Эдвард Докс - Pravda ['Self Help' in the UK]

As was his habit, Alessandro made great play of his winsome desire for sweetness by reading out each of the possibilities—temptations narrowly resisted—until, at length, he declared that no, he couldn’t possibly have chocolate again and how about a coffee instead?

The waiter bowed—a man long ago departed from these shallows for distant oceans of indifference.

“How are you feeling, Nicholas? Are you tired? God, you’ve had the longest day. Thank you for this, by the way. I love eating with you.”

“You don’t have to say thank you. It’s not necessary.”

“Do you want to talk about your trip?”

“I’m not tired.”

This was true. Nicholas was not tired, or not locally so, at least. He returned his attention to his glass—the lazy bubbles drifting languidly to the surface. All that fizz and fuss seemed so long ago. Apart from Alessandro’s extraordinary physical beauty—and he really was Perugino-pretty—his great virtue was that he did not matter in the slightest. And occasionally Nicholas felt that he could say whatever the hell he wished to him, confident that he would neither understand nor reflect upon it.

Nicholas shifted his chair so he could pull his legs from under the table and stretch them out to one side.

“Life let her down, you know, Alessandro. Politics let her down. Russia let her down. London let her down. And I… well, I couldn’t give her what she wanted, what she needed. Poor woman. Poor bloody woman.” He shook his head.

“When did you two…” Alessandro swirled his remaining wine around his mouth, making it froth. “When did you two meet?”

“We met in Russia—in Moscow—at a party, actually. One of my father’s little get-togethers with his Soviet acquaintances. She had just started working in the Secretariat. She was a rising star and she was accompanying some idiot from the Party. She was… she was a very clever woman.” Nicholas looked directly at Alessandro. “She defected to marry me, you know. Abandoned it all six months later: family, job, and friends. Her home. Can you imagine anyone understanding that now? Defecting. The sheer risk. The absolute finality of the severance.” Nicholas set his glass down, two long fingers pressing at the base, and spoke softly. “Knowing you can never go back. Making a decision like that takes courage. Real courage.”

Like all small-time egotists, Alessandro was in the habit of believing every remark to pertain in some way to himself—oblique praise or oblique criticism. And so now he sought to assert his own courage. But could see no obvious opportunity and so chose the next best thing—an indirect attack on what he perceived to be Nicholas’s cowardice. “When did… when did she know?”

Nicholas ignored the question. “We had three or four good years—yes, it’s hard to believe now, but we did. Even when the children arrived. We were always friends. Or at least we always understood each other. Understood the exact nature of each other’s knots, even if we could not exactly undo them… You might find this hard to believe, Alessandro, but actually I think we were happy. Really.”

Alessandro widened his eyes and said breathily, “In love.”

But Nicholas was way past his usual irritation at his lover’s illimitable falsity. “For Christ’s sake, it was impossible not to be happy: young— young and in Paris, sharing a single room in Zola country with a Russian defectress who had left everything to be with me. My God, it seems like a different city…” He tailed off. The mention of those days had made him aware of how old he was, how old he suddenly felt. And the fact that Alessandro hadn’t been born when he had married. When he had married. How in Christ’s name did these things happen? Life passed faster and faster: whole decades racing by like rushing landscapes glimpsed from the window of a perpetually accelerating train. He finished his wine, the taste a welcome reminder of the present. He had never had money back then—or even the prospect, if he was to be honest.

“Did you always live in Russia?” Indulge the old bitch, Alessandro thought, lull him deeper into this softness of spirit.

“I was at boarding school in England, Alessandro. I lived in a dormitory full of boys.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot about that. Sounds perfect.”

“But yes, Russia was home. In the holidays, anyway. From the age of eleven until Cambridge.”

“St. Petersburg?”

“No. Moscow, when my father was at the embassy officially, and then Leningrad afterward, when he was sent there to do whatever the bloody hell he was doing.”

Alessandro tilted his head. “You never talk about your family.”

“You know that I was married, you know—”

“No, I mean your—you know—your dad and all that. Your old family. The Glovers.” Alessandro had glimpsed a path through the trees ahead. By way of family… to money. Family money. There was plenty of that, he was certain. He allowed himself a blink. “Your dad— the spy.”

“My father wasn’t a spy.” Nicholas returned his lover’s gaze directly. “My father was a shit.”

“Oh.” Alessandro withered beneath the sudden flare of disdain. “I thought he was at Cambridge with all those others…”

Wearily, Nicholas suspected he was hearing the story that Alessandro liked to spin to his sun-bed friends at the gym. And suddenly he wanted to exterminate the myth once and for all, even where its peddling did not matter.

“My father was a bloody fool. He liked to pretend that he was friends with the big men, but he wasn’t. I doubt they even knew who he was. He was peripheral, small-time, and he never got the top job.”

“The ambassador?”

“He liked to believe he could have been the top dog if not for his greater use elsewhere. But it’s bloody rubbish. He was like a randy little rat—and he got caught inseminating half of Moscow. Both sides can smell a man like that straightaway. Totally compromised from early on… And the others, as you call them—well, perhaps they were in it for principles, so one is asked to believe. But my father—my father, it turns out, was in it for nothing more than cheap Russian skirt. And bribes. Took it from anyone and everyone like a rent boy.” Nicholas made a conscious effort to relax his jaw. “He was a cheat and probably a thief too. All those paintings we have are the rewards of his conniving, bribing, smuggling. He lined his pockets by lining the pockets of the people who let him line his pockets. The clash of ideologies could have been a game of bloody brag for all he cared. It only mattered insofar as he could bet on it.”

Alessandro sucked his coffee spoon. “But he was still a sort of… mystery man?”

Nicholas shut his eyes a moment, determined not to allow the Italian’s insistent banality to exasperate him. “I suppose… I suppose-pose he must have been up to something, because the British let him go to Leningrad as the unofficial consul instead of recalling him. Which also means the Soviets must have let him go to Leningrad. Which means something was going on. Because—yes, you’re right—ordinarily our Red friends didn’t want Englishmen snooping around the naval yards. I doubt, though, that he was of much actual use to anyone. Probably only got away with it because he was so easily blackmailed by all sides and… Christ, you have no idea how very sick the whole world was then.” He paused. “And my father was the sickest person in it.”

“God, it must have been so weird.”

Nicholas looked at the ceiling. That the great dark leviathans’ struggle of the cold war should now be reduced to “weird”… His mind turned away. And suddenly he had an image of himself as a boy, playing backgammon with his nanny in the courtyard of the embassy, every single summer holiday afternoon of his adolescence wasted—not allowed to leave the house, not allowed to do anything but wait. That was Russia. Waiting for it to end.