The Russian Interpreter

The stewardess was hovering over them, offering them glasses of tea. Proctor-Gould opened his brief-case and took out a tin of Nescafé.

‘I wonder if you would make me up a cup of this instead?’ he asked the stewardess. ‘One teaspoonful in boiling water, if you would be so kind.’

‘Like old times,’ said Manning, after the girl had taken the tin away. ‘How on earth do you come to have it with you?’

‘I managed to persuade them to let me have it in the prison. The police had impounded it for examination. I couldn’t bear the prison tea.’

The stewardess brought the Nescafé. It would scarcely taste the same, thought Manning, not having been measured out in a Woolworth’s apostle spoon. He sipped his lemon tea luxuriously, cradled in the noise and the vibration, and the odd voices of people talking, squeezed to that high, soporific unnaturalness that voices have in aircraft.

‘To be quite candid,’ said Proctor-Gould, ‘I was rather surprised to get such a friendly welcome from you. I mean, I got you involved in all this business, without so much as a by-your-leave. Any apology I might make would scarcely seem adequate. Nevertheless, Paul, I am sorry – deeply sorry.’

‘I think I’m the one who should be apologizing, Gordon. I said a lot of stupid things. I see now that I was wrong.’

Proctor-Gould gazed at Paul, his head turned sideways against the upholstery of the seat.

Thank you, Paul,’ he said. ‘I appreciate that. I’m very touched.’

‘It’s almost certainly my fault we were caught, too. I told Katya about taking those books to the station. She told the police.’

Proctor-Gould frowned.

‘Katya?’ he said. ‘Who’s Katya?’

‘A girl I know. Or rather, knew. You put your arm round her once, a long time ago. Anyway, I’m sorry, Gordon.’

‘Never mind, Paul. The whole thing was my responsibility entirely.’

‘I suppose this is the end of the career you’d built up?’

‘I suppose it is.’

Manning closed his eyes and tried to take in his freedom by imagining that he was still in his cell, and imagining that he was only imagining being on a plane bound for London. When he opened his eyes again Proctor-Gould was still watching him dreamily from the cushion.

‘Nice to be on your way home, Paul?’

‘Yes. Why do you think they expelled us, Gordon, instead of bringing us to trial?’

‘I don’t know. Political reasons, perhaps – something in the current international situation. Or perhaps it would have been embarrassing to reveal who was implicated on the Soviet side.’

‘Maybe when they discovered it was just a matter of getting manuscripts out for publication they decided to turn a blind eye. It’s the sort of back-door liberalism that’s in fashion.’

Manning realized that Proctor-Gould had lifted his head from the head-rest, and was looking at him rather strangely. The suggestion of an embarrassed smile was forming about his lips.

‘You did say Sasha told you what they found in the book?’ he asked awkwardly.

‘He said they found some money in the binding.’

‘He told you how much, did he?’

‘No. Why?’

Proctor-Gould sighed and fingered the lobe of his ear.

‘I was afraid there must be some misunderstanding between us,’ he said.

He thought for a moment.

‘I suppose there’s no point in not telling you,’ he said. ‘You’ll hear soon enough in London. Well, Paul, according to my interrogating officer, they found 30,000 dollars in the book, in thousand-dollar bills.’

The balance of probabilities shifted quite slowly in Manning’s mind.

‘Somebody must have written a real best-seller,’ he said.

‘I knew you wouldn’t like it, Paul.’

‘There were no cuttings, I take it?’

‘Cuttings, Paul?’

‘Of reviews. You said there were cuttings of reviews….’

‘Oh. No. Listen, Paul. I’m just telling you what the interrogating officer told me. I swear to you, I was told in London that I was carrying a few hundred dollars in royalties for a Soviet author That’s what I was told. Now, I don’t know, Paul, whether I was told a lie by the people in London, or whether those notes were put in the book by the K.G.B. when they examined it. It could even be royalties, you know. Dr Zhivago must have earned a lot more than that….’

Manning gazed out of the window and said nothing. It was warm in the plane, and he felt suddenly dazed and crumpled and sleepy. The question which kept coming back to him now was why he and Proctor-Gould were being allowed to return home. He couldn’t get it out of his head that Proctor-Gould must have compounded with his captors. Had he offered to use his connexion with British intelligence on their behalf? But they would know that British intelligence could not use him again after he had been in Soviet hands. Or perhaps they hoped that the British might be tempted to make use of him as a probable Soviet agent, and therefore a channel through which they could feed information that they wished the Russians to have…. Complex possibilities of deceit and counter-deceit opened out in every direction.