Russian Hide-and-Seek

8

The Old Parsonage turned out to be a rather large, squareish building painted pink. In front of it ran a plank fence on which someone of no great talent had recently drawn in chalk an erect penis with testicles appended. Alexander, riding through the gateway, considered that some generous neighbour, rather than the lady of the house herself, was most likely responsible, but that the second hypothesis could not be dismissed with any confidence. On the far side of the fence, out of sight from the road, there was an untidy lawn that had evergreen bushes on it. Untying the couple of metres of head-collar rope he fastened Polly to the gate and began a cautious advance, his eyes open for alternative escape-routes as if he expected to meet a Cambodian suicide squad rather than a presumably unarmed female.

The front door was ajar. He hesitated and pressed the bell beside it, which he heard ringing both then and on a second and a third try, but nobody came, so he pushed the door. A short passage manifested itself with a tiled floor of chequered pattern, rooms on each side behind glass doors, more passage beyond at right-angles and the foot of a staircase. Continuing to advance cautiously, he found a dining-room to the left, a drawing-room to the right and nobody in either. When he reached the right-angle he thought, he was almost certain, that there was a person on the landing or half-landing of the staircase, but his direct look a second later showed nobody. On the left-hand side of the house, behind the dining-room, he noticed another door that was not quite shut. It proved to give into a kitchen in which there was somebody: Mrs Korotchenko, leaning naked against the wall that faced him.

Alexander was not the kind of man to linger (or muddle his brains) over such a sight; his advance now was precipitate and he closed with her fervently. Not long afterwards he muttered,

‘Let’s go upstairs.’

‘No. Here.’

‘Come on, darling, don’t be silly, it’s so much more comfortable.’

‘Here, I tell you!’

Resolutely but not violently he caught her round the waist and tried to pull her away from the wall; in response she lifted her hands above her head and gripped what he saw to be the roller of a roller towel against which, rather than against the wall itself, she was in point of fact leaning. So supported she was in an excellent position to fend him off with her powerful legs and he soon gave up his attempt. Now he did look at her with some curiosity and she returned his look with her eyes and nostrils dilated and her lips drawn back.

‘For the love of God,’ she said through her teeth, and reached out for him. At this stage he remembered how the night before last she had shown herself to be no friend of amorous delay, and in the very least time possible set about answering her appeal. Once or twice he found her mouth with his own but each time she lifted it out of reach. She had evidently kept hold of the towel-roller and quite soon took him unawares with the strength of her arms and shoulders. By then his own strength was under severe test; however, it remained equal to all the demands made of it, even at the end when, except for the relief provided by her leaning posture, her entire weight was upon him. Her strange cry sounded, in its unmuffled form (given close to his ear, too) not liable to wake the dead but bidding fair to bring round anyone in the house who might have been merely dozing. This time the note of helplessness or hopelessness seemed plain to Alexander; another quality, perhaps more than one, still eluded him.

As silence abruptly fell he thought, he was again almost certain, that he heard a noise behind him, a slight cough or perhaps a snigger. He looked over his shoulder as smartly as he could, but saw nobody.

‘What was that?’ he asked.

‘What was what?’ Her tone was incurious.

He shook his head and said nothing. After a moment she moved unsteadily to one side and half-lay in a sprawl across the top of a line of cupboards running towards the door. This stood open; he could not remember whether or not he had shut it and dismissed the matter from his mind when Mrs Korotchenko put his hands against her as she had done before.

‘That was wonderful, darling,’ he said, and he was not exaggerating, though he would have been describing his own feelings more accurately by calling what had happened so odd as to be hard to believe already. He gazed into her face, but could find no emotions there, only signs of her physical state. Her glance met his briefly and moved on as if he had been a stranger whose eye she had caught in a public place. ‘Shall we go upstairs now?’

‘What for?’

‘It’s more comfortable. As I said.’

‘Yes, but why do you want to go there now? All right,’ she went on before he could answer, perhaps remembering their conversation in his father’s garden, and lowered her bare feet to the floor.

‘What about your clothes?’

‘What clothes?’ It was true that there were none of hers to be seen.

‘The ones you… were wearing before I arrived.’

‘What? My clothes are upstairs,’ she said, starting for the door, her arms hanging by her sides.

‘There’s nobody about, is there? Servants or anything? I could have sworn I saw someone.’

‘You’re mistaken, there’s nobody but ourselves.’

They went out and down the passage to the foot of the stairs. As they began to climb he slipped his arm round her waist; she looked down over her shoulder to see just what constituted this outre gesture, scratching her stomach meanwhile. The room they went to was at the far end of the upstairs passage, narrow from side to side but with a high sloping ceiling. There was not a great deal of light in it because the windows were small and half-covered with squares of heavy brocade that must have been cut from some much larger piece, and the dull crimson wallpaper and sepia rugs made it seem darker. The pictures provided no cheer either, watercolour or crayon landscapes and figure-paintings all by the same prodigiously untalented hand, the drawing inept beyond compare, the uneven colours overflowing or falling short of their boundaries. Other objects showed translated versions of the same truly childish incapacity: a bulging earthenware mug, a piece of dirty knitting with a forsaken look to it, an out-of-focus photograph of a girl aged about ten, a book-cover of some artificial material on which the lettering was badly spaced and aligned. Nevertheless it proclaimed clearly enough that the book inside the cover was ‘Anna Karenina’, by Count Leo Tolstoy, and if Alexander had been interested he could have established with great ease that this was indeed so, and further that the pages were creased and occasionally spotted with food and drink up to about the middle of Part One, after which they were quite smooth and clean. But of course he was not in the least interested in that, nor in the pictures nor in any inanimate object in the room other than the bed. Its dimensions and surroundings proclaimed it not to be the marital bed in style or fact, but it would serve well enough.

He pulled off the counterpane, a cheap bought article, and quickly undressed while Mrs Korotchenko watched him from a stool set before a large mirror decorated with picture postcards secured by the frame and with more crayon. As he looked about he became aware that, although he could see articles of clothing here and there around the room, her clothes, in the sense he had meant just now, were still missing. No doubt she went naked indoors at all reasonable times. When he finally sat himself down on the bed and asked her to join him there, he half-expected her to prescribe some unusual alternative place or activity, or at least to ask him what he wanted her to do that for, but she came over at once and in silence. Even so, when he embarked on the activity he had had in mind, which was simply and obviously (for the moment, at any rate) the detailed exploration of what he had so far been able only to glimpse in large outline, her response was not warm, nor even very friendly. She was submitting with a fairly good grace to perversities like being kissed and gently caressed when any normal woman would naturally have preferred to be wriggling about on the sod or dangling from a wall. Her body was so interesting to Alexander that at first he could ignore her indifference, but after a time what he would have called his self-respect began to suffer a little. Asking her her name seemed a good move, especially since he had never been told what it was.

She answered up in full like a child. ‘Sonia Korotchenko.’

‘Mine’s Alexander,’ he said out of politeness, for he quite thought she knew this.

‘Oh yes? Alexander what?’

‘My surname happens to be the same as my parents’.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Petrovsky. Your hosts of the night before last. ‘Oh, I never notice the names of the people my husband takes me out to.’

‘What happens when you return hospitality?’ It took them off the track but was too striking to let go.

‘We don’t, because my husband’s too mean,’ she said like someone mentioning a sick man’s infirmity. ‘If he has to give people drinks he takes them to the club.’ In the same breath she asked, ‘Have you had a lot of girls?’

‘I suppose you could say that. But none of them were as sweet as you, Sonia.

‘Do you like young girls?’

‘Not particularly,’ he said, adding after only a small interval, ‘They’re so immature, most of them. I’d much rather have a- ‘How old was the youngest you’ve had?’

‘Thirteen, I think; I started quite young. How beautiful you are. You’ve got the loveliest- ‘Have you ever had two girls at once?’

‘Two girls at… I see what you mean. No, I haven’t. It’s having one person for your very own that really matters, isn’t it? Unless you-’

‘Would you like to try it?’

These all seemed to him to be perfectly proper questions, but he had no desire whatever to go into them now. He said with more gentleness than he felt, ‘But darling, what business is it of yours, eh? Why do you want to know?’

‘I’m sure you would. Have you ever fucked a man? You must have done.’

‘No I haven’t – men don’t attract me in the least,’ said Alexander truthfully and angrily. Part of the anger was real, based on the thwarting of his conversational wishes, but more of it was assumed, based on his sudden perception that something more and other than displeasure was called for here. What she wanted, and would get, was a great show, a theatrical simulation, of disgust and disapproval. Taking her by the shoulders and glaring hard into her face, he went on in an unnaturally deep, expressive voice, ‘How dare you talk to me in this way! Here I am being as pleasant and loving to you as any man could be, and this is the thanks I get – to be asked the most intimate questions, have foul insinuations made and finally stand accused of unnatural practices with my own sex! And this after I’ve lowered myself to indulge your shameless, debauched fancies! It’s monstrous, obscene! You’re a vile, wicked woman, a whore and a degenerate!’

Long before the end she had begun to stir and twist in his grip, to breathe like someone suffering acutely from cold, to stretch out towards him. As he watched, her eyes dulled, her thin mouth slackened and her whole face grew lumpish and lubberly, an expression quite different from the one she had shown him in the kitchen. But he was not going to pause over the possible meaning of this, and certainly not to need urging on a third time, and very soon he had her snarling and howling away in his arms. When they had finished she fell asleep at once, still in his arms. She was not a quiet sleeper, giving little moans or groans as she exhaled, but Alexander was content. He stroked her cropped hair, which perhaps unexpectedly had not long been washed, and allowed his mind to rove.

Ever since his schooldays one of his favourite books had been Esme Latour-Ordzhonikidze’s ‘Some Thoughts and Sayings’. He still knew large parts of the section on Love almost by heart.

It is the most vulgar of errors to suppose that when a passion comes upon us quickly, it serves notice by doing so that it cannot stay. Is an instant, instinctive loathing sooner relinquished than a reasoned antipathy?

The mystics tell us that the love of God is infinitely strange, sometimes cruel, frightening, even outrageous… We must not forget that it was He who taught us how to love our own kind.

Those who contend that we cannot love more than one person at once would surely not deny that we can fear two or more persons at once, admire them, hate them, wish to protect them. A store of feeling is not a larder or a bank.

‘Love is a game with [only] one rule: that the fact of its being a game must never be acknowledged in word or deed, and as rarely as possible in thought,’ said Archilochus, and men reviled him for his wisdom.

True passion always takes us by surprise, even throws us into disarray. Angels arrive unexpectedly; no-one was ever amazed to see a tax-gatherer.

He whose wish to love is unreserved, free from all thought of self and with no eye for the future – him the fay grants his wish.

To love is to become again as a child and to have a child’s immunity conferred on one. Even attorneys acknowledge an age of responsibility.

These were some of the maxims that, verbatim here and there, floated through Alexander’s head as he lay in the narrow bed with his arms round Mrs Korotchenko. His posture happened to be one he could sustain for a relatively long time without discomfort, a rare accident for one so situated. It may have contributed a good deal to his present feelings, which combined well-being and amiability at a pitch that seemed to him new, or partly new, or relatively new. He believed that he had had a kind of prevision of Mrs Korotchenko as he stood in the lobby at home immediately before their first meeting. Preternatural events of that sort were often associated with important emotional experiences, as Latour-Ordzhonikidze had remarked (under Ghosts, not Love). He was grateful to have been given the chance of pleasuring her, or if not that of satisfying her, or at least of doing what she had wanted him to do. And he was grateful to her in a different way: however a good fuck might be defined (and after half a dozen years of extensive and varied experiences he was still not quite sure) she was one all right. Suddenly he found his thoughts had drifted to Kitty. Of course he loved her too, but not quite in the same sense: more impulsively, less variously, less remarkably. It had something to do with their respective ages. He would learn from the older woman and teach the younger, so improving his capacity for love in an altogether licit fashion: Latour-Ordzhonikidze had made an observation on this head, though Alexander could not recall the exact text.

Time passed. He dozed off. When he woke up Mrs Korotchenko was awake too and looking at him expectantly.

‘How long have we got?’ he asked.

‘My husband’ – she pronounced the words with sardonic emphasis – ‘won’t be here till after six o’clock.’

‘I must be away before then in any case. Do I gather you’re not as fond of him as you might be?’

‘I hate him, but he doesn’t know I do, I make sure of that. I’d do anything to make a fool of him, humiliate him. Anything.’

‘Such as making him think you’d wanted me to make love to you and I hadn’t obliged?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘No, naturally not. Why do you hate him? Why did you marry him?’

‘I married him because I thought he was one kind of man and I hate him because I found out he’s really another.’

‘What kind is that?’

‘Which one?’

‘I don’t care, whichever you like. All right, the kind he is.’

‘An ordinary man.

‘I see,’ said Alexander, seeing only that he had asked about the wrong kind of the two and not pursuing the matter, since he had no curiosity about her idea of an extraordinary man. ‘How would you like to make a fool of him? In what connection?’

‘His work, his job. It would have to be that, it’s the only thing in his life.’

‘I suppose he talks about it all the time,’ he said guilelessly.

‘Not a word, he’s as close as an oyster. So he doesn’t talk about anything. As you may have noticed.’

‘M’m. Er, you mean showing him up as incompetent, something like that?’

‘Yes, no good at dealing with the English resistance, say.’

He was completely unprepared and his face must have given him away, or given something away, if she had not as she spoke shut both eyes, one of which she was now rubbing. ‘What English resistance? I didn’t know…

‘There must be one. I certainly don’t know anything, but there can’t not be one, and probably with a lot of Russians in it. People like you.’

‘Me? Why me?’

‘Young. Impulsive, not afraid of a few risks.’ She opened her eyes; their Asiatic quality seemed accentuated. ‘Chivalrous. You must be in it.’

‘I’ve just never heard of there being anything to be in.’

‘I’d join it myself if I got the chance. Fight the lot of them in any way I could. I wouldn’t mind dying.’

There was not much to be said to that, not that he could think of anyhow. What he did finally say was, ‘I’ll think about that idea. Of showing your husband up. See if I can concoct a scheme.’

Later, as he was finishing getting dressed (she made no move to do so), he took her stole out of his haversack and handed it to her. ‘I’m afraid it’s a little crumpled.’

‘Thank you.’ She seemed embarrassed.

‘Why did you leave it there?’

‘I must have forgotten it.’

‘No. You have just missed your second chance to ask where it was found, which if you really had forgotten it you’d have wanted to know. You left it there in the garden on purpose and I want to know why. By good luck I stopped it being taken to my mother; if it had been I’d have some very awkward explaining to do. And suppose she’d noticed you weren’t wearing it when you came indoors. Suppose your husband had; a fine thing that would have been.’

‘He never notices anything about me.’

‘He’d notice something about you if he came walking into this room now. And about me too – the fact that I’m here. How do I know you haven’t arranged it as an amusement for yourself?’

‘I wouldn’t do a thing like that. Do you think I’m mad?’

‘I don’t know what you are, Sonia, but if you tell me why you left that stole behind I may have something to go by.’

‘It was a sort of joke,’ she said in her lifeless way.

‘Joke! On who? On me, I suppose.’

‘Well, on… on everything, really. I was just stirring things up, on a small scale: I knew nothing serious could happen. But of course I shouldn’t have done it; I see that now; I’m sorry.’

Alexander recognised his cue. ‘I’m glad to hear it. So you should be; it was a piece of absolutely disgraceful behaviour. You’re a naughty girl, Sonia.’

What followed held more than one surprise. She smiled slightly, something he had expected her never to do at all, and a touch of animation was in her voice when she said, ‘Do you think perhaps I deserve to be punished for it? There’s still time.’