‘My Minister called from Australia. But apart from that I thought it all went rather well, didn’t you?’ he said to the chairperson, turning briefly to take another canapé, winking at Edith.
He saw Ulyanov, the almost suave Russian, pushing his way through the crowd towards him. Ulyanov arrived with a quizzical-eyed smile, implying that he had an inkling of what had happened. Ulyanov swept him aside with his arm and at the same time stopped a drink waiter and took two drinks, handing one to him. ‘Tell me Commissioner Australia – what went on there tonight eh?! I, Ulyanov, begin the evening as the concluding rapporteur, the finale, but now the evening is over and I find myself not having been finale: Australia is finale and your message of criticism of ordinary citizen peace workers becomes the finale. Ulyanov asks: how could that have come about when finale was the Soviet’s negotiated and rightful place? How?’
‘These things happen, Commissioner.’
‘These things happen? These things must not happen!’
Ulyanov chuckled away the tone of his complaint.
Next day he had a call from Ulyanov suggesting they meet for ‘something of a cultural exchange’ at a nonofficial level. They had finished the evening on joking terms and the invitation was not unexpected.
Ulyanov suggested that they meet at the bar of the Sacher. ‘But we will not talk Synroc or borosilicate.’
He agreed but after putting down the telephone he had second thoughts and worried about the protocol of such a meeting. He rang the Political Officer just to have the meeting noted but the Political Officer laughed and suggested that maybe Ulyanov wanted to defect. ‘But more likely, just get drunk. Watch out you don’t get caught with the bill.’
‘An expensive venue,’ he said, greeting Ulyanov who was drinking champagne, a bottle of champagne sitting on the bar in an ice bucket.
‘Australia is a rich country, is it not?’
Did that mean that Australia was meant to be picking up the bill?
‘So is Comecon.’
Ulyanov worked with Comecon.
Ulyanov pulled an ambiguous face. ‘We are budget cutting. I admire your clothes – beautiful cotton. I see you in a silk suit one session – very nice.’
‘Have you had me under observation?’
He wondered if Ulyanov were gay and if this was a pass. Ulyanov poured him a glass of champagne.
‘I have a passion for clothing,’ Ulyanov laughed.
He glanced at Ulyanov’s rather well-cut, tailor-made but obviously Russian suit. His cufflinks were Air India and his tie clip from Olivetti. Ulyanov’s shoes were pointed, grey, in some sort of Italian youth-style which was wrong for him.
‘You don’t do so badly yourself,’ he said, dishonestly.
Ulyanov grimaced. ‘In Russia we do not have variety,’ but he seemed pleased with the compliment, ‘I do the best I can.’
‘I have not forgiven you, Australia, I suspect unfair play last night – and you a sporting nation!’
‘What about your news release which some of us on the sub committee didn’t get to see!’
Ulyanov put an arm on his shoulder. ‘Never mind all that. I have an affection for you, Australia – I find something of myself in you. And I have a proposition for you also.’
He waited for the proposition. Maybe Ulyanov was going to try to recruit him.
Ulyanov drank from the champagne, preparing his words. ‘Tell me – do you like caviare?’
‘Yes, I’ve never really ever had enough.’
‘That is as it should be, my friend – one should never satisfy oneself with caviare. But I’m about to offer you an opportunity to do so. I have three kilos of first class caviare – Beluga Prime – arrived yesterday from Soviet Union beautiful – an Aeroflot official has … well … presented it to me – in return for a service.’
Ulyanov looked pleased with himself, pleased that he showed perhaps a flair for Western-style wheeler-dealing. He sipped his champagne, closing his eyes to savour it without distraction. ‘I want to offer you an opportunity to take a share of this caviare – it is in half-kilo cans – a nice gift. Or eat it in your hotel room. A feast. It’s as you say, “top of market”.’
Ulyanov delivered his offer in an imitation of Western ‘salesmanship’.
‘I will definitely say yes.’
‘Good! Let us to negotiations.’
‘I’ll take perhaps two cans – if the price is right.’
‘Boy have I got a deal for you.’ Ulyanov said this with relish, relishing the phrase, again, for its Westernness.
He pulled up his heavily cufflinked shirt to expose a watch calculator. He took out a silver pencil – it looked like a public relations gift but the name of the company had worn away – and used the point to punch up his calculations.
‘Do you think 500 DM is a fair price?’ Ulyanov asked.
‘I know that caviare was selling at US$15 at Christmas – it was in the New Yorker.’
‘I read that,’ Ulyanov said, ‘so you see it is a bargain I offer you.’
‘That was retail.’
He tried to make the US$-DM-A$ conversion in his head – and then the ounce-gram conversion.
‘But if you pay in dollar-A,’ Ulyanov said, ‘we must consider that it is weakening against the basket of currencies.’
Ulyanov turned away from negotiations to ask the barman for a napkin, with which he dabbed his mouth.
‘But we’re not weakening against the rouble.’
‘I work in dollars US.’
Ulyanov had all the conversions clear in his head of course, but switched about to muddy the calculations he was trying to make in his head and they concluded the deal without him having any feel for the reasonableness or otherwise of it. They then drank champagne and talked of great dinners they’d eaten.
After one of the pauses in the conversation, Ulyanov asked thoughtfully, ‘Tell me, Australia, if we were at war could you shoot me?’
‘Yes.’
Ulyanov nodded, pondered.
‘But here at the Commission I listen to you – you are a man without passion. You are the man who raises clever doubts. How could you act?’
‘The important thing is to be able to act decisively while in doubt.’
Again they stood in silence with their champagne, while Ulyanov pondered this, then put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘But now we are living – not shooting. Why don’t we leave now and I will take you to a House of Pleasure. On the Gurtel. They will be good to us.’
It was at this moment that he felt that the delayed response to the telephone call to his girlfriend should begin, the concussion hit.
But it did not.
What fell on him was the bill for two bottles of Moët et Chandon. Ulyanov had only roubles, had ‘overlooked’ changing some money that day.
Thoughts came to him as he paid the bill, of a similar invitation made a few years earlier by a Nigerian at a conference, the brothel bonding, or in the mind of the Nigerian some sort of male combativeness, although he had not fully comprehended the nature of the Nigerian’s challenge.
He saw crudely again that while she, the girl, was denied to him she was available to all others, say to Ulyanov. But again he registered this without reaction. No emotional lightning struck his heart.
‘Zweig, Stefan Zweig – you know of this writer?’ Ulyanov asked as they left.
‘Yes, vaguely, he’s on the Vienna reading list.’
‘Well Zweig, he went to this House.’
‘Is there a plaque?’
‘Plaque? Plague? Is there disease?’
‘No – is there an historical marker – a sign saying Zweig went to this place?’
Ulyanov laughed, realising that he had misunderstood the language and then he made it a joke. ‘There is no plaque in Vienna. A joke, Australia, a joke.’
He roared with laughter as they went out into the night.
A Portrait of a Whore
He rang her again when he got to London, despite
his earlier rebuff, and this time, after some further resistance, she agreed to meet him for a drink.
They met in the lounge of the Basil where he ‘stayed when in London’.
‘I’ve always wanted to be able to say the phrase “where I stay when I’m in London”,’ he said nervously.
‘Yes, you would. I work in Knightsbridge,’ she said, neutrally, ‘so it’s all very convenient. And I’ve done a few out-calls in the Basil.’
‘Oh, so you know it.’ His voice was not as neutral as he would have liked.
She had the jauntiness at twenty-two both of the schoolgirl he’d known and also of a girl who was at home on a bar stool. Being at home on a bar stool together with a use of cosmetics to give emphasis to her youth, both things rippled through her style.
She wore a full-length light white linen coat.
She opened the coat to show a pink silk dress presenting her cleavage and her body line, holding out a leg to display her stockings, her patent high-heeled shoes. ‘Well, how do I look?’ She smiled teasingly at him. ‘Don’t tell me – I know how I look.’
‘You look delicious,’ he said, ‘you haven’t changed …’ That was not quite right and not quite the right thing to say. ‘Age has not wearied you nor the years condemned …’ Not much better.
‘You really mean that you thought that it would make me into some decrepit hag, that sin would have scored my features.’ She laughed, drinking down her vodka and tonic and deepening her voice for effect, but said, ‘I look like a whore: I mean to look like a whore.’
‘Well, you said when I called from Vienna that you’d “changed”. I did expect the worst.’ That was also weakly diplomatic.
‘Not really,’ she said, pensively, ‘not at all, really.’ Adding with a childlike smile, ‘I hope.’
She was no longer his schoolgirl lover or the university student and although he’d tried to prepare himself for this, he had not succeeded. He wasn’t sure whether she was now his peer, and her adultness, her glamour, the female strength of her ‘role’ all bothered him, almost unmanned him. When he’d suggested they drink a martini for old times’ sake she’d declined saying, ‘God, who drinks martinis these days – you are really the last Scott Fitzgerald of the world.’ If only he were.
She’d been slow to show interest in his work with the IAEA and the other things he’d done in the last few years. She laughed again and said, ‘My God, and you were the one who used to say that the bomb had already dropped – inside us,’ and again adopting a deep, stagey voice, ‘“we are the dead in our own life-time”.’
‘That was my period of nihilistic posturing,’ he said, laughing along with her, falsely. ‘I don’t say that now. I’m really only interested in it as a technical and negotiating problem. Australia’s very good on the problem of inspections. I don’t think of it as a street issue any more.’ God that sounded dull.
‘Now, what else did you say in those days?’ she said, making an effort of recollection. ‘What about always defending the smaller polity against the larger polity. Do we still say that?’
He considered that she might have passed him in worldliness and intellectually, he found himself bemused by her use of words such as polity while she sat swinging on a bar stool, dressed as a whore in silk.
‘I have added a refinement to that position,’ he said, foggily. ‘I’m interested in the way we are governed by forums other than recognisable political forums. We are governed by the dead. Maybe the dead are the strongest polity. I’ve moved economics down the list. I enjoy the elegant paradox of nuclear deterrence. Or the inelegant paradox.’
‘Do you now,’ she said, lightly mocking.
‘I guess you’re not interested in all that.’
‘Why? Because I do some whoring? You think I’ve given up on political science? Do you see it as a switch from mind to cunt? Do you think I’m incapable of using both at once?’ She laughed at him.
He blushed.
‘I feel out of my depth.’ He made a gesture of helplessness, waved a hand at her demeanour.
‘Come on now. I’m just kidding you along.’ She touched him, the first touching of their meeting, except for a sisterly kiss when they met. ‘Come on, be the sophisticate, I always look to you as the sophisticate. You were the first man I met who tipped.’
An impossible command. In his mind he gathered together his scrapbook of credentials, scrappy evidence of his ‘sophistication’. He’d talked with Carter, Brezhnev. He’d published important papers. He’d stayed in the finest hotels in the greatest of cities. He’d been drunk with ambassadors, heads of state. He’d been a part of historic occasions. But he had not become a writer. He had not become a Scott Fitzgerald. He had not become a great chemist either.
‘Do you still want to fuck me?’ she asked, returning her lips to the straw in her drink.
He had tried during the meeting so far to push this physical desire for her away, to safeguard himself against desiring the unobtainable, accepting also that her initial resistance to seeing him signalled a contracted involvement with her ‘boyfriend’. But he now sensed that she needed to know whether he still desired her, that she was wanting something from him now, confirmation maybe that she retained some sexual status in the normal world, or at least, the world he came from.
He tried to sound casual, his desire heated to lubricity. ‘I thought we had put all that aside.’
She sat formulating a response, no ready response having glided from her bright lips.
‘I thought we had too,’ she said, ‘but we haven’t.’ Her voice suggested that this was not for her an entirely happy realisation.
‘Your voice has changed again,’ she said, but this time kindly. ‘Come on then, let’s finish these drinks and go up to your room.’ She paused, looked across the top of her glass. ‘Or would you like to come to my apartment? More precisely, the apartment I work from?’
He took a drink, he was now swamped by lubricity, her glow of adolescence was mingled with fantasies of whoredom, together with, all together with, their own erotic history. It was a dreadfully powerful surge of desire and so great was his fear of still being denied it at the last instant that he wished profoundly that they had finished, done it, that it was all over or that all desire was absent. He found he almost wished for a return to the low libido which he’d had during a hepatitis attack.
‘Well,’ she asked, in a voice which suggested she knew the answer, ‘which is it to be?’
He began to answer untruly, to say he’d prefer his room, so as not to reveal how victimised he was by fantasies of whoredom, when she interrupted. ‘I should tell you,’ she said, again as if she knew its effect, ‘that I’ve just come off work – that’s why I’m dressed like a tart.’
‘It doesn’t worry me in the least.’
She laughed. ‘When you rang me from Vienna your voice went like that.’
‘I’m nervous, for godsake. It’s been some time, a few hundred years since we went to bed.’
‘Maybe you’re not sure?’
‘I desire you very much.’
‘Good. I desire you.’
They took each other’s hand.
‘Let’s go to your place, I want to see it, as part of you.’ He tried to control the tone of his lie, but gave up and decided to go to the truth. ‘No, I want to go to it because it would be an incredible turn-on.’
She laughed with relief at their having reached some sort of simple candour.
The place was upstairs, through a doubly locked door – a flatette – freshly painted – well-tiled bathroom, piles of towels, a large satin-covered bed, low lights, prints or photographs of David Hamilton-style girls.
‘Tasteful – in a whorish kind of way,’ he said, enjoying the relief of being able to say the word.
‘It is meant to be “tasteful in a whorish kind of way”,’ she said. ‘We run a class act here,’ she said in her mock, street-tough voice, ‘we even advertise in the Herald Tribune.’
He took her
fur coat and she came into his arms.
‘Let’s go to bed,’ she whispered. She went from him to the bathroom, calling to him ‘put your clothes on the chair, love, there’s a hanger for your coat.’ She poked her head out from the bathroom, ‘Sorry, force of habit, it just came out.’
She went on with her bathroom activity, but called again, ‘Oh, another thing – sorry about this – but could you put £100 in the jar in case Johnny comes and finds us …’
‘Johnny?’
‘The Man. The guy who runs this place.’
‘Oh.’ He guessed he understood. He took the money from his wallet and put it in the jar on the mantelpiece.
She came from the bathroom. ‘There really should be another girl working tonight but she’s sick. We’ll get the money back as we’re leaving – it’s just a precaution against misunderstanding. Johnny’s not a man you want any misunderstanding with.’
When he turned from putting the money in the jar she was lying naked on the bed.
‘Do I look different?’ she asked.
He gazed at her beautiful body. ‘Beautiful, beautiful.’
‘What about my breasts?’
‘Beautiful.’
‘Aren’t they more attractive?’
‘They were always attractive.’
He joined her on the bed.
‘They are larger,’ she said, fondling her breasts. ‘The bastards talked me into it. Some days I’m horrified but generally I suppose I prefer it. They wanted me bigger. There’s this other girl,’ she assumed her tough voice, ‘Sex Queen of the West End. Well, Johnny wanted me to be bigger than she and they talked me into having them enlarged. Voilà!’
‘Like Mariel Hemingway,’ he said, feeling that he was politely trying to normalise her behaviour.
‘Yes. Like Mariel Hemingway. Obviously you’re not turned off by it.’
‘No.’
She laughed. ‘But they still have me on an anorexic diet. Children’s portions. The Brits like the idea of a woman’s breasts on a girl’s body. And the Arabs. And probably every man in the whole fucking world.’
As they began to make love he felt compelled, against his civilised self, to ask her how often she’d been in the bed that day.
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