A small smile. ‘Are you looking for an escape? I have my own key.’
He put some music on – that Janáček piano music seemed appropriate – and led the way into the bedroom. They undressed, rather shyly at first, watching each other cautiously. If he had expected passion and frenzy, that was not what he got. Instead they lay on the bed touching very gently, moving slowly, watching each other’s eyes, sensing how things – heartbeat, expression, breathing – change. How bodies can be measured and vibrant, as though under a great tension, like the strings of a cello.
Afterwards, they dozed, touched each other again, dozed, kissed, dozed again. Sam realised, amongst many other things, that he felt unconscionably happy. It cannot last, he thought.
And then he slept and so, presumably, did she.
7
When he came back from the bathroom in the cool light of dawn Lenka was awake. Her face seemed blurred with sleep, the features ill-defined, her hair a chaotic cloud across the pillow. ‘What’s the time?’
‘Six-thirty.’
‘It’s early. Come back to bed.’
He stood, looking down on her. Already regrets were coalescing in his mind. What did a night like this mean? What did it mean to her? What did it mean to him? He knew how dangerous it all might be. Diplomats were warned about it time and again, warned of blackmail, warned of beautiful women who will flatter a man’s self-image and wheedle information out of him. Swallows, the Soviets called them, swallows, with its hints of what they might do to you, and, correspondingly, what you might do as a result – swallow them hook, line and sinker. It was worse if you were queer – they’d find pretty boys who’d suck your cock while the film cameras whirred away behind one-way glass mirrors. Look at Vassall. A clerk in the naval attaché’s staff in the British embassy in Moscow, he had been famously set up by the KGB, famously photographed pleasuring and being pleasured, and was now famously languishing in Wormwood Scrubs. Of course, Sam told himself, he was running nothing like that kind of risk. No wife to worry about. No heavy-handed policeman to arrest him for indecent behaviour. As Eric Whittaker, his boss, had memorably observed, ‘If you’re going to blow your nose, for God’s sake make sure that the handkerchief is clean.’ Well, Sam’s handkerchief, folded and pressed, had certainly been clean enough up to now because Stephanie was British and worked at the embassy. The worst that might have happened was a raised eyebrow from the ambassador’s wife and a suggestion from the ambassador himself that Sam make an honest woman of the gel. Which would have meant Stephanie resigning her job, the archaic ways of the Foreign Office insisting on the spinsterhood of its female employees. But that hadn’t happened. The ambassadress had said nothing, while he and Stephanie had spent three months more or less together before she got that posting back to London that she couldn’t turn down because her mother was unwell and she was needed to help her father deal with the problem. Aged parents, an only child. It wasn’t easy. The intention was to keep in touch and catch up when Sam got back to London, which would be in eighteen months.
In the meantime, what would happen to their oblique, tense relationship, based as it was on emotions never fully expressed and intentions never fully articulated?
Half-smiling, Lenka looked up at him from the bed. Nothing tense or oblique at this precise moment. He reached down and pulled the sheet aside to expose her to the cool light of dawn. Steffie would have cried in protest and struggled to cover herself. Lenka didn’t move, just lay there beneath his gaze, imperfect and erotic, and so unlike Stephanie as to belong to a different gender altogether. Lenka had a body; Steffie had a figure. Lenka had a scent; Steffie had perfume. Steffie’s perfume was alluring enough – something floral, hints of jasmine and citrus and sandalwood – but Lenka’s scent was different. Ripe and dark. Something sour, astringent. Mammal, organic. He recognised it from someone else, the first woman he had ever loved when he was young and naive. She had been a generation older, a strange, wayward woman who had taught him passion but not constancy. Standing over Lenka, he felt that familiar stirring. Lust? Love? Something beyond words, expressible only by actions.
‘Do you want?’ she asked. She could see that he did. There was no disguising what was happening. But time was pressing. ‘I’ve got a meeting at nine.’
‘It’s Saturday.’
‘Her Majesty’s envoys work tirelessly to protect the realm.’ He didn’t know how to do that in Czech or Russian without it coming out like a piece of Stalinist propaganda rather than the irony he intended, so he said it in English, which meant Lenka rather missed the point. He sat on the edge of the bed and put out a hand to touch her, just her face, the line of her chin, almost as though to define it.
Where, he wondered, do we go from here? And then he turned the thought into words before he had a chance to censor them. ‘Where do we go from here?’
She sat up, pulling the pillows behind her, unashamed of her nakedness. Her gaze was narrow, as though she was trying to see right through his eyes and read what was going on in his mind. ‘You’re worried about your girlfriend?’
‘Not only.’
She reached for a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table. ‘Ah, you think maybe I am an informer. Maybe I work for the StB?’
He smiled. ‘I doubt it, but you might. Diplomats always worry about that kind of thing. Should I be doing this? Is it a set-up? In the proximity of women we’re worse than priests.’
‘If you’re a priest, then I’m a nun.’
Was that a joke? It was difficult to tell. Her manner was strange, oblique at times, startlingly direct at others. Perhaps it was just her unfamiliarity with spoken English. She put her cigarette to her mouth and lit it. A skein of grey smoke appeared between her lips. He had already discovered many of her tastes, and that was one of them, the faint, acrid flavour of tobacco on her mouth.
‘You can’t be a nun. Nuns don’t smoke in bed.’
She laughed now, real, smoky laughter that took a moment to disperse. ‘So, if I am not StB, you ask where do we go from here? But it is not we, is it? It is you. Where do you go from here? Because you are thinking of your girlfriend whose name you have not yet told to me.’
‘Steffie. Stephanie, actually.’
‘That is Štěpánka in Czech. It is beautiful name.’
‘Better in Czech. To me it sounds very English.’
‘And is she very English?’
‘Very.’
‘But I am not, and you are wondering about the difference. Did Stephanie sleep with you the first evening you spent with her? I expect she did not. So, does that make me, what? A prostitute?’
No misunderstanding there. One of the universals. Prostitutka in both Russian and Czech, and probably every other language under the sun. ‘Don’t be absurd. I don’t think like that at all. We both did it, me and you together. Our choice.’
‘But that is how men are, you are thinking. And women aren’t. They should be saving themselves, like Štěpánka did.’
They were hovering on the edge of their first argument. ‘Rubbish. You’re putting words into my mouth.’
‘Ha! Then everything is all right. If we want to stay together, we stay together. If we want to go to bed together, we go to bed together. If we want to go away, we go away. Is that all right?’
‘It seems logical.’
Logic appeared to satisfy her. Logic was good. She sat there in his bed, on his side of the bed, looking as prim and determined as it is possible to be when you are entirely naked. ‘So, are you going to tell me about Štěpánka?’