‘Divorce things?’ said Kemp, refusing him an escape.
‘Yes,’ said Blair, trapped.
‘Thirty years ago, when I was a kid too,’ said Kemp, ‘I think I might have taken a drink – maybe two – if I hadn’t thought I was important enough for my father to bother about, for eighteen months at a time.’
‘How was it?’ asked Ruth, when Blair got to Dominiques: he was late and she was already in the small side bar, nursing a whisky sour.
Blair didn’t answer, not at once, still not through with stripping away the self-protective attitudes, a process which had started at the end of his encounter with the counsellors and continued in the cab on his way to the restaurant. ‘Good,’ he said, self-reflective. Expanding more forcefully he went on, ‘I’m not sure – because nobody’s sure about anything – but I think it was good and I think I’ve found a way to help Paul.’
Now it was Ruth’s turn to hesitate. ‘How?’ she said at last.
‘I’ve been wrong, Ruth,’ said Blair, intent upon a complete catharsis. ‘I abandoned Paul. John too. I’ve got to work out some way to be their father again. Their proper father.’
Ruth sipped the whisky, needing it and wishing it were stronger. ‘How?’ she managed.
‘I don’t know,’ admitted Blair, still self-enclosed and not fully aware of how intently Ruth was waiting. ‘Find some way of getting them into Moscow… of liking Ann. And if that isn’t possible, then making Ann understand there have got to be times I have to spend with my kids.’
Ruth’s drink became really sour, curdling in her stomach and coming back into her throat, so that she had to swallow against it and she actually coughed, to clear the sensation. If it helped Paul – please God, cured Paul – then it was a special occasion, more special than any before. But not special like she’d wanted it to be.
Natalia sat awkwardly before him, cowed but slightly bent to one side, like a beloved pet who’d always obeyed and done every trick suddenly brutally beaten for some misdemeanour it didn’t understand. ‘Why?’ The question came out as a wail.
‘I just don’t feel anything any more.’ Orlov was wet with perspiration, forcing himself on, feeling like a man trying to wade a swamp without knowing where the safe ground was, the mud dragging him down deeper and deeper.
‘But why?’ said the woman again. ‘You haven’t given a proper reason.’
‘Apart too long,’ said Orlov. ‘Not the same any more.’ Where were the rehearsed sentences and the balanced arguments, points carefully anticipated against points, everything arranged so there wouldn’t be a scene like this?
‘It can be the same,’ she pleaded desperately. ‘We can learn to love each other again. I love you!’
‘No!’ he said. Orlov wished the mud were real and he could be engulfed by it.
‘ Please! ’
‘No!’
She fell physically sideways, against the edge of the chair, once trying to raise her head for another protest but being swept away by tears before the words formed, staying huddled there with the sobs shuddering through her. This hadn’t worked as it should have done, thought Orlov. Not at all. Would the rest?
The dissident arrests in Moscow were reported in the Western media, as Panov predicted, and it was linked with the famine in the regions, which Panov also predicted. The practice of rushing the Western supplies in their entirety to the areas of worst unrest, which Sokol organised initially, became unworkable because it denied anything to other suffering districts and caused rioting to break out there. Whenever there was trouble, Sokol had any obvious leaders immediately arrested and jailed in penal institutions as far away from their homes and regions as possible. The internal militia worked always on orders to open fire on any mob violence. Five people were killed and twenty wounded in Rovno, in the Ukraine, and three died in Gomel. Sokol, the methodical man, evolved a regime, working from six in the morning through until mid-afternoon monitoring the shortages and guaranteeing the transportation of the relief shipments and from then working until near midnight on other material moving through the Second Chief Directorate. More alert to fresh, undermining danger than the now scarcely thought-of need for an impressive coup, he stared down at the report of Blair’s return to Washington. What, he thought worriedly, did that mean?
Chapter Fifteen
It was not a sudden idea. It had been with Ann for some time but she refused to acknowledge it. Then she realised how ridiculous she was being and determined there was nothing wrong with it. Jeremy Brinkman was a friend – just a friend – and she was by herself and almost climbing the wall with boredom so what was wrong with seeing a friend? She’d even discussed it with Eddie. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. She’d told Eddie about the Bolshoi and that hadn’t happened yet. But there wasn’t a lot of difference. Eddie wouldn’t see anything wrong with it. How could he? There wasn’t anything wrong with it. She just wanted to talk to someone else before she started talking to herself. Nothing wrong with that at all. Nothing that any sensible adult would find. Betty Harrison would probably make it into something rivalling War and Peace but sod Betty Harrison. Gossiping old cow.
Brinkman, who was growing increasingly frustrated because everything had gone quiet but he knew – was absolutely convinced – that Blair was involved in something big, was delighted to get Ann’s call. Despite the previous decision not to, he was approaching the point of calling her. He told her dinner sounded like a good idea and no he wasn’t doing anything and she had no reason to apologise in advance for her cooking and he’d be there at seven. Which he was, as the hour struck. With a bottle of wine – French, not Russian – and a gift-wrapped box of Floris soaps and bath preparations he’d had freighted from London in the pouch to thank her for the Bolshoi but decided to invest earlier. Hopefully.
Ann wasn’t, in fact, a particularly good cook and she’d tried too hard, which made it worse. She hadn’t marinated the meat sufficiently and it had obviously been tough before she started and she added the cream to the stroganoff too soon and it was on the point of turning.
‘Fabulous!’ said Brinkman. ‘Next time show me how to do it!’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.
‘Would I lie?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Would you?’
He laughed. ‘If I had to. But here I don’t’
‘How often, elsewhere?’
‘All the time,’ he parried. She was in a funny mood and he wondered why. ‘How’s Eddie?’ he asked. It wasn’t too soon; it was an obvious question.
‘He called me today,’ she said, immediately brightening. ‘But it wasn’t a good line. He seems OK.’
‘How long’s he going to be away?’ That was another obvious question.
‘He’s not sure,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’
Big, thought Brinkman. Eddie Blair was on to something big. ‘Wouldn’t have thought he’d stay away for too long,’ coaxed Brinkman.
‘The embassy have been very good,’ she said. ‘I think he can have as long as he likes.’
What the hell did that mean? She’d have been given a cover story, of course. He’d already decided that. ‘Why didn’t you go with him?’ he tried.
Ann smiled at him, sadly. She was using him, she decided: so he deserved some sort of explanation. ‘I don’t think it would have been a very good idea for the wife of the second marriage to go back and get involved with the wife of the first, do you?’
Brinkman knew about the divorce, of course. They’d made no secret of it, during the increasing friendship, and he’d guessed it anyway because of the obvious age differences. It would have made an easy cover for Blair to get back to Langley. He said, ‘Battlefield, eh?’
‘Oh no,’ said Ann. ‘Ruth’s super.’
Brinkman thought that if the circles got much tighter he’d disappear up his own ass. ‘So why didn’t you go back with him?’ he persisted. In an effort to make it seem a casual remark he picked up the bottle, adding to her wine.