CHAPTER 13
It was still too early for the tourist season, and the resort of Gagra, with its elegant palm-fringed front curving along the margin of the Black Sea, was quiet and empty in the southern spring. Most of the hotels were closed, the ice-cream emporiums shuttered, the chess-sets locked away in the beach-huts, the skiffs and pedalos pulled up on the pebbled shore.
The day had been unusually warm, even for Georgia, and when Joyce Warburton had stepped off the train from Sochi that afternoon she had not even needed her coat. The orange trees along the main boulevard were not yet in blossom, and the snowline had been clear and very close, suspended high above the houses like a reef of shining cloud.
As usual, the arrangements had been immaculate: there had been a car to meet her and drive her to the Grand Hotel Gagra, where she had been shown into a suite overlooking the sea. She had had little unpacking to do — an evening dress, pair of shoes and change of underwear, and her few toilet things which had looked rather pathetic spread out on the huge naked dressing-table. The tired trappings of the dirty weekend — in Leningrad, Kiev, Yalta, Sochi, and now Gagra. Only this time she had been promised that it would be different. From now on, no more excuses, no more brave smiles when she greeted Lennie Maddox back at the flat on Sunday evening, having to endure his simpering smile, his sudden tantrums and table-thumping rages. He was a vulgar bully; it had shown in his love-making, aggressive and artless, and in his treatment of waiters, clerks, cloakroom attendants — people he’d been able to lord it over in the West, but who shrugged him off in the Soviet Union, regarding him as just another ugly little foreigner.
That’s just what he was, she thought: ugly and little. A nobody — so that now it was as though he’d never existed. Occasionally, over the last twenty-four hours since she’d been offered her freedom, she had been surprised, even a little dismayed at her complete lack of feeling for him. She told herself that she’d stuck him for so long because she’d thought he might be useful to her — at least, while he stayed with the Frenchman, for it had always seemed there might be some rich crumbs from that table. And besides, he had looked after her, provided for her, taken her out and shown her off — the best tables in the top Moscow restaurants, seats at the Bolshoi, the ritual round of cocktail parties and receptions where she’d been able to flirt skittishly with glass-eyed diplomats and bored businessmen.
At first, the few shreds of English suburban tact that had clung to her as far as Moscow had prevented her from being unfaithful to Lennie Maddox; but soon there had been that glamorous photographer who was part Lebanese and had broken with his wife; but that hadn’t stopped him from returning to Rome after only six weeks, and since then there had only been one postcard.
Then the Englishman had come along.
She’d met him at a rather louche dinner-party given by a Russian whom Lennie had described as being ‘something pretty big with the KGB’, and who in turn seemed to believe that Lennie was equally big with Entreprises Lipp. It had been a typically ghastly evening, she remembered, with the Russians insisting on setting fire to their vodkas before drinking them, with the result that many of them had badly burnt their mouths; and the KGB man who had gone outside to get some air, disappearing down an open manhole and breaking his hip.
During all this, she had found herself seated between an elderly Englishman and a Russian who spoke no English, and who had been counted out in the early stages of the meal when his head had slumped into his soup, and had been pulled out just in time to save him from drowning. For the rest of dinner she had the Englishman to herself. She had been a trifle disconcerted when he introduced himself as ‘Kim’ Philby: though not so much by his reputation, as by his obvious gentleness. She could not believe that he could really be a villain — or, for that matter, a Hero of the Soviet Union. While she was flattered and excited by the attentions of such a man, what really attracted her was something sad, almost defenceless, about him, with his poor tired face and that terrible stammer. He’d been through so much. A lone wolf come home to die, was how he’d described himself. And that’s what she’d come to call him: ‘Lone Grey Wolf’. And in turn he had called her his ‘Golden Mouse’, on account of her pale russet hair, which owed more to a hairdresser in Copenhagen than to nature; and whenever he called her by his pet-name it made her feel just like a schoolgirl again.
In fact, she had been smitten like a schoolgirl from that very first meeting. (Only later had she heard the rumours that his long liaison with Melinda Maclean had just ended.) The next day he had telephoned her at the flat, while Lennie was at the office, and there began a number of discreet meetings, in cafés, obscure restaurants, museums and theatres and walks through the city parks. Then, after a decent interval of three weeks, he had seduced her, rather uncomfortably, on the back seat of an old Moskvitch car during an excursion into the Lenin Hills.
Through the whole idyllic winter that followed she had indulged her secret passion, with each of them playing a protracted game of lovers in a hostile land — she outwitting the sly suspicions of Lennie Maddox, and he ducking the largely imagined attentions of the Western Press. She often felt that Kim enjoyed the intrigue for
