again or (her brief appearance at the fortune-telling hardly seemed to count) still. He hurried into the room and stood before her, aware after brief but quite intense experience that to seize her was no good till she had indicated exactly how she wanted to be seized. In a voice like that of one about to fall into a coma she told him to sit down, indicating a chair placed side-on to the table, on which, he saw as he complied, there stood a plate bearing a cracker spread with pink paste, a small glass of what was probably vodka, a packet of Fribourg and Treyer’s Virginia No. 1 cigarettes and a gold metamatch. Even for cigarettes, these he knew were expensive, over ?20,000 for twenty, or a full day’s wage for a skilled worker. It was no wonder that people rarely- His thoughts shifted (not to anything in particular, just away) when, necessary preliminaries completed, she lowered herself wheezing and whinnying astride him. At the point when, given another few seconds, his thoughts would have begun to reassemble, starting off with some sort of recognition of the fact that so far all seemed strangely straightforward, she reached to her side, picked up the cracker and proceeded to cram it into his mouth. No gourmet had ever concentrated harder on the act of eating than Alexander now; though the flow of his saliva was feeble he got it all down in the end, even contriving to notice that the paste was fish, probably salmon. The vodka followed, every drop, with her holding the glass to his lips and hanging on to the back of his head with the other hand. By some miracle, or series of them, he succeeded in not coughing. Then she opened the packet and took out a cigarette, an operation that cost her some time and trouble. This was nothing, however, to the problem of getting the thing lit. She conveyed it to his mouth quite readily, pushing the heel of her hand against his cheek and turning her wrist till her fingers brought the tip within his reach; the real teaser came when she set about bringing fire to the other end. She made a platform against her bosom with her two hands, but it was only firm relative to herself; their mutual position was still very much that of two people on the deck of a small craft in a short sea. He would have accepted a brief interval at rest, but he could tell that that would not have suited the lady’s sense of style. Finally she pressed her forearm against his shoulder-blade and brought it up to a point where by turning his head at right angles he could get to the flame of the metamatch. Even now, not content with merely letting him puff away, she rested her hand on his jaw and took the cigarette into and out of his mouth. Three times he drew in smoke, not daring to inhale; the fourth time, guessing what was required of him, he pulled her hand aside and blew a jet into her face. At once her eyes shut tight, her mouth opened further and she gave that cry of hers. In it he heard clearly, so clearly that he wondered for a moment how he could ever have missed it, the accent of loathing, of shame, of grief at having done what she had done but, after successfully carrying out the equivalent of a breakneck gallop down a mountainside with stirrups up, he was too pleased with himself to bother about things like that.
Mrs Korotchenko detached from her palm and let fall to the floor what was left of the cigarette, crushed in her grip a minute earlier. When she had briefly held his hands to her breasts, she got up and adopted what could not have been a very comfortable position on the table, stretched out on her back with legs dangling and toes brushing the floor. Alexander attempted no conversation; he knew that to her he was no longer there, had indeed only been in existence for a few minutes in the last couple of weeks. Well, after no very long time he would be reborn. Meanwhile there was only one thing to do; the chair had a satisfactory high back; within seconds he was asleep. He dreamed he was riding Mrs Korotchenko in a ceremonial procession through the streets of Northampton; almost documentary realism, he was to reflect when he called this to mind later. After an unmeasurable time somebody said something to him.
‘What’?’ he said, waking.
‘Have you thought of a plan yet’?’ She was sitting on the edge of the table, absently swinging her legs.
‘Plan? What sort of plan?’
‘You know, you said you’d think of a plan to make my husband look a fool.’
‘Oh, yes, of course. Well, as a matter of fact I have.’
‘What is it?’
‘Well, the idea is for you to get hold of a list of the people who are secretly working for the Directorate, a complete list if possible, and then I’ll write them all letters saying I’m on to them and Deputy-Director Korotchenko doesn’t keep a proper watch on his office. Or his tongue.
After apparent thought she said, ‘That might do a bit more than make him look a fool.’
‘Yes, I suppose it might. Do you mind?’
‘No. No, of course not. They might send him home. The very thing. I can’t stand this country.’
‘Really? What about that list? Is it possible?’
‘It shouldn’t be difficult. No problem, in fact. There’s a man in Korotchenko’s office who wants to do things to me, but I haven’t let him because I don’t like him, but now I could easily tell him I’ll let him do them to me once each after he’s brought me the list. I shouldn’t mind. It’d be worth it. I’ll probably need a few days.’
‘What are these things he wants to do to you?’
‘Oh, all sorts of things.’
‘Er… Sonia, it can’t really be all sorts of things, can it? Astronomical things and gastronomical things and…’
‘Oh, all right. Things like fucking me and so forth.’
‘Things like-’
‘But why should I’? I’ve told you what I could do to get the list, but I didn’t say I would. Why should I? You tell me why I should.’
‘Very well. Listen to me. Your behaviour so far has been bad enough in all conscience, not only in deceiving your husband, in committing adultery, and with a much younger man at that, but in these evil perversions that, your appetite for normal healthy sex glutted and jaded, you positively insist on!’ Resonance was in his voice and dignity and authority, or approximations to them, in his manner. He lifted a forefinger. ‘Just try to imagine how your husband would feel if he could have seen you a few moments ago, sitting across a soldier in his uniform and jogging up and down like a drunken gypsy! You’re revolting!’
He had hardly begun his tirade before she was fidgeting and catching her breath, her features turning coarse and brutal with glee. When he lowered his voice to a deeper pitch of gravity and his manner became grimmer yet, she made a bleating noise and settled herself clumsily at his feet.
‘But all that, even that,’ he was saying, ‘pales into insignificance beside your proposal to submit to the most ignominious indignities in order to be able to deal a deadly blow to your husband’s pride and honour! Your foulest cravings are innocence itself in comparison! But justice will be done, and you will receive fitting punishment!’
Mrs Korotchenko had taken off one of his boots and was in the act of taking off the other; they were really high shoes, finely but stoutly made by Lobb of St James’s, called boots because the name had never been changed in regulations. Now she halted her movements and gave him an eager glance.
‘You mean I can put these back on?’ she asked indistinctly.
‘No, Sonia, I can’t punish you for something you haven’t yet done. When you’ve brought me the list it’ll be a different matter, I promise you. This afternoon I’m just going to correct you for your vicious sexual behaviour.’
She gave a submissive nod, finished taking off the second boot and, with a longing look at them, put the pair aside. Moving on hands and knees, she went to a corner of the large Wilton rug that covered most of the floor of the room and threw it back, uncovering a surface of bare boards scattered with dust, fluff and a few dead insects. Here she lay down on her back, her limbs spread. It was Alexander’s part to trample on her mildly for a few minutes, as he had learned to do last time. Then as now he had resisted her desire that he should carry out this exercise with his boots on. He had very little objection to causing her physical pain, since she so clearly had none herself to suffering it, but it would not do to cause her any kind of actual physical injury or leave an obvious mark on her. As before, too, he tried ridiculously to make himself weigh less as he put his feet down, cursing silently at the boredom of it, trying to find it funny and not succeeding at all.
After a while she ceased to squirm about and make her ambiguous noises. Guided once more by previous experience he stepped off her at this point and waited while she got rather groggily to her feet. What now? She mumbled something about two minutes and the same room upstairs and slouched out. Yawning, he went back to his chair. He noticed for the first time that there were representations of human figures wherever he looked, on plates or mugs, as parts of clocks or candlesticks, in the form of dolls, puppets, statuettes. They had been collected without regard for consistency of material, scale or period, let alone style. Their presence seemed to make it less, not more, likely that two people lived here, ate, slept, saw friends, played the music-sounder, read newspapers, watched the PP projector, gave orders to servants and were waited on by them. It was not after all
