Burgess stirred himself. ‘Sorry,’ he apologized to McFadden. ‘Bad day.’
‘That’s what we’re here to help with, sir,’ Mac responded, bringing out the words slowly in a voice that was evidently of foreign origin but not immediately traceable, one more accent in a city which in recent years had become flooded with refugees. ‘It is a privilege to be able to serve gentlemen such as yourself. This may be the only time in a hectic month you get to relax. A chance to put aside all those worries.’
‘People often shout at you?’
‘We have all sorts of busy gentlemen – businessmen, politicians. Sometimes they shout, sometimes it’s nothing but whispers. We don’t take offence. And neither do we take liberties, of course. We help them relax. Then we forget.’
‘You get politicians here?’
‘Had Mr Duff Cooper in here the other day, when he resigned. Not a surprise, it wasn’t, sir. He’d been complaining to me about the state of things for months. Rehearsed bits of his speech with me, so he did, while he was sitting in this chair. But you get all sides,’ Mac hastened to add, anxious not to offend. ‘Even the Prime Minister has to have his hair cut sometimes, sir. Foreign Secretary, too, and members of the Royal Family.’
‘They all have their stories.’
‘Indeed they do.’
‘And your story, McFadden. What’s that?’
‘My story, sir?’
‘Where d’you get the gammy leg?’
‘No story at all, really. A crushed pelvis. Unfortunate, but …’ He shrugged his shoulders.
‘An accident?’
Mac continued cutting, concentrating in silence as though he’d found a particularly stubborn tuft, shifting uncomfortably on his damaged leg. But the eyes told the story.
‘So, let me guess. If it wasn’t an accident you must have been attacked. Beaten up in some way. Maybe injured in the war?’
‘A little while after the war, sir.’
‘Where?’
Mac didn’t wish to appear impolite or evasive, but neither did he want to lay himself open. This wasn’t how the game was played. It was the customer who kvetched and prattled, and the barber who listened, not the other way round. Still, English gentlemen were so extraordinarily anxious about displaying their ignorance in front of the lower classes that Mac felt confident he knew how to put an end to the conversation. ‘Somewhere you’ll never have heard of, sir. Abroad. A little place called Solovetsky.’
‘Fuck,’ Burgess breathed slowly.
‘Beg pardon, sir?’
‘The gulags.’
Mac started in alarm and dropped his scissors. ‘Please, sir.’ He glanced around nervously, as though afraid of eavesdroppers. ‘It is a thing I don’t care to talk about. And in an establishment such as this …’
‘You poor sod.’
Mac was flustered. He fumbled to retrieve his scissors from the floor and almost forgot to exchange them for a fresh pair from the antiseptic tray. He stared at Burgess, his face overflowing with pain and a defiance that even half a lifetime of subservience hadn’t been able to extinguish. Burgess stared straight back.
‘Don’t worry, McFadden, I’ve no wish to embarrass you. I’m sorry for your troubles.’
Mac saw something in Burgess’s eye – a flicker, a door that opened for only an instant and was quickly closed, yet in that moment Mac glimpsed another man’s suffering and perhaps even private terror. This man in his chair understood. Which was why, when Burgess suggested it, he agreed to do what no barber who knew his proper rank would dare do. He agreed to meet for a drink.
The entrance to Shepherd Market stood just across from Trumper’s. It was a maze of alleyways and small courtyards hidden in the heart of Mayfair. Here a hungry man could stumble upon a startling variety of pubs and restaurants, mostly of foreign origin, and if he stumbled on a little further he could find narrow staircases that led to rooms where he might satisfy many of his other cravings, too.
When Mac arrived Burgess was standing at the bar of the Grapes, as he had said he would be. He was smoking, cupping the cigarette in the palm of his hand, and drinking a large Irish whiskey. The barber levered himself up onto a bar stool. Mac was short, wiry, his shoulders unevenly sloped as though to compensate for his crooked leg, with a back that was already bent, perhaps through stooping over his customers. The greying hair was scraped neatly but thinly across the skull, the skin beneath his mouth was wrinkled, as though the chin had tried to withdraw and seek refuge from the blows. He was not yet forty but looked considerably older.
‘I thought maybe you wouldn’t come,’ Burgess offered, but didn’t extend a hand. The English never did.
‘I thought so too. Particularly when I saw you drinking in the saloon bar. Bit rich for me.’
‘It’s on me. What’s your poison?’
‘I’d be thankful for a pint of mild, Mr Burgess.’
Burgess noted the obsequious ‘sir’ had gone. This was a meeting of equals. Burgess took out a large roll of notes from his pocket and paid for a glass of flat brown liquid. ‘You couldn’t get that in the gulag, could you, McFadden?’
‘We got many things. Brutality and starvation mostly. But there was always plenty of work to fill idle moments.’ He drank deep, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. An old scar ran across the hand, dulled by time, and he had a crooked finger that had clearly been broken and badly set.
‘How did you end up in Solovetsky?’
‘Who can tell any more? Through a series of other camps, moved from one to another, forgotten about, rediscovered, moved on. I wasn’t a criminal, just unfortunate. That was the problem. You see, they’d completely forgotten why I was there, so they couldn’t release me, could they? Not without the proper paperwork. If they’d let me free and made a mistake, they would end up serving the sentence for me. Such things have to be handled correctly. So they kept me, just in case. The only reason I can recall Solovetsky above the many others is because of this.’ He indicated his leg.
‘How’d it happen?’
‘We were building a new dock. It was February, I think. Winter in the Arctic Circle. We hadn’t seen the sun for weeks. I was ordered to unload a wagon full of heavy timbers. In the dark and the cold, they fell on me.’
‘I thought you said it wasn’t an accident.’
Their eyes met once more, almost as combatants. ‘When it’s thirty degrees below, you’ve already worked nine hours without food, you can’t feel your feet or your hands and the entire pile of logs has frozen solid, you’ve been beaten twice by the guards that day because the work detail hasn’t completed its quota, and they threaten they’ll go on beating you until the timbers are unloaded – I don’t call that much of an accident. Do you, Mr Burgess?’
‘You must hate the Russians.’
‘Why should I? Most of my fellow prisoners were Russians.’
‘The Soviets, the guards, then.’
‘Not especially. They simply took over the camps that had been built by the Tsars and didn’t know any different. And it was a Soviet doctor who in the end saved my life. I was one of the lucky ones, Mr Burgess. At the start of the war I was one of many friends, yet today I am the only