Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow Read online

  To my long-time friend and indispensable

  editor Roland Gant

  Contents

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  17

  A Note on the Author

  Also available by Paul Gallico

  1

  The photograph definitely had never been there before.

  Of this Mrs Harris was certain, being sharp-eyed, observant and most particular about the little objects, knick-knacks, pictures and mementoes which cluttered the London flats of the clients for whom she did daily work since the majority of them were fussy about their placements and irritable when they were moved.

  Some eight by ten inches, framed to stand up, it now reposed on Mr Lockwood’s desk. Against a most curious background of snow, a great wall topped by a strange tower, it revealed, fur clad, the head and shoulders of a lovely-looking girl.

  Mrs Harris, whose purpose had been to dust Mr Lockwood’s desk, his typewriter, reference books and the various toys that all writers seem to keep in and about their working area, picked up the mystery photo and examined it more closely. It was obvious that it was a blow-up from a snapshot but even this enlargement of the picture’s grain did not conceal the luminous melancholy of the eyes. The girl wore a fur hat, her hair dark beneath it. Those eyes looking straight into the camera or the person behind the camera were trying to convey a message and to Mrs Harris who was both imaginative and incurably romantic the communication was one of all-pervading sadness and longing. Winter, snow, an unhappy girl and behind her some kind of grim fortress.

  This sadness transferred itself to Mrs Harris or rather for the first time crystallized and intensified the emotion she realized was in some measure always present around Mr Lockwood’s small rented, furnished apartment, for, from the beginning six months ago when she had taken on to ‘do’ for him a couple of hours a day as one of her regular clients, she had felt him to be a distracted man with some kind of secret sorrow.

  She stood there, a thin, wiry figure, armed cap-à-pie for the battle against dust and dirt, in overalls, slippers and head cloth, the long handle of the floor polishing mop held upright in the crook of her arm, the picture in one hand, a dust rag in the other. She had little darting mischievous eyes which were now aglow with the excitement of her discovery, rounded cheeks like frosted crab apples and her chirpy sparrow’s face was a campaign map of lines and furrows of a lifetime of struggle.

  Thus engrossed she did not hear Mr Geoffrey Lockwood let himself into the flat and march through the living-room into his study to catch her at what she would have called ‘snooping’ at the picture. Ada Harris was not basically a snooper and, nipped in flagrante, she began to rub the glass vigorously with her duster.

  Mr Lockwood, with a curiously stern look upon his otherwise pleasant and rather handsome countenance, came over and without a word took the photograph from Mrs Harris’s hands and replaced it, leaving Mrs Harris standing there with a large portion of egg on her face.

  The awful silence absolutely shrieked to be broken. Mrs Harris said, ‘Ain’t she beautiful.’

  Mr Lockwood did not reply and because his back was partially turned to her she could not see the expression on his face which was dark and lowering and did not suit him at all. He was youngish, no more than thirty-five, sandy-haired, blue-eyed with a rugged maleness of features, and a mouth of which his short moustache did not entirely conceal the slight weakness. His face in repose always had an air of ingenuous bewilderment and absent-mindedness that from the very first had awakened Mrs Harris’s mother instincts which were never too far from the surface since she herself had a married daughter and grandchildren.

  Mrs Harris, her remark left unanswered, felt that yet another was called for and asked, ‘Where is it? What’s that plyce there? It looks like a jail.’

  Mr Lockwood replied briefly, ‘The Kremlin,’ and then suddenly without warning, slammed down the package of typing paper he had been out to purchase on to the desk and shouted, ‘Oh, goddamn them!’ with such ferocity and vehemence that Mrs Harris jumped and let out a little scream and then apologized, ‘I’m sorry, sir, I wasn’t meaning …’

  Mr Lockwood turned to her and said, ‘Oh, not you, Mrs Harris,’ and was looking at the photo and through the girl at the wall behind her, repeating, ‘Them,’ and then added, ‘and the bloody, don’t-give-a-damn Foreign Office as well.’

  Mr Lockwood then said, ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Harris, I didn’t mean to startle you.’

  ‘Nor did I mean to snoop neither,’ said Mrs Harris. ‘It’s just that I hadn’t never seen it before and when I come in today there it was and ’er lookin’ so loverly I couldn’t ’elp but …’

  ‘I know,’ Mr Lockwood admitted, ‘I couldn’t bear to have it out before but when I thought the Foreign Office was finally going to do something for me …’ He didn’t finish that sentence but added another equally baffling to Mrs Harris, ‘She’s a Russian girl.’

  Baffling was hardly the word to describe Mrs Harris’s emotions, or her flaming curiosity which required every bit of her self-control to be contained. ‘Foreign Office?’ ‘Kremlin?’ She’d heard of this. But ‘Russian girl?’ Who was she? Wife, sweetheart, mistress? Where was she? And why? Unquestionably she was the key to that mystery and melancholy that always had been wrapped around Mr Lockwood ever since she had answered his ad and come to work for him between the hours of nine and eleven in the morning. But it was a key which Mrs Harris’s innate sense of propriety refused to let her turn.

  Ada Harris belonged to that slowly vanishing breed of London char who, for five bob in the old days, now fifty pence an hour, visited small London flats or offices and cleaned them. She, herself, specialized in dwellings because she loved and was fascinated by other people’s lives and that was where one encountered them. Her clients eventually found her to be not only a conscientious drudge but a woman primed with a fabulous fund of wisdom, home truths, information and sound common sense garnered through practically a lifelong attendance at the school of hard knocks. She could give advice to the lovelorn, had a list of all the best hairdressers, shops and bargain counters at her fingertips, understood the two-legged male animal, could counsel on marital problems, was up to date on all the latest press reports of marriage, divorce and scandal and was herself a member of the charladies’ underground which passed back and forth tidbits of succulent gossip acquired at first hand and which did not find their way into the newspapers.

  She was, however, as she had said, not a snooper, nor did she ever query or pry into the personal affairs of her clients. But once such a one had ever unburdened herself (it was usually the mistress of the establishment who did so) or asked for a bit of advice Ada was ready to hold forth. Propped up by her mop handle she could let them have anything from a half hour to forty-five minutes without drawing a deep breath. She loved nothing better than a good heart-to-heart chat, oft to the considerable distress of employers who had rendezvous with beauty parlours, milliners, dressmakers or had a taxi ticking over outside. A client would have to volunteer. Mrs Harris would never ask a direct question.

  To his own eternal surprise Mr Lockwood suddenly found himself volunteering. He had sat himself down at his desk and after a moment of regarding his electric portable morosely he said, ‘She’s an Intourist guide in Moscow. We met while I was last there for this book, Russia Revealed.’

  Ada Harris could hardly credit her ears. A man she had always felt to be at the core of some m
ystery, impervious to her ministrations and attempts at mothering, appeared to be about to come clean. And Lockwood, without having realized it, seemed to have the need to do so triggered by the production for the first time of the photograph he had long concealed amongst his effects when it looked as though there might be help forthcoming to his problem. The final flat refusal of the Foreign Office to make any representations dashed hopes which had been too high. Mrs Harris’s reaction and the whole miserable unhappy affair crowding in on him, he was ready to unload. And to what better deadend safety valve than this semi-anonymous drudge who appeared daily including Saturday for a date with broom, pail, scrubbing brush and soap powder to clean up his bachelor’s mess and then vanish into limbo.

  ‘She is an Intourist guide,’ he repeated. ‘Her name is Lisabeta Nadeshda Borovaskaya, but I called her Liz,’ and then a phrase leaped into his head and he let it out before realizing it, ‘I suppose we just sort of went up in flames,’ and as he looked at the tiny figure of his listener, mouth open, little eyes popping, hanging on his every word, he fell prey to sudden embarrassment and then continued more calmly and said, ‘It wasn’t really all like that. I mean, we wanted to get married – I’ve never known anyone like her before – well, you’ve seen her picture.’

  Embarrassment curbed him again and he added lamely, ‘Forgive me, I’m talking like a schoolboy.’

  But Mrs Harris at this point was not going to have the tap turned off. Now that the opening had been made she was privileged. She said, ‘What ’appened? Why didn’t you?’

  Lockwood’s chin was down on his chest and his eyes looked away from what seemed to him to be no future and into the past. He replied in one word, ‘Russia,’ as though that were the answer to all questions. And then seeing his audience still agog for information and aware that he had started something, said, ‘They’re dead set against foreigners and forbid any of their people leaving the country or marrying one. We were lucky to be able to keep it completely secret and then I had to leave. If they’d ever found out she would have been in …’ He realized then that his incoherence and cryptic sentences were getting neither him nor his audience anywhere and thereupon launched into a more consecutive narrative.

  They had met, fallen in love and pledged themselves to one another at the very outset of Lockwood’s tour of research in Russia. Moscow had been his first stop before journeying into the interior on a planned Intourist itinerary which, however, Lockwood intended to evade at several points to acquire the material he would need for the book his publishers had commissioned, Russia Revealed.

  They had been extraordinarily fortunate in that their love affair had not been uncovered during his three weeks in the Russian capital. Discreet inquiries, as though for a book, into the problems connected with a Russian marrying a foreigner exposed the enormity of the problem. Such a marriage might take place after unravelling reels of red tape and obstructionism but even then there was no guarantee that the wife or the husband, whichever one was the Russian citizen, would be allowed to leave the country. The prospects were bleak but the two had the courage and tenacity of people in love and agreed that first Lockwood must complete his trip which would take him as far east as Khabarovsk and the Chinese border on the Amur and as far south as Tashkent and Samarkand as well as Russia’s Black Sea resorts. Upon his return he would contact her again and they would discreetly tackle both problems, getting married and arranging for her to be allowed to return to England with him.

  Lockwood had friends in the Foreign Office in London as well as some contacts in the Embassy in Moscow and to the lovers the affair did not look utterly hopeless. The fact that there were potential dangers in the nature of Lockwood’s book was an additional hazard with which he did not burden the girl. He had laid his plans well and did not expect anything to go awry. They would not try to communicate during his absence, Lisabeta would continue guiding British tourists on their packaged trek through Moscow’s sights. Upon his return a mutual friend would introduce them as though they were meeting for the first time. They would then risk letting the friendship develop openly and make the attempt to marry. Lockwood was to be back in Moscow in a matter of three months.

  While he told his tale in a depressed monotone of clipped sentences practically in synopsis form Mrs Harris tried to follow with her alert mind and ‘see’, or rather picture, some of what he was telling, but she had no point of reference beyond the photograph with its background of grim wall and tower. Only in general was she aware that life behind the Iron Curtain was not all that it was cracked up to be. She had also lived long enough to know the truth behind the saying about best laid plans, etc., and from Lockwood’s demeanour it was obvious that his had gone plenty agley. The important thing was to keep him going and learn more for at that point Lockwood had ceased to speak and was sitting miserably regarding the photograph.

  Mrs Harris said, ‘Oh blimey, what ’appened? They wouldn’t let yer get married?’

  Lockwood came out of his reverie and answered, ‘Worse than that. I never saw her again.’

  This was what was killing him, he confessed, as he picked up the story again which was one of over-confidence and betrayal. During the trip he had managed to interview a dissident writer, exiled from Moscow having served a term in a Russian labour camp and who in addition had been given the treatment in a lunatic asylum until protest from the West had secured his release. The meeting with this man had been discreet but not sufficiently so and when Lockwood had stepped off the train in Moscow he had been immediately picked up by the Russian Secret Police.

  Had not another part of Lockwood’s plans worked out it would have gone hard with him. As it was he had kept a duplicate set of notes on the journey. The ones that mattered, the dangerous ones, he had been successful in smuggling out through Turkey during his visit to Sochi on the Black Sea and in the last minute something had made him include the photo of Lisabeta in the packet. So when the KGB pulled him in to one of their underground salons and put him through twenty-four hours of grilling, he was clean. His notes were merely those of a travel writer interested in scenery, customs, costumes and the picturesque. His visit to the dissident he had explained as only an expression of his admiration for the writer’s work.

  There was nothing on which to hold Lockwood and risk disturbing the fragile détente that was being put together, but his interview with the proscribed and dissident writer had made him persona non grata. The KGB confiscated his notes and every other scrap of paper found upon him, escorted him from the interrogation cell to the airport and five hours later Lockwood found himself back in London.

  The full implications of Lockwood’s dilemma had not yet struck Mrs Harris, but faced with a problem that had been exposed to her by a client her mind was already working and searching for a way out and she was beginning to experience the thrill of participating vicariously in someone else’s trouble. She said, ‘But can’t you get back some’ow? A lot of people now seem to be taking trips to Russia. A friend of a lidy I work for has just come back and she said it was loverly.’

  Lockwood spoke bitterly. ‘The two faces of Russia,’ he said. ‘Come to Leningrad and Moscow. See the Golden Carriage in the Kremlin, the mummy of the great god Lenin and the relics of the Czar. Vodka, caviar, coddling, Intourist putting its best foot forward to pull the wool over the eyes of the West; and behind the smiling mask the cruellest and most treacherous people on earth. They’d never give me a visa and especially after this book comes out,’ and he tapped a thick pile of manuscript on his desk. ‘If I were to contact the girl they’d have her in one of those cells so fast she wouldn’t know what hit her.’

  Mrs Harris was beginning to see a little. That cell would be somewhere behind that wall. ‘Ow,’ she said ‘you’re prop’ly in the cart, ain’t you?’ which was the strongest expression she knew for a crushing defeat. ‘But she’ll understand, won’t she?’

  The full import of Lockwood’s tragedy was then revealed. ‘How can she?’ he groaned. ‘Don
’t you see? There’d be no report about my expulsion. I’d promised to be in touch with her when I got back to Moscow. That was six months ago. What I can’t bear besides everything else is her thinking I’ve run out on her.’

  Mrs Harris drew on her fund of experience. ‘If she loves yer, she’d never think that.’

  Lockwood cried, ‘What else should she believe? It’s classic, isn’t it? Madame Butterfly.’

  Mrs Harris said, ‘Madame ’oo?’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Lockwood. ‘He promised and didn’t come back either. It’s one of the oldest ploys in the game.’

  Mrs Harris had no knowledge of the treachery of Lieutenant Pinkerton to poor Cio Cio San and so she resorted to advice again. ‘Come on now, luv, you’re lettin’ this get yer down. Use your nut. Write ’er a letter.’

  Lockwood shook his head. ‘It won’t do,’ he said. ‘All foreign mail is intercepted and read. At the slightest indication that she had any connection with me she’d be arrested. They’d see a plot at once. She’d lose her job if not worse and she would be subject to endless persecution.’

  The whole picture had now developed for Mrs Harris and some of Mr Lockwood’s despair entered her own warm-hearted and sympathetic soul. ‘Cor blimey,’ she said. ‘You poor man. You are for the ’igh jump, ain’t you?’

  ‘Never mind me,’ Lockwood cried. ‘It’s her I’m thinking of, believing I’ve run out on her like every other sod who’s had what he wanted from a girl. It’s driving me out of my mind. She’s as innocent as a child.’

  Mrs Harris asked, ‘What about your pals in the Foreign Office? Didn’t you say that …’

  She only succeeded in rekindling the moment of rage in Lockwood and he slammed the desk with his fist and shouted, ‘Goddamn bloody hypocrites! Up to yesterday they said they might do something. That’s why I brought out her photo and dared to look at it again. This morning a flat turndown. Change in the political situation. “Sorry, old boy, can’t rock the boat right now, you know.”’