On Green Dolphin Street

  “Poor Charlie.”

  “Anyway, the Ukraina’s a bit of a dump, I’m afraid. One of Stalin’s whoppers. Inconvenient, too. But there are lots of us in the diplomatic blocks opposite. Is that where you lived when you were here?”

  “No, we were in Sadova Samotechnaya.”

  “Ah, Sad Sam. So you know the ropes, anyway.”

  “I don’t remember much. I was only here for a few weeks, off and on.”

  Winterburn slowed the car down as they came into the outskirts of the city and stopped at a junction. “You do know that if you go out you’ll be followed?”

  “Yes. I don’t expect to go out much.”

  “No. But if you have to. Don’t be alarmed. They’ll have seen your visa and they’ll be interested in why you’re here. Just be careful, that’s all. And, of course, I need hardly remind you, I’m sure, that the hotel room will be bugged. So. Discretion.”

  They moved forward again.

  “And was Charlie any … any use? Before he fell ill?”

  “Oh yes. The Ambassador was delighted to see him. For weeks on end, we just get bundles of old copies of The Times here. Hardly know what’s going on outside at all. We were all fascinated to hear about the election and Kennedy and so forth. And apparently he’d seen the permanent undersecretary in London, too, so that was worthwhile. Vaut le voyage, as you might say.”

  “So he hasn’t destroyed his career or anything like that?”

  “No, well …” Winterburn did not seem sure on this point. “I’m sure you know as well as I do, the service is tolerant about personal difficulties. There are strains and stresses in the job. The problem here is one of security, that was the alarm.”

  “But in the long term, do you—”

  “It’s really not for me to say, Mrs. van der Linden. Now, I’m just going to pull in here. Bit of a monstrosity, isn’t it?”

  They mounted the steps to the doors of the Ukraina. It was a building of gross imperial intent, in which considerations of design or beauty had been sacrificed to a display of skyscraping power, constructed by the slave labor of defeated Germans to the glory of the Soviet Union, one of seven Stalin monuments that lowered over the city. Mary grasped the wooden handle, on top of which was a small carved brass fir cone, and heaved. There were further doors, only one of which functioned, before they found themselves in a gloomy, endless space, like a deserted ballroom in a power cut. They crossed the dun marbled floor, observed by two unsmiling men in bulky, ill-fitting leather jackets. There was a barber’s shop, closed for the night, and a newsstand, also closed, but no sign of activity; it might have passed for an outsize hospital, barracks or factory floor until Winterburn located a desk at which to register. He spoke Russian to a large woman in a uniform jacket beneath which, Mary could not help noticing, her enormous breasts sagged unsupported. She produced a key and handed it without speaking to Winterburn, who thanked her with a diplomatic smile.

  “Otchen spasibo. I’ll just take you to the lifts,” he said to Mary, “then I’ll leave you to it. Here are some rubles, though I don’t suppose you’ll need them. There’s nothing to buy. The number’s on the key. It’s on the sixth floor. Do call if you need anything, won’t you?”

  As Winterburn walked off into the gloom, Mary pressed the button for the elevator. While she waited, she looked down. On the marble floor at her feet was a cockroach lying on its back; its legs thrashed impotently as it tried to right itself. Everyone she knew in New York was obsessed by what they called “roaches” (they felt unable to utter the first part of the insect’s name) but she had never actually seen one before.

  She pressed the call button again and pushed at the struggling creature with the toe of her mother’s boot, trying to help it over.

  She wanted this interlude, whatever it was going to contain, to be over. She wanted to wrap Charlie in her arms.

  After ten minutes the lift had still not come. Mary was aware of the two men watching her from the other side of the lobby; they did not lift their heavy stares, even for an instant. Another woman was waiting a few feet away; Mary turned and made a shrugging, interrogative gesture; the woman shrugged back, but seemed unsurprised by the wait.

  After fifteen minutes the doors shuddered and clanked open. Two men pushed past, leaving the lift empty; Mary stepped in and pressed the number six; the other woman wanted eight. The inside of the lift smelled of pickled cabbage, sweat and urine, a special Moscow compound she remembered. After the ascent, Mary stepped out with relief and found herself on a dim landing with corridors leading both ways. At a desk sat an old woman in a black shawl, and Mary showed her the number on the key; in response, she raised a finger and pointed down a long, underlit passageway; then she stuck the same finger in the dial of an ancient telephone on the desk.

  Mary walked uncertainly down the corridor, peering at the room numbers on the doors. Eventually, she came to it: 698. She raised her hand to knock, then paused: no etiquette guide that she knew had covered this situation. She rapped lightly with her knuckle. When there was no answer, she tried to slip the key into the lock, but her fingers were trembling too much. She dropped the key, and as she bent to pick it up, she saw the old woman standing at her desk, staring at her down the endless corridor.

  The key rattled at the narrow indentation; finally, by holding it with both hands, Mary was able to sink it in the lock and turn it. She pushed the door open and dragged her case in behind her. The room was in darkness. She closed the door after her and searched the wall for a switch. As she moved forward in the half-light, out of the narrow hallway and into the room, she could see a round table in front of her, and she thought she could make out a figure on the other side of it. Her left hand touched a switch, which moved sideways in its plate; it worked a shaded lamp suspended from the ceiling, in whose glow she saw Charlie slumped at the table with his back to the window, apparently unconscious. “Darling?” she said, going round and putting her hand on his shoulder. She put her arms round him and gently shook him; she tried to lift him up. He groaned a little and opened his eyes, which even in this light she could see were shot with blood, drugged, absent. He had not shaved for days and his chin spiked her hands as she supported his face and kissed him.

  She held him in her arms, wrapping him up in her love as she knelt by his chair. He was coming round; he opened his eyes more fully and seemed to want to smile at her. He appeared to know who she was. “My darling,” she said, “oh, you poor thing.” She felt a responding pressure from his arms; he tried to speak, but could not; then he rose with difficulty from the chair, tottered back for a moment and fell forward into her arms, where she held him for a long time, murmuring words of consolation, “Mummy’s here, it’s all right, darling, it’s all right,” as she stroked him. Eventually she sat him down again and found the switches of two table lamps that lit the room as fully as their bulbs allowed, and showed as much as Mary wished to see.

  The table was covered with a thick-piled crimson cloth with bobbles dangling from the edge; on it were two empty bottles of vodka and three plates used as ashtrays. There was also an opened tin of something, partly eaten, with a fork sticking out of it. Mary looked at the label; since she spoke no Russian, the words meant nothing to her, but it smelled like something that in the West you would feed to a cat.

  She remembered the first time she and Charlie had met. The image went off in her mind like a flashgun: Charlie, aged twenty-nine, lean, bright-eyed, at a party in London, talking to a group of people with delighted amusement but some frustration that he could not form the words quickly enough to catch the flight of his fantasy. There had been a young woman hanging on his arm, a potted palm or tree of some kind behind him, and a plaster pillar against which he occasionally leaned his hand. But he had stopped when Mary approached to be introduced; his good manners prevailed over his exuberance and he brought her into the group of people, smoothing her stranger’s path. She had loved him almost at once.

  Mary moved with swift, unques
tioning certainty. First, she went through the double doors in the bedroom and turned on the light there. The bed was unmade; Charlie’s clothes lay about the room, but there were some clean ones in the open case. Through a further door was a bathroom, where she tried the water in the tub; the hot ran reasonably warm, and she searched for the plug. She would wash him, shave him, change his clothes: she would begin the long road back at once. After she had looked for five minutes, she remembered that this was another dull, recurring fact of life in Moscow: no bath plugs.

  She got him through and undressed him; he made no resistance, and after she had given him a kind of standing blanket bath, shaved him, nicking him twice with the razor, which was no more than he usually cut himself, she dressed him in pajamas and put him into bed.

  “Has anyone been to see you today?” she said.

  “A couple of bloody Embassy wives. I told them to bugger off.”

  “I see. Well, I’m just going to tidy up a bit.”

  In the main room there was a sofa with overstuffed plush upholstery; on the wall above were two cheap paintings of huddled trees, Soviet imitations, presumably, of nineteenth-century Russian landscapes. Near the entrance was a glass-fronted cabinet with a selection of plates, cutlery and vodka glasses, as though it was expected that guests would wish to entertain and dine quite lavishly, even though there was no room service and no food to be bought in the shops.

  Mary looked up to the cornice, neatly cut from a plaster mold, with no sign of where the microphones were concealed; the light fitting was also scarless, and although the wooden cover in front of the radiator was loose, and could be moved, there were no visible wires behind it. The hatched parquet floor had a sheen so viscous-looking, like flypaper, that she was surprised the rubber soles of her boots did not stick to it as she walked.

  She emptied the ashtrays down the lavatory and washed the glasses in the sink; the plumbing in the bathroom was exposed, with chunky soil pipes running candidly across the tiled floor, while hot and cold water supplies had been spliced in around them, spaghetti-fashion. The holder with the roll of paper was on the opposite side of the room to the lavatory itself, a short but inconvenient walk away. In the bedroom, where Charlie had closed his eyes, she could find nowhere to hang his clothes, or hers, but piled them up more neatly in their cases.

  She located a switch for a third table lamp in the sitting room, by whose light she noticed something that she had not seen before: a large envelope addressed to her. Inside was a further sealed envelope addressed to “Doctor treating Mr. van der Linden in London” and a note to herself from the doctor at the Embassy, whose name, as far as she could decipher from his prescriptive scrawl, was Dixon Keslake. It told her that he had left a bottle of blue pills on top of the cabinet in the bathroom and that she should ensure Charlie had three a day, but no more, and no other pills. She was to keep the bottle in her possession. He would call the next day to see how Charlie was; meanwhile she should allow him to drink as little alcohol as possible and try to make him eat. The doctor tried at the end to sound reassuring, though there were too many underlinings and phrases such as “in no circumstances” for his conclusion to have an uplifting effect.

  Mary went back into the bedroom, sat down on the edge of the bed and took Charlie’s hand. She thought of how she had lain awake in Frank’s bed on the first night in New York after they had made love. The practicalities of what she had fallen into and the vocabulary for them—“affair,” “infidelity”—had seemed to her banal and inadequate; she had always believed that the adventure of marriage was incomparably more interesting than the petty indulgence of betrayal. She drew back the curtain on the window and looked down toward the Moscow River beyond the great bronze figure of Shevchenko, the Ukrainian poet braced rhetorically against the darkness below; then she turned back to the bed, where Charlie was beginning to stir. She would shortly discover the depth of her belief.

  Charlie got out of bed and went through into the sitting room, in search of cigarettes and drink. Mary had a pack of Winstons in her purse and pushed them over to him as they sat on either side of the table.

  “Darling,” she said. “Tell me. Tell me what happened.”

  Charlie managed to light a cigarette. His voice was thin, devoid of expression. “I don’t want to live anymore. I could stay alive for you or the children. I could do it. But I want you to set me free.”

  Mary was too shocked to say more than, “But we need you. There’s so much for you still to do.” Fearing that this sounded onerous, she added, “So much joy. So much pleasure for you.”

  Charlie lowered his head into his arms. “I know it all. I’ve seen too much.” He was mumbling into his hands; then he raised his tear-stained face. “And now my brain’s attacking me. The night before I left London, I woke up and I was hallucinating. I was in an unreal world … Of fear and panic. I can’t come back. I can’t come back into your world.”

  Mary could not for the moment find the words to argue against the weakly voiced power of his despair.

  “You forget the things I’ve seen,” he was saying. “Those men in the river in Italy … All those corpses … The end, the only end of it all … Whether it’s now or later, like your mother … The awful insignificance … You have to pit a fantasy against it. A self-deceit. And I have no more energy to invent it. You do it.” He stood up, apparently gaining strength. “You make the fantasy, you create the belief that there is something you can make last or live or seem worthwhile. You’re good at it. I’ve tried. Believe me, Mary, I have tried.” He slumped down again at the table.

  Mary breathed in deeply. A tremor of self-consciousness came to her: this is my life, it seemed to be reminding her; this is the man I chose to spend it with, in what he regards, rightly perhaps, as a delusion, a convenient pretense that there can be value without permanence.

  But he is my life, she thought, and I have no other, and I must save him if for no better reason than that I must save myself.

  She crossed to his chair, knelt down beside him and dredged the depths of herself for the most charged, vital and persuasive memories of their shared life together. She recalled to him his insane joy at Louisa’s birth; how he had rushed out to telephone his father. She described Richard’s double-footed leap across the floor of their Tokyo flat, because a mere walk could not contain his appetite for living; she began an inventory of the children’s most ridiculous words and phrases, mistakes she knew had made him subside, momentarily at least, with the burden of love.

  She gripped his wrist with both her hands, her brow flexed in concentration as she provoked the flow of images, in a free-associated rush, knowing that among them there might be moments of such poignancy and joy that their inexplicable light would find a way into the dark logic of his despair.

  When he tried to speak, she put her hand across his mouth for fear that the decisive example might not yet have come back to her, might still be on the edge of her memory. She talked of flats and houses, villas down dirt tracks and rented farmhouses where they had created characters from people they had met, where friends they loved as much for their forgiven weaknesses as for their admired strengths had held back the hours with talk; she recalled to him Louisa’s blinking face when she emerged from water after swimming and her gurgling laughter; the day when they had sat and watched a school prize-giving, when Mary had known that he would have traded every honor, every degree and advancement he had ever received if his only son might once be mentioned in the junior school spelling prize; that every cell in his body was clamoring in desire for it; and she described the furtive movement of his hand to track away the tear that had rolled out from his clamped eye and exploding heart when it had been so.

  “And the men you cared for in Africa and Italy, the families you wrote to,” she said. “You managed that, my love, you rose above their loss and everything it meant. So did thousands of others like you. That’s why we loved you, you wonderful generation of men, that you were strong enough to do that, to
see what you saw, to go through all that, the death of friends, the death of people dear to you—to all of us, for God’s sake—and would not let it shake your view that the victory was to the meek, the good, the modest. The men who never bragged or talked about it but just went quietly about their business afterwards. For our children, for gentle people like my father and like you. You fought that battle against the despair that might have followed and you won it. Once and for all time you won it. You can’t throw back that victory now.”

  She talked until she felt her throat begin to burn. Then she threw back her head to catch her breath, and as she did so her eye was caught by the plaster of the light-fitting in the ceiling above them. She thought of the concealed microphone, the invisible wires that tracked back to a large spool of slowly turning Soviet tape, so that everything she had said—her reasons for living and her reasons for wanting her husband to live—had been recorded and preserved for later scrutiny.

  She held Charlie tightly in her arms that night in bed, and felt his resistance to living decontract as the blue pill did its gentle work. In the morning, she left him asleep and went downstairs in search of food and drink. As she left the room, the door opposite opened, and a fair-haired young man in a Western suit, clearly the Embassy’s lookout, called a cheerful “good morning.” She had another wait of fifteen minutes for the lift, so by the time she returned to the room, the coffee was cold and Charlie had no appetite for the bread and jam.

  He remained in bed, staring ahead of him without speaking. Mary continued to talk to him as she set about tidying the room; her conversation was much lighter in tone than on the night before, though she made sure that it all looked to the future, to the plans she had for them and for the children. She had inherited a small amount of money from her mother; she did not mention that she had spent a little of it on her hotel bill in New York; she somewhat exaggerated to Charlie how much was left and how far it would go in helping to solve their financial difficulties.