A Little White Death by John Lawton Read Free Book Online Page A

merely his cover. What then? Suppose that even now he is a spy. What then?’
    ‘Then you publish what you find. I’m not even going to ask those questions. I don’t want to know.’

 
§ 7
    At Athens he changed planes and bought a bottle of ouzo – he’d never tasted the stuff and, besides, it would be a beakerful of the warm south to take into the
Russian winter. He also bought the Sunday Post . An outrageous price and nearly two days old, but he desperately wanted an English paper.
    ‘Where is Leigh-Hunt?’ ran the headline, and underneath it was another version of what Said had told him, bylined to Arthur Alliss, ‘our Middle Eastern correspondent’.
The piece concluded that Charlie was in Russia. Troy turned to the inside pages. A leader, the work of his brother-in-law Lawrence Stafford, called upon the Foreign Office to clarify the matter
– had Leigh-Hunt defected or not? ‘Mr Woodbridge was forthright in his denial of rumours alleging that Charles Leigh-Hunt was a Soviet agent some six years ago. It is not for him to
remain silent now. Where is Leigh-Hunt? Who is his paymaster?’
    Troy thought ‘paymaster’ a bit histrionic, but then writing about spookery brought out all the clichés.
    Under Home News, eclipsed by the Charlie scandal, was an item on the Labour Party leadership. The chief contenders to replace the late Hugh Gaitskell were Harold Wilson and George Brown –
both of them politicians swept into the Commons in the great tide of 1945, just like Rod. But Rod’s name was nowhere.

 
§ 8
    He had always known Moscow would be cold. Family history, War and Peace and School Certificate geography told him that – but this cold? He could scarcely believe
thermometers were made that would record temperatures this low. He was wearing every scrap of clothing he had with him, and dearly wished for his Aran sweater or one of those sheepskin things
ex-RAF types wore for tearing round the English countryside in little MGs and boring the arse off village pubgoers with their version of the Battle of Britain. At a pinch he’d settle for an
extra pair of socks or reinforced Y-fronts. Or a hat, he thought, God send me a hat.
    The Russians had not set up one of those flexible tubes that conveyed passengers from plane to immigration like dust up a hoover without ever touching ground, without the literal sense that
‘landing’ implies and ought to imply. Troy touched ground, or touched tarmac, as near as he would get to the soil of Mother Russia, feeling little or nothing and wondering what it was
he should feel. Perhaps wonderment was all and perhaps wonderment was enough? He was the first Troy to return to Russia in fifty-eight years. His father had never set foot east of Berlin, nor had
his Uncle Nikolai and neither had ever expressed any desire to. His brother Rod had tried time and time again to wangle his way onto Labour Party or trade union official visits, and failed time and
time again. Troy had never wanted to visit the old country. He much preferred it to exist in the fanciful yarns and fables of his grandfather Rodyon Rodyonovitch – or in the precise,
near-scientific accounts of his father Alexei Rodyonovitch, which in the end served to foster the mythical status of Russia as surely as his grandfather’s highly unreliable tales had done.
All in all, Russia, the Russia of his boyhood, the Russia of the nursery, the Russia imbibed at his mother’s knee and his father’s dinner table, did not exist except as a country of the
mind. As he stood on the windblown tarmacadam, beneath an invisible sky, between the Tupelov jet and the vast blankness of the concrete buildings, blinded by arc lights, frozen to his fingertips,
surrounded by the sibilant babble of the language of childhood, his sense of wonder amounted to one simple, inadequate question: ‘Is this it?’
    Troy followed the snaking Russian susurrus into the blockhouse. A lazy silence overlay an intimidated whisper. No jets