Old Flames by John Lawton Page A

Russians. Troy found himself between Cobb and Beynon. Peering round Cobb, he could see the Russian Ambassador,
Jakob Malik, and the two faces of Britain: the civil in Lord Reading, Minister of State at the Foreign Office, and the military in Lord Cilcennin, First Lord of the Admiralty. Quite what the
difference was in their roles he could not say. Although both of them were in the Government, he could not be certain whether Cilcennin was actually in the Navy or not, or whether it was even
necessary that he should be in the Navy. Neither of them mattered much. Dogsbodies sent out to do duty on a windswept quayside. Nothing mattered much till they got to Victoria Station, the back
door to Westminster, and came face to face with the Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, a veteran of the thirties—that dirty, double-dealing decade—the bright young Foreign Secretary
who’d had the courage to resign from the Cabinet over Munich and Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler, and who had for so long been heir apparent to the ageing and ailing Winston
Churchill. Heir no longer—he had been PM for almost a year now, carrying with him the hopes of a nation deeply loyal to the old man, but desperately in need of the new man. The problem, as
Troy saw it, was that heir apparent was a role one could play too long.
    The idea of meeting Khrushchev rolled Troy back into memories of youth. When he was nineteen or twenty a cousin of his father’s had visited England as part of a Soviet trade mission. He
was the only Troitsky Troy had ever met. One of the few to have stayed and tried to make the best of a dire inevitability. Troy’s father had entertained cousin Leo royally, keen for any news
of the old country, lost in time like the Sisters Prozorova, dreaming of Moscow once more, drunk on Moscow once more. Moscow. Moscow was the fiefdom of the party boss of the city, a cunning peasant
named Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. It was the first time anyone had heard the name. A hardy survivor of the Revolution, Khrushchev was in the process of building Moscow’s showcase
Metro—the triumph of public works over private demands. From the outside it began to look as though the new Soviet Union was raising its head above the parapet for the first time. Cousin Leo
had an abundance of tales of the eccentric, domineering, charming, drunken apparatchik in charge of the first burst of colour the Soviet Union had seen in almost twenty years. From time to time
Troy had followed the career of this intriguing little man. The late thirties had seen him put in charge of the entire Ukraine—where he took to dressing like a peasant and imitating the
accent of the region. More peasant than the peasant, full of old aphorisms and Ukrainian lore. The pretence had cost him. Ever wise to the weaknesses of his subordinates, Stalin had hoisted
Khrushchev on his own petard. ‘Dance!’ he had told Khrushchev, and the fifty-two-year-old fat little Khrushchev danced for his life, flailing and sweating at his pastiche of the
Ukrainian gopak for the delight of a man who would have thought little of putting him on the next train to Siberia or seeing him hanged in public. The war had found Khrushchev in uniform as
a front-line political commissar, a Lieutenant-General—one better than Bulganin, whose title of ‘Marshal’ was hardly more meaningful than that of a Southern Colonel in Mississippi
or Tennessee. Khrushchev had, by 1949, reappeared in Moscow as a full-blown member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee, complete with overcoat, Homburg and his place on top of Lenin’s
tomb each May Day. Soon enough the old dictator was dead. To those who hardly paid attention to matters Soviet there might have been some immediate confusion as to who had really inherited
power—Beria? Malenkov? The mock Marshal, Bulganin? Or the real Marshal, Voroshilov? Nominally, the head of state was Voroshilov, and for the purposes of this visit it fell to