The Odessa Hotel in that third year of the Great Soviet Reconstruction was not the jewel of Moscow's rugged tourist trade but it was not the worst piece either. It was dilapidated, it was down-at-heel, it was selective in its favours. Tied to the rouble rather than to the dollar, it lacked such refinements as foreign-currency bars and groups of travel-weary Minnesotans appealing tearfully for their missing luggage. It was so ill-lit that the brass lamps and blackamoors and galleried dining room recalled the bad old past at the point of its collapse rather than the Socialist phoenix rising from the ashes. And when you stepped from the juddering lift and braved the frown of your floor concierge, crouching in her box surrounded by blackened room-keys and mossy telephones, you were quite likely to have the sensation of being returned to the vilest institutions of your youth.

But then the Reconstruction was not yet a visual medium. It was strictly in the audio stage.

Nevertheless, for those who looked for it, the Odessa in those days had soul, and with luck has it still. The good ladies of reception keep a kindly heart behind their iron stares; the porters have been known to wink you to the lift without demanding to seeyour hotel pass for the fifth time in one day. The restaurant manager, given the right encouragement, will usher you graciously to your alcove and likes a good face in return. And in the evenings between six and nine the lobby becomes an impromptu pageant of the hundred nations of the Empire. Smartly dressed administrators from Tashkent, flaxen schoolteachers from Estonia, fiery-eyed Party functionaries from Turkmenia and Georgia, factory managers from Kiev, naval engineers from Archangel – not to mention Cubans, Afghans, Poles, Rumanians and a platoon of dowdily arrogant East Germans – pour out of their airport charabancs and descend from the sunlight of the street into the quelling darkness of the lobby in order to pay their homage to Rome and shift their luggage in metric stages towards the tribune.

And Barley, himself a reluctant emissary though from a different empire, that evening took his place among them.

First he sat, only to have an old lady thump him on the shoulder and demand his seat. Then he hovered in an alcove near the lift until he risked being walled in by a rampart of cardboard suitcases and brown parcels. Finally he removed himself to the protection of a central pillar and there he remained, apologising to everyone, watching the glass door turn off and on, and shuffling out of everybody's light, then into it again, while he brandished Jane Austen's Emma at his chest and in his other hand a lurid carrier bag from Heathrow airport.

It was a good thing that Katya arrived to save him.

There was no secret to their meeting, nothing secretive in their behaviour. Each caught the other's eye at the same instant, while Katya was still being buffeted through the door. Barley threw up an arm, waving Jane Austen.

'Hullo, it's me. Blair. jolly good!' he yelled.

Katya vanished and reappeared victorious. Did she hear him? She smiled anyway and lifted her eyes to Heaven in mute show, making excuses for her lateness. She shoved back a lock of black hair and Barley saw Landau's wedding and betrothal rings.

'You should have seen me trying to get away,' she was signalling across the heads. Or: 'Couldn't get a cab for love nor money.'

'Doesn't matter a bit,' Barley was signalling back.

Then she cut him dead while she scowled and rummaged in her handbag for her identity card to show to the plainclothes boy, whose agreeable job that night was to challenge all attractive ladies entering the hotel. It was a red card that she produced so Barley divined the Writers' Union.

Then Barley himself was distracted while he tried in his passable if clotted French to explain to a tall Palestinian that no, he was afraid he was not a member of the Peace Group, old boy, and alas not the manager of the hotel either, and he doubted very much whether there was one.

Wicklow, who had observed these events from halfway up the staircase, reported later that he had never seen an overt encounter better done.

As actors Barley and Katya were dressed for different plays: Katya for high drama in her blue dress and old lace collar that had so taken Landau's fancy; and Barley for low English comedy in a pinstripe suit of his father's that was too short for him in the sleeve, and a pair of very scuffed buckskin boots by Ducker's of Oxford that only a collector of bygones could have regarded as still splendid.

When they met they surprised each other. After all they were still strangers, closer to the forces that had brought them here than to one another. Discarding the impulse to give her a formal peck on the cheek, Barley found himself instead puzzling over her eyes, which were not only very dark and full of light at the same time but heavily fringed, so that he couldn't help wondering whether she was endowed with a double set of eyelashes.

And since Barley on his side wore that indefinably foolish expression which overcomes certain Englishmen in the presence of beautiful women, it was Katya's suspicion that her first instinct on the telephone had been right and he was haughty.

Meanwhile they were standing close enough to feel the warmth of each other's bodies and for Barley to smell her make-up. The Babel of foreign languages continued round them.

'You are Mr. Barley, I think,' she told him breathlessly and laid a hand along his forearm, for she had a way of touching people as if seeking to assure herself that they were real.

'Yes indeed, the same, hullo, well done, and you're Katya Orlova, Niki's friend. Wonderful you could make it. Masterpiece of timing. How are you?'

Photographs don't lie but they don't tell the truth either, Barley was thinking, watching her breast rise and fall with her breathing. They don't catch the glow of a girl who looks as though she's just witnessed a miracle and you're the person she's chosen to tell first.

The restless crowd in the lobby brought him to his senses. No two people, however purposefully united, could have survived for long exchanging pleasantries in the centre of that turmoil.

'Tell you what,' he said, as if he had had a bright idea on the spur of the moment. 'Why don't I buy you a bun? Niki was determined I should make a fuss of you. You met each other at that fair, he tells me. What a character. Heart of gold,' he continued cheerfully as he led her towards the staircase and a sign that read 'Buffet'. 'Salt of the earth. A pain in the neck as well, of course, but who isn't?'

'Oh Mr. Landau is a very kind man,' she said, speaking much as Barley was for the benefit of an unidentified audience, but sounding very persuasive nevertheless.

'And reliable,' Barley called approvingly as they gained the first-floor landing. Now Barley too was for some reason out of breath. 'Ask Niki to do a thing, he does it. In his own way, it's true. But he does it and keeps his thoughts to himself. I always think that's the sign of a good friend, don't you?'

'I would say that without discretion there can be no friendship,' she replied as if quoting from a marriage book. 'True friendship must be based on mutual trust.'

And Barley while responding warmly to such profundity could not fall to recognise the similarity of her cadences to those of Goethe.

In a curtained area stood a thirty-foot food counter with a single tray of sugar biscuits on it. Behind it three bulky ladies in white uniforms and helmets of transparent plastic had mounted guard over a regimental samovar while they argued among themselves.

'Sound judge of a book too, in his own way, old Niki,' Barley observed, stretching out the topic as they took up their places before the rope barrier. 'Bête intellectuelle , as the French say. Tea, please, ladies. Marvellous.'

The ladies went on haranguing each other. Katya stared at them with no expression on her face. Suddenly to Barley's astonishment she drew out her red pass and snarled - there was no other word for it - with the result that one of them detached herself from her companions long enough to yank two cups from a rack and slap them viciously on two saucers as if she were breech-loading an old rifle. Still furious, she filled a huge kettle. And having with further signs of rage unearthed a modern box of matches, she turned up a gas ring and dumped the kettle on it before returning to her comrades.

'Care for a biscuit?' Barley asked. 'Foie gras ?'

'Thank you. I ate cake already at the reception.'

'Oh my God. Good cake?'

'It was not very interesting."

'But nice Hungarians?'

'The speeches were not significant. I would say they were banal. I blame our Soviet side for this. We are not sufficiently relaxed with foreigners even when they are from Socialist countries.'

Both for a moment had run out of lines. Barley was remembering a girl he had known at university, a general's daughter with skin like rose petals who lived only for the rights of animals until she hurriedly married a groom from the local hunt. Katya was staring gloomily into the further end of the room where a dozen stand-up tables were placed in strict lines. At one of them stood Leonard Wicklow sharing a joke with a young man his own age. At another an elderly Rittmeister in riding boots was drinking lemonade with a girl in jeans and throwing out his arms as if to describe his lost estates.

'Can't think why I didn't offer you dinner,' Barley said, meeting her eyes again with the feeling of falling straight into them. 'One doesn't want to be too forward, I suppose. Not unless one can get away with it.'

'It would not have been convenient,' she replied, frowning.

The kettle began chugging but the war-hardened women of the buffet kept their backs to it.

'Always so difficult, performing on the telephone, don't you think?'Barley said, for small talk. 'Addressing oneself to a sort of plastic flower, I mean, instead of a human face. Hate the beastly thing personally, don't you?'

'Hate what, please?'

'The telephone. Talking at a distance.' The kettle began spitting on the gas. 'You get the silliest ideas about people when you can't see them.'

Jump, he told himself. Now .

'I was saying the very same thing to a publishing friend of mine only the other day,' he went on, at the same jolly, conversational level. 'We were discussing a new novel someone sent me. I'd shown it to him, strictly confidentially, and he was absolutely knocked out by it. Said it was the best thing he'd seen for years. Dynamite, in fact.' Her eyes fixed on his own and they were scaringly direct. 'But so odd not to have any sort of picture of the writer,' he continued airily. 'I don't even know the chap's name. Let alone where he gets all his information from, learnt his craft and so forth. Know what I mean? Like hearing a bit of music and not being sure whether it's Brahms or Cole Porter.'