Angels in the Snow

by Derek Lambert

  ‘Bloody marvellous, isn’t it,’ said Ansell.

  Randall swam and floated experimentally. The cold pressed down and tried to clutch him and he escaped by submerging in the warm, bath-water depths. The water was buoyant and when he swam there was an impression of speed in the steam like running at dusk.

  ‘We’ll never find the girls,’ Ansell said.

  ‘The mad monk’s probably got them by now,’ Farnworth said.

  Mortimer breast-stroked alongside Randall. Randall noticed how thin and white his body was. He patted Mortimer’s bathing cap. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘For a moment I thought you were Esther Williams.’

  Mortimer said: ‘And I thought you were the mad monk. But honestly, Luke, isn’t it wonderful? I never dreamed anything like this existed.’

  ‘It’s an experience,’ Randall said. ‘That’s what everyone says when you ask them how they liked Russia—it was an experience.’

  ‘I think it’s wonderful. Not just an experience.’

  Randall floated on his back. Somewhere above him was the snow melting at the touch of the steam. And the clouds and the stars and infinity.

  Above the canned 1945 vintage music coming from the island they heard the girls calling. They swam in convoy looking for them. Farnworth spotted them first and dived. Diana screamed as he caught her legs and pulled her under. When they both surfaced there was blood on the water and Farnworth was holding his nose. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘it was like trying to duck a bloody octopus.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Diana said. ‘My knee caught your face. But honestly it was your fault. I thought you were the maniac.’

  ‘He is,’ Ansell said.

  Randall swam close to Michele. ‘Enjoying yourself?’ he asked.

  ‘I like it,’ she said, ‘but I think it is time we went back to the party.’

  ‘Do you want to go back to the party?’

  ‘Where else is there to go? And do not say your place. You do not look irresistible at this moment.’

  ‘There’s always your place,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact you do look irresistible.’

  ‘You are not very subtle Mister Luke Randall.’

  ‘You can’t be very subtle in a bathing cap.’

  ‘First we must go back to the party. Then we shall see.’

  He shrugged as expressively as he could with the water lapping his shoulders. ‘Okay, back to the party it is.’

  A trio of Russians swimming with gentle precision as if they lived in the water sailed past and a life-guard with flippers and goggles passed between them searching the bottom of the pool for bodies.

  ‘It’s a bit creepy, isn’t it,’ Diana said. ‘Don’t you think we should go back to the party?’

  ‘We haven’t seen the mad monk yet,’ Farnworth said.

  When they were half way back to the exits Diana screamed: ‘There’s a body down there. I’ve just touched a body.’

  Randall peered into the water and saw a filmy human form. He dived and surfaced holding the indignant and indisputably alive body of a first counsellor from the Indian Embassy.

  As they left the pool the canned music switched to ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’.

  Randall grinned at Mortimer and said: ‘It was an experience.’

  After Farnworth had performed his usual dance on a table, after balloons had been chased and burst, after the band had refused to play Christmas songs which in any case they didn’t know, after several wives festively skittish had been hustled home by jealous husbands, after several carols, a Palais Glide and a scuffle between a Pakistani and an Indian who cared little for the spirit of Christmas truces, after a loud announcement by a nanny that she had no intention of letting any bloody British diplomat do anything to her in the snow, after new friendships had been born and hopes for peace on earth and good-will to all men reaffirmed, after a lot of glasses had been smashed and the draught beer had run dry, after all this the dance ended.

  Mortimer was taken off by Diana; Ansell was pulled away by his wife on the end of an invisible lead; Farnworth, whose wife was in London, invited everyone back to his flat because the party was only just beginning; Randall drove Michele home and was told that it really was a little late for him to come up. He accepted the rejection with the grace befitting a man of his years and pondered on misconceptions about the morals of French girls.

  When he parked the car back at Kutuzovsky the snow had thinned to dust which spangled the night air in the lamplight like powdered gossamer. He felt that he should be able to smell pine-wood burning. He stood for a minute and let the dust settle on his shoulders. Then he went up to bed and realised just before falling asleep that already it was Christmas Eve.

  When Randall returned home at lunch-time on Christmas Eve he became very angry with Anna. His shirts were not ironed and the glass from his Martini the previous evening had not been washed up. The bath was dirty and she was playing his Dr. Zhivago long player which already rasped with use.

  He poured himself a beer, read his Christmas cards, took a grip upon himself and called her.

  Her bright cheeks beamed. ‘Gaspadeen Randall,’ she said, ‘It is so good to see you this lunch-time.’

  Randall said: ‘Listen, Anna, I know it’s Christmas-time and I shouldn’t get angry but this is getting out of hand. Anyhow you don’t bother too much about Christmas.’

  All 18 stone of her quivered with pleasure. ‘You are wrong, Gaspadeen Randall. I understand Christmas. It is a good time. There is plenty to eat. You wait there and I will show you.’

  ‘You’ll show me nothing,’ Randall said. ‘We’ve got to have this out once and for all.’

  But she had retreated to the kitchen. A couple of minutes later she re-emerged with a tray on which she had laid a Western Christmas lunch—chicken and baked potatoes and a tiny plum pudding, just enough for one.

  ‘Anna,’ he said, ‘where the hell did you get the recipe for that?’

  ‘It does not matter, Gaspadeen Randall,’ she said. ‘It is enough that you like it. And here is your present.’ She handed him a beer mug moulded in the shape of a woman’s face, a woman with bright mauve lips and gold hair.

  ‘Anna,’ he said, ‘it’s beautiful. Thanks very much.’

  ‘It is nothing,’ she said. ‘But you were calling me. Was there something you wanted, Gaspadeen Randall?’

  ‘There was, Anna,’ he said. ‘I wanted to wish you a happy Christmas.’

  ‘Thank you Gaspadeen Randall,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much.’ She returned to the kitchen quivering with pleasure.

  The Helliers had a smart flat with icons on the walls and a polar bear skin on the floor and the biggest Christmas tree in Moscow. At home all Hellier’s hurried, sharp ways were blunted by domesticity and he only became a newspaperman when the phone rang. He even jumped when a stage phone rang during a television play and searched his pockets for pencil and paper.

  Elaine Marchmont was there with a hand-painted Russian lacquer box for Randall.

  ‘You and I,’ Randall said, ‘are doomed to misunderstandings and unfortunate coincidences.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘Let me guess. Could it be that you’ve bought me a hand-painted lacquer box?’

  ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘Because it’s what I’ve always wanted.’

  They exchanged boxes. A wild Tartar warrior for her, huntsmen slaying a wild boar for him. Both from the dollar shop like most of the other presents exchanged beside the moulting tree—amber beads, records, sets of bright wooden dolls which fitted inside each other, each reminding Randall of Anna, and wooden carvings.

  For the Helliers’ two boys there were a dozen presents each. Russian toys, mostly, basic and badly made. But, Randall noted, the boys didn’t seem to mind. There were presents, packaged with excitement this Christmas morning, and that was all that mattered.

  If children, who had forgotten the clever, glossy toys of the West, didn’t bother about the quality of their toys did it rea
lly matter, Randall wondered, that the Russians’ homes, clothes and food were poor by comparison with the West? All Western criticisms of Russian standards were probably false because they were based on such comparisons. He had seen the happiness on the faces of a family allotted a new apartment in some stark Moscow suburb: all that surely mattered was the quality of the happiness not the comparison with an apartment in Manhattan.

  They drank sherry beside the tree and watched the children squabbling over their toys. They played carols on the record player and remembered other Christmases, each dwarfed by time into a tiny bright picture like a reflection on a Christmas tree bauble. The young Dick Hellier assigned to stand-by duty on a small newspaper in New Jersey and knowing that one day he would become a great columnist, Randall talking about Christmas in Washington and remembering Christmas in Nairobi.

  He had taken the boys, small and tanned the colour of the countryside, into the game park with his wife. They sat in his Peugeot and watched the giraffe running with ancient, angular grace, ostrich staring, gazelle fleeing on dainty ballet hooves from the predatory car. They waited for lions while the blue fire of the sky died, but none appeared. And they returned to their sprawling house and ate cold turkey and mince-pies on the verandah and listened to the beat of drums in the distance. They welcomed the elusive, illusory comfort of seasonal togetherness and dismissed it next day.

  Elaine Marchmont went to the kitchen to help Betty Hellier and their nanny serve the lunch. Randall remembered her forecasting the manner of her Christmas.

  Betty Hellier watched anxiously as they sampled the turkey. She was a big-boned, blonde girl always anxious about something. If there was no crisis fermenting she created one. ‘Is it all right?’ she said. And when they said it was she persisted: ‘Are you sure it’s all right? It could be a little more tender I guess. But it should be good. We had it sent from London. It’s a Norfolk turkey and they’re supposed to be the best, aren’t they?’

  ‘It’s wonderful, Betty,’ Randall said. ‘It’s the best darn turkey I ever had.’

  ‘Is it really? Then have some more, Luke.’

  ‘Betty,’ Randall said, ‘I couldn’t eat another morsel.’

  ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘It’s not tender enough.’

  So Luke took another slice.

  At the head of the table the Helliers’ nanny, who had been kissed ten times under the mistletoe at the dance and had left giggling with a buck-toothed Dane, tended the children with a pre-occupied air and ate in silence.

  As Hellier started to light the brandy-soaked pudding the phone rang. His mind left the snug room and returned to the teleprinter; he put down the matches and searched his jacket for a pencil. ‘Goddam it,’ he said, ‘can’t they ever leave me alone.’ He left the unlit pudding and went to the phone in the hall.

  Betty Hellier said: ‘That’s Christmas ruined. I knew it would happen. He’ll have to go out on a story.’ She stared tragically at the pudding.

  ‘Thank God I didn’t become a newspaperman,’ Randall said.

  Hellier returned smiling. ‘This country,’ he said. ‘If I lived to be a hundred I’d never understand it. Do you know who that was?’

  ‘No,’ said his wife apprehensively. ‘Who was it?’

  The Goddam Foreign Ministry. And do you know what they wanted?’

  Everyone shook their heads.

  ‘They wanted to wish me and my family a happy Christmas. The guy went out of his way to remind me that the Soviets didn’t celebrate it. As if I needed any reminding. But he said he didn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t wish us a happy day. Can you beat that?’

  He lit the pudding and they watched the little blue flames trying to stay alive.

  ‘Sounds as if he’d been on the vodka,’ Elaine Marchmont said.

  Bud Fischer, a news magazine correspondent, said: ‘You shouldn’t be so uncharitable on Christmas Day. It was a nice thought.’

  ‘I guess so. I don’t know. Maybe I have been here too long.’

  Randall said: ‘It’s not you, Elaine. It’s what you’ve been instructed to think for twenty years or more. I reckon a lot of us go on thinking that way without bothering to open our eyes and look.’

  ‘I know one thing,’ Betty Hellier said. ‘The Russians love their kids. I’ve never seen people who love their children so much. And there can’t be much wrong with people who feel like that about children.’

  ‘Goddam it,’ Hellier said. ‘Any minute now someone is going to say why they’re just like us. We’re talking about a great power remember, not some underprivileged African state. Who’s for brandy, or a liqueur maybe?’

  If the Christmas morning was for children then the afternoon was for the adults. The boys were sent to their room to play with their new toys, about a half of which were already broken. And the adults dreamed thickly and fatly over thimble glasses of liqueur, ate chocolates and nuts and wondered where they would be next Christmas.

  Randall found himself holding Elaine Marchmont’s hand.

  ‘It’s Elaine Marchmont,’ she said. ‘Remember?’

  He patted the warm, dry hand. ‘We must go ski-ing again in the forest,’ he said. ‘It was good, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Sure it was good. It’s never been better.’

  ‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘we must do it again. You really did enjoy it, didn’t you?’

  Her hand moved beneath his. ‘Yes, I enjoyed it,’ she said. ‘As much as I’ve enjoyed anything for a long time.’

  Bud Fischer, who was said by other journalists to be the best informed correspondent in Russia, snored contentedly. Betty Hellier and her silent nanny chinked crockery in the kitchen; Dick Hellier cracked walnuts with thin hands restless without keyboard or pencil.

  Daylight began to fade and the Christmas tree shone brighter. Hellier picked his teeth free of walnut and lit a cigar. Bud Fischer’s snores became expansive as, slouched on the sofa, he refiled his stories from Korea and Suez.

  At 6 p.m. Betty Hellier appeared with a huge iced cake. ‘I don’t know what it’s like,’ she said. ‘I sure hope it’s good.’

  ‘Where did you buy it from?’ Randall asked.

  Dick Hellier said: ‘Jesus, now you’ve done it. She made it herself.’

  Betty Hellier flushed. ‘There’s no need to be like that,’ she said. ‘Since when did you dislike my cooking?’

  ‘I didn’t say I disliked it, honey.’

  ‘Then what do you mean?’

  ‘Honest to God,’ Hellier said. ‘I don’t know what I meant. I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t mean a thing. It looks absolutely great.’

  ‘You’ve ruined everything,’ she said.

  ‘Here, give me the knife,’ he said, ‘and I’ll cut it.’ He added under his breath: ‘And God help anyone who doesn’t eat it.’

  They all ate their slices.

  ‘Are you sure it’s all right?’ Betty Hellier asked.

  ‘It’s great,’ Randall said.

  ‘Then help yourself to another slice.’

  Randall laughed. ‘Honest to goodness, Betty,’ he said, ‘it was the greatest cake I ever tasted. But I couldn’t eat another crumb. Please believe me, it was wonderful.’

  ‘I’m glad you liked it,’ she said doubtfully.

  They drew the curtains and relaxed in the exaggerated cosiness accompanying the knowledge of the hostile night outside. They played a few more lazy games with the boys and said good-night with the pantomime tenderness of adults who have had enough of children for one day. Then they played a few games of cards.

  ‘You look restless, Luke,’ Elaine Marchmont said. ‘As if you have other plans for the evening.’

  ‘I am moving on in a few minutes,’ Randall said.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I won’t make a fool of myself again.’

  ‘You didn’t make a fool of yourself before.’

  ‘Sure I did. And kicked myself all night. Don’t worry—it won’t happen again.’

  ‘You’re a good girl,�
�� he said. ‘Don’t keep upsetting yourself.’

  ‘Sure I’m a good girl. And where did that ever get me?’

  ‘Hell, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. I meant you’re nice. One of the nicest people I’ve ever known.’

  ‘Thank you, boss,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much.’

  Just before Randall intended to leave the phone rang again. Hellier answered it and returned from the hall already putting on his shapka. ‘Wouldn’t you know it,’ he said. ‘Some bastard’s screwed everything up by blowing himself up on Red Square.’

  The Christmas atmosphere chilled. ‘What happened?’ Randall asked.

  ‘I don’t know yet. Apparently he was some kind of nut. He just stood outside the mausoleum with a home-made bomb strapped around his gut. They don’t reckon there was anything political to it. The poor guy was just out of his cotton-picking mind. Anyway all entrances to Red Square are sealed and there are enough militia around for a sequel to Keystone Cops.’

  ‘I knew it,’ Betty Hellier said. ‘I knew something would happen.’

  ‘Don’t worry, honey,’ Hellier said. ‘I won’t be long. It’s a messy story but it isn’t important.’

  ‘I’ll look after the girls,’ Fischer said. ‘When you’re as well informed as I am and you work for a weekly you don’t have to chase bum stories like this.’

  ‘If you were well informed you’d have known this guy was going to blow himself up,’ Hellier said.

  That night Randall drove Michele to the Lenin Hills. The snow had stopped and they stood where Napoleon had once stood and gazed over Moscow, asleep beneath a quilt the colour of seagulls’ wings. The night and the new snow had quietened its restless, nagging spirit and the hope which Christians resurrect once a year had spread, unsolicited, to the fount of disbelief. The people slept unaware of the glow, more gentle even than moonlight, over their city; unaware that this holy night, as they rested and prepared for the growling labour of tomorrow, they were looked down upon and cherished: unaware that it mattered little who cherished them—a creed or a God—it mattered only that they were cherished.