The Red House

‘Vladimir,’ she said, ‘would you like to dance?’

‘I would be charmed,’ said Vladimir Zhukov, soldier, diplomat, agent provocateur, spy, perfect gentleman.

Wallace Walden, accompanied by his patient wife, Sophie, looked around him with contempt. He disliked career diplomats and opportunist politicians because he believed that all their conniving was directed towards personal rather than patriotic ends: this he had long ago decided, was the cardinal difference between himself and the other Washington players.

The dinner jacket made his body look very squat and powerful. He was drinking Scotch-on-the-rocks and smoking a thick cigar—from Tampa not Havana, he explained. He jerked the cigar towards a group of laughing men in their thirties accompanied by healthy shiny-haired girls with Florida tans carefully maintained. ‘Someone important’s made a joke,’ he said. ‘A dirty one, most likely.’ He dismissed them with his cigar. ‘Court sycophants.’

Henry Massingham from the British Embassy said, ‘Don’t be too hard on them, Wallace. After all it is election year.’

‘They make me sick,’ Walden said.

‘I don’t see why. It’s all part of democracy, merely human nature applied to politics. No better, no worse than business or commerce or sport. Out of it all emerges one of the best governmental systems in the world.’

‘Maybe,’ Walden conceded. ‘But that doesn’t mean I have to like them.’ Or you, he thought, squashing out his cigar in the Waterford glass ashtray.

Massingham’s business was political assessment. An elegant and professional eavesdropper. Almost a caricature of the British diplomat because he had discovered that American ridicule of the typical Englishman disguises considerable reverence. At first he had been self-conscious about his deep and decent voice; then he had found that his American companions (and antagonists) were just as self-conscious about their accents in his presence; so he ladled it on with the result that he was often complimented by Washington women on his divine diction. Massingham also worked on the accompaniments to his accent: suits of striped and slightly crumpled elegance, regimental tie askew, wavy hair a little too long. When he overheard a White House aide describe him as ‘that limey pansy’ he managed to interpret the insult as an inverted compliment.

Henry Massingham had also established a reputation for erudition and artistic appreciation and it was rumoured that he wrote poetry. ‘A real culture vulture,’ the Americans said, unaware of his rather mediocre degree at Trinity College, Dublin. Which was one of the reasons that Henry Massingham, in his late forties and beginning to accept that he would never become an ambassador, or even a minister, adored the Washington scene: unlike his own kind they hadn’t unmasked him.