Troy looked around and felt lost. Eighteen guests strung out either side of the table. His father at one end, his mother at the other. His elder brother, Rod, sat at his mother’s right hand. Macmillan sat at his father’s right, a rather obvious clue that Alex had an agenda of things he meant to say and meant Macmillan to hear.
Troy was slightly closer to his father, off-centre, next to his sister Masha, twin of the now completely sozzled Sasha. He wondered if he’d been placed there to keep an eye on Masha or she on him. She’d not appeared for cocktails, but had emerged from her dressing room looking like Greta Garbo or Anna Karenina … black dress, pale skin, and plenty of cleavage. He wondered who she might be tarting at but could spot no likely candidate.
Centre table was Burgess, on the far side of Masha. She leaned Troy’s way, her lips all but touching his ear.
“Who’s the new bloke?” she whispered.
“Guy Burgess.”
“Hack, novelist, pol?”
“Hack. I gather the old man’s taken him on. Rod tells me they overlapped at Cambridge.”
“Funny. Never heard Rod mention him.”
“Me neither.”
“Have you seen his fingernails? Looks as though he scrapes dung off a cow’s backside for a living.”
“Say it a bit louder and he’ll hear you.”
“Don’t care. I wouldn’t let those fingers up me.”
“For Christ’s sake, Masha.”
“Only saying!”
“Only saying what?”
It was Burgess, pricking the illusory bubble that Masha had sought to blow around the two of them.
“That you and Rod were at Cambridge together.”
“Oh, yes. Not exactly together. I think Rod came down at the end of my first year. And we never quite mixed in the same circles.”
“Rod tells me you were in Russia a while ago?” Troy said, hoping for and getting the desired effect.
No other word would have exploded into the room, slicing through all other dinner chit-chat, quite like “Russia.” Facing him were his uncle Nikolai and Baroness Budberg. Within earshot, his father, and, just out of it, his mother. All of them Russian exiles.
Before Burgess could answer Nikolai leapt in.
“When?” he asked simply.
“Last summer. Went Intourist with a Cambridge chum. The quid quotidian—a pound a day to see Moscow. Cheaper than Blackpool or Skegness.”
“Ah,” said Nikolai. “The fellow travellers’ package.”
Burgess seemed not to hear the contempt in Nikolai’s voice.
“No, actually, I was a fully paid-up member of the Communist Party at the time.”
He looked around, well aware that he had taken centre stage, and, as far as Troy could tell, was loving it. Troy could not deny the charm, even as Burgess was uttering such show-stopping lines—bricks cascading down like demolition. If it weren’t for the fingernails, and the remnants of the soup course down his shirt-front, Troy might even concede that Burgess had style.
“Such folly,” Nikolai gently stabbed.
“Quite,” said Burgess. “I resigned last year.”
“Ah … the visit opened your eyes?”
“Forgive me, Professor Troitsky, if I say that my eyes weren’t closed. Let us say that I returned with a different perspective. I did not suffer an overnight conversion to become an anti-Soviet.”
“Nor I. But I have been an anti-Soviet since before the USSR existed.”
Moura Budberg said something so quietly to Nikolai that Troy did not catch it. All he knew was it was in Russian and sharp of tone.
His father stepped in.
“Nikolai, don’t be so hard. Guy has been to Russia, and only a year ago at that. When were any of us last there? I am sure he has things to tell us.”
Burgess paused for a few seconds as his audience rearranged their thoughts. A quiet moment broken only by the sound of Macmillan clanking his fish knife. Troy was not at all certain Macmillan had been listening, but then the big, sad eyes looked up as though wondering at the gap in the conversation.
“I came back not so much critical of Russia, that is of the Russian system, as critical of myself, of my own generation. Of all us fellow travellers, if you like. We hitched our wagon to the wrong star. The red star. We fell too readily into the folly, as you put it so aptly, of being starry-eyed utopianists in search of a workers’ paradise, and convinced ourselves that the Soviet Union was that paradise. What my visit to Russia taught me was that it may well be a workers’ paradise. There is much to admire. But it is a paradise only for Russian workers and only in the context of Russian history. It isn’t a model for the West.”
“Ah,” said Nikolai. “You have seen the future and it doesn’t work.”
Even Troy’s mother, a woman who could be fiercely humourless when she tried, laughed at this. It was a twentieth-century classic. Lincoln Steffens, the American journalist, had summed up the Soviet Union in a single quotable line after his visit in 1919. But that had been the trend … the exiles could not return, yet Western intellectuals seemed to descend upon the new country in droves, the publicity value of their visits being immeasurable.
Bernard Shaw, an enthusiast, had visited in 1931 and had vigorously defended the Soviet Union, the Five-Year Plans and the “Workers’ Republic” in the pages of the Manchester Guardian. His odd choice of travelling companion had been the Tory MP Nancy Astor, a less-than-enthusiast who had boasted to Alex Troy that she had told Josef Stalin that Churchill was a spent force in English politics.
“You’re wrong,” Alex had replied.
H. G. Wells, lover of the Baroness Budberg, seemed to be in and out of Russia at the drop of a hat … but who among living English writers had been quite so troubled by so many dystopias? G. K. Chesterton’s sister-in-law had written about her “Russian Venture,” and the Labour politician Ethel Snowden had published a book with a title like Across Bolshevik Russia on a Dog Sled on her return. Troy hadn’t read either. He’d been brought up on the old Russia not the new one. A Russia of fading memories, peeling like the pea-green paint on a decaying dacha. His father had fled in 1905, an escape shrouded in mystery and carpeted with diamonds. His uncle and grandfather had stuck it out until 1910, protected from the Tsar’s secret police by the patronage of the most famous writer in the world, Count Leo Tolstoy. With Tolstoy’s death the protection stopped, and Nikolai had brought the old man to England to live out his days without learning a word of English, and to die at ninety—author of a dozen pamphlets on civil disobedience and numberless letters to The Times—without ever seeing Russia again. Troy doubted any of the old ones at table would ever see Russia again. He felt that Burgess had the advantage of him, of them all. Troy was fluent in Russian, but had never been to Russia. Burgess had. Whilst Troy had all but tuned out to muse awhile, he could see that Rod, whose dislike of Burgess was all too apparent, was listening to him intently. He was serving them Russia on a plate, between the fish and the meat, gently oscillating between reservation and endorsement, warning against expecting miracles whilst expecting them himself.
Troy stopped daydreaming just as Burgess was saying something about encountering a woman on a Moscow tram with a pig under each arm.
“It’s almost impossible to imagine how close contemporary Russia, in the midst of the most directed and planned society on earth, in its urban capital, is to the nineteenth century and to peasantry.”
Nikolai was smiling now. He had no difficulty whatsoever in such a feat of imagination. Macmillan was smiling too.
“I met a chap with an Aberdeen Angus on top of a 38 bus in Bloomsbury once,” he said.
Troy thought his father and brother might die laughing. Burgess too—well, at least he could laugh at himself. No small virtue.