Expo 58: A Novel (18 page)

Mrs Foley fell silent. Thomas thought about what she had told him, but he could not turn it into a mental picture: when he tried to imagine his grandfather and his uncles being gunned down by German soldiers, the blazing thatched roof of the farm in the background, nothing vivid or real would come into his mind. Instead, he found himself presented with a memory, a memory from his own childhood, something he had not thought about for many years: the little flat in East London, two or three storeys above a butcher’s shop, where his grandmother used to live, and where he used to visit her, sometimes, with his mother, when he was only five or six years old. After that he remembered one visit, one visit only, to some sort of hospital or nursing home where she was staying and where she had seemed much younger than all the other patients. She had smelled strongly of some violet-scented perfume and when she had leaned in to kiss and hug him he had recoiled slightly and tried to avoid contact with the enormous, prominent mole on her left cheek . . .

The door to the dining room opened and Sylvia came in.

‘Wouldn’t you like the light on in here?’ she said, turning on the overhead lamp. ‘You can hardly see what you’re doing.’ She came forward and peered with interest at the map spread out on the table. ‘What’s this? Looking for buried treasure?’

‘Mother was just showing me where her parents’ farm used to be,’ said Thomas. ‘Here – this is what it looked like.’ And he passed his wife the tiny, blurred square of black-and-white photograph.

‘I want Tommy to go there while he is in Belgium,’ Mrs Foley now announced, with her characteristic brusqueness and emphasis.

‘Really?’ said Thomas. ‘I thought you specifically said . . .’

‘I know. But I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve changed my mind.’

Thomas nodded slowly. ‘All right. But why don’t you come with me?’

‘No. I don’t want to come. But it would mean something to me, to know that you have been there, and stood on the same ground where the farm used to stand. I would like a photograph of you, standing there. Taken in the yellow field – if there is still a yellow field.’ There was a pleading look in her eyes, now, which was entirely new to him. ‘Will you do that for me?’

‘Of course I will, Mother.’

‘I think it’s a lovely idea,’ said Sylvia. ‘Now – does anybody want coffee?’

While Sylvia was in the kitchen, putting the kettle on to boil, Mrs Foley gathered up the map and the papers from the table and put them back in her old school satchel, saying to her son as she did so: ‘Don’t forget what I told you.’

‘I won’t. You’ll get your photograph.’

‘Not about that. Remember: Grandma and I never saw my father again. I grew up without him. She grew old without him. Life was more difficult for both of us. Don’t make your wife and daughter go through anything like that.’

And with those words, she finished securing the buckles on the satchel and handed it across the table to him, in a manner that was almost sacramental.

The morning of Sunday, 3 August 1958 opened in a blaze of sunshine. In London, it was the first really warm day of the summer. Thomas and Sylvia decided that it was too hot to cook a roast lunch, so they put the lamb joint aside until the evening, and prepared a green salad, with ham and pickles, which they ate with Mrs Foley in the garden, while Baby Gill played contentedly in the sandpit which Mr Sparks had finished building just a few weeks earlier. Mr Sparks and his sister Judith were out in their own back garden, eating a simple lunch of cold beef sandwiches. It was rare to see Judith out of doors: even today, she had covered her legs with a thick
woollen blanket. Such was the benign influence of the good weather, Thomas had forgotten yesterday’s fit of animosity towards his neighbour, and they chatted for a few minutes in a friendly, casual sort of way, while Sylvia enquired most solicitously after Judith’s health. After that, it was time to walk Mrs Foley to her bus stop.

When they had seen her safely onto the Leatherhead bus, they continued on to Tooting Common, with Thomas behind the pushchair and Sylvia, after a while, taking him by the arm. Sylvia was concerned that, even with the hood of the chair pulled up, Gill would become grumpy under the heat of the afternoon sun; but it seemed that nothing was destined to spoil their mood that day. The baby behaved herself perfectly. They bought ice creams from the van parked on the Common and sat on the grass to eat them, watching the hordes of younger people passing by, towels and swimming costumes tucked under their arms, on their way to the Lido in self-absorbed pairs and excited, giggling groups.

If only every Sunday, every day, in London, could be like this, Thomas thought. For half an hour or more he and Sylvia lay down together on the grass, holding hands, their eyes closed against the sun as it shone down on them benignly and uninterruptedly from a pale-blue sky. To Thomas, Brussels seemed further away than ever before, and he realized with a shock that he had no desire to return to Belgium tomorrow. Now, suddenly, it was the Expo, and everything that had been happening there, that seemed distant and unreal, and his life at home – his life with Sylvia and Gill – was what he wanted to cling onto.

That night, lying awake in bed beside Sylvia, he rested a tentative hand on her hip, and then, in a slow, supplicating sort of movement, he began to slide her nightdress up to expose the lower half of her
body. When he had attempted this manoeuvre the night before, Sylvia
had turned away and rebuffed him coldly. Tonight, although she made no immediate gesture of acquiescence, neither did she resist. When the nightdress was rolled up around her waist, Thomas eased his hand gently between her legs and felt the hot, expectant wetness. She turned towards him, and they kissed. Eagerly, but not wanting to repulse her with a display of undue haste, he wriggled out of his pyjama jacket and trousers. Dropping them to the floor on his side of the bed, he switched on the bedside lamp, and made as if to kiss her again. But she drew back.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘Can we not have the light on? I’d like to see you.’

‘Please,’ Sylvia said, ‘I’d rather not.’

Thomas smiled, and kissed her forehead.

‘So modest,’ he whispered. ‘So well brought up!’

He turned off the light and then Sylvia, as if roused to unexpected passion by his teasing, pulled her nightdress roughly over her head and wrapped herself around him, her arms and her legs clinging to him in a tight, almost desperate embrace. He entered her swiftly and their lovemaking, accompanied by deep, furious, hungry kisses, was soon over. Thomas reached his climax in less than a minute, Sylvia soon afterwards. But even when they were done, she continued to cling to him, and they lay closely entwined for all the time it took her to drift off into sleep. Only when Thomas heard her breathing grow slower and more regular, until it evolved into a familiar, very soothing and very gentle kind of snore, did he dare to ease the weight of her head carefully from his shoulder, and slide his arm free from the place where it had been sweetly trapped beneath her neck.

Slightly disturbed by the movement, Sylvia murmured something indistinguishable through her drowsy breath and then quickly sank down into an even deeper and more contented sleep. But Thomas was not so lucky. He lay awake for a few minutes and soon realized, with a sense of weary acceptance, that he probably had several wakeful hours ahead of him. Every position that he tried to adopt felt awkward. His mind raced with fleeting impressions of all his strange experiences from recent days, and he felt weighed down with dread at the thought of leaving for Brussels early in the morning. He rolled over and lay on his front but could still not get settled. To compound his discomfort, there was something at the bottom of the bed that was annoying him. With his big toe he could feel something – something small and unidentifiable, a little pellet of soft and sponge-like matter. He could not for the life of him think what it was. After brushing it backwards and forwards with the tip of his toes for a minute or two, he finally reached down and retrieved it with his hand. But he was none the wiser for exploring it with his fingers. What on earth could it be?

Wide awake now, and impelled by a nagging curiosity, he swung his legs out of bed, put his pyjamas and slippers on and went to the bathroom, taking the foreign object with him. Once there he yawned, turned the overhead light on, and examined it in horror.

Too many statistics!

‘Are you all right, Mr Foley?’ Shirley said. ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’

She placed a pint of Britannia on the table in front of him and Thomas turned away from the window – through which he’d been staring sightlessly – to nod his thanks.

‘You’ve been looking strange ever since you got back from London,’ she added.

‘Really? Oh, it’s nothing. Think I might have picked up a bit of a bug on the plane or something.’

‘Well, you be careful – summer colds, they’re the worst.’

He took his first sip of the beer as she walked away, back to the bar, and reflected that her turn of phrase, unoriginal though it was, might contain a germ of truth. Had he been seeing ghosts? Where was the reality in these surroundings, after all? The Britannia was a fake: it was a fake pub, projecting a fake vision of England, transported into a fake setting where every other country was projecting fake visions of their national identity. Belgique Joyeuse, indeed! Fake! Just like the Oberbayern! Fake! He was living in a world constructed entirely out of simulacra. And the more he thought about this, the more ghostly and unstable everything around him began to appear. These people waiting to be served at the bar, and sitting at the tables: were they real, or were they fake? Were any of them as they seemed? A few days ago he had believed that Mr Chersky, whose arrival he was awaiting now, was a friendly young Muscovite writer and journalist who wanted his editorial advice; now, apparently, he was supposed to accept that he was a top-ranking officer in the KGB. Which was the truth, and which the lie? Maybe Shirley
was
a ghost. Even Emily was playing a part, now that he thought of it: she too was nothing more than an actress, pretending to be an ordinary suburban housewife for the benefit of visitors to the American pavilion. Maybe every single person in the Britannia this Tuesday lunchtime was an actor, too, hired by Mr Radford and Mr Wayne as part of some elaborate, insane masterplan to confuse and disorientate him.

There was only one thing that he knew for sure: at the foot of his marital bed, on Sunday night, he had found a used corn plaster. A
Calloway’s Corn Cushion, no less. Which meant that Norman
Sparks had been in that bed, perhaps only a day or two before. That was the only reality in his life at the moment, and everything else, for all he knew, might be a figment of his or the British security services’ or for that matter Baron Moens de Fernig’s vivid imagination. No wonder Shirley thought that he looked strange. He felt as though he was beginning to go mad. Having a nervous breakdown, or something.

He looked across at Shirley. She was talking to that American, Ed Longman, again. Thick as thieves, nowadays, those two. Nice to see at least one of these Expo romances flourishing, he supposed, in a relatively uncomplicated way. He wondered how many of the love affairs taking shape at this fair would stand the test of time: how many of the couplings begun in its heady, unnatural atmosphere
would lead to anything substantial: to marriage, or to children. Shir
ley and Longman seemed pretty tight together, at any rate. He was looking into her eyes and pressing something into her hand. She saw Thomas looking at them and winked at him.

Thomas sighed, drank more beer, and looked at his watch. Chersky was late. He did not much care for being made to wait here, alone with his thoughts. The more he contemplated his wife’s betrayal, the more depressed he felt, and the less he could decide what to do about it. He had promised to wake her before leaving the house on Monday morning, but in the event he had not done so: unable to talk to her, look at her or even be close to her, he had spent the rest of the night in the spare bedroom and then sneaked out of the house at six in the morning after looking in on the sleeping Gill. Since arriving back in Brussels he had not phoned Sylvia, let alone begun writing the letter he knew would finally have to be written. In fact, apart from calling on Emily in the American pavilion earlier that morning, he had done nothing apart from sitting in his cabin, and at various bars and cafés around the Expo site, in a daze of indecision and inertia.

‘My dear Mr Foley,’ a familiar voice now said, ‘I’m so sorry for being late.’

It was Mr Chersky, looking somewhat flustered and out of breath. He had his briefcase with him, filled with the usual sheafs of papers. Thomas already had the latest issue of
Sputnik
open on the table. He stood up and shook Chersky by the hand, hoping that his eyes did not give any indication of the new wariness he felt towards him.

‘Sit down, sit down,’ he said. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

‘Miss Knott saw me come in, I believe. I’m sure she will bring me my usual, without me having to ask. This is the sign of a good English pub, isn’t it? Knowing your “regulars”, as I believe they are called.’

‘You’ll be returning to Moscow a veritable expert on the British way of life,’ said Thomas, flatly.

‘I hope so. That is certainly my intention. Now – did you get the chance to read our last number? I would welcome your thoughts.’

‘Yes, I did read it,’ said Thomas, casting his eye across the large sheet of cheap newsprint, folded in half as always to make up a four-page issue. ‘I have to say that I don’t think you’ve made much progress. It has all the same faults as the earlier ones.’

‘Namely?’

‘Well, I’ve told you all of this before. First of all, it’s the statistics. There are too many statistics!’ He started to read aloud from an article extolling the triumphs of the Russian childcare system. ‘Listen to this: “In the Soviet Union there are 106,000 accommodations in children’s sanatoriums, 965,000 accommodations in permanent, over 2 million in seasonal crèches, and 2.5 million accommodations in kindergartens and children’s summer playgrounds.’ ”

‘Well?’ said Andrey. ‘Don’t you think that’s impressive?’

‘Of course it’s impressive. But this is hardly the way to make your readers –’

‘Sorry to interrupt, gentlemen.’ It was Shirley, carrying another pint of bitter and a packet of crisps. ‘Here you are, Mr Chersky. I don’t have to ask what you want any more, do I?’

‘Indeed you don’t, Miss Knott.’

‘I’m going to buy shares in Smith’s crisps when I get home,’ she said, putting the drink carefully down on the table. ‘In a year’s time I reckon the whole of Russia will be eating them, if you have anything to do with it.’

‘You might be right.’ And as she walked away, he called after her, laughing, ‘But not with the salt on! Salt is bad for you, remember?’

Shirley laughed too. ‘Oh, Mr Chersky, you are a card!’

Andrey was still chuckling to himself as he took his first sip of the beer. ‘Ah, the English sense of humour. Finally I think I’m beginning to get the hang of it. And, as I hope you noticed, there is also more humour in the paper now than before. That’s your influence, Mr Foley.’

‘Yes, I was going to mention that. This collection of “humorous” sayings from Russian children.’

‘Charming, aren’t they?’

‘Baffling, would be my own way of putting it. What about this one? “Is the knife the fork’s husband?’ ”

Andrey laughed long and hard at this. Thomas stared at him.

‘I don’t get it,’ he said, and Andrey turned off his laugh abruptly.

‘Neither do I,’ he admitted. ‘I was hoping you could explain it to me. What about this: “What if a rooster forgets he’s a rooster and lays an egg?” Isn’t that funny?’

‘Not especially.’

‘Hm!’ He snorted with displeasure. ‘The writer assured me that these were hilarious. I thought I just wasn’t clever enough to understand them.’

‘I think you should forget about humour for a while.’

‘Very well. That sounds like a good idea. Especially as our next issue will be devoted entirely to science. And the main feature is an
excellent
piece of work. Even you, Mr Foley – even you who are so hard to impress – you are going to enjoy this article.’

‘Why, what’s it about?’

Mr Chersky had opened his packet of crisps and was munching through them, as usual, with an expression like that of a gourmet enjoying an especially fine example of
haute cuisine
.

‘It’s about the man of the future,’ he said, between mouthfuls. ‘A very eminent Soviet scientist has written an article explaining how mankind will have evolved one hundred years from now.’

‘And . . .?’

‘Well, of course you will have to read it. But it will be one of many things in this particular issue to interest you, I think. We also have a good article about Russian advances in nuclear fusion. Of course, in the interests of journalistic truth and impartiality, we had to report – with great sorrow, naturally – that the British scientists who have been working in this area seem to have greatly overestimated their own achievements. Which reminds me . . . there was one fact I wanted to check with you. Is it true, as I have heard, that the replica ZETA machine has been removed from the British pavilion to save embarrassment?’

This question was accompanied by a smile but also by an insolent, challenging look. Thomas’s own smile barely concealed his distaste. Honesty, however, compelled him to say: ‘Yes, it’s true.’

‘Good. We will mention it in the article. Only, it’s always best to check the facts first, don’t you agree?’ He finished the last of his crisps, folded up the empty bag carefully and put it into the side pocket of his jacket. ‘And in the next issue but one, you’ll be pleased to hear, we will be talking about Soviet ladies’ fashions, and contrasting them with their American counterparts. Miss Parker has been most helpful in supplying us with some designs. And talking of Emily –’ (his smile became even more charming, and at the same time – Thomas thought – even less sincere) ‘– I understand that you are planning an excursion with her in the next few days. Is that correct?’

‘Yes,’ said Thomas, carefully, wondering how Andrey could have heard of this already, and realizing at once that there were hundreds of ways.

‘It sounds a delightful idea. A summer picnic, in the Belgian countryside! This Saturday, I believe.’

‘That’s right.’

‘She told me that you know of a most attractive location. A field of golden buttercups, she said, by the banks of a river, not far from Leuven.’

‘Something like that,’ said Thomas – who had seen Emily, and shared his imagined impression of this scene, only a few hours before.

‘Then only one question remains.’Andrey gathered his papers and shuffled them together into a neat pile. ‘What time shall I pick you both up?’