Free Old Flames by John Lawton Page B

Tom Driberg. A friend
from the war years. Too far away for a chat. Then he heard the scrape of a chair being pulled back and turned to see a short, stout, owlish man sat next to him. Brown. Of course. George Brown. MP
for Somewhere-up-North. Shadow Minister for Something-or-Other. He had met him once or twice. Neither a friend nor an enemy of Rod’s. Somewhat to the right of the party, and known for his
outspokenness.
    Brown exchanged a few pleasantries with Troy. Nice enough bloke, thought Troy. The chap on his left was deep in conversation with his neighbour, and when Brown started an awkward, mediated chat
with Sergei, Troy realised he had been let off very lightly, and was free to graze his way through the awful House of Commons food and … well … dammit … daydream. In the event of any of
the old fogeys really having a shotgun, Beynon could be the one to plug him dead.
    He dreamed his way through the delights of a weekend back in the country, something he looked forward to after a fortnight traipsing around London. Of spotted pigs and sprouting Aprilish
vegetables. And when he had dreamed his rural idyll away he seemed to see in his mind’s eye the score of a Thelonious Monk arrangement he had spent a small age trying to master. April in
Paris. The score was an illusion. He had never seen it written down—nor, he felt, had Monk—it was a visible pattern of fingers moving across a keyboard. An audible antipattern of
deliberative tangents, of musical geometry.
    He had dreamed a dream too far. He could smell pipe tobacco, pulling him back to the solid world. The meal was over. They were into the speeches. He hadn’t noticed the pudding even as he
ate it. Khrushchev was on his feet, the translator racing to keep up with him. And the seat next to him was empty. At some point Brown had sloped off. Troy looked around. Brown had moved around to
face Khrushchev across the table, the pipe smoke was his. Suddenly Driberg appeared in the vacant seat.
    ‘Fancy seeing you here,’ he said, and Troy knew he was up to something. Khrushchev was still droning on about the new era of peace. Driberg all but whispered in his ear. ‘I
don’t suppose you could get me an interview with Khrushchev, could you?’
    ‘You suppose right.’
    Driberg leaned closer. Oblivious as ever. ‘It could be very useful to me. I mean … none of the papers have got a look-in. No press conference, nothing. The Reynolds News or even
the Herald couldn’t possibly turn me down if I brought them an exclusive.’
    ‘Tom, fuck off.’
    ‘Oh, come on. You could do it.’
    ‘With Bulganin and the embassy staff and the interpreters hanging about?’
    ‘You could get him alone. You speak the lingo.’
    Troy took his eyes off Khrushchev and looked at Driberg. ‘Tom,’ he said softly, ‘has it ever occurred to you that Khrushchev doesn’t know that, and might not be supposed
to know that?’
    ‘Bugger,’ said Driberg and lapsed into a silence that Troy knew from experience could only be temporary.
    In the gap he suddenly became aware that Khrushchev’s tone had changed. He was on a different tack, there was a passion in his voice which no translator could hope to convey.
    ‘Peace has been too long coming. We have extended the olive branch time after time only to see it snapped off in our hands. We were a young country in 1919, building ourselves anew in the
wake of a war that had almost destroyed us, free for the first time in history from the yoke of tyranny. We asked for help. What did you send? Soldiers to Archangel and Murmansk. An attempt to
force a restoration upon us. Then in the 1930s—we were fighting Hitler long before you in Britain knew who he was.’
    A ripple of murmuring dissent went around the room. Brown grunted so audibly that Khrushchev looked straight at him, missed a single beat in the rising tempo of his improvisation on a theme,
then took it up again. He was jazzing. It was what the man did best. In his