The Russian Interpreter

Manning got up and went across to the window. It was a dull, dead day, with a low ceiling of cloud moving slowly over from Smolensk and Mogilev in the west, past Moscow to Sverdlovsk and the unimaginable distances beyond. Tiny figures in grey raincoats and grey fedoras trudged across the great landscape of the square. Here a man in a double-breasted blazer with threads of cotton hanging from the nap could still prosper.

‘I take it that this offer is entirely what it seems?’ asked Manning suddenly. ‘I’m not being recruited for some sort of intelligence work?’

Proctor-Gould turned slowly round towards Manning and gazed at him steadily with his great brown eyes.

‘What makes you ask that?’

‘I don’t know. It was just a thought.’

‘I ask you to interpret for me – and the first thought that comes into your head is that it might have something to do with intelligence?’

‘Well, one’s always hearing of people being approached in some roundabout way.’

Proctor-Gould pulled his ear in silence for a moment or two, gazing sombrely down at the heap of clothes on the floor.

‘Let me assure you, Paul,’ he said slowly and quietly, ‘that this has nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence.’

‘I’m sorry. Silly of me to mention it.’

‘You accept my word?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘And let me ask one thing of you, Paul. Never – ever – refer to intelligence or espionage in the context of our work again, even as a joke.’

‘All right.’

‘Things get overheard, as you know. They get misunderstood and misreported. And once an idea has been implanted, however preposterous it is, it’s almost impossible ever to uproot it again.’

‘I’m sorry, Gordon.’

‘Don’t forget – our work depends on creating confidence.’

From the word ‘our’ Manning took it that he was considered as engaged. Already he found Proctor-Gould a strangely impressive employer.

8

Manning’s life became a round of parties, receptions, conferences, congresses, reunions, exhibitions – all the various bends and corners in life at which a sediment of people might be deposited for inspection. For his purely commercial dealings in balalaikas and Repin prints Proctor-Gould continued to use Soviet interpreters. But there turned out to be a third aspect to his activities which he had not mentioned before, and for which he preferred Manning. He was an export-import agent in goodwill. He had commissions, Manning discovered, from a number of organizations in Britain which wished to maintain or improve their contacts with the Soviet Union. Manning spent hours with him calling on government offices, university departments, and cultural agencies to convey greetings from British counterparts. They shook hands, drank toasts, smiled smiles. Often they delivered gifts, usually books from the stock which Proctor-Gould had referred to as his beads.

‘I accept commissions of this sort only from organizations with the right sort of standing,’ he explained. ‘I help them – their reputation helps me.’

‘You do it for nothing?’ asking Manning.

‘No, no – I charge a modest fee. They’re happy to pay it, I can tell you – it costs them far less than it would to send a man of their own over here. And I don’t want to boast, but I probably make rather a better job of it than they would themselves. I know from long experience how Russians like these things to be done.’

‘You seem to have struck quite a little goldmine,’ said Manning.

They were walking down a crowded shopping street as they talked, back to the black Chaika saloon which the government had put at Proctor-Gould’s disposal. At Manning’s remark Proctor-Gould stopped among the crowds, and fixed Manning with that gaze of curious intensity and levelness which indicated that the subject was so important to him that it took up the whole of his attention.

‘Paul,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t like you to get the wrong impression about my work here. There’s nothing cynical about my attitude, I assure you. I happen to believe that there’s nothing more important in the world today than the establishment of trust and understanding between Russia and the West. If I can feel that I’m making some small contribution to this end by my professional services, that’s my real reward. The money is of secondary importance. I should like you to get that quite clear, Paul.’

Manning believed he was sincere. Proctor-Gould had that patent sincerity directed towards unsubtle objectives which is the strength and hallmark of public men. That was what he was, thought Manning – a public man. He was not interested, as Manning was, in making his contacts with the world around him personal and intimate. Towards his parents, thought Manning, he would make generous formal gestures, as if they were not so much his parents as the emissaries of parents as a social class; towards women, gestures of generalized concupiscence, as if they were not Lucinda or Sally-Anne, but representatives of Lucindahood and Sally-Annity.