“Lakmé is coming,” said the Colonel, for it was his turn to speak. “It’s far and away my favorite opera. It makes an awful fool of the officer caste.” This was said with ambiguous satisfaction. He was not really disowning himself.
“How does it do that?” said Amabel, who was not more comfortable sitting down.
“Why, an officer runs off with the daughter of a temple priest. No one would ever have got away with that. Though the military are awful fools most of the time.”
“You’re that class — caste, I mean — aren’t you?”
The Colonel supposed that like most people he belonged to the same caste as his father and mother. His father had worn a wig and been photographed wearing it just before he died. His mother, still living, rising eighty, was given to choked melancholy laughter over nothing, a habit carried over from a girlhood of Anglican giggling. It was his mother the Colonel had wanted in Moscow this Christmas — not Amabel. He had wanted to bring her even if it killed her; even if she choked to death on her own laughter as she shook tea out of a cup because her hand trembled, or if she laughed and said, “My dear boy, nobody forced you to marry Frances.” The Colonel saw himself serene, immune to reminders; observed a new Colonel Plummer crowned with a wig, staring out of a photograph, in the uniform his father had worn at Vimy Ridge; sure of himself and still, faded to a plain soft neutral color; unhearing, at peace — dead, in short. He had dreamed of sending the plane ticket, of meeting his mother at the airport with a fur coat over his arm in case she had come dressed for the wrong winter; had imagined giving her tea and watching her drink it out of a glass set in a metal base decorated all over with Soviet cosmonauts; had sat beside her here, at the Bolshoi, at a performance of Eugene Onegin, which she once had loved. It seemed fitting that he now do some tactful, unneeded, appreciated thing for her, at last — she who had never done anything for him.
One evening his wife had looked up from the paperback spy novel she was reading at dinner and — having waited for him to notice she was neither eating nor turning pages — remarked that Amabel Bacon, who had been Amabel Fisher, that pretty child Catherine roomed with in school, had asked if she might come to them for ten days at Christmas.
“Nothing for children here,” he said. “And not much space.”
“She must be twenty-two,” said his wife, “and can stay in a hotel.”
They stared at each other, as if they were strangers in a crush somewhere and her earring had caught on his coat. Their looks disentangled. That night Mrs. Plummer wrote to Amabel saying that they did not know any young people; that Mrs. Plummer played bridge from three to six every afternoon; that the Colonel was busy at the embassy; that it was difficult to find seats at the ballet; that it was too cold for sight-seeing; Lenin’s tomb was temporarily closed; there was nothing in the way of shopping; the Plummers, not being great mixers, avoided parties; they planned to spend a quiet Christmas and New Year’s; and Amabel was welcome.
Amabel seemed to have forgotten her question about the officer caste. “… hissing and whispering behind us the whole time” was what she was saying now. “I could hardly hear the music.” She had a smile ready, so that if the Colonel did look at her he would realize she was pleased to be at the Bolshoi and not really complaining. “I suppose you know every note by heart, so you aren’t bothered by extra noise.” She paused, wondering if the Colonel was hard of hearing. “I hate whispering. It’s more bothersome than something loud. It’s like that hissing you get on stereo sometimes, like water running.”
“Water running?” said the Colonel, not deafly but patiently.
“I mean the people behind us.”
“A mother explaining to a child,” he said, without looking.
Amabel turned, pretending she was only lifting her long, soft hair away from her neck. She saw a little girl, wearing a white hair ribbon the size of a melon, leaning against, and somehow folded into, a seal-shaped mother. The two shared a pear, bite for bite. Everyone around them was feeding, in fact. It’s a zoo, Amabel thought. On the far side of the Colonel, two girls munched on chocolates. They unwrapped each slowly, and dropped the paper back in the box. Amabel sighed and said, “Are they happy? Cheap entertainment isn’t everything. Once you’ve seen Swan Lake a hundred times, what is there to do here?”
Mrs. Plummer slapped at her bangles and said, “We were told when we were in Morocco that children with filthy eye diseases and begging their food were perfectly happy.”
“Well, at least they have the sun in those places,” said Amabel. She had asked the unanswerable only because she herself was so unhappy. It was true that she had left her husband — it was not the other way around — but he had done nothing to keep her. She had imagined pouring all this out to dead Catherine’s mother, who had always been so kind on school holidays because Amabel’s parents were divorced; who had invited her to Italy once, and another time to Morocco. Why else had Amabel come all this way at Christmastime, if not to be adopted? She had fancied herself curled at the foot of Mrs. Plummer’s bed, Mrs. Plummer with a gray braid down on one shoulder, her reading spectacles held between finger and thumb, her book — one of the thick accounts of somebody’s life at Cambridge, the reading of the elderly — slipping off the counterpane as she became more and more engrossed in Amabel’s story. She had seen Mrs. Plummer handing her a deep blue leather case stamped with dead Catherine’s initials. The lid, held back by Mrs. Plummer, was lined with sky-blue moire; the case contained Catherine’s first coral bracelet, her gold sleeper rings, her first locket, her chains and charm bracelets, a string of pearls, her childless godmother’s engagement ring.… “I have no one to leave these to, and Catherine was so fond of you,” said a fantastic Mrs. Plummer.
None of it could happen, of course: From a chance phrase Amabel learned that the Plummers had given everything belonging to Catherine to the gardener’s children of that house in Italy where Catherine caught spinal meningitis and died. Moreover, Amabel never saw so much as the wallpaper of Mrs. Plummer’s bedroom. When she hinted at her troubles, said something about a wasted life, Mrs. Plummer cut her off with, “Most lives are wasted. All are shortchanged. A few are tragic.”
The Plummers lived in a dark, drab, high-ceilinged flat. They had somehow escaped the foreigners’ compound, but their isolation was deeper, as though they were embedded in a large block of ice. Amabel had been put in a new hotel, to which the Colonel conducted her each night astonishingly early. They ate their dinner at a nursery hour, and as soon as Amabel had drunk the last of the decaffeinated coffee the Plummers served, the Colonel guided her over the pavement to where his Rover was waiting and freezing, then drove her along streets nearly empty of traffic, but where lights signaled and were obeyed, so that it was like driving in a dream. The sidewalks were dark with crowds. She wiped the mist away from the window with her glove, and saw people dragging Christmas trees along — not for Christmas, for the New Year, Colonel Plummer told her. When he left her in the hotel lobby it was barely half past eight. She felt as if her visit were a film seen in fragments, with someone’s head moving back and forth in front of her face; or as if someone had been describing a story while a blind flapped and a window banged. In the end she would recall nothing except shabby strangers dragging fir trees through the dark.
“Are you enjoying it?” said Mrs. Plummer, snatching away from the Colonel a last-ditch possibility. He had certainly intended to ask this question next time his turn came round.