‘Everyone’s duties are generally known in Moscow.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I must go.’
‘Thanks for coming up,’ Mortimer said. ‘I suppose you think I was imagining things.’
‘I’m not altogether convinced you were looking at your own apartment. It’s an easy mistake to make in the dark.’
‘Perhaps you’re right. You make me feel like one of those cranks who are convinced they’re being followed all the time. Persecution complex Moscow-style. But I’m pretty sure I was looking at the right flat.’
‘I suppose you have a heavy date tonight with Diana. I guess that should take your mind off mysterious intruders.’
Mortimer nodded without enthusiasm. ‘But first I’ve got my Russian lesson.’
‘Bit late, isn’t it?’
‘UPDK are sending a new teacher along because my regular woman is sick. This was the only time she could manage it.’
When Randall left it was as if a piece of solid, dependable furniture had been removed.
CHAPTER TEN
Visits by the teachers sent by UPDK were not anticipated with pleasure. Many of the tutors were young men more anxious to improve their English than to teach Russian; they were also adept at goading their pupils into spirited defence of Capitalism. They liked to read the Western newspapers and magazines and lament the latest reports of decadent behaviour in a corrupt society. But their laments were often tinged with envy. Brush-ing-up their English, testing their skill at debate, reading the scandal-sheets—for this the naïve Westerners paid them.
The lessons were dreaded by novices in Russian and those who claimed they had never been able to learn any language—by which they meant they had never tried. Many wives took lessons because it was the thing; just as ballet classes were the thing even if you were physically better suited for weight-lifting.
Mortimer was lucky. He had studied Russian in Britain and his Moscow teacher was a woman in her sixties, not interested in polemics or improving her English, and a little bit mad in the nicest possible way.
Her name was Valentina. She was small and smiling and very vague: time had stopped as far as she was concerned in 1917. No one really knew why. Some said she had seen her parents shot by the Bolsheviks, others said that she had shot her parents, everyone agreed that she had undergone a traumatic experience. She made outrageously treasonable statements which had been ignored by the different regimes, none of them noted for tolerance in such matters, and still referred to Tsar Nicholas the Second as if he were still alive. ‘A very handsome man. Not unlike your dear King,’ she told Mortimer. ‘But of course they are related. He’s a gentleman through and through not like this peasant they call Lenin.’
Mortimer found his first lesson an embarrassing experience. Whenever she began to talk about the Tsar, or Lenin, or the Bolsheviks, he switched on the record-player and paced up and down trying not to participate in the conversation. Later he learned that even the Russians regarded her as a joke and that when she entered a flat the listening KGB man went for his vodka break. She was an excellent teacher although her English was sweetly archaic.
But tonight it was Nina who came to teach him.
When he opened the door she was standing there and he was not surprised.
‘But you could not have possibly known that it would be me,’ she said.
‘I know. It’s funny, isn’t it. I didn’t even know you gave lessons. And yet when I went to open the door I somehow knew you would be standing there.’
‘You have a seventh sense,’ she said.
‘Sixth. I can see I’ll be teaching you English.’
‘That is what I hope. It seems to me that my English is not as good sometimes as it should be. I was very happy when they told me I was going to teach Gaspadeen Mortimer.’
‘Did you tell them that you already knew me?’
‘No.’ She looked embarrassed. ‘That would not have been wise.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘My countrymen can be funny people sometimes. If they had known that we knew each other they might have sent me somewhere else.’
‘And you wouldn’t have liked that?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have liked that.’
‘Can I get you some tea? Or a drink perhaps? You refused my offer last time.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘A cup of tea perhaps. Then we must get on with the work. I have determined that we shall do much work.’
They went into the kitchen. She was wearing the same grey dress that she had worn when he had first seen her. She had a pink silk scarf tied at her throat and her reddish hair was upswept and held with two amber combs. He made the tea and poured milk into both cups. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you would have preferred it without milk.’
‘I like it with milk the way you English drink it. In Russia they always drink it black or with lemon in. They even put lemon in the coffee.’
‘I know so little about what Russians like and don’t like. I never seem to meet any. You and your brother are about the only ones I’ve really spoken to.’
She sipped her tea. ‘It is very sad. The fault of both sides, it seems to me. Everyone is so suspicious. We Russians have known treachery and intrigue for so long that we are suspicious by nature. Like my brother. He is suspicious of everyone and he is always ready to think the worst. I do not know why he should be like that. He is not old enough to have known any great hardship. He is about your age I think. How old are you, Gaspadeen Mortimer?’
He wanted to add a few years on to his age. To impress upon her the experience that those years would have encompassed. ‘I’m twenty-three,’ he said.
‘The same age as my brother. I thought as much.’
‘You think we both have a lot to learn?’
‘You are both young. I am younger but then a woman grows wise before a man.’ She finished her tea. ‘And now I must teach you Russian. All the time we are talking together you are wasting money.’
Mortimer was relieved at the mention of money because he was alarmed at the pleasure which had expanded inside him when he found her at the door, and the desire to protect her from pain he experienced whenever she bent her head and he looked at her slender, vulnerable neck. Now it was business once again, tutor and pupil. That was how it should be: he could take his secret pleasures by observing her gestures, her expressions, and accepting her smiles. He must never become more deeply involved: that had been made clear from the beginning and he could never accuse anyone of failing to warn him. But why on God’s earth did it matter any more that he was English and she was Russian?
‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked. ‘You are certainly not concentrating on Russian.’
‘I’m sorry. I was thinking about what we were talking about earlier. The hostility between East and West. In any case isn’t my time nearly up?’
‘You have another five minutes left. It is right that you keep learning until your time is up. After all it is your money you are spending.’
‘You keep talking about money.’
‘Everyone talks about money. Especially in Russia.’
‘Why’s that? There’s not supposed to be any poverty in Russia any more.’
‘There are poor in every country. But it is true that in the Soviet Union not many people are really poor any more. Not like they used to be. They have enough food, roofs over their heads and always enough money for a holiday.’
‘Where do you go for your holidays?’ The time was up and he wanted to keep her talking.
‘I like to go to the Black Sea or in the winter I go ski-ing in the Caucasus. It is very beautiful there. You would like it. Do you ski?’
‘A little. I went to St. Moritz once. I only got as far as the nursery slopes.’
‘Ah St. Moritz. The paradise of the Capitalists.’
‘Now you sound like your brother.’
‘Perhaps.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘And now I must be going. It is well past our time toget
her.’
‘You can stay a little longer,’ he said. ‘There’s no harm done.’
‘I can stay a little while longer. Not much though. You see the militia will have booked me in and they will be waiting to book me out.’
‘Does that matter?’
‘Perhaps not. But you never know. I have seen harmless things like that used against people years later. Even now they could be listening to us.’
‘We haven’t said anything very bad even if they are. But I should think they’ve got better things to do than to listen to a conversation between an interpreter and a very junior diplomat.’
‘Perhaps you are right. It seems to me that we haven’t fully recovered from Stalin. We still see and smell evil when it no longer exists. Do you know that the revelations about Stalin after his death completely broke some people? It was just like people in the West being told that God was the Devil. Imagine it, suddenly being told your God—for that was what he was to the people of the Soviet Union—was a mass-murderer, another Hitler. Even now many people cannot believe it. They refuse to believe it. But the younger people believe. It will take you a long time to understand my people. How long are you here for, two years? Not a chance, Gaspadeen Mortimer. In two years you won’t even have begun to understand them. You cannot because your life has been so different. You do not understand the suspicions which envelop us.’
Mortimer said: ‘I’m certainly beginning to understand those. And, although I might be young, I’m not completely simple, you know.’
She was filled with repentance. ‘I am sorry. I am very rude. I know I am too outspoken. It is one of my worst failings. Tell me about your childhood, Gaspadeen Mortimer. I would love to hear about it.’
‘Not on your life,’ Mortimer said. ‘And for goodness sake stop calling me Gaspadeen Mortimer. Call me Richard, or Dick if you like.’
She was suddenly very shy. ‘Richard? Dick? I think I will call you Richard.’ He fancied she was blushing. ‘Tell me a little. What is your home town like?’
‘I have been thinking about it today,’ Mortimer said. ‘It is very small. It is in the country not far from the sea. This evening children will be out in the streets singing carols—songs to celebrate Christmas.’
‘I know what carols are. A Christmas Carol. Dickens is one of my favourite authors. Will the snow be very deep?’
‘Do you know,’ Mortimer said, ‘for a moment I imagined snow there. In fact I can’t remember a white Christmas. We have a song, you know—“I’m dreaming of a White Christmas”.’
‘A winter without snow. That must be very funny indeed.’ She remembered the time. ‘Now I really must be going. That militiaman will be having a heart attack. It has been very enjoyable. I hope to see you again soon.’
‘Tuesday lunch-time,’ Mortimer said. ‘That’s my next lesson.’
‘But Valentina may be well again by then.’
‘You know it’s a terrible thing to say—and I don’t really mean it—but I almost hope that she will not be fully recovered.’
‘You must not think such things. It is very wicked. But I do not think she will be back. She is resting in a sanatorium. She is not physically ill, you understand.’
‘Poor old Valentina.’
‘Till Tuesday, then.’
‘Till Tuesday.’
He sat down and waited for Diana. And when he made love to her he felt soiled and guilty like a husband committing furtive adultery in his own home while his wife is away.
He put the Christmas tree in a bucket and weighted the bucket with bottles filled with water. At home he would have filled it with soil, but there was no soil here in the winter—just black stone far below the surface of the snow. He covered the bucket with red paper and hung the decorations, left in a drawer by the previous tenant, on the branches already shedding their needles on the carpet. A snowman with a jagged hole in the back of his head, a peacock with a spun-glass tail, spheres and tear-drops of glass tissue, some of last year’s tinsel, a few flakes of cotton-wool snow, a string of lights shaped like acorns, and the tree was dressed for Christmas.
By then it was midday on Sunday. Forty-eight hours until his next Russian lesson. And that, he knew, was how it was going to be. All interest in work and normal pleasure erased by the presence in Moscow of one girl with a neck which looked as if it were nakedly awaiting the executioner’s axe. He was filled with jubilation and despair. The knowledge that she was there in the same city, feeling its moods as he did, seeing the same clouds and the same first snow of the day, glowed within him. But any move to develop their friendship was professional suicide. Once it had been his mother: now it was the Foreign Office.
He placed the stems of plastic-berried foliage behind the pictures on the walls and put the few Christmas cards that had so far arrived on the top of the bookshelf. Then he opened a can of beer, played a record of Gilels playing Lizt and sat down to consider what ruse he would employ to try and forget his tutor.
Giles Ansell supplied the answer. He bounced into the flat and said: ‘Enough of that secret drinking, old man. Your country needs you.’
Mortimer poured him a beer and waited for him to explain.
Ansell said: ‘Have you ever played broomball?’
‘Never. As far as I know it’s only played in Moscow, isn’t it?’
‘Not to worry. Put on some plimsolls and your sweater—one of the team has gone sick. Have you got one of those small Russian brooms made of flowering grass or whatever it is?’
‘I think so.’
Ansell examined it. ‘Not up to much, is it? I mean it’s a bit moth-eaten. Some of the lads dip them in water and hang them out of the window all night so that they’re as solid as cricket bats in the morning.’
Mortimer said: ‘I’m sorry about my Russian broom. I might have been able to do something about it if I had known I was going to play broomball.’
‘You’ll be all right,’ Ansell said. ‘There’ll be a few spare brooms. Then just get stuck in. We’re playing the Press and we’ve got to beat those buggers.’
The game was played on an ice-covered tennis court behind the British Embassy. Instead of a puck they used a rubber ball and instead of hockey sticks they used the brooms. The trick was to be able to run and stay on your feet on the ice. Mortimer never mastered the trick and, lying on his back on the ice, wondered what had happened to the good humour he had been told characterised these encounters. It was, he decided, similar to the good humour in rugby when you spat out your teeth and smiled gummily before crippling your assailant. The decent young men of the embassy who professionally wore reserve like a uniform became commandos, burly and ferocious, as if muscles usually strapped down inside their grey suits had been released for the game. Up and down the ice they raced, bellowing to each other, punishing the ball and the Press for all the indignities young diplomats endured in the Soviet Union. The Press played more cannily, reserving their energy for the second half. At half time, thanks to the inspired leadership of the Daily Telegraph correspondent, the score was two all.
Mortimer was told that the final score was a 3-2 win for the embassy when he awoke in the British doctor’s headquarters. It was the first thing Ansell told him. He looked at himself in a mirror and saw that he had a bump the size of an egg on his temple. ‘Well played,’ Ansell said. ‘I don’t know what we’d have done without you.’
For three days Mortimer lay in bed in his flat suffering from mild concussion. He was told that he had helped to score the winning goal before denting the ice with his head.
On the first night his dreams were sick and frightening, peopled with beckoning figures. Shadows across lighted windows and when he looked through the windows he saw his mother, wearing steel-rimmed spectacles, knitting a scarf like a snake and laughing to herself. Dancers leaping on spongy snow, smiling with painted lips, women inserting microphones in the end of his bed and winking grotesquely.
He jerked awake.
Diana said: ‘Don’t worry, Ric
hard, it was only a nasty old dream. I’m here to look after you.’
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘What time is it?’ He searched for the bedside lamp.
‘It’s about one in the morning. Don’t fret about me staying here. I got the doctor’s clearance. He said it would be a jolly good idea if I stayed all night in case you wanted anything.’ She giggled. ‘I’m sure you won’t be wanting that. Although you never know with some of you men. Anyway I’m sleeping in the lounge.’
‘Then what are you doing in the bedroom?’ Memory of the dreams was fading and his head ached.
‘Really, Richard, you don’t seem very pleased to find me here. I heard you calling and came in. You must have been having awful nightmares.’
He groaned. ‘It’s very good of you. My head’s splitting.’
‘The doctor said you should take two of these if you awoke with a headache.’ She handed him two white tablets. ‘Codeine I expect.’
‘Thanks.’ He swallowed them.
‘Perhaps you’d feel better if I snuggled down beside you.’
‘It wouldn’t be fair on you,’ Mortimer said. ‘I’m tossing around here like a mad thing. Neither of us would get any sleep.’
‘As you wish,’ she said primly. ‘I thought you should have gone to hospital but everyone was against the idea. Ansell said that if you went into a Russian hospital with a headache you’d come out with piles.’
‘Ansell should have been on the music hall.’
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer me to stay in here? I mean you’re not just being decent or anything are you?’
‘No,’ Mortimer said. ‘You get some sleep in the other room. I feel quite sleepy again now. It must be those tablets. And’—he squeezed her hand—‘thanks for everything, Diana.’
When he closed his eyes again the wildness had left his sleep. Nina came to him pressing a cool hand against his forehead, and the pain departed.
The next day passed pleasantly and placidly. He tried to retain his vision of Nina for as long as possible but by lunch-time she had faded. Visitors came and stood around awkwardly for a few minutes before leaving, happy they had performed their duty. Ansell described the winning goal three times. Mason, he suspected, came to find out if he had divulged any embassy secrets during his concussed sleep. Diana stayed during the morning, cooked him an omelette and went to work in the afternoon leaving instructions to phone her if he suffered a relapse. But he knew he was almost well.
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