Russian Hide-and-Seek

19

His office had said that Theodore would be in a pub in George Row near the former county hall, now of course the seat of the civil administration. Although the street was only a couple of hundred metres long, Alexander had trouble finding the place. At last he registered the fact that two men were in process of changing its sign; from having been the Marshal Grechko it was that moment becoming the Jolly Englishman, an imaginative stroke, a bold stroke, a stroke that had not been cleared with authority in all its forms. Loud singing was coming from within. It was ragged and some of it was out of tune, but it sounded unnatural, forced, like low-life, rather drunken singing in a movie of sixty years and more earlier. At least it might have sounded so to an Englishman of that time, jolly or not. Certainly it meant nothing at all to Alexander.

‘Get on well, for I must leave you,

Do not let this parting grieve you,

And remember that the best of friends must part, must part.

Good-bye, good-bye, kind friends, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye,

I can no longer stay and sigh, stay and sigh,

I’ll hang my harp…’

He threw Polly’s reins to a middle-aged labourer who had perhaps paused to listen to this and strode into what had been the public bar.

Through a cloud of tobacco-smoke (the Festival made its own rules) he had a brief impression of men in check shirts and neck-scarves with pewter tankards in their hands sitting on hard chairs round an upright piano. Theodore, who was at the keyboard, gave a startled look and came over to Alexander as soon as the chorus ended.

‘What’s the-’

‘Shut up. Let’s go.’

After a longer look Theodore called to a young man standing by the piano, ‘Take over, Henry. Go on to the end, then start again at the beginning. Don’t forget the cheers and the clapping. I’ll probably be back before you’ve finished.’

‘Yes, Mr Ivanov. What about the dirty stories?’

‘We can run through those in the morning.’

Outside, Theodore said, ‘You and I were meeting anyway in less than an hour.’

‘This won’t wait,’ said Alexander. ‘Keep walking.’

‘What about your horse? Is that your horse?’

‘I haven’t forgotten her. Here.’

The proffered sheet of paper bore the faint diagonal red lines required by law on any replicated matter, which would otherwise have been indistinguishable from an original. It ran, in part,