Randall had his hair cut by his favourite barber, a grey-haired woman with warm, sensitive hands. The other women, as buxom as Anna, looked as if they might cut off your ears if you upset them, especially if you had the misfortune to be a West German. But not his grey-haired Katrina: he felt that she regarded him maternally and when his head rested briefly against her bosom he imagined her soothing him as she would soothe a son. She had told him that she had lost her only boy in the Battle of Moscow.
‘None of you in the West know what war is,’ she told him. ‘None of you except perhaps the Germans. And they found out when they tried to conquer us.’
He had argued. What about all those who had been bombed, bereaved, crippled? What about the carnage in the Pacific and on the beaches of Normandy? What about the Blitz on London? But she had shaken her head gently. ‘You had your misery and suffering,’ she said. ‘But it was individual suffering. We bled as a nation. If one of your young men died it was bad luck, if one of our young men returned it was a miracle. We lost a generation of men. That is why we women still do so much work.’
With her Randall found he could talk without the self-consciousness which usually stilted conversation with Russians. She was not affected by rancour or suspicion.
Now as she snipped carefully away at his hair, grasping it between her fingers as adroitly as any male barber, she touched his burning ears and said: ‘You have been out without your shapka, Gaspadeen Randall. That is very bad. Soon you will have no ears for your shapka to rest on.’
‘Then your job will be easier,’ Randall said. ‘You won’t have to bother about trimming the hair round them.’
‘Frost-bite is no laughing matter,’ she said. ‘I have seen men lose their limbs. Especially in the war.’
Always they returned to the war. ‘Do you still hate the Germans?’ he asked. ‘All this time afterwards.’
‘I don’t hate them. Many people do. They don’t really hate the Americans or the British. They are told to hate them but the reasons for the hatred are too remote. But they can never forgive the Germans for what they did. Some women—you can see them shovelling the snow now—lost everyone, husbands, sons, grandsons. Why, these women don’t even know where Vietnam is. All they know is that it was the Germans who took everything—everything Gaspadeen Randall—from them.’
Beside him a square man in a grey suit who might have been a German asked to have his head shaved. Randall looked inquiringly at Katrina in the mirror. ‘Da?’
She smiled. ‘Niet.’ And whispered: ‘I think he comes from Kazan. A Tartar if you like.’
‘How many heads of hair will you have cut by the time the day is over?’
She shrugged. ‘Twenty, thirty, who knows.’
‘And how many nationalities?’
‘A dozen, maybe. Eastern Europeans mostly. I don’t mind them. It is the Italians and French I don’t like. They are so fussy with their hair. Especially the ones with poor hair. You, Gaspadeen Randall, have a good head of hair.’
‘I wish you could cut the grey hairs out and leave the black.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with grey hair. Grey-haired men are more attractive. And you have a young face. It is the face that counts.’
Randall grinned at himself in the mirror. ‘You,’ he said, ‘are the greatest charmer since Eve.’
He gave her a fifty kopek tip, which she took although no one in the Soviet Union was supposed to accept gratuities, and went happily down the stairs to the coffee bar.
They drove through new suburbs—cube upon cube of pale flats, and past an old village of ice-cake cottages which the cranes and grabs had not yet reached. Five miles out of the city they parked the car and put on their skis.
Elaine Marchmont, Randall thought, looked almost pretty in her scarlet ski clothes, her face pink with the cold and framed with white fur. Together they slid into the forest, wading along the flat, coasting down the small inclines, skis sighing beneath them.
Above them the snow lay heavy on the branches, as still and thick as candle grease, and the stems of the silver birches moved beneath the weight as if they might snap as easily as the limbs of old ladies. The white light and the cold and the silence embraced each other and became one. Randall and Elaine Marchmont kept to a path polished by other skiers, but sometimes tracks broke away into the deepening silence where a lone skier had departed to a cottage or a white glade, to meet his love or find himself.
‘It’s wonderful,’ Elaine said, and there was youth in her voice.
‘Do you feel like a rest?’
‘If you do.’
‘I do.’
They swooped down a small hill, fell in a drift and unclasped their primitive cross-country skis. The pale bones of the silver birches seemed to shudder with the impact; fingers of snow detached themselves from twigs and fell with soft sounds. Behind them fleeting sunshine burnished their ski tracks into ribbons of metal.
They stood and looked at each other. ‘This is the Russia you’re liable to forget,’ Randall said.
‘I wish we could stay in this Russia.’
‘Us and the wolves.’
‘You don’t get wolves this near the city,’ she said without conviction.
Up on the ridge behind them two figures stopped and a healthy Texas voice broke the stillness. ‘Hi, there, kids. Having fun?’ It was a third counsellor from the embassy out with his wife.
‘We sure are,’ Randall shouted back.
‘Cold enough for you?’ shouted the counsellor’s wife.
‘It sure is,’ Elaine shouted.
The two intruders moved on, voices freezing and dying.
‘It’s impossible to go anywhere in this wide world without meeting an American,’ Randall said. ‘I’m surprised there wasn’t one sitting on Everest when the British got to the top.’
‘The snow always makes me think of my childhood,’ Elaine said.
‘It makes most grown-ups think of their childhood. That’s why so many of them don’t like it.’
‘I love the snow. When it’s like this—sombre and majestic. When we were kids we used to play a game called Angels in the Snow. It wasn’t a game, really. You just had to lie in the snow and move your arms up and down and your legs out sideways so that you left a print in the snow which looked like an angel. Or we kidded ourselves they looked like angels.’
‘Okay,’ Randall said. ‘Let’s see you make an angel.’
‘If you’ll make one too. Although I should think St. Peter would have a fit at the thought of Luke Randall making an imprint of an angel.’
She lay down in the snow laughing, a slim happy girl whom he had never met until today. When she arose there was an imprint which bore some resemblance to an angel.
‘Now you,’ she said.
He lay down self-consciously and moved his arms and legs about. When he stood up he left behind a deeper imprint. ‘You know something?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Our wings are touching,’ he said.
‘Time to be getting back,’ she said. ‘It’s going to snow again.’
Other skiers were heading back towards the road, bright-faced, breath frosting on the air. Hollows were filled with shadows and ink filled the veins of the trees in the distance as Randall and Elaine Marchmont skied slowly back to their adult lives. A wind eased its way through the forest rustling the parchment skins of the silver birch, blowing away the tinsel of the day. Their feet ached with the cold.
When they reached the road it had begun to snow and in the glow of the headlamps of the lorries which never ceased trailing each other in and out of Moscow the first few flakes looked like moths seeking the light.
‘I suppose,’ Elaine said carefully as they neared Kutuzovsky, ‘I suppose you’re going out tonight.’
‘As a matter of fact I am,’ Randall said. ‘There’s a party at the British dacha.’
‘I guessed as much,’ Elaine Marchmont said.
‘Why don’t you come along?’ But it was
too late.
‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘As a matter of fact I’m going out too.’
They pondered on the lie until he drew up outside her block.
The party at the British dacha was as he had known it would be. Stilted at first; then when the important guests had left and the liquor had thawed upper-lips and dissolved reserve, scenes of gaiety on the dance floor. A young man with fuzzy hair said: ‘We made sure it would be a super party by inviting all the most amusing people in Moscow.’ Randall watched Farnworth dancing on a table and noticed Mason disappear into the garden—looking for intruders, perhaps—and return with frost on the bushes of hair in his ears. But Randall enjoyed himself because the gay mood of the day persisted and the girl called Michele who said she had not enjoyed the afternoon was there.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When the snow finally settled Moscow was as Richard Mortimer had always expected it to be. And he settled down into a routine which he hoped would settle the uneasiness fertilised by Mason’s warnings and the incident with Green.
The Ambassador had been very gentle. ‘You weren’t to know,’ he had said. ‘Green is a very experienced journalist. In the past I have assumed—quite disastrously sometimes—that journalists knew more than they did. But there’s no real harm done. The story was quite accurate.’
‘Then it hasn’t harmed Anglo-Soviet relations?’
‘Good gracious no,’ the Ambassador said. ‘Whoever told you that? It’s probably done them more good than harm. We actually handed a defector over to the Russians.’ He smiled at the young man who might one day become an ambassador. ‘I sometimes think that rules and regulations are interpreted a little too rigidly by some members of the staff. There’s no harm in stories like that being reported. But, of course, there are some matters—questions of policy and suchlike—that will come to your ears which shouldn’t be talked about. Your own common-sense will tell you which those are.’
Later Mortimer asked Ansell: ‘Who told the Ambassador that I leaked the story to Green?’
Ansell shook his head. ‘No idea, old man. But I suppose it had to get back to him sooner or later.’
‘Did you tell anyone?’
‘I gave Mason an outline of what had happened. There would only have been a bloody great inquiry and it would have looked all the worse in the end.’
‘And I suppose Mason immediately told H. E.?’
‘I suppose so, old man. Don’t fret. He didn’t give you an awful bollocking, did he?’
Mortimer experienced a spurt of spite. ‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘He was very decent. And, of course, I told him all I knew.’
‘All you knew? But you didn’t know any more than any of us.’
‘I knew where Green got the story from in the first place,’ Mortimer said.
‘You didn’t tell me,’ Ansell said.
‘I thought you knew,’ Mortimer said.
After that Ansell’s eagerness to help Mortimer waned. And when Mortimer’s Anglia arrived from Britain he was able to drive himself to and from work, losing himself in one-way streams of traffic that swept him to unfamiliar places, speeding beneath red lights suspended high above the streets, stopping miserably when the militia whistled at him, nodding nervously as, bleak-eyed and unsmiling, they reprimanded him before dismissing him because he was a diplomat.
He was also provided with a girl friend.
Her name was Diana. A pretty, bouncy girl from the embassy who gladly complied with his colleagues’ attempts to partner her with Mortimer. At most of the dinner parties he was invited to Diana seemed to be there.
At first he told himself that he enjoyed the parties. The conversation over drinks—ballet, Russian lessons, previous postings, the stupidity of maids, the rudeness of Russians in general, how the time dragged during the second year in Moscow; hostesses shunting guests around so that everyone mixed, the call to the dinner table with names printed on slips of cardboard, and Diana’s name never very far away.
Then talk about the food, always good, and the wine which they imported although there was nothing wrong with Georgian wine. Munching paused while everyone listened to the observations of the Minister, or a visiting MP rehearsing his opening remarks on the bonds of friendship between Britain and the Soviet Union for tomorrow’s Press conference. Faces mottled with food and fired with brandy; jokes about misunderstandings with Russians which were regretted in the morning. Russian lessons again, ballet, a last drink and off home at 11 p.m.
And there was always the question of getting Diana home. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I can get a taxi.’
But before he could reply the host clumped him on the back. ‘Get a taxi? Not on your life. Richard wouldn’t want that, would you, Richard?’ And a wink for both of them.
Before long their names were coupled together. ‘Are you and Diana coming out to the dacha tomorrow? Would you and Diana like to come ski-ing with us at the weekend?’ It seemed as if the personnel department of the Foreign Office had, with the care it reserved for Moscow and Eastern European postings, arranged a friendship which would discourage either partner from becoming a security risk.
On the first occasion she invited him up to her flat for coffee and kissed him. A small, friendly kiss. ‘I like you,’ she told him. ‘I think you’re very sincere.’
They drank their coffee on the sofa and she asked him if he were engaged. The instinct of self-preservation prompted him to say he was. But other instincts drew his attention to the plump, bouncing breasts and an expanse of thigh revealed by the high-hitched skirt. He remembered Valerie’s breasts and thighs, occasionally and accidentally on show but never on offer.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a girl friend back in England. But we’re not engaged or anything like that.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a feeling we’re going to be good friends.’
‘I hope so,’ he said, as she leaned forward to pour him more coffee, showing him the swell of her breasts.
He drank the coffee. ‘And now you must go,’ she said, as if they had just completed the act of love with a few minutes to spare before the return of a cuckolded husband.
On the second occasion he was allowed to feel her breasts. He didn’t recall making the attempt himself, no struggle with a brassière, no half-hearted resistance—in fact no resistance at all. She put out the main light and sat beside him, and then her breasts were free and his hands were on them.
‘Do you like them?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said, and wondered what else one said.
‘Kiss them then,’ she said.
He obeyed, feeling the small pink nipples between his lips.
‘I like that,’ she said. And then put them away beneath her pink sweater, which matched her nipples, as if she were replacing art treasures in a glass case. The movement was so definite that he abandoned tentative thoughts of slipping his hand along her thigh.
Once he gave a small dinner party and didn’t invite her. Just the Masons, the Ansells—reluctantly—Hugh Farnworth who was in charge of security, and his wife, and Luke Randall whom he thought of as his first friend in Moscow. He borrowed a maid from downstairs to cook the meal.
Immediately they asked: ‘Where’s Diana?’
Farnworth was particularly interested. ‘Not fallen out have you, old man? She’s a damned nice girl you know.’
‘We haven’t fallen out,’ Mortimer said. And added with a trace of irritation: ‘We’re not engaged or anything you know.’
‘Don’t say another word,’ Farnworth said. ‘I know how it is. We mustn’t be too presumptuous.’ He implied that an engagement announcement could be expected soon.
Mrs. Ansell said: ‘They have a place here called the Palace of Weddings. It’s such a sweet ceremony. Chandeliers and music and lots of champagne afterwards. Do you remember, dear, when the Simpsons were married in one.’
‘I thought it was diabolical,’ Ansell said, glancing at his wife as if anything connected with matri
mony were diabolical.
Mason said: ‘Diana seems to be a decent enough girl. You could do worse, Richard.’
Randall said very little.
Next day at the embassy Diana chattered with spurious enthusiasm about his party. ‘I was so pleased to hear that you had a working dinner at your place,’ she said. ‘I know those sort of do’s are essential for your career.’
By the end of the day he felt sorry for her. He stopped her in the lobby. ‘I’ve got a couple of tickets for the Bolshoi tomorrow. I thought you might like to come. It’s Swan Lake.’
‘I’d love to,’ she said.
At the top of the broad stairs he caught sight of the Ambassador. He was smiling approvingly.
The ballet started early in the evening so that Muscovites could go straight there from work. Mortimer, who had been delayed by a militiaman for making an unauthorised U turn, arrived with Diana five minutes before it was due to begin.
They melted into what appeared to be a queue at one side of the foyer which was packed with jostling bodies. Mortimer handed the tickets to a scowling woman and asked the way; she gestured behind her with her thumb towards another crowd.
‘I’ve no idea where we go,’ Richard said.
‘Let me have a look at the tickets,’ Diana said in her efficient, secretary voice. He had a sudden vision of her, middle-aged and impatient, snapping at a mild and inefficient husband.
‘Well?’
‘It must be down this way,’ she said. ‘We’d better take off our hats and overcoats. They won’t let us in with them.’
At a door leading into the stalls another woman pointed at their coats. ‘Niet,’ she said.
Mortimer said in faltering Russian: ‘We are not wearing them.’
The woman folded her arms. ‘Niet,’ she said.
‘We’ll have to go back to the cloakroom,’ Mortimer said.
‘I’ll wait here,’ Diana said. ‘You take the coats.’
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