He rang, and she knew at once that she had been waiting all this while for his call, because she was already smiling. Unlike Igor, he did not say his name or hcrs.

'Elope with me,' he said.

'Tonight?'

'Horses are saddled, food for three days.'

'But are you also sober enough to elope?'

'Amazingly, I am.' A pause. 'It's not for want of trying but nothing happened. Must be old age.'

He sounded sober too. Sober and close.

'But what about the book fair? Are you going to desert it as you deserted the audio fair?'

'To hell with the book fair. We've got to do it before or never., Afterwards we'll be too tired. How are you?'

'Oh, I am furious with you. You have co'mpletcly bewitched my family, and now they ask only when you will come back with more tobacco and crayons.'

Another pause. He was not usually so thoughtful when he was joking.

'That's what I do. I bewitch people, then the moment -they're under my spell I cease to feel anything for them.'

'But that's terrible!' she cried, deeply shocked. 'Barley, what are you telling rne?'

'Just repeating the wisdom of an early wife, that's all. She said I had impulses but no feelings and I shouldn't wear a duffle Coat in London. Anyone tells you something like that, you believe it for the rest of your life. I've never wom a duffle coat since.'

'Barley, that woman - Barley, that was a totally cruel and irresponsible thing for her to say. I am sorry but she is completely wrong. She was provoked, I am sure. But she is wrong.'

'She is, is she? So what do I feel? Enlighten me.'

She broke out laughing, realising she had walked straight into his trap.

'Barley, you are a very, very bad man. I shall have nothing to do with you.'

'Because I don't feel anything?'

'For one thing, you feel protection for people. We all noticed that today, and we were grateful.'

'More.'

'For another, you feel a sense of honour, I would say. You are decadent, naturally, because you are a Westerner. That is normal. But you are redeemed because you feel honour.'

'Are there any pies left over?'

'You mean you feel hunger too?'

I want to come and eat them.'

'Now?'

'Now.'

'That is completely impossible! We are all in bed already and it's nearly midnight.'

'Tomorrow.'

'Barley, this is too ridiculous. We are about to begin the book fair, both of us have a dozen invitations.'

'What time?'

A beautiful silence was settling between them.

'You may come at perhaps-half-past-seven.'

'I may be early.'

For a long while after that neither of them spoke. But the silence joined them more closely than words could have done. They became two heads on a single pillow, ear to ear. And when he rang off it was not his jokes and selfironies that stayed with her but the tone of contented sincerity – she would almost say solemnity – that he had seemed unable to keep out of his voice.

He was singing.

Inside his head, and outside it too. In his heart and all over his body at last, Barley Blair was singing.

He was in his big grey bedroom at the gloomy Mezh on the eve of the Moscow book fair, and he was singing 'Bless This House' in the rccognisable manner of Mahalia Jackson while he pirouetted round the room with a glass of mineral water in his hand, glimpsing his reflection in the immense television screen that was the room's one glory.

Sober.

Hot sober.

Barley Blair.

Alone.

He had drunk nothing. In the safe truck for his debriefing, though he had sweated like a racehorse, nothing. Not even a glass of water ' while he had rcgaled Paddy and Cy with a sweetened, unworried version of his day.

At the French publishers' party at the Rossiya with Wicklow, where he had positively shone with confidence, nothing.

At the Swedes' party at the National with Henziger, where he had shone yet more brightly, he had grabbed a glass of Georgian shampanskoye in self-protection because Zapadny was so pointedly amazed he was not drinking. But he had contrived to leave it undrunk behind a flower vase. So still nothing.

And at the Doubleday party at the Ukraina with Henziger again, shining like the North Star by now, he had clutched it to look a mineral water with a bit of lemon floating in like gin and tonic.

So nothing. Not out ot high-mindedness. Not a reformed spirit, God forbid. He had not signed the Pledge or turned over a new leaf. It was merely that he wished nothing to mar the clear-headed, reasoned ecstasy that was collecting in him, this unfamiliar sense of being at dreadful risk and equal to it, of knowing that whatever was happening he had prepared himself for it, and that if nothi n*g was happening he was ready for that too, because his preparedness was an all-round defence with a sacred absolute at its centre.

I have joined the tiny ranks of people who know what they will do first if the ship catches fire in the middle of the night, he thought; and what they will do last, or not do at all. He knew in ordered detail what he considered worth saving and what was unimportant to him. And what was to be shoved aside, stepped over and left for dead.

A great house-cleaning had taken place inside his mind, comprising quite humble details as well as grand themes. Because, as Barley had recently observed, it was in humble detail that grand themes wrought their havoc.

The clarity of his view amazed him. He peered round him, took a turn or two, sang a few bars. He came back to where he was, and knew that nothing had been left out.

Not the momentary inflection of uncertainty in her voice. Or the shadow of doubt flitting across the dark pools, of her eyes.

Or Goethe's straight lines of handwriting instead of wild scrawls.

Or Goethe's cumbersome, untypicaljokes about bureaucrats and vodka.

Or Goethe's guilty dirge about the way he had treated her, when for twenty years he had treated her however he had damn well felt like, including using her as a throwaway delivery-girl.

Or Goethe's callow promise to make it all up to her in the future, so long as she'll stay in the game for the time being, when it is an article of Goethe's faith that the future no longer interests him, that his whole obsession is with now: 'There is only now !'

Yet from these spindrift theories that were most likely nothing more than theories, Barley's mind flew effortlessly to the grandest prize of his clarified perception: that in the context of Goethe's notion of what he was achieving, Goethe was right , and that for most of his life Goethe had stood on one side of a corrupt and anachronistic equation while Barley in his ignora nce had stood on the other.

And that if Barley were ever called upon to choose, he would rather go Goethe's path than Ned's or anybody else't, because his presence would be urgently required in the extreme middle ground of which he had elected himself a citizen.

And that everything that had happened.to Barley since Peredelkino had delivered the proof of this. The old isms were dead, the contest between Communism and capitalism had ended in a wet whimper. Its rhetoric had fled underground into the secret chambers of the grey men who were still dancing away long after the music had ended.

As to his loyalty to his country, Barley saw it only as a question of which England he chose to serve. His last ties to the imperial fantasy were dead. The chauvinist drumbeat revolted him. He would rather be trampled by it than march with it. He knew a better England by far, and it was inside himself.

He lay on his bed, waiting for the fear to seize him, but it wouldn't. Instead, he found himself playing a kind of mental chess, because chess was about possibilities, and it seemed best to contemplate them in tranquillity rather than try and sort through them when the roof was falling in.

Because if Armageddon didn't strike, there was nothing lost. But if Armageddon did, there was much to save.

So Barley began to think. And Barley began to make his preparations with a cool head, exactly as Ned would have advised if Ned were still holding the reins.

He thought till early morning and dozed a bit and when he woke he went on thinking, and by the time he strode cheerfully into breakfast already looking round for the fun of the fair, there was an entire section of his head that was given over full time to thinking what the fools who do it describe as the unthinkable.