bright little man at Camp 3, very clever and on the up, and your Michael Holly is going to be his pride and joy, and when he can wheel your man into that press conference he's going to be very smug. And I'll tell you what we'll be, we'll be on the floor, and it hurts down there. You understand me?'
'Yes, sir.'
'When you netted this young man, unproven, untrained, did you tell him of the risks?'
'Not exactly, sir. Well, it wasn't really discussed.'
'Should those risks have been discussed, Mr Millet?'
'I didn't want to go into any more detail than absolutely necessary. But perhaps, perhaps they should have been discussed. Yes, sir.'
'And if they had been discussed then he might not have gone. That's surely worth brooding on, Mr Millet.'
'Yes, sir.'
'On your way then, lad, and I'll offer you one thought to tide you over. Michael Holly didn't come to you, you recruited him. You put him where he is now. Camp 3 at Barashevo won't be fun, not in summer, not in winter. It'll be bloody awful there. You won't forget that, Millet?'
'Yes, sir.' Millet was rising from his chair. ' N o… I mean, no I won't forget that, sir.' _
The roof of the porch was shallow. It offered Alan Millet little protection from the rain that drove across the street and battered against his body.
He had rung the bell twice, listened to its chime and heard a distant door open and the call of voices.
He was pressed against the wood face, his hips hard onto the letter box, and he cursed the slow reaction. Below his raincoat his trousers showed the damp, and his shoes were lustreless from their soaking.
The door opened, a few inches only, the limit of a security chain.
'My apologies for coming without warning… it's Mr Holly, isn't it?'
'I am Holly, Stephen Holly.'
An old man, the grey face of age, a dulled unhappiness in the eyes. A striped shirt without a collar, and trousers that were held at a slender stomach by braces, and carpet slippers in checked shades of brown, and a smell of pipe tobacco. He spoke English with the gravel accent of the Central European, and there was a tremor in his words.
'Who are you? What do you want?'
'My name is Alan Millet. I'm Foreign Office, I'd like to talk to you about Michael.' He'd rehearsed that as he walked from the station, but it was still blurted. He felt a fraud.
'There is a Mr Carpenter at the Foreign Office, we deal with him. ..' it's a different department, a different matter.'
The rain dribbled down Millet's socks.
'Mr Carpenter had not told us anyone else was coming.'
'I'm half drowned out here, Mr H o l l y… I'd like to come inside.' Millet mouthed what he hoped was a winning smile.
And he was admitted.
He shook his coat outside and it was carried before him by Stephen Holly along the corridor that led into the backroom where a windowed coke boiler blazed and the coat was draped across a fender. A woman with a brush of close-cut grey hair sat with her sewing close to the fire and a cat rested on her lap, and she looked at Millet with fear and seemed to warn her husband that this was an intruder. It was a tidy, precious little room, from the polished linoleum floor to the filled bookcase of works in English and Russian, from the glass-shined pictures of distant landscapes to the square table covered by plastic cloth and laid for a meal. it's Mr Carpenter who comes from the Foreign Office to see us. No one else has ever come.' The woman echoed her husband. it's a pretty big place, Mrs Holly. We have a lot of sections there… '
'What do you want from us?' For a man of such broken physique, Stephen Holly's voice carried a curious brusqueness.
What did he want? Well, you don't tell two old people that a year and a bit too late you're out to find what the sticking power of their son will be when it comes to the choicer interrogation techniques of KGB. If they use the noise machine, if he doesn't sleep for a week, if it's the rubber truncheons, if it's the electrodes, if it's a pardon in return for goodies… well, you don't tell two old people that. Slowly, he told himself, slowly and gently, because the flow won't come easily, and they're frightened and foreign, and alone without a breakwater to shelter behind. What did he want?
'We're very concerned about Michael, both of you must understand that. We worked very hard to get him out of the Soviet Union – well, you know all that, Mr Carpenter will have told you, and he will have told you what went wrong…'
'Mr Carpenter told us why they would not release Michael.' Stephen Holly spoke sharply as if now he regretted his decision to admit the stranger.
'I'm one of the team of people at the Foreign Office that will be constantly working on Michael's case. I thought that it was right that I should talk to you, try and build a better picture of Michael.'
'You want to know whether he can survive his sentence?'
'I wouldn't put it as bluntly… we're very concerned, though, about Michael, Mr Holly.'
'Do you know anything of the Dubrovlag?'
'I know a little of it.'
'You want to know whether he can live through fourteen years in the camps, whether for our son that is possible?'
'We feel that the more we know about Michael, then the more we can help him.'
The cat yawned and stretched and its teeth and claws flashed, then it turned its back on Millet and settled again on the lap of Michael Holly's mother. The old woman stared at him and her eyes were bright and piercing and the silver thimble had fallen to the lap of her dress, and her fists were clenched now as if she searched for a memory, and her husband watched her anxiously as if he witnessed that she was at war within herself. Alan Millet stood with his back to the fire, feeling his inadequacy and waited for the woman to settle herself.
'You said your name was Millet… you said that you had come here to find out more about our son.'
'Alan Millet, Mrs Holly. Yes, I said…'
She dismissed him to silence with a wave of a narrow, fleshless arm. The arm hovered before the bookcase and then darted at a book end and retrieved a bound diary. The fingers scooped at the pages as if there was a reference that was familiar. if you are Mr Alan Millet then you come to us in deceit.'
The world was caving around him, and he did not know yet from which quarter the disaster would fall, only that its arrival was certain. i don't know what you mean, Mrs Holly.'
'My son kept a diary… three weeks before he flew to Moscow he recorded that he met an Alan Millet… four days before he left he met again with Alan Millet… why now does this Alan Millet speak of our son as if he were not known to him? Why…?'
Just a frail little thing, wasn't she, the wind could have picked her up and tossed her away, yet she had demolished him as surely as if she had wielded a pick-axe handle to his belly.
'I can't answer. You know that… you understand that
… I'm sorry.'
The silence gathered in the room around Millet. He saw the shadows that reached from the furniture, that slipped from a man and the woman of his life. When they had met at the pub, and boasted of the ease of the despatch of the packet that Michael Holly would carry, he had never thought of a moment such as this. He wanted only to be gone, to break out of the circle of reproach and injury around him.
'My son will survive, Mr Millet. That is what you want to hear from me? Michael will survive. If he serves every day of the sentence passed on him… even if you desert h i m… he will survive. He would never bow to them. I know my son, Mr Millet.'
The tears dribbled on her face and made bright lines across the greyness of her cheeks and then her head was lost in her hands.
'You should go now, Mr Millet,' Stephen Holly said.
'You should not come to us again.'
Alan Millet plucked his coat from the fender and saw that the drips had made a pool on the linoleum floor. He
