Kingsley Amis - Russian Hide-and-Seek

The wooden phraseology, the loud, grating, uninflected voice seemed to add to the impression made on the audience. Unbelievably, they fell silent, except for the continued frenzied coughing of a hugely fat, pop-eyed old character whose frilled shirt lay open to the navel. The cards clicked loudly in Mrs Tabidze’s hands. Coming to the last one of a heap, she sat still for a moment and turned it over. What she saw, or the interpretation she put on the sight, made her spring to her feet and grunt with an astonishment much more acute than that shown over Mets’s fortune a few minutes earlier. In years of acquaintance Alexander had never known her behave so excitedly before. Mrs Tabidze looked up, became aware she was standing and sat down again in some confusion.

‘I could have sworn I’d…’ She paused and collected herself, blinking rapidly. ‘Forgive me, all of you – the cards spring their surprises on occasion. Now… my dear, I have good news for you. Soon, you will perform an act of great virtue, of great courage and humanity, an act for which your name will live in praise. And this will be soon. Within four weeks. No, sooner than that,’ she added, looking momentarily troubled again, but went on with all her usual firmness, ‘The performance is at an end. Thank you for your attention.’

Mrs Korotchenko rose almost as quickly as Mrs Tabidze had done and, looking to neither right nor left, marched away and into the spacious corridor that ran the breadth of the house. When, after leaving it long enough not to court suspicion, he followed in her track, it appeared that he had also left it long enough for her to disappear. She was not to be found in the east hall nor anywhere within sight in the garden. On his return he saw that the chair beside the pillar was empty, and so he never knew whether its occupant had been Korotchenko or another.

The original (or perhaps just the former) picture of the male parts on the Korotchenkos’ fence had been blotted out with some dark paint or stain and another, executed with rather more dash, laid on top. As he approached the house on foot, having left Polly at the stables on the Northampton road, Alexander wondered whether there were not dozens, even hundreds of such drawings sited there one under the other, the work of successive afternoon-visitors regularly blotted out at the husband’s decree or the wife’s whim, yet in a sense still there. Alexander half-remembered a Latour-Ordzhonikidze aphorism according to which each of our lovers adds something to us which no subsequent experience can efface. He wondered what Mrs Korotchenko was going to turn out to have added to him.

No new information on this point was immediately available. As on his previous visit, the door was not shut, his ring at the bell went unanswered. Inside, he moved a few paces along the tiled floor in the passage, looked through the glass door to his right and saw nobody, looked to his left and saw somebody, the same somebody as had been leaning against a wall before. This time she was sitting at a dining-table instead but of course was naked 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.