‘May we go inside?’ he asked. How well he spoke English, formally, deprecatingly, without trace of accent. He was like a very well-brought-up child who hides his real nature in placatory, conventional phrases, his vicious potential perfectly camouflaged.
He talked to us in the drawing-room, while Mrs Grace busied herself in the kitchen with the twins. Helen and I stood by the fireplace while he stayed by the closed door, leaning against it at first, then pacing round the end of the room slowly.
‘You don’t really think you can keep all four of us cooped up here for a week, do you?’ Helen said at once, ‘Like chickens.’
‘No, of course not,’ he said evenly, not at all surprised by her deductions. ‘Your children may go out with Mrs Grace. You may do the same, while your children stay here with Mr Marlow. And Mr Marlow may come out with me, if he chooses.’
‘And you’ll be here all the time?’ I asked.
‘I’ll be around. And there are others.’
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘Of course nothing!’ Helen suddenly shouted. ‘Of course I’ll do nothing of the sort. We were going out this morning. And I’m going.’
The man turned to her in surprise and his reply was genuinely solicitous. ‘I am very sorry.’ He looked over the town from the big windows. ‘Separately, yes. Together, no.’
Helen moved towards him. ‘We’re not going to run away — with two young children. You can follow us. We won’t telephone.’
She was lying. She was suddenly desperate. And I saw how the idea of our doing something happy — then, at that moment, that morning — was very strong in her, that she had forgotten everything else, looking out on the valley, on all its pressing invitations to life. Her face was intense in its longing, as if, with a sudden change of fortune, she could achieve the whole world in the coming hour. Now that it was about to be denied to her she longed to be released immediately; all the paraphernalia of a free existence rose before her, as it might for a prisoner, unaware of his incarceration until the very last moment when the key is actually turned in the cell door.
The man saw this, as I did, and he said again, with real courtesy: ‘I am not responsible for the orders, Mrs Jackson. You will know that. Let us get on together as well as we can. I know that it is not pleasant. Obviously. But it must be finished.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s finish with this. We’re trapped until I start my job down there. Mrs Grace will feed us. And you’ll stop us from doing anything stupid. You and your friends. We understand, it’s perfectly simple. Let’s leave it at that.’
‘Thank you, Mr Marlow,’ he said, with meaning. ‘I will make everything as easy and pleasant as I can for you.’ And I felt he meant that too.
‘Would it be of use if Mrs Grace took the children out now? A walk, a zoo perhaps? And you both — will you let me know of anything, anything you want at all, which we can get you in the town?’
We said nothing. His pleasant, accommodating tones were too much like those of a warder recommending to the condemned man that he eat a hearty breakfast.
Mrs Grace took the children out and the man took a book of military memoirs into the garden and sat in the sun reading it on a seat by the steps. We could see him from the corner of the kitchen window. Helen was making coffee.
‘So,’ I said. ‘A plan of campaign?’
We laughed. The situation was so peaceful, so ludicrous; it was unreal.
‘How many men do you suppose they have here?’ she asked.
‘They must be using outsiders from another country, or deep-cover illegals in England, like Mrs Grace. They’d avoid sending anyone from the Embassy or Trade Missions, who could be followed down here. Though there may be one or two of them organising it: Cheltenham is a big town, a holiday place, lots of hotels, quite a few tourists still. Easy to place strangers here. I should say they have at least a dozen people on it. Probably in three groups, with cars, and some central liaison point — a hotel where they can leave messages. What about the area round here — the lane, where does it lead up to?’
‘A common on top of the hill, with a golf course: the twelfth green.’
‘And the plantation?’
‘It must lead back to the common as well — further up.’
‘And in front?’
‘You can see yourself — just fields, hedges, cows, then the reservoir, then the government buildings, about two miles away — and open ground most of the way.’
As we looked I saw a tractor with a circular-saw attachment trimming the hedges, about half a mile away. We could just hear the sharp intermittent whine as it bit into the wood. In a long field next to it a combine harvester was moving ponderously, spewing a hazy white dust into the air around it.
‘Binoculars, or a telescope, would be useful.’
‘There might be something in the attic. The people locked away a lot of things there. We could look. What about a mirror? You could signal down to the government buildings?’
‘I don’t know morse — and without that they’d just come running up here and there’d be some sort of stupid shoot-out with us or the children being used as hostages. What about the postman?’
‘Mail comes in a box at the end of the lane, by the main road. Mrs Grace picks it up when she comes, with the papers.’
‘It all fits. The KGB might have chosen the place for you.’ I drank the coffee. ‘They must have someone above us in the woods, in a logger’s hut or something, where they can look over the house, the lane and the fields in front of us. And someone patrolling the main road end of the lane and the golf course end as well — all linked by radio. But what do they do at night — if we decided to run then, taking the children with us?’
‘I suppose they think that’s very unlikely, with children, in the darkness. Or else they’re going to have him here at night, or on the lane, in a car by the garage.’
‘Completely geared to stopping us getting out. But how about someone getting in — Alexei Flitlianov, for example? That could be casier. If he’s here he’ll be doing the same thing as he did in New York: checking the ground out before making a move. And if he’s doing that he must have seen all these people and cars around us. He can’t get through as yet, he’s blocked.’
‘If he got out of Russia and hasn’t been picked up in America, he should be able to get into here — or meet us somehow. There must be a way. Look at the place, so easy, so open.’ Helen looked down again on the town baking in the light, the sun shimmering on the uncut corn beyond the lane.
‘Is there? I don’t see it.’
I opened the local paper that had come that morning. I glanced at the editorial, an equivocal piece about a new ring-road inside the town, trying to please the motorists and the conservationists at the same time. And then I saw it — a notice in the entertainments column next to the editoriaclass="underline" the Kirov Dance Troupe and Balalaika Ensemble was coming for a night to the Town Hall next Sunday evening.
‘I don’t believe it.’ Helen looked at me.
‘It’s a coincidence,’ I said. ‘It must be. Must have been arranged months ago.’
‘All right. But it means they can have many more than a dozen men around here, all with perfect cover: a whole company, the KGB orchestra no doubt, with a few heavy secret-police dancers thrown in.’
Again we laughed. But with a strange feeling of genuine elation now.
‘What do you think his name is?’ I said, looking out at the man lolling in the chair.
‘Ask him, why don’t you? Bring him a cup of coffee.’
She smiled, touched my arm; we were happy. For this future musical event, though in one way possibly making our prison more secure, none the less suggested hope: it was a vivacious message, confirmation of plans and activities in a real world that we had lost, and through this music we might regain it.