Derek Lambert - Angels in the Snow

The breeze picked up a corkscrew of snow and drove it across the car park. In December the children sprayed the playground with water and their skates sang in the dusk. Now they scrabbled and fell and laughed at a puppy nosing in the snow for moles or bones. By February the snow would be piled eight foot high around the clearing as soiled and sordid as dirty sheets.

In the kitchen he drew the curtains and watched two cockroaches, brown and shiny, run for cover frantically waving their long antennae. In India he had seen cockroaches as big as your thumb. He made some coffee and took a cup to the woman waiting for him in the bedroom.

She sipped it slowly, feeling for words, knowing the answers.

‘When does your husband return?’ he asked.

‘Next week. You know that.’

‘I never promised anything,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said, ‘you never promised anything.’

‘You make me feel like a heel.’

‘I don’t mean to.’

Two diamond tears formed in the corners of her eyes.

‘For God’s sake don’t cry.’

‘Don’t look at me then.’

The two tears coursed down her cheeks and reinforcements took up their positions. Her eyes were green in the sunlight, the colour of sea-water just past the shallows. The flesh beneath her chin was tired and her breasts beneath the black nylon nightdress chosen for illicit love were flaccid.

‘I’m not looking at you,’ he said. He turned towards the snow again and the bright sky curdling towards the centre of the city into a pall of creamed smoke from the power station. It was always there in the winter, quite grand sometimes or—according to your mood—obscene with the convolutions of a naked brain. A red Moskvich car moved off painting black ribbons in the snow. A Russian chauffeur brushed snow from a Mercedes with a brush made from thick, flowering grass grown in the south, with the delicacy of a hairdresser. He looked very compact and self-sufficient nine floors below. The pigeon peered into the bedroom, pulsing its throat.

‘I know I look ugly,’ she said. ‘But I wasn’t ugly last night, was I?’

‘You were beautiful,’ he said. ‘I loved you and desired you.’

‘And then?’

‘And then it snowed.’

Upstairs a fat maid called Larissa arrived early for once in her lazy life and, on her way to draw the curtains in the lounge, walked into the hanging carcass of her master. She felt the body uncomprehendingly, then screamed, then fainted, then screamed again and ran out of the flat. At first no one took any notice because noises in the flats were many and varied and the Cubans across the way were accustomed to screams at any time of the day. Finally a woman delivering cables slapped the maid’s cheeks and fetched the militiaman from the courtyard. The agencies reported the death and it made two paragraphs in the New York Times.

Across the courtyard Richard Mortimer inspected his new home. A narrow, spinsterish bedroom, a small lounge where he would have intimate dinner parties, a bathroom with a hand-shower, a parquet-floored corridor linking all three. It was his for two years and he was excited with the knowledge.

Outside, Moscow was again as he had imagined it. The blocks of flats staring at each other with dead eyes, grey or yellow-bricked. The snow and the mufflered children. From the other window he looked across the highway at a vast hotel, a lunatic cement wedding-cake, sand-coloured and bayoneted with spires.

He dressed carefully in his new charcoal suit. White shirt, striped tie, waistcoat.

Harry Waterman spent the morning sticking strips of newspaper across the joins in the windows to prevent the iced wind piercing the flat in deep winter. He worked slowly and inefficiently, and as he worked the familiar sourness spread inside him like a stain—eight years of his life lost, the dwindling years ahead. He could look neither behind nor ahead for comfort. The sourness was becoming worse, an ulcer of the soul. He drank a neat vodka, then another, and the sourness sharpened into anger.

He went into the kitchen which was the only other room in the flat, to see what his wife had left him for lunch. There was a saucepan of borsch, cold sausage and tomato salad on top of the stove. Soup, sausage and spuds. It was as bad as the food in the camp, he lied to himself.

He went down to the road to a beer hall, hiding his bottle of vodka inside his coat, scowling at the cold. In the beer hall they greeted him and listened to his routine stories of life at the camp on condition that he stoked them with vodka and told them about the girls.

Luke Randall finished dressing and said good-bye to the woman in his bed. ‘Try and be gone before the maid arrives,’ he said.

‘Why do you hate me?’ she asked.

‘I hate myself,’ he said.

‘You’ll destroy yourself,’ she said. ‘Soon you’ll have no one. You can’t go on using people and rejecting them. You can’t say you love people one minute and throw them out the next. No wonder your wife left you.’

‘She’s on holiday in the States,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’

‘She’s left you and I don’t blame her.’

‘How do you know she’s left me?’

‘Because I read a letter from her to you.’

‘You’d better be gone when I come back this afternoon,’ he said.

‘She left you because of your affairs.’

He looked at her with distaste. She looked middle-aged and bitter. They had reached the spiteful stage. ‘The trouble with my wife,’ he said, ‘is that she understands me.’

He took his coat, left the flat and waited for the lumbering lift. In the flat across the landing, as bare as a prison cell, a French woman screamed at her husband. The husband screamed back and there was silence.

The lift arrived and he slammed the gate with the finality of a man closing a book at the end of a chapter. Stuck inside the lift, as ponderous as a pulley on a building site, was a typewritten slip advertising a Moskvich for sale; it had been bought duty-free by a diplomat who was now out for his profit on the open market.

Outside, the shining sky had dulled to slate. Wisps of snow as sparse as last autumn leaves drifted from the greyness, flakes of whitewash dislodged from the ceiling.

A snowball squeezed into a small cannon-ball of ice hit him in the back.

‘Hey,’ he shouted, ‘who threw that?’ He thought about throwing a snowball back; then thought about his own children and walked away, a big badger of a man, with his head tucked into the wind. Thus he collided with the young man emerging from the adjoining block. A young man too smart by far wearing a new dark overcoat and new sheep’s wool gloves and new shining shoes. Luke Randall was in no mood for pleasantries. ‘Why don’t you look where you’re walking,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Richard Mortimer. And spent the next half hour cursing himself for accepting the blame for what was patently the big man’s fault.

Perversely the encounter stimulated Luke Randall. He decided to walk to work. As he rounded the corner of the block and emerged on to the main street he felt the wind, tunnelled between the buildings on either side, push him. He turned and walked against the wind. The snowflakes accelerated as they turned the corner and fled down the broad highway. He opened his mouth, felt the wind in his throat and raised his head, exhilarated.

He walked quickly, wanted to run. But diplomats never run. He smiled and the pale, screwed-up faces passing by stared at him curiously. No fur hat and a smile on his face—the big man was drunk or mad.

He made a couple of skipping steps like a ballroom dancer showing off with the quickstep, swallowed a snowflake and laughed. He was free again for a while.

CHAPTER ONE