She felt her stomach move with this sudden renewal of emotion — at this realisation, which she had suppressed, of how imperative immediate presence was in love; of how, just as it often started with a shared look across a room, so it survived, or could be regained in a moment, long afterwards, with this same simplicity of an intense regard.
So her affection died for Marlow as it rose for Alexei: Marlow began to disappear and Alexei swung towards her, like the wooden figures on a miniature Swiss chalet that came out for sun, or rain. And the articles of trust were transferred from one to the other, as the deeds of a dead man’s estate are passed to a living heir.
The church was coming up on their left, Catholic, a long, modern building, characterless as a Nissen hut, in reconstituted Cotswold stone, the Christian vernacular of the seventies, where the setting had to be as bland and undisturbing as the new Liturgy.
As they got to the gateway of the church, a police car swung round the traffic-lights ahead of them and stopped on the corner. Two plain-clothes men got out. They could see Mrs Grace and the two children sitting in her car, parked on the far side of the chapel next to the presbytery.
Alexei looked up the road. The men hadn’t seen them yet but they would at any moment.
‘Go inside, Helen. Quick. I’ll bring the others.’
In a minute the five people, a perfect Sunday family, with Auntie, were sitting in one of the back rows. The mass had already begun. The children sniffed the air appreciatively, their eyes fixed on the altar and the movements of the priest as on some charade, a dumb crambo whose meaning would at any moment become clear to them, when they could then laugh and cheer.
Helen and Alexei were at the end of the row, by the windows, in a distant hollow of the chapel. The congregation knelt in front of them for the Consecration. But the children stayed on their feet, happy infidels, peering intently over the edge of the pew.
‘Where are we going?’ she whispered to Alexei, their heads bowed, close together.
He shook his head, without saying anything. The priest prepared the Host. At last he whispered back, ‘Out of here. You have the names.’
‘We’re not all going to get away. The roads will be blocked. The children. We can’t run forever. Couldn’t you give the names to the British? Get them to help in the future?’
‘No. They wouldn’t believe it.’
The priest lifted the Host above the altar. A bell tinkled quickly — and then again, an impatient demand from some impossible old woman.
‘You’re beginning to believe like they do.’ He tilted his head briefly in the direction of the altar. ‘In failure. But we know all about that. That’s obvious everywhere. You don’t have to come to believe in it. You do something about it. I told you years ago. I said, “You believe in these political facts now; remember that when you begin to despair of them — as you will.” As you have.’
‘I still believe in those facts. But children are facts too. And so are road blocks.’
‘We’ll have to get out. The names you have — we’re responsible for hundreds of people: that’s a whole world in our hands.’
‘And so is this — us, here, now. That’s a world as well.’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said with tiredness. The little bell rang again, insistently, another mysterious demand. ‘And you’ll lose it — if you stay.’
‘I’ll lose it either way, Alexei. We were lucky — sharing each other as well as a belief. But they don’t often go together. And not now. You go on your own with the names.’ She took out the plastic envelope tucked in behind her trouser belt, and passed it to him. ‘They can’t do much to me.’
‘They can. Prison. You’ll lose your children. And haven’t you lost enough already?’
‘Yes. But I knew the risks when I started. Be realistic: those names are more important than me. You know that, Alexei.’
‘Yes, I know that.’
‘I want to go with you. But it wouldn’t work. I want to very much. But you must go on your own.’
She smiled — a rapid, intense smile, compacting the message, making it a sudden, boundless gift, through which she could tell him that she felt hope, and was not sad, in this divided future; a smile that would confirm her renewal with him as much as their imminent separation — which would tell him, without doubts, that she had re-achieved all the forward parts in her nature; that she had found again — here with him at this moment — the world, that proper world, which they had both sought for so long, where charity and affection ruled, where prayer was continuous and not distantly intermittent. And to find that world you had to lose it first. Wasn’t that what they said?
‘You must go, Alexei,’ she said quite simply.
Harper travelled inside with me in the ambulance from the hotel. He didn’t want to let me out of his sight, I thought — I was the one man who might know too much. I wondered if he’d try and kill me. We drove to the side of the Town Hall to a police caravan hidden in the trees, a temporary command post, where he got out to see how the road blocks were getting on.
And now I could hear the balalaikas quite clearly on the still air, coming from the Town Hall beside us, a long restrained vibrato on many instruments, which rose in pitch gradually, until the tune was suddenly released and a sad and restless music spread over the night.
‘Nothing,’ Harper said when he got back into the ambulance, sitting on the bunk opposite me. ‘Nothing yet.’ His face began to crinkle, filling up with a sly smile. ‘But they’ll come. We’ll get them.’ He was so happy.
I said, ‘Now there’s only me to worry about.’
‘You?’ He reached out his arm and fingered the tap on an oxygen cylinder strapped to the partition at the end of the ambulance. He lifted the mask up and put it against his own face and stared at me, unblinking, like some fearful prehistoric fish revived from the depths.
‘One can die of too much oxygen, I suppose,’ he said, dropping the mask, ‘as well as too little.’
‘Might be tricky at the post mortem though.’
‘Would it — in your case? Delayed shock, a sudden seizure. I had to give you oxygen quickly … Would it?’
We looked at each other carefully, like boxers between rounds.
Harper put the mask back. ‘I don’t have to run the risk. I know what you think about me, Marlow. But it’s just your word against mine. And after I’ve shopped hundreds of KGB men tonight who is going to believe you then? No one.’
‘How are you going to get those names?’ I asked. ‘They’re not going to leave the town all together. They’ll separate. And in any case they’re not going to give the names to you — of all people — whatever happens.’
‘I’ll get them.’
I wanted to keep Harper talking. He was too confident. He was bound to relax — for an instant, at the wrong moment. Then I might get him. He thought I was an invalid. But I hadn’t been that badly wounded. I could move, I was sure — move fast for a few seconds at least.
‘They’ll give themselves up — the women and children. But he won’t. And it’s quite a big town, inside your road blocks.’