The two notebook pages lay side by side with their ragged torn-off fringes at the top. On one, ‘For Alyosha’, ‘J. Farringford’, and all the rest. And on the other, the name Malcolm Herrick, and a telephone number.
‘He gave that to me the first night I was in Moscow,’ I said. ‘In the bar of the National Hotel.’
‘Yes... but... Those notebooks are universal. You can buy them everywhere. Students... typists... Aren’t they especially printed to take shorthand?’
‘And constantly used by newspaper reporters,’ I said. ‘Who have a great habit of crossing out pages when they’ve finished with them. I’ve seen them over and over, at the races, talking to me maybe when I’ve won a race. They flick over the pages to find a fresh one... they go all through the pad one way, and then they turn it over and start on the backs. And to save themselves looking through endless pages afterwards to find just the bits they want, they put a scribble or a cross over the whole page when they’ve finished with it... just like this one, which we got from Kropotkin.’
I turned over the sheet Malcolm had given me with his telephone number on, and there, on the back, were some notes about a visiting puppet theatre, sprawlingly crossed through with a wide flowing S.
‘Malcolm,’ said Stephen, looking bewildered. ‘Why should Malcolm send this to Kropotkin?’
‘I shouldn’t think he did. Maybe he just gave it to whoever did that writing on the back.’
‘But why should he?’ Stephen said frustratedly. ‘And what does it matter? It’s all crazy.’
‘It’s unlikely that he’ll remember who he gave an odd piece of paper to nearly three months ago,’ I said. ‘But I think... we might ask him.’
I dialled the number on the paper, and he was at home. His big voice positively crackled through the receiver.
‘Where’ve you been sport? Been trying to reach you. Moscow at weekends is like Epsom when they’re racing at Ascot.’
‘Out to the Hippodrome,’ I said obligingly.
‘Zat so? How’s it going? Found Alyosha yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Told you it was a bum steer, sport. I looked. I told you. If I couldn’t find a story, there is no story. Right?’
‘You’re an old hand, and I’m not,’ I said. ‘But Kropotkin at the Hippodrome has called on all the horse people in Moscow to work on it. So we’ve an army of allies.’
He grunted, not sounding very pleased. ‘Has the army come up with anything?’
‘Only with something pretty small, so far. In fact,’ I said, half making a joke of it, ‘a page which looks as if it came from one of your notebooks.’
‘A what?’
‘Page... with the name Alyosha on it. And Johnny Farringford’s name, ringed with stars. And a lot of doodling. I’m sure you wouldn’t remember writing it. But the thing is... do you remember lending or giving a piece of scrap paper to anyone at Burghley who could now be here in Moscow?’
‘Christ, sport, you ask damn silly questions.’
‘Yeah...’ I said, coughing on a sigh. ‘Um... if you’re dead bored, care to come to the Intourist Hotel for a drink in my room, around six? I’m going out for a bit, but I’ll be back by then.’
‘Sure,’ he said easily. ‘Bloody good idea. Saturday night’s made for drinking. What’s the room number?’
I told him and he said fine, and disconnected. I put the receiver down slowly and reflected that I’d done some silly things in my time but that that probably topped the lot.
‘I thought you didn’t much like him,’ Stephen said.
I made a face and shrugged. ‘Maybe I owe him for the dinner in the Aragvi.’
I sat on the sofa and gingerly explored my right-hand fingers with those of the left. The worst of the soreness was beginning to wear off, and I could bend and unbend them a bit. It seemed probable that a couple of bones were cracked, though one often couldn’t tell for sure without X-rays. I supposed I should count myself lucky they weren’t splintered.
‘When do you doodle?’ I said.
‘Doodle?’
‘Like that.’ I nodded towards the page of Malcolm’s notebook.
‘Oh... during lectures, mostly. I do zigzags, and triangles, not boxes, stars and question-marks. Any time when I’m listening with a pencil in my hand, I suppose. On the telephone, for instance. Or listening to the radio.’
‘Mm... Well...’ I stopped unsuccessfully doctoring my fingers and got through on the telephone to the International operator. Calls to England, I was told, would entail a long delay. How long was a long delay? Calls to England were not at present being connected. Did that mean hours or days? The International operator couldn’t or wouldn’t say. Frustratedly, I stood up. ‘Let’s go out.’
‘Where to?’
‘Anywhere. Round and round Moscow in a taxi.’
‘Out of thugs’ reach?’
‘Sometimes,’ I said with mock disparagement, ‘you’re quite bright.’
We took with us the matroshka in its string bag, and also (in my pocket along with the telex) the two pages from Malcolm’s notebook, on the basis that as these four treasures were the only tangible results of my efforts, they should not be carelessly left around to be pinched by Frank or anyone else who could open my bedroom door.
Even though he’d stopped saying it was cheaper on the metro, Stephen boggled a bit at the expense of that afternoon. The Prince was paying, I said, dealing out roubles in hefty instalments at half-hour intervals to a taxi driver who thought I was mad. Stephen suggested the University, for which in the morning he had got me a visitor’s pass in order to avoid the juggling of the day before: but for some reason I always thought best on wheels, and had planned many a campaign while driving continually up and down on a tractor. There was something about a moving background that triggered shifts of mind, and left new ideas standing sharp and clear where they hadn’t existed before. I was an outdoor man, after all.
We saw a lot of Moscow, old parts and new. Old elegance and new functionalism, historically at odds but united in the silent white freezing slide into hibernation. Thick white caps on the golden domes. Shops with more space than goods. Huge advertisements saying ‘Glory to the Communist Party’ over the rooftops. On me the cumulative effect was a powerful pervading melancholy, a sadness for so great a city entangled in such suffocating bureaucracy, such denial of liberty, such a need to look over its shoulder before it spoke.
When darkness closed in we stopped once, to buy a couple of glasses and some reinforcements in the booze line, and a souvenir for me to take home to Emma: and I chose a bright new matroshka with all its little matroshkas nestling inside, because it seemed to me that what I had been doing in Moscow had been in effect like opening that sort of doll. When one pulled off one layer, there was another layer underneath. Remove that, and another layer was revealed. Under that, another: and under that, another. And, in the centre, not a tiny wooden mama with rosy cheeks, but a germinating seed of terror.
When we finally returned to my room it looked uninvaded, undisturbed.
Perhaps we could have stayed there safely; but wasted precautions were never to be regretted. ‘If only’ were the saddest words in the language.
The tape-recorder still stood silently on its precarious tower, and, when Stephen pressed the ‘record’ button, it told us mutely that the listeners slept.
It was five to six. We left the recorder switched on, and went along to the armchairs by the lifts to await the guests.
Ian came first, by no means drunk but slightly rocking. It made no difference to his face, which was as white, calm and expressionless as ever, or to his speech, which had no fuzzy edges. He told us with great lucidity that on Friday evenings and Saturdays, when there was no flap on, he embraced the great Russian leisure-time activity with the fervour of the converted. And where, he asked, did I keep the bottle?