‘The cell leader. The identity of the leader of the whole movement is known only to two other people.’
‘I can see the point of that, but it must raise certain-’
‘Alexander, I want to come to talk to your father about something, something quite different obviously, but I’d like you to be about the place too. When would be a good time?’
‘Friday is his open-house evening. If you want a long chat with him you’d do better to wait till next week. I can be there almost any night.’
‘Friday will do nicely. Thank you for not asking questions. I hope you won’t mind if I ask you one. Did you mean what you said about your father, that you were prepared to shoot him?’
‘I said I thought so. I still think so, but I can’t really imagine what it would feel like to be actually about to do it.’
Without further inquiry Theodore removed himself, mentioning a pile of work at the Commission. Alexander, left hand in pocket as traditionally allowed off-duty Guards officers, strolled down to his earlier position near the stage, on which a break had just been called and mugs of tea were being handed round. This time the young actress did catch his eye, long enough for him to give her a nod of greeting but no longer. He waited to see if she would turn towards the others, from whom she was standing a little apart; when she did not, he moved. Almost at once he was introducing himself as a newly-appointed member of the Commission.
‘My name is Sarah Harland,’ she said in an inexpressive tone, quite different from the one she had used when speaking her lines. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I thought you might do me the honour of letting me take you out to lunch. I’m afraid there’s nowhere very-’
‘Why should I?’
‘No important reason. I got interested in the play, and we could-’
‘No you didn’t, Russian; all you had any time for was whatever the boss was telling you.
‘You were watching me, then.’
‘I was watching the audience – an actress always does that in rehearsals. No, you’re not interested in the play, you’re not even interested in me; all you want is to get me on my back as fast as possible. You
She was not speaking inexpressively now. Seen close to she looked sprightly and rather formidable, Alexander thought, with something very attractive about the way she moved her lips and something even more attractive about the development of her figure. Carefully underplaying the honest bewilderment, he said after a pause,
‘What can I do to convince you that at least I’m interested in you? – never mind the play.’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’
Sarah Harland turned her back and went and accepted more tea while he grinned a little to himself. Even during their short conversation she had invisibly led them away from the main body, now augmented by a young actor and an old actor, and had kept her voice down. So all he had to do was the only thing open to him to do and watch more of the play, watch an hour of it, watch till the rehearsal was over, watch on a future occasion, but anyway introduce a long enough pause, whether of minutes or days, for Miss (or Mrs) Harland to feel able to satisfy some mysterious power that she was not making herself cheap. Then would come lunch and then, after minutes or days, but inevitably from the moment just now when she had spoken her first words to him, bed. Once, when he was sixteen, he had known a girl from a remote country district who pulled his hand away the first few times he laid it on her breast and again when he thrust it up her skirt; the same trait on a different scale. When one looked at it in a certain way, it was quite remarkable how little there was to understand about women.
12
‘You know, Brevda, when you come to think about it, life is hell.’
‘It notoriously has its negative aspects, sir.’
‘There seems no rest from having to decide what one ought to do in a given situation.’
‘The necessity of moral choice can be most onerous, sir.’
‘Self-interest just isn’t a sufficient guide to behaviour, is it?’
‘Sadly deficient in many respects, sir.’
‘After all, there is such a thing as right and wrong.’
‘Bravely spoken, sir.’
Having paced the length of the gallery a couple of times engaged in this style of talk, master and man halted at the east window of the house. It was Friday evening about six-thirty. In the afternoon there had been a heaviness of the air that had seemed to threaten thunder, but this had passed and the sun sparkled brightly on the dark waters of the pond below them. Alexander’s mind was blank; he could not now remember why he had started this conversation, nor had he any idea what to say next. In an effort to shake off inertia he turned abruptly on Brevda, saying almost at random,
‘Have you got me some fresh cigarettes?’
‘No, sir, I-’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, I have to go in tomorrow, sir, and you still have about ten, and you never smoke more than about two or three in a-’
‘Tonight might be just the night I want twenty. Simply because you lead such a wretchedly repetitive mean little life you needn’t suppose others do the same. In future see I have a full packet at all times. I’m sick of the sight of you – be off and draw my bath.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Brevda.’
‘Sir?’
Alexander stared at his valet for a long time, blinking and slowly opening and shutting his mouth. Then he said, ‘Sorry. It’s… the heat,’ this in such a way as to leave no doubt that, whatever it was, it was not that. ‘Well, am I forgiven?’
‘Of course, your honour.’
Half an hour later Alexander was in his bedroom putting on his mess-dress. By now he seemed in the best of spirits; he was whistling a song of the regiment, fresh in his mind after hearing the band practising it in preparation for the next morning’s ceremonial parade. The vodka-bottle still stood on the writing table, but its level had not changed for over a week. In the same kind of way he had given notice of his intention to turn up this evening and had spent the last half-hour quietly reading when he could have been lying face down on his bed. These improvements originated not in any self-reformatory efforts but in the completeness with which his energies were now absorbed: any time left over from work and sex was used up by the revolution and there was none to spare for drink, plaguing the household or behaving like someone in a nineteenth-century Russian novel. As a result he was nearer to being contented, even happy, than he had been for years; it was true that his second visit to the rehearsals of the English play, paid the morning after the first one, had been productive only of irritation, but a kind of semi-discreditable relief had soon followed. His obvious response to the set-back must be complete inactivity for as long as possible, not a daunting prospect to one already so extended. In fact, he had since realised, his original approach to Sarah Harland had been in pursuance of that earlier and comparatively juvenile policy of his that dictated instant pursuit of any attractive female – earlier than his association with Mrs Korotchenko, the most unjuvenile passage, it seemed to him, of his career to date.
His comb struck a tangle of hair at the crown of his head, spun out of his hand and skidded across the top of the dressing-table to vanish between it and the wall. Cursing loudly in English, he used excessive force to make an aperture for his arm. His groping fingers soon found the comb, but they had already found something else as well, something that felt like a crumpled piece of card. It proved to be a treasure he had thought for a year or two to be lost – he had had no cause to look behind the dressing-table in that time, and no more had any servant: the ancient photograph, taken seven metres below where he stood, that had told him of the cypress avenue, the yew hedge, the statues of nymphs and hunters, the little stone lions once to be seen from his window. Whether because of the lapse of time, or the renewed effect of the old flat-look process, or most likely the experience he
