So there was silence, an empty space, where words had died and anger bloomed — and where that fabulous regard which two people can share, that calm offering of self, so unmistakable in promise and beyond all language, had gone too. That vision between us had become despicable. The radio behind me crackled and perhaps the wind changed, for I could hear the balalaikas from the hall again now, rising and falling sweetly. But neither message pleased — the words and music from a cooling, sour world.
The twins had been looking at me, I suddenly noticed. And of course I realised I was still in their father’s clothes — his shirt and old school tie and coat and ruined trousers.
They tried to walk over to me but Helen and the policewoman held them back. They were tired and the pain of all these confused events was beginning to show in their faces. The game was wearing thin. But they had recognised me — brightly and eagerly — and were sorry now that they couldn’t come over to me.
‘But that’s the Daddy we play with,’ one of them said. ‘Not our real one, but the one that tells us stories, Mummy. Can’t we have a story?’
‘No, not now,’ Helen said, smiling at them, touching their hair, stroking their cheeks, intensely familial, in these last moments. ‘Later perhaps. When we get home.’
And that was the saddest story I ever heard.
I hobbled over to the doorway of the caravan, but could see nothing of the rear action inside the huge building.
I don’t know exactly how they got Flitlianov. But they got him, of course. And they got the names, for by the end of the month the whole thing blew up and more than a hundred Russian diplomats and trade officials were expelled from the country.
I tried to imagine Flitlianov’s last moments. Like something from a Hitchcock film, I supposed: the men creeping up through the audience, along the aisles, and the others coming in by the stage door at the back. A pincer movement. Perhaps he’d hidden in a lavatory and had tried to flush the names away? Perhaps he’d put up a fight — fisticuffs or guns? — one wouldn’t have heard anything above the din on stage. It was ludicrous, I thought — a man being trapped like this. It always was. Sheer fantasy. Perhaps it had happened like the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera — Flitlianov swinging across the stage on a chandelier, losing himself among the players, then a frantic chase about and behind the stage. The comedy of this idea appealed to me. And I longed for a comic life. And not the strident music, so full of vehement intention, which we heard throughout the finale — the Gopak Dance: feet stamping, shouting, endless clapping, the clash of swords. It all went on for a long time, before it ended and a tremendous applause broke out over the evening. Bravo …
They brought him out through a side door quite close to the caravan — while the applause was at its height — so that it seemed that Flitlianov was the reason for the frenzied appreciation, a hero being hurried away from the field of his glory.
Helen and the others had been taken away just before and I’d hobbled over to the doorway of the caravan to watch. And now I saw them both for an instant before they were put into separate cars, and though I couldn’t make out anything in their faces, I saw them wave to each other before the cars drove off and turned into the lights under the huge chestnut trees along the Promenade.
McCoy came back into the caravan to pick up his things — happy, savouring already a tremendous future: the bureaucratic commendations, possibly a medal from the Queen.
‘All over, Marlow. Finished. Safe and sound. And you’ve helped. At least, I’ll say you did. A few days in hospital and then I’m sure we can let you out to grass.’
I looked at McCoy — the puffy, ruined face proud now and full of all the silly rewards he worked for.
‘We’ve got them altogether, now. Every one. All happily resolved. Don’t you see?’ he said, as though he was offering me at last the incontrovertible evidence, the veracity of faith I had long denied.
I smiled at McCoy then. The only thing that had been resolved was our absence from each other.
‘All together, McCoy, of course,’ I said, ‘as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Fucking Amen.’
McCoy looked at me curiously.
‘Don’t be like that, Marlow,’ he said.
Also by Joseph Hone in Faber Finds
The Private Sector
The Sixth Directorate
The Flowers of the Forest
The Valley of the Fox
The Paris Trap