Moscow: Район Хамовники улица Большая Пироговская 53-55, квартира 68 1956
It pained him to heft his bitch tits—all the same, he did so two or three times a week. Usually in front of a full-length mirror. The true reflection of the most distorting aspect of his nature—vanity.
His London controller, “Peter,” on one of his fleeting visits back to Moscow, had been the first to point out that he was putting on weight.
“Well, if the fucking diet here wasn’t so fucking stodgy I fucking wouldn’t be, would I?”
“Still dreaming of London’s restaurants, Guy?”
“I close my eyes and I can still smell Wheeler’s fish soup. I can taste the Arbroath smokies in Simpson’s. I could reach out and touch the filet mignon at the Ritz.”
And then his new suit had arrived from Savile Row, with a polite note from his tailor, “Sir, we note the change from 32 waist to 34. If you would be so good as to advise us of any further changes.”
It was tempting to write back and say he now dressed to the left, but what was the point? They’d never get the joke. What, indeed, was the point of anything?
Burgess was not a happy man. Those fleeting moments when happiness seemed possible, tangible, only heightened his frustration. Such as the day his harmonium arrived from England.
Tom Driberg had shipped it for him. Along with most of his books. A sentimental, self-deceiving man—and Burgess was both—might be able to recreate the illusion of the flat in Bond Street. But every so often, or a hundred times a day, he’d find himself looking out of the window at the Novodevichy Cemetery, next to the Orthodox convent, and no illusion of home could sustain itself with such a view. Not that he disliked the cemetery. With hours to kill he often killed them there—he’d drift from Chekhov’s tomb, to Gogol’s, to Bulgakov’s (not that he’d read a word of Bulgakov), to Nadezhda Stalin’s, and on … and on … to Sergei Eisenstein’s. He’d sat through Oktober and Battleship Potemkin, and quite enjoyed both. He’d tried sitting through Ivan the Terrible and failed utterly to enjoy it or stick with it to the end.
He’d have felt better if the harmonium had worked, but its lungs were shot, its leather bellows perished.
The arrival of his books, however, had revived his “frenetic bibliomania.” He’d felt an acute sense of loss without them. He tried to feel lucky, feeling no more lucky than he felt happy; after all, he’d known people who really had lost their books during the Blitz—blown up and burnt up, nothing left but ash. His pal Duncan (or was it Denis? Couldn’t have been much of a pal) sitting over breakfast in the Ritz one day in 1941, tearfully drawing up a list of lost books, then producing, wrapped in a damp, snotty hanky, the charred corner of a book.
“Oxford English Dictionary,” he said. “Volume 12: Supplements. Page 381. It’s all that’s left.”
Trying for uplifting levity, Burgess had said, “Fond of 382, were you?”
And Duncan (or Denis) had wept buckets into his pre-porridge Scotch and soda.
There was his copy of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, a tale of pointless love for a worthless woman, which had fired and fuelled his adolescence. His copy of Walter Sickert’s essays, edited by Osbert Sitwell—newish, only a few years old, but it had become one of his most treasured books.
But … but … but the one he really missed was: Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.
He’d had the newest, updated edition, dating from 1949. It had a column and a half just on the word “Bum
“Bum-clink”
“Bum-perisher”
“Bum-feagle”
It had been a treasury of delight in the English language, a riot of filth and double entendre, and his favourite bedtime reading. Almost made insomnia worthwhile.
Even more on cock.
“Cock-maggot (in a sink hole)”
“Cock-smitten”
And the classic, the timeless entry:
“Fucked, more times than I’ve had hot dinners, she’s been.”
The taxonomic pleasure of typing a line like that. He wondered how Partridge had ever been able to type such a line and keep a straight face.
The possibilities, the endless possibilities for insult. Oh, to have it back again. To be at large in a country where few, if any, spoke English, armed with the thinking, drinking man’s bible of abuse. He’d give up his hand-annotated two volumes of the Selected Marx and Engels and throw in his copy of Murchison’s The Dawn of Motoring too just to be able to refresh his reservoir of insults from Partridge. But—he’d left it in Washington. Not happy. Philby had promised to ship it. He never had. Not lucky.
But … but … but there were now regular letters from his mother.