There were four courses to the evening meal, and the only choice was eat it or don’t. The meat looked identical to the tasteless rubber of the evening before, and when it arrived I stared at it gloomily.
‘Aren’t you going to eat that?’ Frank demanded, pointing fiercely at my plate.
‘Are you still hungry? Would you care for it?’ I said.
‘Do you mean it?’ He took me at my word, slid the plate in front of him, and set to, proving that both his appetite and molars were a lot stronger than mine.
‘Did you know,’ he said with his mouth full, giving us a by now accustomed lecture, ‘that in this country rents are very low, and electricity and transport and telephone calls are cheap. And when I say cheap, I mean cheap.’
Mrs Wilkinson, who had twice the life of Mister, sighed with envy over so perfect a world.
‘But then,’ I said, ‘if you’re a retired welder from Novosibirsk, you can’t go on a package tour of London, just for a bit of interest.’
‘There, Dad,’ Mrs Wilkinson said. ‘That’s true.’
Frank chewed on the meat and made no comment.
‘Isn’t it term time?’ I said to him innocently.
He took his time getting to swallowing-point while he thought of the answer. He was between jobs, he said. Left one school back in July, starting at another in January.
‘What do you teach?’ I said.
He was vague. ‘You know. This and that. Bit of everything. Junior school, of course.’
Mrs Wilkinson told him that her nephew, who had ingrowing toenails, had always wanted to be a teacher. Frank opened his mouth and then decided not to ask what ingrowing toenails had to do with it, and I smothered my laughter in ice-cream and blackcurrant jam.
I was glad to laugh. I needed something to laugh about. The intensity and fear that had vibrated among the Russians in Evgeny Titov’s flat remained with me as a sort of hovering claustrophobic depression. Even leaving the place had had to be carefully managed. It would never have done, I gathered, for so many people to have left at once. Evgeny and Olga had pressed Ian Young and me to stay for a further ten minutes after Boris had gone, so that if anyone were watching, we should not be connected.
‘Is it aways like this?’ I had asked Ian Young, and he had said prosaically, ‘Pretty much.’
Evgeny, having shifted the burden of his knowledge squarely on to me, had shaken hands gravely in farewell, clasping my hands in both of his. He had done his best, I supposed. He had passed on the flaming torch, and if now the Olympics were scorched by it, it would be my fault, not his.
Olga had seen us out with the same prudence as she had let us in. We picked our way through the scaffolding — ‘old apartment building being renovated’ Ian explained in the car later — and walked back through the garden. There were still only two sets of black footprints in the snow on the path — our own from the outward journey; and no one came after us through the gates. Two dark silent figures, we eased our way into the car, and the noise of the engine starting seemed suddenly too loud for safety. To have to live like that, constantly wary, seemed to me dreadful. Yet the Russians and even Ian Young considered it normaclass="underline" and perhaps that was most dreadful of all.
‘What are you going to do?’ Ian asked, driving back towards the city centre. ‘About this story of Boris’s?’
‘Ask around,’ I said vaguely. ‘What are you?’
‘Nothing. It’s just his overheated imagination.’
I didn’t altogether agree with him, but I didn’t argue.
‘And I’d be glad if you’d do me a favour, my old son.’
‘What’s that?’ I said, internally amused.
‘Don’t mention Evgeny or his apartment to anyone from the Embassy. Don’t mention our visit. I like our good Oliver to be able to put his hand on his heart among the natives and swear he has no knowledge of any of his staff making private visits to Russian homes.’
‘All right.’
He turned into a wide, well-lit dual-carriageway which at eighty-thirty held as much traffic as four in the morning back home.
‘And don’t get them into trouble,’ he said. ‘Evgeny and Boris.’
‘Or you’ll kill me.’
‘Yeah...’ He laughed awkwardly. ‘Well... it sounds stupid, out here.’
I didn’t ask if he really meant it. It was a question to which there was no answer, and I hadn’t any intention of putting him to the test.
With the image of Ian Young in my mind I glanced across the table at Frank Jones: the one who looked Russian and walked carefully on the wrong side of the regulations, and the other who looked English and harmless and could throw you to the spikes.
Natasha brought her marvellous eyebrows to the table and drew up a chair. She wore a neat pink wool dress, which went with the lipstick and displayed curves where they looked best. Her voice had a small disarming lisp, and she was achieving a slightly anxious smile.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘the Exhibition of Economic Achievements...’
‘Tomorrow,’ I said, providing my best giving-no-offence expression, ‘I’m going to see some horses. I’m sure the exhibition is great, but I’m much better at horses, and I have this absolutely wonderful chance to see some of your very best, your really top horses, the ones that are being trained for the Olympics, and that will be such a treat for me that I simply can’t miss it.’
The floweriness more or less did the trick, and it was Frank who asked, with natural-looking interest, where the horses were that I was going to see.
‘At the racecourse,’ I said. ‘They are stabled near there, I believe.’
I saw no point in not telling him. It would have looked odd if I hadn’t, and in any case he could have found out by following.
Stephen Luce appeared promptly at ten the following morning outside the hotel, his round cheerful face the brightest thing under the grey Moscow sky. I made the passage from hot air to cold through the double entrance to join him, passing at least six men standing around doing nothing.
‘Metro and bus to the Hippodrome,’ Stephen said. ‘I’ve looked up the stops.’
‘Taxi,’ I said firmly.
‘But taxis are expensive, and the metro’s cheap.’
‘And the far side of the Hippodrome could be two miles’ walk from the front entrance.’
We took a taxi. Pale greeny-grey saloon, with a meter. Stephen carefully explained where we wanted to go, but the driver had to stop and ask twice when we reached the area. Passengers, it appeared, very seldom asked to be driven to the back of the racecourse. I resisted two attempts to decant us with vague assurances that the place we wanted was ‘just down there’, and finally with a scowl or two and some muttering under the breath we drove right into the stable area, with the track itself lying a hundred yards ahead.
‘You’re very persistent,’ Stephen said, as I counted out the fare.
‘I don’t like wet feet.’
The air temperature must have been about one degree centigrade and the humidity ninety-five per cent: a damp icy near-drizzle. The slushy snow lay around sullenly melting, lying in puddles on the packed clay surface in the centres of the stable roadways, banked up in ruts along the edges.
To left and right a double row of lengthy stable blocks stretched away, built of concrete on the barn principle, with the horses totally enclosed, and not sticking their heads out into the open air. Ahead the stable area led directly out through a wide gap on to the railed racing circuit, which was of the grey sticky consistency of dirt tracks the world over.