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Gard didn’t reply for some time. “I have a feeling you’re going to be a long-term customer,” he finally said, “so I’m tempted to let you have this magnificent ring at an introductory price. Shall we say one hundred pounds?”
“You can say anything you like, but I don’t have a hundred pounds.”
“Look upon it as an investment.”
“For whom?”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said Gard, returning to his desk and opening a large ledger. He turned over several pages, then ran a forefinger down a list of figures. “To show how confident I am that you’ll be a future customer, I’ll let you have the ring for the price I paid for it. Sixty pounds.”
“We’ll have to go back to the bottom shelf,” said Seb reluctantly.
Gard threw his arms in the air. “How can a poor man hope to make a profit when he has to bargain with someone as sharp as you? My lowest possible offer is,” he paused, “fifty pounds.”
“But I only have about thirty pounds in my bank account.”
Gard considered this for a few moments. “Then let us agree on a ten-pound deposit and five pounds a month for one year.”
“But that takes it back up to seventy pounds!”
“Eleven months.”
“Ten.”
“You have a deal, young man. The first of many, I hope,” he added
, as he shook Seb’s hand.
Seb wrote out a check for ten pounds, while Mr. Gard selected a small red leather box in which to place the ring.
“Pleasure to do business with you, Mr. Clifton.”
“One question, Mr. Gard. When do I get to see the top shelf?”
“Not until you’re chairman of the bank.”
8
ON THE DAY BEFORE Harry flew to Moscow, Michael Stewart, the British foreign secretary, summoned the Russian ambassador to his office in Whitehall and, on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government, protested in the strongest possible terms about the disgraceful treatment of Anatoly Babakov. He went as far as to suggest that Babakov be released from prison, and the ban on his book lifted immediately.
Mr. Stewart’s subsequent statement to the press made the front pages of every broadsheet in the country, with supportive leaders in the Times and the Guardian, both of which mentioned the campaign mounted by the popular author, Harry Clifton.
During Prime Minister’s Questions that afternoon, Alec Douglas-Home, the leader of the opposition, voiced his concern for Babakov’s plight, and called upon the PM to boycott the bilateral talks that were due to take place with the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, in Leningrad later that month.
The following day, profiles of Babakov, along with photos of his wife Yelena, appeared in several of the papers. The Daily Mirror described his book as a time bomb that, if published, would blow the Soviet regime apart. Harry did wonder how they could possibly know that when they couldn’t have read the book. But he felt that Sir Alan couldn’t have done any more to assist him and was determined to keep his side of the bargain.
On the night flight to Moscow, Harry went over his conference speech again and again, and by the time the BOAC plane touched down at Sheremetyevo airport, he felt confident that his campaign was gathering momentum and that he would deliver a speech Giles would be proud of.
It took him over an hour to get through customs, not least because his suitcase was unpacked by them, and then repacked by him, twice. Clearly he was not a welcome guest. When he was finally released, he and several of his fellow delegates were herded onto an old school bus which trundled into the city center, arriving outside the Majestic Hotel some fifty minutes later. Harry was exhausted.
The receptionist assured him that as the leader of the British delegation, he had been allocated one of the hotel’s finest rooms. She handed him his key and, as the lift had broken down and there were no porters available, Harry dragged his suitcase up to the seventh floor. He unlocked the door to enter one of the hotel’s finest rooms.
The sparsely furnished box brought back memories of his schooldays at St. Bede’s. A bed with a thin, lumpy mattress, and a table scarred by cigarette burns and stained with beer glass circles passed as furniture. In the corner was a washbasin with a tap that produced a trickle of cold water, whether it was turned on or off. If he wanted a bath, a notice informed him that the bathroom was at the far end of the corridor: Remember to bring your towel, and you must not stay in the bath for more than ten minutes, or leave the tap running. It was so reminiscent of his old school that if there’d been a knock on the door, Harry wouldn’t have been surprised to see Matron appear to check his fingernails.
As there was no minibar, or even the suggestion of a shortbread biscuit, Harry went back downstairs to join his colleagues for supper. After a one-course, self-service meal, he began to realize why Bingham’s fish paste was considered a luxury in the Soviet Union.
He decided on an early night, not least because the first day’s program revealed that he would be addressing the conference as the keynote speaker at eleven the following morning.
He may have gone to bed, but it was some hours before he could get to sleep, and not just because of the lumpy mattress, the paper-thin blanket, or the garish neon lights that invaded every corner of his room through nylon curtains that didn’t quite meet. By the time he finally fell asleep, it was eleven o’clock in Bristol, two in the morning in Moscow.
