‘We all go against our better judgement from time to time in our youth. I’m not so sunk in age that I can’t remember behaving foolishly myself. It’s understandable and forgivable; perhaps it’s even necessary. But what’s none of those things is persistence in foolishness. Being swept off one’s feet, carried away, is one thing; to embark on a course of mistaken action and pursue it deliberately is quite another. Are you with me so far?’
‘Yes, sir.’ What sort of person would it have to be who had been unable to keep up with this?
‘Good. Sooner or later, you know, we have to go back, and it had better be sooner than later. There is such a thing as common prudence, after all. You must consider the immense weight of what is after all accepted as how things are supposed to be run. Will you – I beg you – will you give up this disastrous adventure? Please don’t force me to be more specific.’
Alexander hung his head, or more precisely allowed it to droop. ‘You know, sir,’ he said in an interested tone, ‘it’s funny sometimes, the way things work out.’ As he spoke he was telling himself that next week he would be able to bang Mrs Korotchenko in the middle of Northampton market square at midday if he felt like it and if she felt the enterprise would not be too humdrum. ‘You know you ought to do something,’ he twaddled on, deliberately not thinking ahead or back in the interests of verisimilitude, ‘in fact you want to do it very badly, but you just can’t bring yourself to. Lack of will or energy or something. And then, out of the blue, when you think it’ll never happen, something turns up and gives you a nudge and in a flash you’re the other side of the gap. You’ve taken the decision and you’ll never go back on it. Well, that’s what happened to me while you were speaking just now. I’ll break it off, Uncle Nick. In fact I already have; it’s just a question of letting it be known.’
Having followed this with a series of eager nods and a spreading smile, Tabidze came over and embraced him. ‘I’m delighted! What a relief! Sensible lad, to step out in time, before you do anything really foolish. You’ll never know how glad I was to hear you say those words. Which of course are confidential, like everything I’ve said to you. Have another drink, my dear. No, I insist. I’ll join you.’
A few minutes later, Alexander said, ‘Well, you were quite right, sir, I have things to do,’ and sniggered inwardly.
‘You must just have a word with Agatha before you go. She’d never forgive me if you didn’t. In the garden, need I say it? Never out of it when the weather’s half tolerable.’
Mrs Tabidze was out at the back of the house kneeling on a mat of some rubber-like substance, doubtless in the interests of comfort, since her green denim trousers could hardly have been dirtier; she seemed to be attacking a long row of various smallish plants with a pair of clippers. When she saw Alexander she smiled delightedly, got to her feet and took off her equally dirty gloves. They hugged each other; he was quite fond of her, in so far as he was fond of anyone. After the hug he looked about him, or feigned to.
‘The garden’s looking absolutely marvellous, Agatha,’ he said, trying to ram sincerity into his voice. ‘You have done well.’
She glanced at her husband and laughed. ‘Coming from somebody who doesn’t know a daisy from a hollyhock, that’s a handsome compliment. There’s nothing so ignorant as a man when he’s not on his subject.’ She turned. ‘What are you looking so pleased with yourself about?’
‘Oh, Alexander has made a very satisfactory report to me.’
‘By the way you’re beaming he must have reported they’re going to make you a general.’
‘Nothing like that.’
During this exchange, a matter of the barest particle of genuine interest came to Alexander’s mind. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you, Agatha: you remember you told fortunes at that party at our place? The last one was a certain lady,’ – as he felt at the moment he was able to speak with unexampled naturalness – ‘and at the end something happened that surprised you very much. What was it?’
Her face had changed at the mention of the lady, but it had changed back by the time she answered. ‘Yes, it was most odd. You see, I’d turned up the seven of hearts in the active near-future position, and there it means, as you heard, that the subject will soon do a deed of resounding virtue. Well, in a way of course that isn’t at all remarkable, theoretically any card may come up at any time, but what shook me was that I was quite certain I’d turned up the seven of hearts before, when it was what we call a dead card and didn’t signify – so certain I’d have wagered all I possess on it. But when I looked back to where it had been before, where I thought it had been before, it wasn’t there. Nicholas says it must have been the seven of diamonds I saw, but then… Still, that’s what it must have been. Very strange. Mark you, the whole thing’s strange, fortune-telling by cards, I mean. Did you know it’s a recognised form of proper divination? Oh yes. Cartomancy, they call it. Goes back centuries. You’re going to laugh at me, but I think there’s something in it. Yes, I do. It’ll be interesting to see how that prediction of mine turns out. Not that one would really have expected… But I mustn’t run on. How’s everybody at home?’
Alexander told her how and shortly afterwards took his leave. At one point in their conversation he had felt puzzled, but could not now remember the circumstances. As he rode away he dismissed the matter from his mind. Yes, he thought to himself, there might well be something in – what was it? -cartomancy. There might or might not be more in it than in faith-healing, clairvoyance, palmistry, flying saucers, telepathy, evolution, water-divining, time-travel, the unconscious, religion, the flat-earth theory, art, astrology, relativity, the Loch Ness monster, dreams, racialism, socialism, vegetarianism, spiritualism, reincarnation and the belief that Earth was colonised by beings from outer space. But there was something in it, something in all of them, something for everybody.
Whatever that something was, wondering about it on the way to the house of Korotchenko at least helped Alexander to shut out as far as possible any thought of what lay ahead. This was not only because of the inherent unwisdom of allowing in any such thought while in the saddle of a moving horse; earlier that afternoon, he had found his normal joyfully lecherous expectation becoming tinged with a certain grimness as the hour approached, an almost sullen curiosity best stifled. The English had a phrase about being put through the hoops to describe the experience of having an elaborate ordeal forced upon one by another. To judge by the escalating unconventionality of the ones provided on previous occasions, today’s hoops would have to be rather special.
It took some time to establish what they consisted of, even longer than expected. After a ten-minute search, in which he sagaciously included a checking of all cupboards and wardrobes, plus under the beds and even a none-too-large trunk in the corner of a box-room, he concluded that the house was empty. At that stage he remembered that there had been no cock and balls pictured on the front fence; perhaps Mrs Korotchenko had taken down her sign and moved on. Then in the silence he heard a pig squeal, as last time, and decided there was no harm in making absolutely sure.
Outside the back door there were quite a few pigs loitering about in a three-sided enclosure which also held a number of chickens, a number of ducks, a duck-pond, a dung-heap in an active state, a waggon with three wheels, a trap or dog-cart with one and a great pile of cardboard boxes, still saturated after the rain in the night. At the other end stood a large barn with a tiled roof and an open doorway in its middle. Alexander walked over, picking his way with some care, and looked inside.
His quest was done. Mother and daughter, naked as usual, were sitting side by side on the edge of what looked like a kitchen table near the middle of the building. As soon as they saw him they moved, mother getting up on to the table in her ungainly fashion and daughter getting off. He noticed a rope that had been thrown over a beam below the roof and was looped at one end, and speculated whether the arrangement might be that he should hang Mrs Korotchenko, or perhaps she him, during the act of love. When he got nearer he saw that there was a loop at the other end of the rope too and that she was engaged in putting one of them over her shoulders and under her arms, a task she finished in time to extend a courteous helping hand to him. The table moved a couple of centimetres as he climbed up on to it; he guessed it was on castors, which struck him as mildly odd. Very soon the second loop was round him, and not long after that the act just mentioned had begun. It continued when the table had been moved out from under their feet (so that was the point of the castors) and they dangled together in mid-air, continued further, though with much effort, when Miss Korotchenko, showing some of her mother’s bodily strength, sent them swinging to and fro in wider and wider arcs. Up to within a few metres of the end wall they zoomed, were suspended for an instant at rest and almost horizontal, plunged downwards again. By shoving them at angles to their original path the girl put them into a curved course that bore them out towards the side walls, and also cleverly imparted a spinning effect, so that they hurtled round the barn in a succession of vast unique elliptical orbits. Alexander thought it might never end, but it did; it had just started to when there was a slight jerk and he found himself flying through the air with an altogether different motion, out into the sunlight still locked with Mrs Korotchenko, now bawling her loudest near his ear, across the farmyard over the pigs and poultry and straight into the pile of cartons, which thanks to the soddenness of the cardboard adequately broke their fall. If they had come down anywhere else (except the dung-heap) they would have suffered severe injuries at least. When he had somewhat recovered he said,