‘Yes. Can you imagine a foreign tourist being fined in England because he went to Manchester instead of Birmingham? Can you imagine an English hotel doing anything but shrug if he didn’t turn up? But everything here is regulated. There are masses of people just standing around watching other people, and they all report what they see, because that’s their job. They are employed to watch. There’s no unemployment here. Instead of handing a bloke dole money and letting him spend it in civilised ways like soccer and gambling and pubs, they give him a job watching. Two birds with one stone, and all that.’
‘Standing in groups at airports and in bus shelters, and dotted around outside hotels?’
He grinned. ‘So right. Those guys in bus stops are there to stop all foreign-registered cars going out of Moscow, to check their destinations and visas, because all foreigners need a visa to go more than thirty kilometres from the centre. Sometimes they stop Russian cars, but not often. Anyway, there’s a joke here that you always see at least three Russians together when they’ve any regular contact with foreigners. One alone might be tempted, two might conspire, but if there are three, one will always inform.’
‘Cynical.’
‘And practical. What did you say you’d do today? I take it you have Intourist girls looking after you?’
‘Natasha and Anna,’ I said. ‘I told them I’d be in the hotel to lunch and go on a bus tour of the city afterwards.’
‘Then you’d better do it,’ he said judiciously. ‘I’m not sure they don’t get into trouble if they lose their charge, so to speak.’
I paused at the centre of the bridge to look over the parapet at the iron grey water. Snow speckled everything and filled the air like torn tissue-paper. To the right along the river bank stretched the long red beautiful walls of the Kremlin, with golden towers at intervals and vistas of golden onion domes inside. A walled city, a fortress, with defunct churches and active government offices and the daily tread of millions of tourists. To the left, on the opposite bank, the British Embassy.
‘Better move on,’ Stephen said. ‘Two men standing still on a bridge in the snow... that’s suspicious.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘You’d be surprised.’
We walked on, however, and went back up the incline to Red Square.
‘Job number one,’ I said. ‘Will you make a call for me?’
I showed him the Olympic team trainer’s name and number, and we stopped at a glass-walled telephone box. Telephone calls, it appeared, were cheap. Stephen brushed away my offered rouble and produced a two kopek coin.
‘What shall I say?’ he asked.
‘Say I’d like to see him tomorrow morning. Say I was very impressed with the Russian team at the International Horse Trials and would like to congratulate him and ask his advice. Say I’m frightfully important in the horse world. Lay it on a bit. He doesn’t know me.’ I gave him some well-known Eventing names. ‘Say I’m a colleague of theirs.’
‘Are you?’ he said, dialling the number.
‘I know them,’ I said. ‘That’s why I was sent. Because I know the horse people.’
Someone answered at the other end, and Stephen launched into what was to me a vague jumble of noises. A softer-sounding language than I had for some reason expected. Pleasing.
He talked for quite some time, and listened, and talked, and listened, and talked, and finally rang off.
‘Success,’ he said. ‘Eleven o’clock. Outside the stables, round the far side of the racecourse.’
‘The Hippodrome,’ I said.
‘That’s right.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘The Olympic horses exercise there on the track.’
‘Fantastic,’ I said, astounded. ‘Bloody incredible.’
‘And you were wrong about one thing,’ Stephen said. ‘He did know who you are. He said you went to ride in a race called the Pardubice in Czechoslovakia, and he saw you finish third. He seemed in point of fact to be quite pleased to be going to meet you.’
‘Nice of him,’ I said modestly.
Stephen spoilt it. ‘Russians love a chance of talking to people from the outside. They see so few, that they love it.’
We agreed that he should meet me outside the hotel the following morning, and his cheerfulness was catching.
‘When you go on that bus tour,’ he said as we parted, ‘you’ll stop in Derzhinsky Square. With a statue of Derzhinsky on a tall column. There’s a big store for children there. What the guide won’t tell you, though, is that the building next to it, across the street, is the Lubianka.’
There were taxis waiting outside the hotel but none of the drivers spoke English, and either they didn’t understand the words ‘British Embassy’, or the address written in English script, or they understood but refused to take me there. In any case, I got a chorus of shaken heads, so in the end I walked. It was still snowing, but wetly, and what lay on the ground was slush. After a mile and a half of it my feet were soaking and icy and my mood deepening from cross to vile.
Following Stephen’s instructions, I found the steps at the far side of the bridge and descended to the lower level, walking along there with dark heavy buildings on my left and the chest-high river wall on the right. When I at length reached the gateway of the Embassy a Russian soldier stepped out of a sentry box and barred my way.
An odd argument then took place in which neither protagonist could understand a word the other said. I pointed vigorously at my watch, and to the Embassy door, and said, ‘I am English,’ several times very loudly, and got even crosser. The Russian finally, dubiously, stood back a pace and let me through into the short driveway. The huge front door of the Embassy itself was opened, with a lot less fuss, by a dark blue uniform with gilt buttons and braids.
Inside, the hall and stairs and visible doorways were rich with the glossy wood and glass and plaster mouldings of more elegant ages. There was also a large leather-topped desk behind which sat a one-man reception committee, and, standing near him, a tall languid man with noble bones and greying hair combed carefully backwards.
The dark blue uniform offered to relieve me of my coat and hat, and the man at the desk asked if he could help me.
‘The cultural attaché?’ I said. ‘I’ve an appointment.’
The grey-haired man moved gently like a lily in the wind and said that the cultural attaché happened to be himself. He extended a limp hand and a medium smile, and I responded with the merest shade more warmth to both. He murmured platitudes about the weather and air travel while he made some internal judgements about me, but it appeared that I had passed his private tests, because he suddenly changed mental gears and asked with some charm whether I would care to see over the Embassy itself before we went to his office for a drink. His office, he explained, was in a separate building.
We climbed the stairs and made a tour of the reception rooms, and duly inspected the loo with the best view of the Kremlin. The cultural attaché, who had identified himself as Oliver Waterman, kept up a genial informed chatter as if he showed visitors round this route every day of the week: which, on reflection, perhaps he did. We ended, after a short windy outside walk, in a more modern-looking first-floor suite of carpeted book-lined offices, where he wasted no time in pouring hefty drinks.
‘Don’t know what we can do for you,’ he said, settling deep into a leather armchair, and waving me to one similar. ‘This Farringford business seems to be a fuss over nothing.’
‘You hope,’ I said.
He smiled thinly. ‘True. But there’s no fire without smoke, and we haven’t had even a whiff.’
‘Did you yourself interview the three Russian observers?’ I asked.
‘Er,’ he said, clearing his throat and looking concerned. ‘Which observers would those be?’