Pause while she completes a line of lipstick. “Shouldn’t think so. Si’s a Berkeleyan. He denies the existence of everything he can’t perceive.” Clare took a Cambridge degree in philosophy before shouldering the intellectual burdens of a Foreign Office wife. “And since we don’t exist, we can do whatever we jolly well want, can’t we? And we still won’t have done it, will we?”
In Maidenhead I parked at the railway station and, armed with Bairstow’s briefcase, took a taxi to the hideous fifties barracks where they lived. A disintegrating climbing frame adorned the overgrown front garden. Clare’s bashed Renault stood abandoned at a dramatic angle in the weed-infested drive. A faded notice by the bell said CHIEN MÉCHANT. I presumed it was a relic of Simon’s visits to Brussels as a NATO Moscow-watcher. The door opened, and the au pair eyed me with slothful curiosity.
“Anna Greta. Still here, my goodness. How splendid.”
I stepped round her into the hall, picking my way between per-ambulators, children’s bicycles, and a wigwam. As I did so Clare came charging down the stairs and flung her arms around me. She was wearing the amber brooch I had given her. Simon believed she had inherited it from a distant cousin. Or so she said.
“Anna Greta, darling, will you please go and dish up the vegetables and put them on the hotplate?” she ordered, taking my hand and leading me upstairs. “You’re still terribly yummy, Tim. And Si says you’ve found an absolutely super, frightfully young girl. I think that’s awfully clever of you. Petronella, look who’s here!” She carried my hand round to my backside and pinched me. “It isn’t fish; it’s duck. I decided Si’s heart could lump it for once. Let me look at you again.”
Petronella emerged scowling from the bathroom, dressed in a towel and a mackintosh hat. She was now an ungrateful child of ten, with wire round her teeth and her father’s hovering smile.
“Why are you kissing my mother?”
“Because we’re very old friends, Pet, darling,” Clare replied with hoots of laughter. “Don’t be so silly. You’d like a hug from somebody as dishy as Tim, I’ll bet.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
The twin boys wanted Rupert Bear. A visiting girl called Hubbie wanted Black Beauty. The conciliator in me chose Peter Rabbit, and I was coming to the bit about Peter’s father having an accident in Mr. McGregor’s garden when I heard Simon’s footsteps ascending the stairs.
“Hullo, Tim, nice to see you,” he said, all on one note, as he offered me a lifeless hand. “Hullo, Pet. Hullo, Clive. Hullo, Mark. Hullo, Hubbie.”
“Hullo,” they said.
“Hullo, Clare.”
“Hullo,” said Clare.
I went on reading, while Simon listened from the doorway. In my weightless state of mind I had hoped he might like me better now that I was a fellow cuckold. But he didn’t seem to, so perhaps it didn’t show.
The duck must have been frozen, because parts of it still were. As we hacked our way through the bleeding limbs, I remembered that this was how we had always eaten, when we ate our frightful meals together: potatoes boiled to a sludge and school cabbage floating in a green lake. Did their Catholic souls derive solace from such absti-nence? Did they feel closer to God and further from the herd?
“Why are you here?” Simon asked in his dry, nasal voice.
“Visiting a spinster aunt, actually,” I replied.
“Not another filthy rich one, Tim?” said Clare.
“Where is she?” said Simon.
“No, this one’s indigent,” I told Clare. “Marlow,” I told Simon.
“Which nursing home?” said Simon.
“Sunnymeades,” I said, giving him a name I had plucked from the yellow pages and hoping it was still in business.
“Is she an aunt on your father’s side?” Simon asked.
“Actually she’s a cousin of my mother’s,” I said, forestalling the likelihood that Simon would telephone Sunnymeades nursing home and establish that she didn’t exist.
“Are you growing many grapes, please?” sang Anna Greta, who had been elevated to guest for the evening.
“Well, not a bumper harvest, Anna Greta,” I replied. “But fair. And first tastings extremely promising.”
“Oh,” Anna Greta exclaimed, as if astonished.
“I inherited a bit of a problem, quite honestly. My uncle Bob, who founded the business for love, put a lot of trust in his Maker and rather less in science.”
Clare gave a hoot of laughter, but Anna Greta’s jaw sagged in mystification. For some inexplicable reason, I forged on.
“He planted the wrong grapes in the wrong place, then he prayed for sun and got frost. Unfortunately, the life expectancy of a vine is twenty-five years. Which means we must either commit genocide or keep on fighting nature for another ten years.”
I couldn’t stop. Having derided my own efforts, I exulted in the success of my English and Welsh competitors and deplored the tax burdens imposed on them by an uncaring government. I painted a ful-some picture of England as one of the ancient wine-growing countries of the world, while Anna Greta gawped at me with her mouth open.
“Poor you,” said Simon.
“So let’s hear about this underaged girl you’ve shacked up with,”
Clare cut in recklessly; after two glasses of Romanian claret, she was capable of saying absolutely anything. “You’re such an old dog, Tim. Simon’s absolutely green with envy. Aren’t you, Si?”
“Not in the least,” said Simon.
“She’s beautiful, she’s musical, she can’t cook, and I adore her,” I proclaimed gaily, grateful to have an opportunity to extol Emma’s virtues. “She’s also warmhearted and brilliantly clever. What else do you want to know?”
The door opened, and Petronella stormed in, her blond hair brushed over her dressing gown, her blue gaze fixed on her mother in an expression of ethereal agony.
“You’re making so much noise I can’t sleep!” she protested, stamping her foot. “You’re doing it on purpose.”
Clare led Petronella back to bed. Anna Greta moodily cleared away the plates.
“Simon, I’ve got a bit of office shop I need to try out on you,” I said. “Could we possibly have quarter of an hour alone?”
Simon washed while I dried. He wore a blue butcher’s apron. There was no machine. We seemed to be washing up several meals at once.
“What do you want?” said Simon.
We had had these conversations before, in his joyless eyrie at the Foreign Office, with jaded Whitehall pigeons eyeing us through the filthy window.
“I’ve been approached by someone who wants to be paid a lot of money for some information,” I said.
“I thought you’d retired.”
“I have. It’s an old case come alive.”
“You don’t have to bother with those; they’ll dry by themselves,” Simon said. “What’s he trying to sell you?”
“A forthcoming armed uprising in the North Caucasus.”
“Who’s rising against who? Thanks,” he said as I handed him a dirty saucepan. “They’re rising all the time. It’s what they do.”
“The Ingush against the Russians and Ossetians. With a little help from the Chechen.”
“Tried it in ’92 and were trounced. No arms. Only what they’d pinched or bought at the back door. Whereas, thanks to Moscow, the Ossetians were armed to the teeth. Still are.”
“What if the Ingush equipped themselves with a decent armoury?”
“They can’t. They’re scattered and dispirited, and whatever they get hold of, the Ossies will get more of. Weapons are the Ossies’ thing. We had a story in last week that they’ve been buying up Red Army surplus in Estonia and running it down to the Serbs in Bosnia with the help of Russian intelligence.”
“My source insists that this time the Ingush are going for broke.”
“Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”
“He says there’s no stopping them. They’ve got a new leader. A man called Bashir Haji.”
?
??Bashir’s yesterday’s hero,” said Simon, vehemently scouring a very pitted saucepan. “Brave as a lion, great on a horse. Black-belt Sufist. But when it comes to fighting Russian rocketry and helicopter cavalry, he can’t lead a brass band.”
We had had conversations like this before. In Simon Dugdale, the art of debunking secret intelligence had found its master. “If we believe my man, Bashir is promising to provide high-tech state-of-the-art Western weaponry and send the Russians and Ossetians back where they came from.”
“Listen!”
Slamming down his saucepan, Simon splayed a wet hand in my face but managed to stop it a couple of inches short.
“In ’92 the Ingush popped their garters and made an armed march on the Prigorodnyi raion. They had some tanks, a few APCs, a bit of artillery—Russian stuff, bought or plundered, not a lot. Drawn against them”—he grabbed his thumb with his spare hand—“they had North Ossetian Interior Forces”—he grabbed his index finger— “OMON Russian special forces; Republican guards; local Terek Cossacks”—he had reached his little finger—“and so-called volunteers from South Ossetia flown up by the Russians to cut throats for them and squat the Prigorodnyi raion. The only support the Ingush got was from the Chechen, who lent them so-called volunteers and a bit of weaponry. The Chechen are pals with the Ingush, but the Chechen have got their own agenda, which the Russians are aware of. So the Russians are using the Ingush to drive a wedge into the Chechen. If your man is seriously telling you that Bashir or anyone else is planning a full-scale organised attack on the enemies of Ingushetia, either he’s making it up or Bashir’s gone potty.”
His outburst over, he plunged his arms back into the suds.
I tried another tack. Perhaps I wanted to draw something out of him that I knew was there. Something I needed to hear again as an affirmation of Larry’s emotional logic.
“So what about the justice of it?” I suggested.
“The what?”
I was making him angry. “Of the Ingush cause. Have they got right on their side?”
He slapped a colander facedown on the draining board. “Right?” he repeated indignantly. “You mean in absolute terms, as in right and wrong—how has history treated the Ingush?”
“Yes.”
He seized a roasting tray and attacked it with a scourer. Simon Dugdale had never been able to resist the lecturer’s temptation.
“Three hundred years of having the living shit beaten out of them by the tsars. Frequently returned the compliment. Enter the Coms. False interlude of serendipity, then business as usual. Deported by Stalin in ’44 and declared a nation of criminals. Thirteen years in the wilderness. Rehabilitated by decree of Supreme Soviet and allowed to empty the dustbins. Tried peaceful protest. Didn’t work. Rioted. Moscow sits on its arse.” Pressing down on the roasting tray, he gave it a vengeful scrub. “Coms go down the tube; enter Yeltsin. Sweet-talks them. Russian Parliament passes fuzzy resolution restoring dispossessed peoples.” He kept scrubbing. “Ingush buy it. Supreme Soviet adopts law favouring an Ingush republic within Russian Federation. Hooray. Five minutes later Yeltsin puts the knockers on it with a presidential decree forbidding border changes in the Caucasus. Not so hooray. Moscow’s latest plan is to force the Ossetians to accept the Ingush back in agreed numbers and on terms. Some bloody hope. Morally, whatever that’s supposed to mean, the Ingush case is unassailable, but in the world of con-flicting compromises which it’s my misfortune to inhabit, that means approximately bugger all. Legally, for whoever gives a toss about post-Sov legality, it’s no contest. The Ossies are in breach of the law, the Ingush are blameless. When did that alter the price of fish?”
“So where are the Americans on this?”
“The what?” he said—implying that while he might be an expert on the North Caucasus, the United States of America were an unfamiliar concept to him.
“Uncle Sam,” I said.
“My dear man—” He had never in his life till now used an endearment towards me. “Listen up, do you mind?” He assumed an American accent. It fell somewhere between a Deep South plantation owner and an East End costermonger. “What the fuck’s the Ingush, man? Some kind o’ Injun, man? Ameringush?”
I pulled a dutiful smile, and to my relief Simon returned to his normal drab voice.
“If America has a post-Sov policy down there, it’s not to have a policy. Which is consistent with her post-Sov policy everywhere else, I may add. Planned apathy is the kindest description I can think of: act natural and look the other way while the ethnic cleansers do their hoovering and restore what politicians call nor-mality. Which means that whatever Moscow does is okay by Washington, provided nobody frightens the horses. End of policy.”
“So what can the Ingush hope for?” I asked.
“Absolutely sweet Fanny Adams,” Simon Dugdale replied with relish. “There are bloody great oil fields in Chechenia, even if they’ve been screwed up by lousy exploitation. Minerals, timber, all the goodies. There’s the Georgian Military Highway, and Moscow intends to keep it open whatever the Chechen and the Ingush think. And the Russian army isn’t about to march into Chechenia and leave Ingushetia next door as a joker in the pack. Piss.”
He had spilled something on his apron, and it had permeated his trousers. He seized another apron and, though it was even dirtier than the first, wrapped it round his midriff. “Anyway,” he said accusingly, “who would you favour if you were the Kremlin? A bunch of bloodthirsty Muslim highlanders, or the Sovietised, Christianised, arse-licking Ossetians, who pray every day for Stalin to come back?”
“So what would you do if you were Bashir?”
“I’m not. Hypothetical codswallop.”
Suddenly, to my surprise, he sounded like Larry dilating on the subject of fashionable and unfashionable wars. “First, I’d buy myself one of those smirking Washington lobbyists with plastic hair. That’s a million bucks down the tube. Second, I’d get hold of a dead Ingush baby, preferably female, and put her on prime time television in the arms of a snivelling newscaster, preferably male, also with plastic hair. I’d have questions asked in Congress and the United Nations. And when absolutely sod all has happened as usual, I’d say to hell with it, and if I had any money left, I’d take my family to the south of France and blow the lot. No, I wouldn’t. I’d go alone.”
“Or go to war,” I suggested.
He was crouching, packing saucepans into a pitch-dark cupboard at floor level.
“There’s a warning out about you,” he said. “Thought I’d better tell you. Anyone who sights you is supposed to tell Personnel Department.”
“And will you?” I asked.
“Shouldn’t think so. You’re Clare’s friend, not mine.”
I thought he had finished, but there was evidently too much left in him.
“I rather dislike you, to be frank. And your bloody Office. I never believed one word you and your people told me unless I’d happened to have read it in the newspapers first. I don’t know what you’re looking for, but I’d be grateful if you didn’t look for it here.”
“Just tell me whether it’s true.”
“What?”
“Are the Ingush planning something serious? Could they do that? If they had the guns?”
Too late in the day, I wondered whether he was drunk. He seemed to have lost his orientation. I was wrong. He was warming to his subject.
“It’s quite an interesting one, that, actually,” he conceded, with the boyish enthusiasm he brought to all forms of catastrophe. “From stuff we’re getting in, Bashir seems to be raising a pretty good head of steam despite himself. You may be onto something.”
I took Emma’s part and played the innocent. “Can’t anyone stop it happening?” I asked.
“Oh sure. The Russians can. Do what they did last time. Turn the Ossies loose on them. Rocket their villages. Gouge their eyes out. Drag ’em down to the valleys, bang ’em up in ghettos. Deport them.”
“I meant us. NATO without the Americans. A
fter all, it is Europe. It is our patch.”
“Do a Bosnia, you mean?” he proposed in the same triumphant note that in Simon Dugdale celebrated every impasse. “On Russian soil? Brilliant idea. And let’s have a few Russian shock troops to sort out our British football hooligans while we’re about it.” The anger I had been provoking in him had caught light. “The presumption,” he resumed on a higher note, “that this country—any civilised country—has a duty to interpose itself between any two groups of knuckle-draggers who happen to be determined to butcher each other . . .” He’s talking like me, I thought. “. . . to patrol the globe, mediating between hell-bent heathen savages nobody’s ever heard of . . . Do you mind going now?”
“What’s the forest?”
“Are you mad?”
“Why would an Ingush warn somebody about the forest?”
Once more his face cleared. “Ossetian Ku Klux Klan. Shadowy mob, fed and watered by the KGB or its derivatives. If you wake up tomorrow morning with your balls in your mouth, which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, in my view, it will like as not be the work of The Forest. After you.”
Clare was in the drawing room with a magazine on her lap, watching a black-and-white television set over the top of her reading glasses.
“Oh, Tim, darling, do let me run you to the station. We’ve hardly talked at all.”
“I’m ordering a cab for him,” said Simon, at the telephone.
The cab came and she took my arm and led me to it, while Simon the Berkeleyan stayed indoors, denying the existence of everything he couldn’t perceive. I remembered the occasions when I had performed a similar courtesy for Emma, fuming inside the house and grimacing at my reflection while she said goodbye to Larry in the drive.
“I always think of you as a man who does things,” Clare whispered in my ear, while she chewed it half to pieces. “Poor Si’s so academic.”
I felt nothing for her. Some other Cranmer had slept with her.
I drove, with Larry beside me in the passenger seat.
“You’re mad,” I told him, taking a leaf from Simon Dugdale’s book. “Dangerously, cogently mad.”