to every service and that first year or so, he remembered, had been filled with the smell of incense and the sound of chanting. Whether, in his mother’s case, it was faith or a nostalgia for the mystery of an altar secluded behind the iconostasis and its array of holy icons, he couldn’t say. For him it had become a natural part of life. Until, by the time the liturgy had just about become second nature, he had found himself shipped off to a boarding school, one that didn’t cater for foreign notions like Orthodoxy. There he’d been fed the standard Anglican fare that the rest of the school were given for divine sustenance. At first he had found it akin to eating stale bread after being accustomed to the staff of life. And, looking back, he supposed that that might have been the point at which his appetite for that sort of thing — along with his soul — had begun to shrink. Which had withered first, appetite or soul — chicken or egg? He couldn’t say, but once both had shrivelled to the dimensions of the indiscernible, the matter was beyond consideration. The critical point now was that if the need for salvation arose, how long would he have to stay on his knees to make any impression on a shrunken soul?

Later in the afternoon, tiring of the novelty of being doused by sea-spray, he passed back through the companionway into the saloon. It was still empty except for Korbelov and Solokov, ensconced in a corner, the one writing furiously before passing each page as it was finished to the other who read through and amended it. The pages, Paul saw, were covered with Cyrillic script and he was struck by how alien it looked and how long it must have been since he had read anything in Russian. His mother had the great novels in the original, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Gogol, Turgenev and all the rest, but he had not looked at them since he was a boy. It would all come back, he supposed, in the manner they said riding a bicycle does to one who hasn’t been in the saddle for some time. And, in truth, he was counting upon the fact. There would be no English spoken where he was going. If he knew what was good for him he’d refrain from attempting to use it.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said to the pair as he entered.

They both nodded to him, amiably enough, and he ventured to remark, ‘You look busy,’ before wishing something a little more intelligent had come to mind.

‘We are writing our address to the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies,’ said Korbelov.

‘Really?’ said Paul. ‘You expect to give a speech, then?’

The Russians exchanged glances as if the fact should have been self-evident.

‘But of course,’ Solokov said, his goatee bobbing up and down like the rear end of a pied wagtail. ‘They will expect our view of British socialists following Russian example in casting off imperialist yoke.’

‘Oh yes,’ Paul said, ‘I suppose they will,’ trying to imagine Trotsky’s reaction to having a fatter version of himself in the Soviet. Perhaps he would take it as a case of the sincerest form of flattery. It might even be that the place was full of imitation Trotskys and Lenins. ‘That’s Russian, is it?’ he asked, pointing at Korbelov’s script.

‘You speak our language?’ asked Korbelov.

‘No, not a word, it’s just that I don’t think I’ve ever seen it written down before.’

‘You speak Finnish?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Then how will you conduct your business, if you speak neither Russian nor Finnish?’

‘A translator,’ Paul decided. ‘My company have arranged for a translator.’

‘This company works for British Government?’ Solokov asked.

‘Oh, no,’ Paul said quickly. ‘That is, we have government contracts, of course. In time of war and all that. Absolutely.’

‘And workers? They have labour unions?’

The conversation had taken a turn Paul had not foreseen. He had worked up a few responses concerning pit props, and had decided to stick to coal as the product of his fictitious mines. At least knew what that looked like when it came out of the ground. Labour relations were a seam he hadn’t investigated. He decided it best to back out before the roof caved in.

‘Would you mind?’ he asked, gesturing at the page Korbelov was holding. ‘It’s only curiosity.’