‘Seriously? Are people getting sick…?’
‘You may well ask. Officially not, we have been assured they are not harmful – but as you can imagine people are not entirely reassured.’
‘I don’t wonder. How do you feel about it?’
‘Occupational hazard, I guess. Apparently, it started in the early sixties and no one’s died yet. They’ve been secretly monitoring our blood – can you believe it? Without telling us anything. Listen, keep all this to yourself – not even Edward, promise?’
‘Of course.’
‘Otherwise I will lose my job and you might end up in the Gulags.’
It was becoming addictive, she confessed to herself as she left the café and headed towards the university; this amateur sleuthing, finding titbits for Larry and hearing secrets about goings-on at the embassy. Or was it something to do with Larry himself? There had been a difference in him today. She felt she had glimpsed a more serious person within. Already she was looking forward to their next meeting and she was planning in her mind how to engineer the introductions which he had suggested.
As the weeks passed, Marianne became aware that Larry was occupying more and more of her time, to the detriment of her academic work – but she didn’t care. She was transported into a different world; no longer researching what Lermontov was getting up to a hundred and fifty years earlier, her life was now focused on the present. She hung around the bars and cafeterias, listening to gossip and allowing men to chat her up – while keeping clear of any entanglements. She went in search of new samizdats which might interest Larry and spent hours tracking down rumours about a young lecturer in the foreign languages school who was believed to be the author of some of the dissident material which was circulating around the university. It was an existence utterly different from anything she had experienced in the past – an existence with which she was becoming increasingly intoxicated.
Then there was Larry himself; she had barely looked at another man since her marriage to Edward – but that look he had of Daniel, and the aura of danger which hovered around him… Of course, it was all fanciful, she told herself sternly; how could she think of deceiving Edward, the father of her beloved Izzy and the rock around which she had built her life?
Larry told her that meeting him too often in public could become awkward for her. Embassy staff had to assume they might be followed or watched. It was getting too cold now to meet outside and he had given her a name, the Minsk hotel, which was not on the Intourist A or B list but convenient for the centre of the city. ‘I use it sometimes for meetings,’ he had said. ‘It’s a safe place.’
It was a neutral request – nothing more had been said. No nods, no winks; a place to talk in confidence and she knew she could play it safe, be cool and detached. She also sensed it was an invitation she could accept if she wanted – that she was hovering on the brink of an adulterous relationship with unknowable consequences. She comforted herself that there was still plenty of time to decide. Yet when she looked into his eyes she could see desire in the liquid pools behind those thick-rimmed glasses and she suspected she knew which way she would jump.
The December snow was everywhere now and in two weeks she and Edward would be flying back to Vermont with Izzy to stay with her parents for Christmas. What she was contemplating did not affect Edward. Her love for him was steady and sure, she knew that – and she didn’t doubt his love for her. Sometimes she teased him about the nurses at the hospital but she doubted that Edward would transgress. No, this was altogether separate from Edward. She had entered a parallel universe; she hadn’t intended it, at least she didn’t think that she had – although at that first moment she had seen him at the embassy party it was as if a seed had been planted somewhere inside her, small at first but growing steadily over the subsequent months; it seemed to her a matter of unfinished business.
Most days she would pick Izzy up at one o’clock from kindergarten but today she had told them that Izzy would stay for the after-lunch nap and then play in the snow with the other children. The teachers had built a small slide out of ice in the yard behind the school and Izzy had been gratifyingly excited about staying for the afternoon.
As she tramped along the pavement towards the Minsk hotel, wrapped in her warmest clothes, Marianne didn’t think about Izzy or about Edward, she thought only about herself. She observed herself with curiosity, with an objective critique, as if she could determine the precise cause of this strange conduct, as if she had to explain to the impartial observer why this woman was heading to a hotel with every expectation of having a sexual encounter with a man who was not her husband. What was the reason for this atavistic behaviour? Was it rebellion against motherhood and domesticity or an attempt to recover a lost moment from the past?
Clearly, this could not be her, but this stranger – this previously unknown woman – had feelings she could no longer suppress. She had to know him completely, how he would look, how he would feel. She had sensed a lean and muscular body; she needed to bite his lips, taste the nicotine on his tongue. She wanted to feel his hands slipping under her blouse, peeling off her clothes and caressing her skin. She wanted to feel his skin against hers, the press of his body on her and in her; it was something she had to do – a consummation delayed for half a lifetime. She would not be denied.
As she made her way up to room 212, Marianne began to think she might have slipped into a private sexual fantasy and completely imagined their mutual intent. Larry seemed calm and matter of fact as he opened the door for her and inside the room they stood staring at each other for several seconds. He said nothing, but she felt his eyes asking her a question and with the slightest of smiles and a tiny movement of her head she answered his question in the affirmative. As she did so, he came towards her, took her head in his hands and kissed her.
Later, with her body still throbbing and burning hot in the overheated hotel bedroom she watched Larry slumber. Feeling the urge to talk, she said, ‘So this is where you bring your girls?’
‘Girls? No… come on, Marianne… no. I use the hotel just as a place to talk confidentially to people I need to keep in touch with.’
‘Really?’
‘Really, Marianne. I’ve never been here with a woman before.’
Did she believe him? It didn’t matter. He was single. She was the adulterer. She could hardly cast stones.
‘You know,’ said Larry, ‘I would never guess you were American if I didn’t know.’
‘It comes with being a linguist. After a year or so in England I’d picked up the accent and regular English vocabulary.’
‘So now you grill your tomarrtoes and walk on the pavements…?’
‘I do. And what’s more, I know my arse from my fanny,’ she said, giving him a sharp bite on the shoulder.
‘Ouch! That hurt. So, am I really like this guy you fancied when you were a kid?’ he said.
‘A bit. But I was little more than a child and we didn’t make love – at least not full sex – so I can’t compare you in every detail,’ she said, laughing and reaching down to caress him between his legs.
‘Hey, easy… but, I mean, it was real love, was it, with this guy?’
Marianne was silent for a moment; how to explain? Then she said: