‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Tell Mr Kropotkin that I quite understand what he is saying. Tell him I regret having stood in the way of the horse box. Tell him that I am glad the horse is unharmed, and that I see no reason why I should need to mention this morning’s happenings to any other person.’
Stephen stared. ‘You learn fast.’
‘Tell him what I said.’
Stephen obliged. Kropotkin’s manner lost so much tension that I only then realised quite the extent of his anxiety. He even went so far as to produce a definite lightening of the features: almost a smile. He also said something about which Stephen seemed less doubtful.
‘He says you ride like a Cossack. Is that a compliment?’
‘Near enough.’
Kropotkin spoke again, and Stephen translated.
‘Mr Kropotkin says he will give you any further help he can, if you ask.’
‘Thank you very much,’ I said.
‘Friend,’ the deep voice said in its slow heavy English. ‘You ride good.’
I pushed my glasses hard against the bridge of my nose and thought murderous thoughts about the people who had stopped me racing.
Stephen and I trudged about half a mile to where Kropotkin had said there was a taxi rank.
‘I thought you’d be one for rushing off to the police,’ Stephen said.
‘No.’ I picked some of the dirt off my fur hat, which someone had retrieved. ‘Not this trip.’
‘Not this country,’ he said. ‘If you complain to the fuzz here, you as likely as not surface in clink.’
I gave up cleanliness in favour of a warm head. ‘Hughes-Beckett would have a fit.’
‘All the same,’ Stephen said, ‘whatever Kropotkin may say, that horse box was trying to kill you.’
‘Or Misha. Or the horse,’ I said, untying the ear-flaps.
‘Do you really believe that?’
‘Did you see the driver?’ I asked.
‘Yes and no. He had one of those balaclava things on under a fur hat with the earflaps down. Everything covered except his eyes.’
‘He took a hell of a risk,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘But then, he darned near succeeded.’
‘You take it incredibly calmly,’ Stephen said.
‘Would you prefer screaming hysterics?’
‘I guess not.’
‘There’s a taxi.’ I waved, and the green-grey saloon swerved our way and slowed. We piled aboard.
‘I’ve never seen anyone jump on a horse like you did,’ Stephen said, as we set off to the Intourist. ‘One second on the ground, the next, galloping.’
‘You never know what you can do until Nemesis breathes down your neck.’
‘You look,’ Stephen said, ‘like one of those useless la-di-dahs in the tele-ads, and you perform...’ Words failed him.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Depressing, isn’t it?’
He laughed. ‘And by the way... Misha gave me a telephone number.’ He put a hand in a pocket and brought out a crumpled scrap of paper. ‘He gave it to me while Kropotkin was chasing after you on the track. He says he wants to tell you something without Kropotkin knowing.’
‘Does the taxi driver speak English?’ I asked.
Stephen looked only faintly and transiently alarmed. ‘They never do,’ he said. ‘You could tell them they stink like untreated sewage and they wouldn’t turn a hair. Just try it.’
I tried it.
The taxi driver didn’t turn a hair.
On the principle of turning up where and when expected, I arrived on time for lunch in the Intourist dining-room. The soup and the blinis were all right, and the ice-cream with blackcurrant jam was fine, but the meat with its attendant teaspoonfuls of chopped carrot, chopped lettuce, and inch-long chips went across the table to Frank.
‘You’ll fade away,’ said Mrs Wilkinson, without too much concern. ‘Don’t you like meat?’
‘I grow it,’ I said. ‘Beef, that is. On a farm. So I suppose I get too fussy over stuff like this.’
Mrs Wilkinson looked at me doubtfully. ‘I would never have guessed you worked on a farm.’
‘Er... well, I do. But it’s my own... passed down from my father.’
‘Can you milk a cow?’ Frank said, with a hint of challenge.
‘Yes,’ I said mildly. ‘Milk. Plough. The lot.’
He gave me a sharp look from over my chips, but in fact I spoke the truth. I had started learning the practical side of farming from about the age of two, and had emerged from agricultural college twenty years later with the technology. Since then, under Government sponsorship, I’d done some work on the interacting chemistry of land and food, and had set aside some experimental acres for research. After racing, this work had been my chief interest... and from now on, I supposed, my only one.
Mrs Wilkinson said disapprovingly, ‘You don’t keep calves in those nasty crate things, do you?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘I never do like to think of all the poor animals being killed, when I buy the weekend chops.’
‘How were the Economic Achievements?’
‘We saw a space capsule.’ She launched into a grudgingly admiring outline of the exhibition. ‘Pity we don’t have one in England,’ she said. ‘Exhibition like that, I mean. Permanent. Blowing our own trumpet for a change, like.’
‘Did you go?’ I asked Frank.
‘No.’ He shook his head, munching. ‘Been before, of course.’
He didn’t say where he had been instead. I hadn’t noticed him following Stephen and me, but he might have done. If he had, what had he seen?
‘Tomorrow we’re going to Zagorsk,’ Mrs Wilkinson said.
‘Where’s that?’ I asked, watching Frank chew and learning nothing from his face.
‘A lot of churches, I think,’ she said vaguely. ‘We’re going in a bus, with visas, because it’s out of Moscow.’
I glanced at her as she sat beside me, divining a note of disappointment in her voice. She was a short woman, solid, late fifties, with the well-intentioned face of the bulk of the English population. An equally typical shrewdness lived inside and poked its nose out occasionally in tellingly direct remarks. The more I saw of Mrs Wilkinson, the more I saw to respect.
Opposite her, next to Frank, Mr Wilkinson ate his lunch and as usual said nothing. I had gathered he had come on the trip to please his wife, and would as soon be at home with a pint and Manchester United.
‘Quite a few people are going to the Bolshoi this evening, to the ballet,’ said Mrs Wilkinson a little wistfully. ‘But Dad doesn’t like that sort of thing, do you, Dad?’
Dad shook his head.
Mrs Wilkinson said in a lower voice to me, confidingly, ‘He doesn’t like those things the men wear. Those tights. You know, showing all the muscles of their behinds... and those things in front.’
‘Cod-pieces,’ I said, straight-faced.
‘What?’ She looked embarrassed, as if I’d used too strong a swear-word for her shock-threshold.
‘That’s what they’re called. Those things which disguise the outlines of nature.’
‘Oh.’ She was relieved. ‘It would be much nicer if they wore tunics, that’s what I think. Then they wouldn’t be so obvious. And you could concentrate on the dancing.’
Mr Wilkinson muttered something which might or might not have been ‘Poncing about’, and filled his mouth with icecream.