‘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.’
9
At about the time Alexander was leaving the Korotchenko residence Theodore Markov was riding his power-assisted bicycle up the drive of a large house on the other side of Northampton. Several other such machines stood near the portico, as did two motor-cars: he recognised those of Controller Petrovsky and Commissioner Mets. There were also a number of horse-carriages of various kinds. Theodore dismounted and moved to the side of the building, where a path lined with flowering shrubs took him into a large open garden. Here some dozens of people were sitting or standing in groups round two all-weather tennis-courts, on each of which play was going forward. White-coated servants moved about with trays of wine, soft drinks, fruit, cakes and cold meat pasties; more substantial refreshments were being prepared in a marquee. Beyond the courts, where four English ball-boys darted to and fro at need, a woodwind orchestra occupied a small bandstand and played waltzes and galops from a century and a half before, while two or three couples danced on the surrounding paved space. Everything was supposed to be done in style, for this was one of the regular summer parties given by Igor Swianiewicz, victualler-general to the units of supervision.
And everything, from a sufficient distance, looked as if it had been done in style, looked right; to everyone there everything was right. No one thought, no one saw that the clothes the guests wore were badly cut from poor materials, badly made up, ill-fitting, unbecoming, that the women’s coiffures were messy and the men’s fingernails dirty, that the surfaces of the courts were uneven and inadequately raked, that the servants’ white coats were not very white, that the glasses and plates they carried had not been properly washed, or that the pavement where the couples danced needed sweeping. No one thought, no one perceived with other senses that the wine was thin, the soft drinks full of preservative and the cakes stodgy, or that the orchestra’s playing was ragged and lifeless. No one thought any of that because no one had ever known any different.