We arrived at a flight of steps and toiled upwards to the main road. A black car rolled up and stopped beside us with amazing promptness. Frank threw my wet coats into the back of the car and shovelled me in after them. He himself sat in the front, instructing the driver briefly in Russian, with the result that we went round the by now familiar and lengthy one-way system and arrived in due course outside the Intourist Hotel.
Frank took my coats and escorted me through the front doors into the embrace of the central heating. He collected my room key without asking me the number. Shovelled me into the lift, pressed the button for the eighth floor, and saw me to my door. He fitted the key, and turned it, and steered me inside.
‘What are you going to do, if you can’t see?’ he said.
‘G... got as... spare pair.’
‘Where?’
‘T... top drawer.’
‘Sit down,’ he said, practically pushing me on to the sofa; and only the tiniest push was necessary. I heard him opening the drawer, and presently he put the reserves into my hands. I fumbled them on to my nose and again the world took on its proper shape.
He was looking at me with unexpected concern, his face firm and intelligent: but even while I watched the hawk-like quality dissolved, and the features slackened into the mediocrity we saw at meals.
He was wearing, I saw, only a sweater over his shirt, and, wound round his neck, his long striped college scarf. My lifeline.
I said, ‘I’d b... better give you your coat,’ and tried to undo the buttons. The fingers of my right hand seemed both feeble and painful, so I did them with the left.
‘You’d better have a hot bath,’ he said diffidently. No decision, no swearing, no immense effectiveness in sight.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
His eyes flickered. ‘Lucky I happened along.’
‘Luckiest thing in my life.’
‘I was just out for a walk,’ he said. ‘I saw you get out of a taxi ahead and go down those steps. Then I heard a shout and a splash, and I thought it couldn’t possibly be you, of course, but anyway I thought I’d better see. So I went down after you, and luckily I had my torch with me, and well... there you are.’
He had omitted to ask how I could have fallen accidentally over a breast-high wall.
I said obligingly, ‘It’s all a bit of a blank, actually,’ and it undoubtedly pleased him.
He helped me out of his coat and into my dressing-gown.
‘Will you be all right, then?’ he said.
‘Fine.’
He seemed to want to go, and I made no move to stop him. He picked up his torch and his hat, from where they were lying on the sofa, and his coat, and, murmuring something about me getting the hotel to dry my clothes, he extricated himself from what must have been to him a slightly embarrassing proximity.
I felt very odd indeed. Hot and cold at the same time, and a little light-headed. I took off the rest of my clammy clothes and left them in a damp heap on the bathroom floor.
The fingers on my right hand were in dead trouble. They hadn’t bled much because of their immersion in ice-water, but there were nasty tears in the skin of three of them from nails to knuckles, and no strength anywhere at all.
I looked at my watch, but it had stopped.
I really had to get a grip on things, I thought. I really had to start functioning. It was imperative.
I went over to the telephone and dialled the number of the University, foreign students department. Stephen was fetched, sounding amiable.
‘Something else?’ he said.
‘What time is it? My watch has stopped.’
‘You didn’t ring just to ask me that? It’s five-past-six, actually.’
Five-past-six... it seemed incredible. It was only three-quarters of an hour since I had set off to the Embassy. Seemed more like three-quarters of a century.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Will you do me a great favour? Will you go...’ I stopped. A wave of malaise travelled dizzily around my outraged nervous system. My breath came out in a weird groaning cough.
Stephen said slowly, ‘Are you all right?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Look... will you go to the British Embassy, and pick up a telex which is waiting there for me, and bring it to the Intourist? I wouldn’t ask, but... if I don’t get it tonight I can’t have it until Monday... and be careful... because we have rough friends... At the Embassy, ask for Polly Paget in the cultural attaché’s office.’
‘Have the rough friends had another go with a horse box?’ he said anxiously. ‘Is that why you can’t go yourself?’
‘Sort of.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way.’
I put the receiver back in its cradle and wasted a few minutes feeling sorry for myself. Then I decided to ring Polly Paget, and couldn’t remember the number.
The number was on a sheet of paper in my wallet. My wallet was or had been in the inside pocket of my jacket. My jacket was wet, and in the bathroom, where Frank had put it. I screwed up the energy, and went to look.
One wallet, still in the pocket, but, not surprisingly, comprehensively damp. I fished out and unfolded the list of telephone numbers and was relieved to see they could still be read.
Polly Paget sounded annoyed that I had not even started out.
‘I’ve finished my jobs,’ she said crossly. ‘I want to leave now.’
‘A friend is coming instead of me,’ I said. ‘Stephen Luce. He’ll be there soon. Please do wait.’
‘Oh very well.’
‘And could you give me Ian Young’s phone number? Where he lives, I mean.’
‘Hang on.’ She went away, and came back, and read out the number. ‘That’s his flat here in the Embassy grounds. As far as I know, he’ll be home most of the weekend. Like all of us. Nothing much ever happens in Moscow.’
Lady, I thought, you’re a hundred per cent wrong.
Stephen came, and brought Gudrun.
I had spent the interval putting on dry pants, trousers and socks, and lying on the bed. I disregarded Frank’s advice about hot baths, on the Ophelia principle that I’d had too much of water already. It would be just too damned silly to pass out and drown surrounded by white tiles.
Stephen’s cheerful grin faded rapidly.
‘You look like death. Whatever’s happened?’
‘Did you bring the telex?’
‘Yes, we did. Reams of it. Sit down before you fall down.’
Gudrun folded her elegant slimness on to the sofa and Stephen dispensed my scotch into toothmugs. I went back to sitting on the bed, and pointed to the sensitive spot on the wall. Stephen nodding, picked up the tape recorder, switched it on, and applied it to the plaster.
No whine.
‘Off duty,’ he said. ‘So tell us what’s happened.’
I shook my head slightly. ‘A dust-up.’ I didn’t particularly want to include Gudrun. ‘Let’s just say... I’m still here.’
‘And ve have vays of not making a fuss?’
I more or less smiled. ‘Reasons.’
‘They’d better be good. Anyway, here’s your hot news from home.’ He pulled an envelope out of his pocket and threw it to me. I made the mistake of trying to catch it naturally with my right hand, and dropped it.
‘You’ve hurt your fingers,’ Gudrun said, showing concern.
‘Squashed them a bit.’ I took the telex message out of the envelope and, as reported, there was reams of it: Hughes-Beckett busy proving, I thought sardonically, that my poor opinion of his staff work was unjustified.
‘While I read all this,’ I said. ‘Would you cast your peepers over that stuff there?’ I pointed to the cough-lozenge tin and Misha’s pieces of paper. ‘Translate them for me, would you?’