Russian Hide-and-Seek

‘Just that the sulky look might be a dissatisfied look and Deputy-Director Korotchenko must be nearly sixty and Mrs Korotchenko can’t be much more than thirty-five. I think perhaps I should have said an unsatisfied look or a not-satisfied-enough look, shouldn’t I?’

‘I really have no idea,’ said Alexander, loftily again.

There was a short pause. Nina scratched her neck and stared out of the window. Still staring, she said in a monotone,

‘If you like, I’ll tell Anatol where you want to eat tonight.’

‘Thank you, my dear.’

‘It’s nothing. Where shall I say you want to eat?’

‘What? Oh, in the dining-room. Alexander sounded mildly surprised.

‘Good,’ said Nina with an effort, even now keeping her face turned aside; it would not do now to show amusement. ‘Did you have a good day?’

‘Deadly dull as usual. Nina, I… did something rather bad this afternoon, coming home from quarters.’

At once she looked him in the eye, all trace of levity gone from her manner. ‘What? What did you do?’

‘I… chased a sheep.’

‘Oh. That doesn’t sound very terrible.’

‘I was riding Polly, remember. There are several flocks of sheep in those fields on the far side of the road,’ – he pointed approximately – ‘and I must have passed them hundreds of times without it ever occurring to me to chase them, but today I did, and one of them ran away from the others and I concentrated on it, and harried it, and almost knocked it over, and then it froze, and it gave such a cry… Oh, Nina, think how frightened it must have been.’

Alexander was weeping, his hands over his face. First turning her dilated eyes heavenwards and drawing back the corner of her mouth, Nina went to him and put her arm round his shoulders. She said very quietly,

‘It’ll have forgotten all about it by now, you can be sure of that.’

‘How can I be sure? And even if it has, I still did it, didn’t I? I was still cruel.’

‘Yes, you were. We must be thankful it was no worse. And also you’ve learned how badly you feel when you’ve been cruel, and that’s bound to help to stop you being it another time.’

‘Yes, it’s bound to do that. And I should think it probably has forgotten, wouldn’t you?’

‘Oh, YES,’ she said with confidence. ‘Now I’d better go and dress, and you’d better start thinking of doing the same. Would you like some orange-juice?’

‘What a marvellous idea.’ He dried his eyes on a silk handkerchief.

‘I’ll have some sent up.’

‘Nina, there’s no doubt you are the nonpareil of sisters.’

He embraced her, able because of his greater height to hold her head against his breast. Unseen by him she pursed her lips. Presently she disengaged herself and left. After a moment’s thought he followed her, went to the stairhead and bawled the name ‘Brevda’ several times. Other voices took it up. After no very long time the sound of running feet became audible. Alexander retreated and stood looking out of the east window with his back to the gallery. The footfalls approached, slowed, shuffled, and an uncertain voice, a man’s voice, said behind him,

‘You called me, sir?’

‘Yes, Brevda, I called you. Would you be good enough to run my bath and then when I’m in it lay out my mess-dress?’

‘With great pleasure, your honour.’ Brevda spoke readily, perhaps with more than readiness; his master’s hardly less usual practice was to converse in unadorned imperatives with manner to match. He never complained or showed the least resentment; to do either would be unproductive at best, true, for Brevda was actually Trooper Brevda, Alexander’s bat-man, on indefinite but all too easily terminable detachment to the parental household in an era of servant shortage. At the same time he had been known to show what looked like a genuine regard, anyway something more than his position required. He stood now in renewed uncertainty, this time wondering whether he was to consider himself dismissed or not. Alexander had still not turned round. A moment or two later he said,

‘I think one should take life as it comes, don’t you, Brevda, not considering every detail from every possible angle?’

‘That would certainly seem to be a cumbersome procedure, sir.’

‘It doesn’t enhance a pleasure to dwell on it, as far as I can see.

‘My own experience has been along the same lines, sir.’

‘It’s very important to behave naturally and spontaneously. don’t you think?’

‘Of the greatest consequence, sir.’

‘After all, what are we to do in this world but enjoy ourselves?’

‘One might well ask, sir.’

Turning at last, Alexander gave Brevda a keen glance. Brevda, bespectacled, thin, untidy, much scarred by acne, looked steadily back. Then, simultaneously, both smiled. Alexander said briskly,

‘Make sure the bath isn’t too hot. It’s not January.’

‘Very good, your honour.’

Three-quarters of an hour later Alexander was on his way to join his father’s party. The Guards mess-dress (light-grey jacket with yellow piping and gold-plated bars of rank, matching trousers with a double gold stripe down the outer seam) showed off his handsome appearance to perfection. In the lobby before the drawing-room he paused. Here was the window-pane or panel his mother had referred to, once a small oblong of engraved glass, now a rough triangle of the same with the missing portion inexpertly filled in by a later hand. Part of the east front of the house could be seen depicted, together with some of the trees that had formerly stood near it. An inscription across the top referred to… omas Alexander third L … The very fragmentariness of this text had caught the imagination of the present Alexander, who had built up a mental picture of his namesake that was an only slightly idealised version of himself. Sometimes it occurred to him that, living in the same place and being, he would have said, of a sensitive cast of mind, he might one day attain a special, quasi-telepathic understanding of that distant figure; certainly he often asked himself what ‘Alexander’ would have felt, thought, done at some local turn of events.

Not so this evening, a warm, still time when colours faded in the ravaged gardens and a tiny breath of cooler air crept across the pond towards the house, one that would in the past have carried with it scents of the rural outdoors, some readily traceable, others strange and puzzling. For a moment Alexander tried to imagine them, to smell them, but even as he did so a delicious, distracting melancholy possessed him; he felt as if he had renounced all ambition, all art, all natural beauty for a doomed love. Peering through the thickening shadows to where the avenue of cypresses had stood, resting his forehead against the window, he whispered, ‘I am yours and yours alone, and the world shall end when I so much as permit another to glide into my dreams, my very dear lost one.’ He was of course addressing nobody in particular, nobody in existence, though all male persons and all females outside a fairly narrow age-group were unconsideringly excluded from his avowal. The tone of things in general seemed to him gravely lowered when, a moment later, he found he was wondering to quite a degree about Mrs Korotchenko.

2

Mrs Korotchenko had been fairly described by Nina as far as that description had gone; she, the wife of the Deputy-Director of Security, was in addition of muscular build, black-haired with that hair fashionably short and, tonight, clad in a dress of unprinted muslin so cut as to show off the afore-mentioned bosom. She also had on a light, fawn-coloured stole. Her husband, a thickset, heavily-whiskered fellow in formal olive-green, stood at her side during introductions in the drawing-room. The last one in the short line was a dark-complexioned young man called Theodore Markov, who could not have been more than thirty but was already going bald at the temples. He wore a dark-blue linen suit with single-breasted jacket and narrow trouser-cuffs.

‘Good evening, my dear chap,’ said Theodore Markov in his melodious voice.

‘Fine to see you, old customer,’ returned Korotchenko, rather grudgingly taking the