‘Have you got me some fresh cigarettes?’
‘No, sir, I-’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, I have to go in tomorrow, sir, and you still have about ten, and you never smoke more than about two or three in a-’
‘Tonight might be just the night I want twenty. Simply because you lead such a wretchedly repetitive mean little life you needn’t suppose others do the same. In future see I have a full packet at all times. I’m sick of the sight of you – be off and draw my bath.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Brevda.’
‘Sir?’
Alexander stared at his valet for a long time, blinking and slowly opening and shutting his mouth. Then he said, ‘Sorry. It’s… the heat,’ this in such a way as to leave no doubt that, whatever it was, it was not that. ‘Well, am I forgiven?’
‘Of course, your honour.’
Half an hour later Alexander was in his bedroom putting on his mess-dress. By now he seemed in the best of spirits; he was whistling a song of the regiment, fresh in his mind after hearing the band practising it in preparation for the next morning’s ceremonial parade. The vodka-bottle still stood on the writing table, but its level had not changed for over a week. In the same kind of way he had given notice of his intention to turn up this evening and had spent the last half-hour quietly reading when he could have been lying face down on his bed. These improvements originated not in any self-reformatory efforts but in the completeness with which his energies were now absorbed: any time left over from work and sex was used up by the revolution and there was none to spare for drink, plaguing the household or behaving like someone in a nineteenth-century Russian novel. As a result he was nearer to being contented, even happy, than he had been for years; it was true that his second visit to the rehearsals of the English play, paid the morning after the first one, had been productive only of irritation, but a kind of semi-discreditable relief had soon followed. His obvious response to the set-back must be complete inactivity for as long as possible, not a daunting prospect to one already so extended. In fact, he had since realised, his original approach to Sarah Harland had been in pursuance of that earlier and comparatively juvenile policy of his that dictated instant pursuit of any attractive female – earlier than his association with Mrs Korotchenko, the most unjuvenile passage, it seemed to him, of his career to date.
His comb struck a tangle of hair at the crown of his head, spun out of his hand and skidded across the top of the dressing-table to vanish between it and the wall. Cursing loudly in English, he used excessive force to make an aperture for his arm. His groping fingers soon found the comb, but they had already found something else as well, something that felt like a crumpled piece of card. It proved to be a treasure he had thought for a year or two to be lost – he had had no cause to look behind the dressing-table in that time, and no more had any servant: the ancient photograph, taken seven metres below where he stood, that had told him of the cypress avenue, the yew hedge, the statues of nymphs and hunters, the little stone lions once to be seen from his window. Whether because of the lapse of time, or the renewed effect of the old flat-look process, or most likely the experience he had gained in the interval, the sight affected him strongly.
In a few seconds his manner lost all its new firmness and sobriety and his eyes grew unfixed. He imagined, or tried to imagine, the scene in the photograph not as it was, not empty, not strange and sad, but enlivened by some of the people who had known it just as it was then, at the very moment the camera had recorded it, the men in tweed suits, striped shirts and the ties of their school, university or regiment, the women wearing elaborate dresses of light coloured silk and fine silk stockings, with much jewellery. At this hour, perhaps, they would have been eating gherkin sandwiches and drinking gin, Scotch whisky, port, champagne, out of crystal goblets.
What had they thought was awaiting them? -for Alexander had always fancied, had taken it for granted, that the picture commemorated a vanished world not by chance but by design, that it dated from the last months or days of that world and had been pushed under the gallery floor for him to find, or more strictly for him to take possession of some years after a workman replacing rotten boards had found it. What had they said to one another, those men and women of the final stage of capitalism? Had they talked of the starving pensioners in their tiny unheated rooms, of the dying children turned away from hospitals because their parents could not afford to rent a bed for them, of the immigrants cowering at the backs of their shops while the racist mobs looted and burned and the police stood by or joined in the rapine, of the groups of workers hastily assembling and training for the supreme struggle? (Hardly of the last-mentioned, which could be assumed to have taken place in secret, though details of this and of all the other matters were lacking.) Or had that conversation of long ago revolved round traditional interests, fox-hunting, pheasant-shooting, cricket, the London theatre, adultery? He had no idea whatever of the answers to any of these questions, just hoped very much that some sort of Yes could be attached to the last one because that made the participants more admirable, more aristocratic, more English. And surely that other Alexander would have enjoyed his hold on the life he had always known until the instant when it was forcibly taken from him.
At the thought of his namesake and predecessor, Alexander Petrovsky raised his head and lost some of his dreamy look. After a pause he stepped across to the bookcase, took out the purple-bound volume, opened it at an acute angle and popped his finger inside. Then he read aloud, in a high, slow, monotonous voice, the passage that either chance or a prodigiously close knowledge of the lay-out had put in his way.
‘Freckled hands reach out to clasp in love,
The mouth drools that would kiss, the straining eyes
Hold sweet images of what never was;
Ah, shut them with a blow, strike aside
The hands, silence the mouth for ever
Before it calls for reason, faith, justice,
And the hangmen come.
This time the reader shut the book without a sound and replaced it gently on the shelf. After standing a minute in thought, evidently unpleasing thought, he gave a long sigh, checked his appearance in the wardrobe mirror and marched out, straightening his mess-jacket.
Downstairs, in the drawing-room, in the east hall, by the east front, the first guests were assembling. Three long tables formed an open square on the paved space between the entrance staircases and the edge of the pond. There were dishes of ham, smoked goose, cold mutton, cold chicken, cold sliced beetroot, marrow, red cabbage, watercress and endive, bowls of date chutney and pickled mushrooms and onions, and plates of thick white bread and butter. Peaches, gooseberries, loganberries and cream and junket were also offered, together with several varieties of cake. Bowls of a transparent plastic meant to resemble glass contained a cold punch of Krasnodar Riesling with lemon-juice and sugar-syrup and a slight stiffening of vodka. Vodka itself was to be had for the asking, and of course there would be plenty of asking.
These informal receptions of the Controller’s, held on the second and fourth Friday of every month from March to October, were highly valued throughout the units of supervision, not for the generous hospitality alone, though this was indeed a factor, nor so much for ordinary social reasons as for the opportunity, provided almost nowhere else, of running into colleagues, opposite numbers, persons normally inaccessible for reasons of rank or protocol and, in these unceremonious circumstances, settling in a couple of minutes difficulties that weeks of official exchanges might have failed to solve.
The difficulty which now occupied the Controller and his wife had been doing so on and off for nearly ten years and was certainly not going to be settled in a couple of minutes. Even so, the urgency in Tatiana Petrovsky’s tone and manner suggested that she had by no means given up hope of one day carrying her point. She and her husband were standing some distance round the curve of the pond, away from the sprinkling of guests; it was years since
, in furtherance of informality, Petrovsky had left off the practice of having individuals presented on arrival at the fortnightly receptions.
‘You must speak to him,’ she said, not being a believer in originality for its own sake.
‘I can hardly speak to him this minute, my love.’
‘That’s precisely what you can do, Sergei. He’s just arrived, he’s on his own, he’ll be sober and above all he’ll be unprepared. That’s your only chance of getting him to listen to you. If you signal your intention by telling him you want to have a chat with him, or… however you put it, by the time you see him he’ll have worked out which attitude to use to keep you at a distance, cold or humble or… You know how he is.’
‘Yes, I think I do. What do you want me to say?’
‘Dear God, what I’ve just been telling you, that she’s a notoriously disreputable creature, also that one of her young men committed suicide and she was suspected of murdering another, or at least accidentally killing him, but she was never charged, nobody was, that she-’
‘All allegation. Rumour.’
‘What else would you expect? One’s friends and their friends aren’t on oath, but why should they lie, and tell the same lie? That woman is a pervert. She likes… Well, Agatha Tabidze wouldn’t specify, and we’ve been friends for ten years. Surely that suggests something.’
‘Indeed it does, like everything else you say about her-that the lady must be irresistible to any young man of spirit. Oh, I don’t welcome it, of course, but…’
‘But what?’
Sergei Petrovsky’s handsome bearded face showed a refined discomfort, an awareness of duty left undone coupled with mild, regretful cynicism about the real value of that duty. His attire was similarly diversified: austerely-cut suit of dark-grey flannel or an approximation to it, bright-coloured striped waistcoat with copper buttons in student style and cream shirt with open collar, bureaucratic necktie thrown aside. Beside him, round-shouldered and not tall, in finely-woven azure cotton with lilac ribbons, Tatiana was to the casual eye a much less impressive figure. A second glance might have noted determination in her gaze and in the set of her mouth, and strong will or at least obstinacy in the prominent bar of frontal bone above her eyes, a characteristic inherited by her sons but not her daughter, and one who had noted so much might very likely have gone on to feel a certain sympathy for a man whose wife knew so precisely and so certainly how he ought to behave on any occasion and was so fully prepared to make him a present of that knowledge at any time. Only a close and attentive friend of the family, perhaps, Agatha Tabidze or another, was in a position to observe how unimpressively, how lamely Sergei answered Tatiana’s scoldings and urgings and how serenely he did or went on doing just as he pleased, which in practice usually meant not doing something that would incur hostility.
‘But what can I do?’ he answered her now. ‘What should I do? And what makes you so sure there’s an affair going on? I’m not aware of any evidence of it.’
‘My darling, you wouldn’t be aware of any evidence if you saw them in bed together, but if you want to hear I’ll tell you what makes me so sure. Two things at least. The way she behaved that night when they’d come back indoors. Not a word out of her all evening and then all of a sudden interested in everything. Like a drug-addict in a last-century movie, before and after taking a dose. He carried it off very well. But then he’s grown so secretive, that’s the other thing. Oh, he has his silly fits but until this started, one way or another I always knew what he was up to. He senses I’d disapprove more strongly than I usually do. His manner’s altogether different.’
‘Young men may have all manner of reasons for being secretive.’ Petrovsky spoke very gently, or at least in a very propitiatory way.‘ And why do you disapprove? Having moral attitudes these days seems rather… pointless.’
‘These days there’s more point than ever before. But no need to take things as far as morality – surely you can see other grounds for disapproving, practical ones. Suppose her husband finds out; have you thought what damage he might do? And what she might do? At least you should warn him.’
‘I’m sure he’s taken all that into consideration, my love.’
‘Are you really’? When was he last seen taking into consideration anything that might hinder him from doing whatever he wanted to do?’
Still gently, Petrovsky said, ‘We’ve come as far as morality now all right, haven’t we? Moral disapproval of someone doing as he pleases, of that in itself. I’m afraid I’ve never been able to summon up very strong feelings along those lines.’
‘Yes, Sergei, that is your serious misfortune, and others’. All human beings, especially those with good looks or some other advantage over their fellows, need strong opposition when young, that in itself. If it isn’t forthcoming, their characters suffer. They become egotistical, impossible to deflect from any course of action they may have set themselves, and yet erratic, given to abrupt, entire changes of direction for no external cause. I can’t image why it’s always supposed to be the over-indulgent mother who spoils her son when the father is obviously so much more important in teaching him how to behave. It must be more difficult for a father to take in the fact that his son is growing up, that he isn’t still the little boy whose activities are too harmless and unimportant to have a strict watch kept on them. And of course being tolerant is so much less trouble. At the time. But just wait. Our son is now a very dangerous person – to himself. I hope for all our sakes, Sergei, that you’re a less liberal administrator than you are a father.’
When he judged she had finished, he said in the same tone as before, ‘Goodness, I could tell there was a good deal of moral disapproval about. What I hadn’t realised was how much of it was reserved for me.
As they stared at each other, the lines of bitterness and accusation round her mouth and eyes began to fade a little, but there was still an edge to her voice when she said, ‘We all need opposition from time to time, including you, dearest Sergei,’ thinking to herself as so often before that this time there was a chance he might actually do something about the matter in hand.
‘I’ll speak to him. If he knows we know, at least it’ll make it easier for him to come to us in a crisis.’
‘Don’t let him get away with denying it.’
‘I think you can trust me not to do that,’ he said, sounding less than bland for the first time.
Already wondering whether she thought so too, she looked over his shoulder and at once her manner changed slightly but perceptibly. A small figure, no more than a metre and a half high but finely proportioned, had just emerged from the house and now stood for a moment surveying the assembled company before starting to walk down the steps.
Petrovsky glanced briefly at his wife and followed her gaze. Without conscious thought the two moved nearer each other as if the better to resist some form of physical attack. For the new arrival was Director Vanag, who had never been known for certain to do anything whatever in his official capacity except go to his office in Northampton Town Hall five and a half days a week, but who was always brought to mind (though less often mentioned) when someone was recalled to Moscow and never heard of again, or when someone else met an unnatural death in the district. Earlier that very week, the drowned body of a clerk in the administrative department concerned with housing had been pulled out of the river Nene, a man of unblemished public and private life, a man with no visible enemies. He had suffered a blow on the head, perhaps in falling, perhaps not. It was inferred as a matter of course that Vanag had been responsible, the victim’s strongly-presumed innocence being taken by some as positive confirmation, on the argument that indiscriminate ‘demonstrations’, as such acts had become known, were more efficacious than selective ones. According to a simpler and more fashionable view, Vanag was too lazy or incompetent to track down any real undesirables there might have been and ordered the occasional random murder purely as evidence of zeal. Whatever the truth of that, nobody was amused, and th
e need to stand well with the Director was so thoroughly understood that nobody, except perhaps Alexander, seriously blamed the Petrovskys for inviting him to their parties.
Now he paused again, standing on the bottom step, and again looked about him. As always he was unaccompanied; at no social gathering had he ever been seen with a companion of either sex and, although he was universally believed to be under strong guard night and day, any guards were never identifiable as such. He seemed just on the point of resuming his progress when he caught sight of his hosts and raised his hand to them. It was a curious gesture, prolonged until what had looked like a greeting became something not far from a warning; than he moved off and was lost to sight among his taller fellow-guests. The Petrovskys looked at each other once more, this time in a way that showed deep intimacy and mutual trust, he conveying a mild request for moral support against any difficulties that might ensue, she warmly promising it. They were about to join a nearby group when Alexander, Nina and Theodore came up to them. The latter pair were holding hands and had an air of great seriousness and suppressed excitement and a little discomfort.
‘These two have something to say to you, papa.’ Alexander too seemed ill at ease, but amused at the same time. ‘For some reason they want me to be present when they say it, though I can’t see what business it is of mine.’
‘Have I your permission to speak, sir’?’ asked Theodore.
‘To speak? Why, certainly.’
‘Nina and I are in love with each other, I have asked her to be my wife and, subject to your approval, sir, she has accepted. So I now formally request your daughter’s hand in marriage.’
‘I see. Well… of course. A splendid idea. I formally… award you her hand. A splendid idea. My congratulations to you both. We must arrange a party. An engagement party.’
Russian Hide-and-Seek Page 14