Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow (6 page)

Mrs Harris's connection with these people has continued over the years. The cover she has employed has been that of a char, the British word for a daily cleaning woman, which has enabled her to maintain her contacts. We have evidence that in 1958 she made a trip to Paris to contact Chassagne and in 1960 made a journey to New York in the company of the anti-Russian producer, Schreiber, where she was known to have travelled widely in connection with subversive activities. In 1965, as a reward for her services to her country, she was appointed to the Houses of Parliament but apparently resigned shortly afterwards at the behest of the British Secret Service for further duties all the while maintaining her cover as a cleaning woman which as you will note appears upon the enclosed copy of her application.

Of the companion accompanying her, Mrs Violet Butterfield, nothing is known and I consider that our operatives in London have been highly remiss in failing to penetrate the activities of this unquestionably likewise
dangerous woman. The very fact that she has been able to conduct her work without attracting our attention is sufficient indication of what appear to be truly extraordinary abilities.

It is my recommendation that the application for visas of these two spies be granted and that they be allowed to enter the Soviet Union in order that we may ascertain the nature of their mission and what new plots are afoot in London. Naturally they will be kept under constant surveillance but I would presume to counsel with particular attention to the one known as Mrs Butterfield who must obviously be the more dangerous of the two since she has been able to operate so long and successfully without her objectives being known. Our branch will keep you supplied with all photographs and information as soon as available.

I sign myself, dear Comrade Gregor Mihailovich, as your faithful and obedient servant,

Vaslav Vornov

Inspector Foreign Division

Internal Security.

Ten days later Mrs Harris and Mrs Butterfield received a notification from Regent Street that their applications for visas had been granted, that they were leaving for Moscow on Aeroflot Flight 101 at 10:30 Sunday morning the 26th of August and would they kindly come to the Intourist office to collect their tickets, documents, vouchers, instructions, etc.

Mrs Harris hovered over 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! Liz! Communication! He regarded Mrs Harris still in confusion. Of course, it was out of the question. With a shaking hand he took out a cork-tipped cigarette from a box on his desk, put it in his mouth and lit the wrong end. Impossible!

The astute cockney mind of Ada Harris read him like a book; every change in complexion, every shade, every shake and every quiver. She knew exactly what he was thinking which, of course, was the same as she herself had in her mind.

Once more speaking aloud Mr Lockwood said, ‘Would you repeat that, Mrs Harris. Did I hear you say Moscow?'

‘Package Tour 6A,' replied Mrs Harris. ‘I'll bring
you the brochures if you'd like to see. A proper lark. I bought me a chance to try to win me a colour telly set and instead …' She stopped because apparently something in her remarks had set off Mr Lockwood into a series of new gyrations. He seized his cigarette by the burning end to take it from his mouth, swore, dropped it on the floor, stamped on it, shook his singed finger and now from paper-pale turned as bright red as his pen and then suddenly put his head in his hands. Mrs Harris, therefore, saw no further reason not to come right out with it; not the whole of the fantasy, of course, but the part that anybody would consider reasonable. She said, ‘Why couldn't I try to get in touch with your young lady for you?' staring hard at the photograph. ‘Maybe give 'er a letter or a message?'

From the depths of the emotions that were gripping him Mr Lockwood, removing his hands from his fevered brow, groaned, ‘Oh, Mrs Harris, could you? Would you? Oh, my God, a letter. Something for her, for us both to hold on to. Communication. A thread.'

But immediately the reaction set in and dully he said, ‘But of course, it's utterly impossible. You're very kind to offer it, Mrs Harris, but I wouldn't dream of it.'

‘Why not?'

‘It's too dangerous.'

‘Dangerous?' scoffed Mrs Harris. ‘Come on, Mr
Lockwood, what's dangerous? They couldn't 'ave been nicer to us at that Intourist office. Everything fixed up for the 'ole of the trip and tickety-boo. I arranges to meet the young lady and slips 'er the letter. 'Oo's to know?'

Mr Lockwood now had more of a grip upon himself and said, ‘Mrs Harris, the Russians are the most suspicious people on the face of the earth. They are constantly looking for spies, not only under the bed, but in, on top and over and everywhere else. Nothing sets them off like a foreigner trying to contact a Russian national. You'll …' He had been about to say that she would be under constant surveillance from the moment she entered Russia until she left but thought it stupid to put the wind up her and perhaps spoil her trip since the particular kind to which tourists were exposed was merely routine, unobtrusive and harmless.

Besides which the image of the letter he would write to Lisabeta Nadeshda Borovaskaya had formed in his mind, flaming words were already curling up from the pages. Lisabeta, Liz, Liz, Liz, and his eyes, too, wandered to the photograph of the beautiful girl. He said, ‘If they were to find the letter on you, you would be in great trouble and she too.'

The more he talked the happier and more determined Mrs Harris became. Actually the delivery of a missive had played not too important a part in her thoughts. It was rather the fantasy, the great design
of exporting Liz, which was so exciting her. But now Mr Lockwood was even adding a fillip of menace to this simple enough transaction, one incidentally in which she did not believe for a moment. She laid her mop aside, moved closer to the desk and said, ‘Come on now, Mr Lockwood, 'oo's going to be looking for anything on the likes of me, an old biddy with 'er pal going around with a bunch of tourists admiring the sights? I ain't no fool, Mr Lockwood, what do you fink, I'd be carrying the bloomin' letter in me 'and and 'aving the young lady paged? 'Ere's a chance if you've ever 'ad one.'

Mr Lockwood succumbed as he had known he would all along. He said, ‘Mrs Harris, if you were to do that for me I would be grateful to you to the end of my days. I'd forgotten that you'd be with a crowd all the time.'

‘Then it's settled,' said Mrs Harris happily, ‘and if you let me 'ave the letter I'll …'

‘I'll write it immediately,' said Mr Lockwood. ‘I'll not only let you have it but I'll read it to you as well.'

‘Read it to me!' exclaimed Mrs Harris. ‘I wouldn't dream of it, pryin' into a person's personal affairs.'

‘But in this instance I want you to and you must,' insisted Mr Lockwood moving towards his typewriter. ‘For you know the story. You see, to make it easier for Liz I shall be writing it in Russian and it would be wrong to ask you to take a letter into
Russia without your being completely conversant with the nature and innocence of its contents.'

Mrs Harris folded her hands across her overalls and her mischievous eyes were all aglow. She was beginning to be crowned with romance like a halo.

‘By the way,' said Mrs Harris, ‘ 'ow will I find Miss Liz?'

Mr Lockwood looked up from the typewriter into which he had slipped a sheet of letter paper. He said, ‘You won't have any difficulty. Perhaps you noticed my agitation earlier on when you mentioned the number of your tour. She is the Intourist guide for your package tour Number 6A to Moscow.'

Like so many first-class professional writers Mr Lockwood wrote rotten love letters, his cool literacy and sentence structure deserting him for such phrases as ‘I thought I would go mad when I couldn't see you again' and ‘There never has been, there isn't now, there never will be anyone but you in my thoughts and my life, my darling', and several more pages of treacle plus explanations of how it all happened and that he was trying to ‘move heaven and earth' to bring their separation to an end. It took him another page to complete the subject of the high quality and undying nature of his love.

But Mrs Harris as he translated it for her adored every word of it, felt thrilled and uplifted and borne away upon the wings of the highest sentiment, almost as though the words had been written to
herself as the sheets came steaming out of Mr Lockwood's over-heated mill.

She sniffed audibly several times and tears gathered in her eyes as she listened to the inspiring declaration of love eternal, inspiring to the point where if her thought about extracting Liz from behind the Iron Curtain had been only a kind of sweet daydream it had now become annealed into a steely determination.

If Mr Lockwood had had so much as a hint of this, he would of course have put an end to the entire operation immediately, but naturally how could he suspect such a thing of the little char? As it was he had the good sense to take normal precautions both for the protection of Mrs Harris as well as Liz. He took the sheets, folded them, put them in a plain envelope and sealed them without superscripture, signature or address and the manner in which he moistened the gum on the envelope flap was practically a kiss delivered to the lady of his heart. But to Mrs Harris he said, ‘You see I haven't addressed it or signed it or anything so that if it should fall into the hands of any but the one for whom it is intended, why …'

‘It won't,' cried Mrs Harris fiercely, ‘and you can put all your money on that. And not to worry.'

‘I know,' said Mr Lockwood and repeated a half dozen times how deeply grateful he was, adding, ‘The first time you are alone with her you need only
tell her who it is from and the circumstances. By the way, are you in need of any money. Can I perhaps … ?' and he made a gesture towards his wallet.

‘No, sir, oh no,' protested Mrs Harris, ‘not a penny. The trip is all pyde for and we 'ave all we want.' She wasn't going to have the exquisite beauty of this romance and her share in it sullied by the squalor of cash.

Sunday morning was one of those heavenly, clear, azure days provided occasionally by the Celestial Management when it wants to reassure the inhabitants of Planet Earth that things aren't really as bad as they might think they are and Mrs Harris and Mrs Butterfield were all packed and ready to go.