‘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.
Traffic moved swiftly this morning, the drivers anxious to escape from the new cold. On the Tchaikovsky Street stretch of the ring road which encircles the heart of Moscow lorries bored through the snow while ugly Volga taxis bullied their way along giving precedence only to the big black Chaikas with their curtained rear windows heading for the Kremlin. Single-decker buses and trams were crammed with Muscovites glum with the feel of winter. Drivers turned their Chevrolets and Cadillacs cautiously into the American Embassy convinced that the cab drivers would forgive the cold if only they could score a dent in the side of a bourgeois automobile.
This morning, glowing with temporary elation, Luke Randall noticed people and buildings and cars afresh. He confirmed his first impression that the American Embassy looked like a large, bankrupt hotel—mustard-coloured, old before its time, as prosaic as a plane tree.
The militiaman outside saluted him with the wary cheerfulness which policemen reserve for foreigners. ‘Zdrastvuite.’ What was he at home, denuded of uniform and boots? Did he put his stockinged-feet on the table, grumble behind Izvestia and Pravda and slop borsch down his vest? Or did he divest himself of authority, stick postage stamps in an album and adore a peasant woman with a rump like two bed bolsters?
He collected his mail and took the lift up to his floor. The duty marine who had recently arrived from Vietnam greeted him with a deference tinged somehow with the contempt he felt a military man should feel towards a diplomat. A closed-circuit television set recording departures and arrivals outside flickered beside him.
‘Seen anyone suspicious on that thing today?’ Randall asked.
The marine, crew-cut and built like a Wimbledon champion, shook his head. ‘Seen one helluva lot of snow, Mr. Randall,’ he said.
‘Should be a change after Vietnam.’
The marine shrugged. ‘I guess it’s a change right enough.’
‘But not a change for the better?’
The marine grimaced. What had he done to deserve Moscow?
In his office the secretary he shared with another diplomat was dealing his letters on to his desk.
‘You look like a card sharper,’ he said.
‘No card sharper should have fingers as cold as mine,’ she said.
Her fingers, he reflected, looked cold even in the summer. Thin and chalky like a school teacher’s fingers. Elaine Marchmont finished the deal and sat down at her desk. She was wearing her boots for the first time since the last winter had melted and dried up.
‘Shouldn’t you take those things off in the office?’ he asked.
‘Is it against protocol to wear boots in the office?’
‘Not as far as I know. I didn’t think they looked too comfortable, that’s all.’
‘If it was someone like Joyce Holiday or … or Mrs. Fry wearing them you’d tell them to keep them on.’
‘Why Mrs. Fry?’ he asked. And added quickly: ‘Or why Miss Holiday for that matter?’ He hoped Janice Fry had left his flat by now.
‘Because they’re the sort of women men like to see in boots.’
‘I don’t give a damn about boots on anyone. Those happened to look uncomfortable. You didn’t steal them from a Russian soldier did you? I noticed one on guard outside the Kremlin without his boots on.’
Elaine Marchmont said: ‘Why do you have to keep riling me? We can’t all be sex kittens.’
Then he felt sorry for her. Sorry about the boots that did nothing for her. Sorry about her myopia, her thin body, her hair which was the colour of dried grass rather than straw.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘There’s some decoded cables for you,’ she said. ‘Some mail from the pouch. A report from Chambers in agriculture. Three invitations to cocktail parties and APN’S translations of the Soviet Press.’
There was a duty letter from his wife, written with effort, recording the boys’ progress at school, asking for money to redecorate the flat in Washington. The words only flowed naturally when briefly they were oiled by anger, and she recalled his infidelity. The words became her voice, precise and plaintive and Anglicised. ‘Who, I wonder, is the current girl friend.’ Then she remembered her Bostonian upbringing; the voice faded and she hoped without sincerity that he was keeping well.
The cables contained Washington reaction to Soviet reaction to American policy in Vietnam. Their phraseology was as drearily predictable as the wording of a protest note.
Cocktails with his neighbours who still included his wife on the invitation although they knew she had left. Cocktails with his opposite number at the British Embassy. Cocktails with his own ambassador. Gallons of cocktails, except that there were never any cocktails—Scotch and soda, gin and tonic, occasionally Russian champagne.
Snowflakes