Саймон Моуэр - Prague Spring

It was a joke. James laughed to demonstrate his acute sense of humour. Ellie’s father frowned.

‘I’m not joking, young man. Believe me. She always lived in a fantasy world as a child. Dragons and elves. Hobbit stuff. Tolkien. I used to go to his lectures before I saw the light and changed to law. Bloody idiotic, all that elvish nonsense. Most children grow out of it, but not Eleanor. Wouldn’t take my advice and read law. Instead she wanted to wallow in Romantic poetry and feed her imagination with all sorts of nonsense. And then there’s the politics. Another fairyland. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Pah! So don’t believe a word she says about Master Kevin. Or anyone else. She’s a delightful girl but she’s a fantasist.’ He reached for the decanter and poured James a further two fingers of the precious whisky. ‘Now tell me about yourself. A scientist of some kind, aren’t you? I like scientists. They make good witnesses. And defendants.’

It wasn’t until after midnight that James won his release and made his way quite shakily upstairs to bed. The women had long since retired. The upper floor of the house was dark and silent. He crept to the spare room and climbed into bed, thankful for his freedom. Five minutes after he had turned off the light and was beginning to drift into unconsciousness there was a scratching at the door like the sound of a mouse in the wainscot. Dimly he was aware of the door opening and a shadow slipping into the room. For a dreadful moment – in silhouette their figures were not dissimilar – he thought it might be Mrs Pike. It was only when the shadow whispered, ‘James, are you awake?’ that he recognised Ellie.

He felt her climbing onto the bed, pushing his feet aside. He scrabbled for the bedside light and when finally he found the switch, there she was, cross-legged, at the foot of the bed, elf-like, wearing a long cotton T-shirt and apparently nothing else. His eyes went up and down her figure, and hesitated where matters were most difficult, where the hem of the T-shirt was stretched tight from thigh to thigh and there was a dark triangle of shadow. Possibilities crowded in on him. Lis, he thought, remembering moments during the play. She could do that trick, the actor’s trick, of assuming personalities at will.

‘So how was cross-examination by my beloved father?’

‘I think I passed.’

She considered him thoughtfully. It was disturbing to see vague and uncertain reflections of her father in her face, almost as though he was a hideous caricature of his daughter. ‘I think he likes you. He likes scientists. They make good witnesses, that’s what he always says.’

‘And he asked if we were sleeping together.’

She sighed. ‘How very forensic of him. What did you reply?’

‘I told him the truth, that Kevin gets in the way.’

That seemed to silence her. She looked down, picking distractedly at the duvet. Finally she raised her eyes and looked at him. ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I haven’t told you all about Kevin. Not really. I think I should.’

‘Not if it’s going to make me jealous.’

‘Envious,’ she corrected sharply. ‘You’re jealous of what you already possess, envious of what someone else has.’

‘And Kevin has you?’

She pouted. It was a good pout, with a strong French accent. He could imagine her in Paris, throwing rocks at French policemen and pouting.

‘Kevin and I were engaged, you see. I haven’t told you this, have I? I mean really engaged, a notice in The Times and the Telegraph , the church booked – yes, church, for God’s sake. Nuptial mass. The order sheets had gone to the printers. Reception at his college. It was all planned.’

‘I’ll bet your mother loved the idea.’

‘She did as a matter of fact. But it all fell apart. Differences, I suppose. Of character, of ideas. It was all a bit traumatic. Anyway, we decided at the last minute to call the whole thing off. Except it isn’t, really…’

‘Isn’t over?’

‘I went up to London last weekend.’

‘To see him?’

She looked miserable. Maybe, he thought with astonishment, she was about to cry. ‘We did it,’ she admitted quietly. ‘You know what I mean. We’d broken up and the idea was to meet up for lunch like old friends, to wish him all the best with his new job… and it sort of happened. In the afternoon. In his new flat that he shares with a couple of other guys. And there we were, shagging in his bedroom while they were watching football in the sitting room.’ There was silence. They sat at either end of the bed watching each other and experiencing all the agonies of behaviour in a time of transition, when love was meant to be free but actually was merely denominated in a new kind of currency. What did she owe the wretched Kevin? What, if anything, did she owe James? And what did she keep in the bank for a rainy day? She turned her attention back to picking at the quilt. ‘Don’t you mind?’

‘Not yet.’

A wry smile. She crawled up the bed to kneel beside him and plant an artless kiss on his cheek. ‘You’re very sweet, you know that? And funny.’

‘Funny’ll do, but I’m not sure I want to be sweet.’

There was something infinitely appealing about her face just a few inches from his, mouth part open, as delicate as a flower. He bent forward and touched his lips against hers. This was about to be, he felt sure, the moment – of truth, of consummation, of catharsis, of something. He wasn’t quite sure of the words. There was that familiar presence of her against him that he recognised from the play, when he, Fando, had had to carry her, the crippled Lis, on the road to Tar. He knew the angle of her bones, the roundness of her joints, the flesh and the sinew. And the smell of her, an amalgam of things that included soap and shampoo, but other, nameless scents as well. His hand went downwards, beneath the T shirt and down the front of the underpants he discovered there, the sort of groping he knew, back row of the stalls stuff, that he had done with one or two other girls. Then she twisted away.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. I’m fine. It’s just, I don’t want that now. I’m sorry, but I don’t.’ She slipped off the bed. ‘It’s not you, James, it’s all sorts of stuff. Kevin, of course. But other things as well. The parents, everything.’

‘ Everything? ’

At the door she paused, looking back with a bright and positive expression. ‘Tomorrow we set off,’ she said. ‘How’s that for exciting?’

And then she slipped out into the darkness of the upstairs landing and the door closed behind her.

Sam leaves the bed, crosses over to the window and draws back the curtains.

How does one end up here, he wonders, in this wooden-beamed room with its painted ceiling and arched windows and, beneath the floorboards, the soft tick of some beetle that will ultimately destroy everything? Of course he can provide a literal answer to all that – languages in the sixth form at school and then that Russian course at the Joint Services School for Linguists during his National Service, which gave a callow youth a taste for things Russian that he could never shake off. University followed as a matter of course, with an upper second in Slavonic languages and the foreign service examination in which his academic weaknesses were easily outshone by his sharp, clipped mind and ability to synthesise an argument from a plenitude of facts. And his knack for thinking on his feet. And the fact that he could actually speak Russian pretty well, where all the others could conjugate and decline and analyse and parse but they couldn’t actually feel it in the way he did. But none of that is quite what he means as he stands there looking out on the squat fifteenth-century towers, the grey bridge decked out with statues, the river that everyone knows from Smetana’s musical homage, Vltava.