Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow by Paul Gallico

Geoffrey Lockwood.
    She was clad in her going-into-action clothes, felt slippers, overalls, headcloth and long-handled dry mop. She was also loaded to the eyebrows with the import of her news but was unable to find the break to impart it. Mr Lockwood was reading page proofs of
Russia Revealed
.
    He had once given her instructions: ‘When I’m at home or working when you come, Mrs Harris, don’t mind me. Take no notice and go right ahead.’
    This had often proved to be the case. Sometimes he would be writing, at others reading or scrawling down notes or, as now, engaged in making corrections or marking up what seemed to be a printed book with queer symbols. All of these things he did with intense concentration enabling Mrs Harris to dust, wipe, clean and polish all around him. At none of these times would she dare to initiate a chat, however dearly she would have loved to. But at this point it had become a necessity.
    She tried doing a little banging about with the stick of her mop. One of her virtues was that she worked as silently as a cat crossing a room to get to the door. And she was hoping that Mr Lockwood might look up and say, ‘Must we have all this noise, Mrs Harris?’ but he didn’t. He was imprisoned in the depths of his own prose. She then stood stock still not far from his desk and simply stared at him hypnotically. Somewhere she had read that if you did that long enough the other party was bound to feel it and look up. Mr Lockwood didn’t.
    And so as was inevitable Mrs Harris burst. The load and nature of her information was too great to be further borne. She cried, ‘Mr Lockwood, I’m going to Russia. Me and me friend, Mrs Butterfield, we’ve got the tickets.’
    Mr Lockwood thought:
Christ! Proof readers. They ought to be in a home for the blind
, and marked the change of the letter ‘w’ in the mysterious word ‘thw’ to an ‘e’. However, he was also aware that a sentence from somewhere in the outside world had assailed his ears; it had a subliminal import, and so aloud he said, ‘That will be nice for you’ at which point the one word of the sentence that could possibly connect with what he was doing registered and he looked up from his labours and asked, ‘What? What? Where?’
    The breach had been made, Mrs Harris spilled, ‘To Russia, to Moscow for five days. We won it in a lottery. We’ve got the tickets and everything. On a plane. Next Sunday. I’ve notified all me clients but you’re sort of special, you know, bein’, – like now,’ and here she suddenly dried up but fixed her glance upon the photograph of the girl which had reposed on the desk ever since she had bade him to leave it out.
    Mr Lockwood laid down his red proof-marking pen and looked up at Mrs Harris with some bewilderment, eyes staring out of a face that had gone quite pale. He said, not entirely coherently, ‘What? – Moscow – you? Who is Mrs Butterfield? You say lottery. I don’t understand.’
    But he did understand very well, had understood her, which was the reason for his confusion and the draining of all colour from his face caused by the sudden whirlwind of impossibilities, hopes, fears,yearnings and the barest and most remote, hardly even to be considered, thought of salvation. Here was the familiar figure of this spry old lady who impinged on his life only when she arrived to put his living quarters in order, who had never broken from this mould except for that one moment which he preferred to forget when he had unburdened himself with regard to his unhappy love affair and she had lent a sympathetic ear. And here she was in mob cap and some kind of an anonymous garment that concealed the rest of her, leaning on her mop telling him, in effect, that the following Sunday evening, of all places, she would be in Moscow. The incredible was made credible by the excited twinkling of her eyes. Moscow!