‘No I haven’t – men don’t attract me in the least,’ said Alexander truthfully and angrily. Part of the anger was real, based on the thwarting of his conversational wishes, but more of it was assumed, based on his sudden perception that something more and other than displeasure was called for here. What she wanted, and would get, was a great show, a theatrical simulation, of disgust and disapproval. Taking her by the shoulders and glaring hard into her face, he went on in an unnaturally deep, expressive voice, ‘How dare you talk to me in this way! Here I am being as pleasant and loving to you as any man could be, and this is the thanks I get – to be asked the most intimate questions, have foul insinuations made and finally stand accused of unnatural practices with my own sex! And this after I’ve lowered myself to indulge your shameless, debauched fancies! It’s monstrous, obscene! You’re a vile, wicked woman, a whore and a degenerate!’
Long before the end she had begun to stir and twist in his grip, to breathe like someone suffering acutely from cold, to stretch out towards him. As he watched, her eyes dulled, her thin mouth slackened and her whole face grew lumpish and lubberly, an expression quite different from the one she had shown him in the kitchen. But he was not going to pause over the possible meaning of this, and certainly not to need urging on a third time, and very soon he had her snarling and howling away in his arms. When they had finished she fell asleep at once, still in his arms. She was not a quiet sleeper, giving little moans or groans as she exhaled, but Alexander was content. He stroked her cropped hair, which perhaps unexpectedly had not long been washed, and allowed his mind to rove.
Ever since his schooldays one of his favourite books had been Esme Latour-Ordzhonikidze’s ‘Some Thoughts and Sayings’. He still knew large parts of the section on Love almost by heart.
It is the most vulgar of errors to suppose that when a passion comes upon us quickly, it serves notice by doing so that it cannot stay. Is an instant, instinctive loathing sooner relinquished than a reasoned antipathy?
The mystics tell us that the love of God is infinitely strange, sometimes cruel, frightening, even outrageous… We must not forget that it was He who taught us how to love our own kind.
Those who contend that we cannot love more than one person at once would surely not deny that we can fear two or more persons at once, admire them, hate them, wish to protect them. A store of feeling is not a larder or a bank.
‘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?’
