Honey for the Bears Page 13

  ‘That,’ said Madox, unperturbed, ‘might in some circles be regarded as clever. But it’s not clever enough, not by half, my old mate. No, you leave the Doc out of it as far as those speculations are concerned. It was your walk we were talking about, wasn’t it? I’d spot your walk a mile off.’

  ‘What about my walk?’ asked Paul with heat. ‘What precisely do you mean by that remark?’

  ‘Take it easy,’ said Madox easily, pouring. ‘And if you can’t take the drink it’s best to leave well alone. Sex,’ he said, ‘is nothing to do with me.’ He seemed to toast that observation, taking a frothy swig. ‘You live your own life. Nobody else can do it for you.’

  ‘You seem,’ said Paul angrily, ‘to be implying something that nobody has any right to imply about another man. I resent it, that’s what I do, resent it.’

  ‘This talk,’ said Madox, still calm, ‘is taking what you might call a sexual turn. Now why can’t we leave sex out of it, eh? Let’s be like the Doc, how about that, eh? Sex,’ he said, shrugging with his clerkly face puffed out smugly, ‘sex—I’ve had it all ways and I never talked about it. And now it’s all over for me. But if it’s not all over for you, mate, then what I say is: jolly good luck to the girl who loves a sailor. And now let’s finish this lot, because I’ve got to address some envelopes.’

  ‘Look,’ said Paul, red, aware that his neck was growing thicker, ‘I didn’t like what you said then about sailors. The song was about soldiers and you know it. And I was in the RAF.’ ‘Poor dear Robert,’ he thought; he wanted to cry very quietly somewhere now. Sweet champagne and cognac. Grapes that were like sugar-plums; wood alcohol with burnt sugar. Or to be sick somewhere. ‘I’ve got to sell this,’ he said, bunching the brown-paper parcel up in his hand. ‘You don’t know what it’s like, having to go round selling this. With my wife in hospital and no money left. Trying to sell dresses to bloody Russians with no money.’

  ‘In hospital, eh?’ said Madox. ‘And you being forced to sell her dresses. Poor old devil. This,’ he said, putting out very white fingers, ‘seems a nice bit of material. How much do you want for it?’

  ‘Thirty roubles,’ said Paul, ‘and that’s very cheap.’

  ‘You do drive a hard bargain, don’t you?’ said Madox. ‘Still, anything to help a fellow-subject of Her Majesty.’ He took out a wallet of Russian leather, fat with notes, and counted out four fives and a ten. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘I know a barmaid back home I can give it to. A present from Russia, I can say.’ Pocketing the money, Paul nearly cried with gratitude.

  2

  PAUL WALKED NONE TOO STEADILY (HE WONDERED IF HE had been eating enough lately) to the Baltic Station. In the entrance-hall he nodded briefly at the bas-reliefs of Ushakov, Lazarev, Kornilov, Nakhimov and Makarov—Russian admirals all, and they looked it. He was getting to know them well. The ocean-coloured marble from the Urals in the underground hall, the ceiling that billowed like a sail, ‘The Shot from the Aurora’ represented in Florentine mosaic—these made his nausea seem marine and healthy. But on the brief journey (there was only Narvskaya Station in between) to the Kirov Works stop, he had a sensation of quarrying going on in the Urals of his brain, or rather a bas-relief of the true Paul Hussey being laboriously hammered, also urgently (day and night shifts) because the unveiling to slow hand-claps and ironical Prokofiev music was not far off. It was not right that a time for downright no or yes should have dawned when he had never been more aware of everything necessarily containing its opposite. What was he, then, and what was he in the world for? He had a partial answer to that: there had to be people presiding with rubbed hands and smiles (part-false) over dust accumulating, veil over veil over veil, on Elizabethan pennies in plush, sailing-ships in bottles, some volumes of Jacobean and Caroline sermons, a page—framed—of a Civil War Courier, a Roundhead pennant: ‘I AM A JEALOUS GOD’, a beautiful oak sideboard of 1689, some genuine Queen Anne silver candlesticks, a set of The Rambler, a first edition of Cowper, a Regency brocade waistcoat and a battered Regency striped sofa, some regimental table-pieces showing tarnished silver savages subdued by gun or Bible, whatnots, meticulous taxidermy, a sadistic and a sentimental Landseer, starry Pre-Raphaelites with very strong female noses …

  Kirov Works Station. Up to light-grey Caucasian marble, the fluorescent square ceiling lamps like natural daylight; the workers like so many papiros-smoking Bottoms amid the airy delicacy. Then out into sunlight and, soon, the familiar landmark of the eleven-storey tower of the Kirov District Soviet; there was a cinema there, and that was where Anna, the dark mistress of Alexei Prutkov, had once worked as a projectionist. Alexei had told some story about her snarling up several thousand feet of some epic of the steppes during a gala performance or something; now she helped clean up the tiny workshops of the Children’s Technical Station at the Kirov Works Club. Ah, Russia.

  Paul walked near the thirty-acre Ninth of January Park, where the workers of the Narvskaya Zastaya had assembled to take a petition to the Tsar and had been shot down instead. (The slim shiny topboots, the careful aim, the Eisenstein black holes of bloody mouths and the cracked steel-rimmed spectacles.) It was all a fair, modern, smiling district, but the flat-block Paul now approached dated from the nineteen-thirties and had become as sorry, stained, peeling, as anything built in England during that flimsy period. Crowning the edifice was the bas-relief image of some hero in overalls, his face nibbled away and his body striated with weather-stains. There were little verandahs with washing on them; several radios were bleating the same contralto recital. Paul sighed and began to climb the stairs.

  He was panting and palpitating when he reached the door of the flat; he opened it (it was never locked). Anna was there alone, lying on the one bed. Paul frowned at that, not being quite sure what he felt about Anna or she about him, panting. She had very black eyebrows which she would beetle at him, as she did now, flipping through a sports magazine (Amazon weight-lifter on cover) on the bed, fully dressed in black stockings, thick pepper-and-salt skirt, baby-blue ribbed sweater. Paul had offered her a drilon dress, but she had rejected the gift. She resented his being there. Paul panted. He had never before, now he came to think of it, been alone with Anna in the flat. The prospect of being with her now, until Alex came home, didn’t greatly please him. What he really wanted was to lie down on that bed, quietly and alone, and snore. It was curious that the image of a desirable nap should come to him in the form of a snore. There was only one bed in the flat; he had, so far, slept in the cane chair (fleas in it, he was sure) that stood by the summer-empty stove, his feet up on an old box that—according to the stencilling—had formerly held cucumbers. At night, that was, or what was normally left of it after drink, argument, poetry, jazz. During the day, when not visiting Belinda or trying to sell drilon dresses, he would take a grateful flop on the old charpoy, alone and quiet save for the flies buzzing and odd noises outside—children not at school, water drumming into a bucket from a tap on the landing, trucks changing gear on the corner, Radio Leningrad. Now, just after three in the afternoon, he would have to attempt a doze with the fleas, but there could be no uninhibited snoring. Anna was critical of everything that came out of his mouth, everything she understood, anyway. She would sneer faintly at his Russian accent, wait with mock patience and lifted eyes while he struggled with spoken syntax; she would open her mouth at his laughs, hums, sighs, as if these too were not being properly declined or conjugated; and once, when his little denture, tongued out in sleep on the chair, had fallen to his lap, he had awakened to see her picking it up with coke-tongs, sneering.

  He looked down at her now, still panting, and attempted a smile, then said in careful Russian:

  ‘You are having a rest after your labours?’

  She examined that offering with a look of distaste, as though it were a broken transistor radio or something; anyway, she did not seem pleased with it from the point of view of its phonetics, its grammar, or its propriety. Paul, panting more slowly now, sat down in the can
e chair and took out his packet of Bulgarian cigarettes. He made a noise at her and an offering gesture, but she shook her head. ‘Sod her then,’ he said to himself, lighting up. She turned over a page. He picked up the day’s Pravda from the top of the stove and yawned out smoke. Oh, glory be to God, what was he doing here? How the hell had he managed to get himself in this position, dirty and near-bearded, smoking a painfully aromatic Bulgarian cigarette in a flea-haunted cane chair in a miserably small Leningrad flat that smelt of cabbage, aniseed, kvass, and now the vague muskiness of a dark woman from Georgia lying, breathing up at her sports magazine, on a bed with a dirty flowered coverlet? She had her black legs flexed, apart, as for the heat. Her shoes had been kicked off and there was a hole in one foot-sole. She scratched an armpit and the magazine flapped shut. She shook it open impatiently. ‘Anna,’ said Paul. ‘Anna, Anna.’

  ‘Chto?’ She responded to that, giving him a dark suspicious questioning look. Paul realized that he’d had no reason at all for speaking (it wasn’t really calling) her name. ‘Nichevo,’ he said. But, of course, it was because of Belinda, nymph of The Rape of the Lock, and Hampton Court, where thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey—‘Chai,’ he suggested; he could do with a cup, or rather a glass, of—‘Chai mozhna?’ She shook her head very forcibly; the little bitch resented his having anything in that flat, despite his payment of the rent. ‘Right,’ said Paul, ‘I’ll make some bloody chai myself.’ And he got up, puffing Bulgarian smoke, to go to the little cupboard by the stove to get the chainik and the tea, and then to see if there was any water in the filthy electric kettle that, because it leaked, was all clumsily bound up in sticking-plaster. He shook it and heard only the dry rattle of broken-off bits of calcium deposit; but there was water from the landing tap in the old-fashioned rosy wash-jug. Ready to pour, he was astonished to find himself set upon from the rear, not only with irritable words but with one hand in the hair at his nape, the other—stubby, he saw clearly, and with bitten nails—trying to wrest the electric kettle from him. The latter went down on the bare floor, clattering. He turned on her, saying, ‘Damn and blast it, who pays the bloody rent here? And if this is your idea of bloody Russian hospitality …’ He couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying, but he got a fine close-up of her opening and shutting mouth with the red meat of her tongue darting up all the time to her palate for the y-y-y-sounds which were called iotization, the straight and (now he came to think of it) Burne-Jones-type nose with the promise of an eventual woman’s moustache beneath it, the speckled nasty eyes, the moving black wedded brows above. ‘Oh, shut up,’ he said and gave her a light back-hander. She recoiled back towards the bed, though with no show of outrage: perhaps she was used to being hit—though not, Paul thought, by Alexei Prutkov; probably the man in Georgia whom she’d left.

  Which from the neighbouring Hampton—Hampton, Hampton: how had the word come to describe, in the vernacular of vulgar men, the cory or Master John Thursday? Paul felt there was a well-damped-down fire of excitement somewhere round his perineum. He said, in softer tones, to the girl on the bed who was rubbing her cheek and spitting odd words at him, ‘All right, I know I shouldn’t have done that. I won’t have any tea, then. Let’s say no more about it.’ He must get Belinda on the next available bloody boat, whatever the doctor said. ‘Here, have a Jezebel,’ proffering his packet. That was his little joke; the cigarettes were really called Djebel. But she struck the packet out of his hand. Jezebel? He generated no current in her, that was evident. He’d be out of this flat now, if only he could get some money. But Alex was all right, Alex and he got on fine together. ‘Ah, well,’ said Paul, picking up the cigarettes that had spilled out of the packet and going back to his cane chair and the copy of Leningradskaya Pravda. Anna lay down flat on the bed again and resumed her scowling at the sports magazine. She had made her point: Paul was to stay here, if Alex said so, but he was to keep his paws off things that came into her province. The whole thing was damned silly.

  Paul tried to read a front-page letter from N. Khrushchev to a Soviet minister called Tovarishch Tsedenbal; he could not tell whether it was a letter of praise or rebuke. He started on a long news item about the fulfilment of some industrial long-term plan or other, full of percentages which all—save for the odd 99 or 98 to make the list look more plausible—spilled over the hundred. The Cyrillic print began to swim; he had to squint to distinguish a sh from a shch. His Russian was not good enough; he and Robert had wasted a lot of time on that course back during the war; nor had he kept it up since. If only he had foreseen a time when, in summer Leningrad, he would be sitting like this, in a cane chair jolly with fleas in a one-roomed flat in the Kirov district, a dark monoglot bitch from Georgia lying on the bed, he would have spent the long hours when nobody came to the shop in reading War and Peace in the original, a crib at the side like a bread-and-butter plate. It would have been good for his French, too….

  Comrade Somebody-or-other was jeering loudly at the toothless British lion. ‘It is evident,’ he told a large committee of heavy-shouldered, heavy-browed men and women, ‘that here is the great object-lesson in decadence, the most patent exemplification of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism. Observe the alternation of aimless spasmodic action and sheer paralysis—the craving for exotic sauces thus becoming cognate with a scared huddling into the dusty dark of the past. The same ambiguity is discernible in sex …’ The voice went harshly on. Paul was now shocked to see projected on a screen as wide and high as the Kremlin a cartoon straight out of Pravda: Paul Hussey himself in John Bull hat and waistcoat, but plump with a soft cream-cake plumpness, no solid beef-red flesh, old ormolu clocks tied to his shoulders, simpering along toothlessly, bare hairless legs knock-kneed under a kilt that was no kilt—a drilon skirt rather. ‘Highly inflammable,’ said somebody; a match was set to it and the image, still simpering, started to burn. There was a noise of splashing water, but that would not put the fire out.

  Paul woke to this splashing and a dry mouth. The splashing went on in the real world of the harsh cane chair and the Baltic summer. The splashing, he saw, came from a vision of moving pinkness in the dark farther corner. It was a pink body with a pair of pink arms weaving. It was Anna washing her hair in a basin.

  He allowed a sense of outrage to rise. This, then, was what they thought of him, was it? A lump of dough, a piece of old furniture, a discarded boot. That creature over there thought she could switch her breasts on in his presence, did she, without getting electrocuted? Breathing shallowly, pretending to be asleep still, Paul watched her twist and turn blindly, soap in her eyes, doing a sort of little dance in her black-stockinged feet, while she tore away at her scalp with a witch’s nails. She was a full-breasted young woman, and her breasts swung in a grave rhythm, minims, say, to the fingers’ quavers. Her armpits had black silken beards. The flesh on her well-fleshed upper arms shook and rippled. She was naked down to the navel. The dark-ringed eyes of her breasts ogled him, eyes capable of independent motion, like the eyes of some strabismic Mack Sennett comedian—Ben Turpin, Chester Conklin, somebody like that. Paul was aware of a solid physical response. Which from the neighbouring Hampton takes its name.

  He got up from the chair and stole towards her. What a counterpoint of metres—heart, her fingers, her breasts, the flesh on her arms, his stealthy feet. He stumbled against one of his suitcases jutting out from under the bed. She heard that and, still blinded by soap, seemed to sniff in the direction of the noise. She began to grope for the greyish towel that lay on the bed. But Paul was upon her, good strong daring arms about her quite substantial nakedness, the smell of clean soapy hair—tempered by the sharper tang of armpits—a new Russian smell to be prized and hoarded. One would find that particular smell of soapy hair no longer now in the West; there it would be something perfumed, oily, medicated, well advertised on ITV. But this was a smell with no built-in allure: it was honest, harsh and functional. And it was also something from the past. ‘God help me,’ groaned Paul
excitedly to himself; it was his mother washing herself down in the scullery in Bradcaster, himself about ten with an Œdipus limp still: he had been profoundly and unholily stirred by that slapped wet nakedness.

  Anna, as was to be expected, knocked at his face and chest as if she wanted desperately to be let in; her eyes were open in shock and outrage, though wincing at the stinging soap; her dripping hair slapped wet at Paul as in some asperges ceremony. And she cried authentic bad Russian words at him, trying to kick with her pathetic black-stockinged feet. The kicking could be checked by Paul’s inserting one leg between her two, stopping her mouth with his mouth. He saw himself doing all this and marvelled. The little denture came loose, but he clamped it down with his upper teeth. That was no way to kiss, however; that was the sort of mouth some girls would offer in Postman’s Knock, a sort of cushioned boniness. So he opened up moistly, trying to insinuate his tongue in. She, of course, tried to jerk her head away, still fisting strongly at his chest, so he plunged his own fingers into the wet head of hair and held her skull rigid, stopping her mouth with a no-nonsense firmness. It became necessary then to immobilize her completely, for she was using those witch’s nails to tear at his cheeks. Gravity; the resourceful man makes use of gravity—bed and the posture of Venus Observed.

  He had her flat on that bed in no time. ‘Be persistent,’ he told himself, ‘and every woman must soften; it is in the nature of woman to yield.’ Gasping, he released her mouth and swallowed a chestful of Russian air. He and the creaking bed had her sandwiched beautifully. (An image of trying to eat a live frog sandwich, some cruel Pravda political cartoon of the French and Algeria.) She yelled at him. In a glorious transport of triumph he raised himself sufficiently to deliver a ringing smack on her left cheek. (Hadn’t he done that before, somewhere, to somebody else, here in Leningrad? It seemed too long ago to remember.) Anna looked up at him with a child’s eyes and mouth and a doll’s red cheek. Then she started to howl like a child. Paul tumbled into a great soft membranous pit of tenderness, saying, ‘There, there, I’m sorry, forgive me,’ kissing her all over in a punctuation of remorse and a softer sort of desire. And now he was free to crush a dark nipple between his life-line and his heart-line, the milk-blue flesh starting up between his spread fingers. She became all passivity, all waiting. Suddenly the life went out of what he was trying to do; the big proud chord (chordee?) on the electric organ faded to niente with the coming of a power-cut, though the player’s hands still stayed in position. Once, at nine years old, he had heard an older boy explain in the elementary-school urinal what it was a man did with a woman. Paul had wanted to know why; what was the point, what could they possibly get out of it? It was like that now. Or as in a theatre the actor playing Mellors in a stage version of Lady Chatterley would be preoccupied with things quite different from what the love-scene was about. Like that.