Alexander was weeping, his hands over his face. First turning her dilated eyes heavenwards and drawing back the corner of her mouth, Nina went to him and put her arm round his shoulders. She said very quietly,
‘It’ll have forgotten all about it by now, you can be sure of that.’
‘How can I be sure? And even if it has, I still did it, didn’t I? I was still cruel.’
‘Yes, you were. We must be thankful it was no worse. And also you’ve learned how badly you feel when you’ve been cruel, and that’s bound to help to stop you being it another time.’
‘Yes, it’s bound to do that. And I should think it probably has forgotten, wouldn’t you?’
‘Oh, YES,’ she said with confidence. ‘Now I’d better go and dress, and you’d better start thinking of doing the same. Would you like some orange-juice?’
‘What a marvellous idea.’ He dried his eyes on a silk handkerchief.
‘I’ll have some sent up.’
‘Nina, there’s no doubt you are the nonpareil of sisters.’
He embraced her, able because of his greater height to hold her head against his breast. Unseen by him she pursed her lips. Presently she disengaged herself and left. After a moment’s thought he followed her, went to the stairhead and bawled the name ‘Brevda’ several times. Other voices took it up. After no very long time the sound of running feet became audible. Alexander retreated and stood looking out of the east window with his back to the gallery. The footfalls approached, slowed, shuffled, and an uncertain voice, a man’s voice, said behind him,
‘You called me, sir?’
‘Yes, Brevda, I called you. Would you be good enough to run my bath and then when I’m in it lay out my mess-dress?’
‘With great pleasure, your honour.’ Brevda spoke readily, perhaps with more than readiness; his master’s hardly less usual practice was to converse in unadorned imperatives with manner to match. He never complained or showed the least resentment; to do either would be unproductive at best, true, for Brevda was actually Trooper Brevda, Alexander’s bat-man, on indefinite but all too easily terminable detachment to the parental household in an era of servant shortage. At the same time he had been known to show what looked like a genuine regard, anyway something more than his position required. He stood now in renewed uncertainty, this time wondering whether he was to consider himself dismissed or not. Alexander had still not turned round. A moment or two later he said,
‘I think one should take life as it comes, don’t you, Brevda, not considering every detail from every possible angle?’
‘That would certainly seem to be a cumbersome procedure, sir.’
‘It doesn’t enhance a pleasure to dwell on it, as far as I can see.
‘My own experience has been along the same lines, sir.’
‘It’s very important to behave naturally and spontaneously. don’t you think?’
‘Of the greatest consequence, sir.’
‘After all, what are we to do in this world but enjoy ourselves?’
‘One might well ask, sir.’
Turning at last, Alexander gave Brevda a keen glance. Brevda, bespectacled, thin, untidy, much scarred by acne, looked steadily back. Then, simultaneously, both smiled. Alexander said briskly,
‘Make sure the bath isn’t too hot. It’s not January.’
‘Very good, your honour.’
Three-quarters of an hour later Alexander was on his way to join his father’s party. The Guards mess-dress (light-grey jacket with yellow piping and gold-plated bars of rank, matching trousers with a double gold stripe down the outer seam) showed off his handsome appearance to perfection. In the lobby before the drawing-room he paused. Here was the window-pane or panel his mother had referred to, once a small oblong of engraved glass, now a rough triangle of the same with the missing portion inexpertly filled in by a later hand. Part of the east front of the house could be seen depicted, together with some of the trees that had formerly stood near it. An inscription across the top referred to… omas Alexander third L… The very fragmentariness of this text had caught the imagination of the present Alexander, who had built up a mental picture of his namesake that was an only slightly idealised version of himself. Sometimes it occurred to him that, living in the same place and being, he would have said, of a sensitive cast of mind, he might one day attain a special, quasi-telepathic understanding of that distant figure; certainly he often asked himself what ‘Alexander’ would have felt, thought, done at some local turn of events.
Not so this evening, a warm, still time when colours faded in the ravaged gardens and a tiny breath of cooler air crept across the pond towards the house, one that would in the past have carried with it scents of the rural outdoors, some readily traceable, others strange and puzzling. For a moment Alexander tried to imagine them, to smell them, but even as he did so a delicious, distracting melancholy possessed him; he felt as if he had renounced all ambition, all art, all natural beauty for a doomed love. Peering through the thickening shadows to where the avenue of cypresses had stood, resting his forehead against the window, he whispered, ‘I am yours and yours alone, and the world shall end when I so much as permit another to glide into my dreams, my very dear lost one.’ He was of course addressing nobody in particular, nobody in existence, though all male persons and all females outside a fairly narrow age-group were unconsideringly excluded from his avowal. The tone of things in general seemed to him gravely lowered when, a moment later, he found he was wondering to quite a degree about Mrs Korotchenko.
2
Mrs Korotchenko had been fairly described by Nina as far as that description had gone; she, the wife of the Deputy-Director of Security, was in addition of muscular build, black-haired with that hair fashionably short and, tonight, clad in a dress of unprinted muslin so cut as to show off the afore-mentioned bosom. She also had on a light, fawn-coloured stole. Her husband, a thickset, heavily-whiskered fellow in formal olive-green, stood at her side during introductions in the drawing-room. The last one in the short line was a dark-complexioned young man called Theodore Markov, who could not have been more than thirty but was already going bald at the temples. He wore a dark-blue linen suit with single-breasted jacket and narrow trouser-cuffs.
‘Good evening, my dear chap,’ said Theodore Markov in his melodious voice.
‘Fine to see you, old customer,’ returned Korotchenko, rather grudgingly taking the other’s hand. If he had been surer of his ground he might not have done so at all, and he would certainly not have fallen in with the prevailing liberal fad of exchanging remarks in English by way of salutation. But he was a little overawed by the rest of the male company, Controller Petrovsky, who was his host, and Lieutenant-Colonel Tabidze, the military commander of the district. Nor had he been much comforted by the cool glance Mrs Tabidze had given him on their being introduced, even though what women thought of him was of no significance. Altogether the process of settling down in his new post (he had arrived only the previous month) had proved to hold its irritations.
In his not-so-distant youth Sergei Petrovsky had often been spoken of as the handsomest man in Moscow, and even today there was a young man’s vigour in his bearing and a bloom to his complexion, though his head of tawny hair and neatly-trimmed full beard bore heavy grey streaks. With a smile that showed excellent teeth he said to the newly-arrived Theodore Markov, who had just taken a glass of vodka from a servant’s tray,
‘Throw that down and have another, my boy. These fiddling little affairs hold no more than a coffee-spoon.’