Kingsley Amis - Russian Hide-and-Seek

As silence abruptly fell he thought, he was again almost certain, that he heard a noise behind him, a slight cough or perhaps a snigger. He looked over his shoulder as smartly as he could, but saw nobody.

‘What was that?’ he asked.

‘What was what?’ Her tone was incurious.

He shook his head and said nothing. After a moment she moved unsteadily to one side and half-lay in a sprawl across the top of a line of cupboards running towards the door. This stood open; he could not remember whether or not he had shut it and dismissed the matter from his mind when Mrs Korotchenko put his hands against her as she had done before.

‘That was wonderful, darling,’ he said, and he was not exaggerating, though he would have been describing his own feelings more accurately by calling what had happened so odd as to be hard to believe already. He gazed into her face, but could find no emotions there, only signs of her physical state. Her glance met his briefly and moved on as if he had been a stranger whose eye she had caught in a public place. ‘Shall we go upstairs now?’

‘What for?’

‘It’s more comfortable. As I said.’

‘Yes, but why do you want to go there now? All right,’ she went on before he could answer, perhaps remembering their conversation in his father’s garden, and lowered her bare feet to the floor.

‘What about your clothes?’

‘What clothes?’ It was true that there were none of hers to be seen.

‘The ones you… were wearing before I arrived.’

‘What? My clothes are upstairs,’ she said, starting for the door, her arms hanging by her sides.

‘There’s nobody about, is there? Servants or anything? I could have sworn I saw someone.’

‘You’re mistaken, there’s nobody but ourselves.’

They went out and down the passage to the foot of the stairs. As they began to climb he slipped his arm round her waist; she looked down over her shoulder to see just what constituted this outré gesture, scratching her stomach meanwhile. The room they went to was at the far end of the upstairs passage, narrow from side to side but with a high sloping ceiling. There was not a great deal of light in it because the windows were small and half-covered with squares of heavy brocade that must have been cut from some much larger piece, and the dull crimson wallpaper and sepia rugs made it seem darker. The pictures provided no cheer either, watercolour or crayon landscapes and figure-paintings all by the same prodigiously untalented hand, the drawing inept beyond compare, the uneven colours overflowing or falling short of their boundaries. Other objects showed translated versions of the same truly childish incapacity: a bulging earthenware mug, a piece of dirty knitting with a forsaken look to it, an out-of-focus photograph of a girl aged about ten, a book-cover of some artificial material on which the lettering was badly spaced and aligned. Nevertheless it proclaimed clearly enough that the book inside the cover was ‘Anna Karenina’, by Count Leo Tolstoy, and if Alexander had been interested he could have established with great ease that this was indeed so, and further that the pages were creased and occasionally spotted with food and drink up to about the middle of Part One, after which they were quite smooth and clean. But of course he was not in the least interested in that, nor in the pictures nor in any inanimate object in the room other than the bed. Its dimensions and surroundings proclaimed it not to be the marital bed in style or fact, but it would serve well enough.

He pulled off the counterpane, a cheap bought article, and quickly undressed while Mrs Korotchenko watched him from a stool set before a large mirror decorated with picture postcards secured by the frame and with more crayon. As he looked about he became aware that, although he could see articles of clothing here and there around the room, her clothes, in the sense he had meant just now, were still missing. No doubt she went naked indoors at all reasonable times. When he finally sat himself down on the bed and asked her to join him there, he half-expected her to prescribe some unusual alternative place or activity, or at least to ask him what he wanted her to do that for, but she came over at once and in silence. Even so, when he embarked on the activity he had had in mind, which was simply and obviously (for the moment, at any rate) the detailed exploration of what he had so far been able only to glimpse in large outline, her response was not warm, nor even very friendly. She was submitting with a fairly good grace to perversities like being kissed and gently caressed when any normal woman would naturally have preferred to be wriggling about on the sod or dangling from a wall. Her body was so interesting to Alexander that at first he could ignore her indifference, but after a time what he would have called his self-respect began to suffer a little. Asking her her name seemed a good move, especially since he had never been told what it was.

She answered up in full like a child. ‘Sonia Korotchenko.’

‘Mine’s Alexander,’ he said out of politeness, for he quite thought she knew this.

‘Oh yes? Alexander what?’

‘My surname happens to be the same as my parents’.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Petrovsky. Your hosts of the night before last. ‘Oh, I never notice the names of the people my husband takes me out to.’

‘What happens when you return hospitality?’ It took them off the track but was too striking to let go.

‘We don’t, because my husband’s too mean,’ she said like someone mentioning a sick man’s infirmity. ‘If he has to give people drinks he takes them to the club.’ In the same breath she asked, ‘Have you had a lot of girls?’

‘I suppose you could say that. But none of them were as sweet as you, Sonia.

‘Do you like young girls?’

‘Not particularly,’ he said, adding after only a small interval, ‘They’re so immature, most of them. I’d much rather have a- ‘How old was the youngest you’ve had?’

‘Thirteen, I think; I started quite young. How beautiful you are. You’ve got the loveliest- ‘Have you ever had two girls at once?’

‘Two girls at… I see what you mean. No, I haven’t. It’s having one person for your very own that really matters, isn’t it? Unless you-’

‘Would you like to try it?’

These all seemed to him to be perfectly proper questions, but he had no desire whatever to go into them now. He said with more gentleness than he felt, ‘But darling, what business is it of yours, eh? Why do you want to know?’

‘I’m sure you would. Have you ever fucked a man? You must have done.’

‘No I haven’t – men don’t attract me in the least,’ said Alexander truthfully and angrily. Part of the anger was real, based on the thwarting of his conversational wishes, but more of it was assumed, based on his sudden perception that something more and other than displeasure was called for here. What she wanted, and would get, was a great show, a theatrical simulation, of disgust and disapproval. Taking her by the shoulders and glaring hard into her face, he went on in an unnaturally deep, expressive voice, ‘How dare you talk to me in this way! Here I am being as pleasant and loving to you as any man could be, and this is the thanks I get – to be asked the most intimate questions, have foul insinuations made and finally stand accused of unnatural practices with my own sex! And this after I’ve lowered myself to indulge your shameless, debauched fancies! It’s monstrous, obscene! You’re a vile, wicked woman, a whore and a degenerate!’

Long before the end she had begun to stir and twist in his grip, to breathe like someone suffering acutely from cold, to stretch out towards him. As he watched, her eyes dulled, her thin mouth slackened and her whole face grew lumpish and lubberly, an expression quite different from the one she had shown him in the kitchen. But he was not going to pause over the possible meaning of this, and certainly not to need urging on a third time, and very soon he had her snarling and howling away in his arms. When they had finished she fell asleep at once, still in his arms. She was not a quiet sleeper, giving little moans or groans as she exhaled, but Alexander was content. He stroked her cropped hair, which perhaps unexpectedly had not long been washed, and allowed his mind to rove.