Angels in the Snow. Derek Lambert

Englishman and laughed. His eyes were red, his cheeks coursed with sooty streams, his coat singed and flaked with ash. ‘You’d better come up and have a drink,’ he said. ‘You look as if you need one.’

      ‘No thanks. I’m perfectly all right. I need a bath more than a drink.’

      ‘A drink first,’ Randall said firmly. ‘Come on. What’s your name by the way?’

      ‘Mortimer. Richard Mortimer. I only arrived last night.’

      ‘A baptism of fire,’ Randall said.

      Mortimer smiled, teeth flashing coonishly in his blackened face. ‘It’ll be something to write home about,’ he said.

      Randall entered the flat cautiously in case Mrs. Fry had returned, or never left. There was a note in the bedroom: that was inevitable. It would have taken over an hour to compose, vituperation distilled into four painstaking paragraphs. He tore it up without reading it. The room smelt faintly of her hair lacquer.

      ‘What can I get you?’ he asked. Mortimer was patrolling the lounge examining his possessions—the simova, two heavy brass candlesticks, beaming wooden dolls, flabby succulents, a cactus which had sprouted two ears and looked like a cat, a collection of china eggs bought in one of the commission shops, the modern art sprawled across one wall.

      Mortimer said he would have a beer. Randall said: ‘You need a Scotch.’ And poured him one. ‘What do you think of them?’ He pointed at the paintings.

      ‘I think they’re splendid,’ Mortimer said.

      ‘I think that one looks like two Indian footprints, one on either side of a lavatory pan. My wife bought it. She bought them all.’

      ‘I take it you don’t like them.’

      ‘I don’t mind them for what they are. An hour or so’s decorative work. I object to them being described as art.’

      ‘I don’t much care for modern art myself,’ Mortimer said.

      ‘Then why didn’t you say so?’

      Mortimer tinkled the ice in his glass. ‘Perhaps because I didn’t want to offend you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps because I’m a diplomat. Perhaps because I’ve been taught manners.’

      ‘Well said. Have another Scotch.’

      Outside, as the evening chilled and darkened, an ambulance arrived to take the burned boy away.

      ‘Poor little devil,’ said Randall. He was thinking of his own boys. ‘I expect he was looking forward to the snow.’

      ‘Was he badly burned?’

      ‘I don’t know. Possibly not. I can’t stand seeing children hurt.’

      They stood at the window watching the marionettes far below tidying up the drama. On the other side of the playground women were burning refuse on a bonfire. One by one the lights came on in the block across the way.

      ‘Sometimes,’ Randall said, ‘I feel as if I can control everything from here. See that car moving over there? I’ll park it in that space beside the Mercedes and the Chev.’ Obediently the car turned in. ‘And I’ll lead the driver across the sand, where he will pause briefly to look at the burned-out case, to entrance seven.’ The man followed the instructions.

      ‘Very impressive,’ Mortimer said.

      ‘Not really. He always parks there and he lives at number seven. I knew he wouldn’t bother too much with the fire. He’s a Norwegian, not very imaginative.’

      ‘There’s certainly a lot of nationalities here.’

      ‘The lot. The East Europeans are in that new block over there. We don’t mix except for cocktails. You’ll be having a lot of cocktails. Are you married?’

      ‘No. Are you?’

      ‘In a manner of speaking. My wife is in America.’ He poured himself another drink. ‘We’re separated if you must know,’ he said; and wondered why the green young Englishman was the first person in whom he had confided.

      ‘I’m sorry. Have you any children?’

      ‘Two.’ Randall didn’t want to discuss it any more. ‘A diplomat hanged himself here this morning,’ he said.

      ‘So I heard.’

      The stylised understatement irritated Randall. ‘You Goddam Englishmen,’ he said, is that all you can say—so I heard?’

      ‘It’s terrible. I’m sorry but I’m a bit overwhelmed. The fire, a hanging, my first day in Moscow …’

      ‘You’ll soon settle down. When the real snow comes. It sort of cossets you the first time round. It’s how you always imagined Russia. Come February and March you never want to see another snowflake. It’s on your second or third winter that you start to crack up.’

      ‘It is my experience,’ said Mortimer, selecting his words carefully, ‘that wherever you arrive there’s always someone around who wants to frighten you. I don’t believe that it’s such a bad place. It can’t be that bad.’

      ‘It isn’t,’ Randall said. ‘It’s me. Have another drink.’

      ‘No thanks. I’ll have to go now. Thanks for your hospitality.’

      ‘Don’t mention it. Drop in any time.’

      He watched the marionette Mortimer, lit by the lamps round the playground, walking towards his entrance. Soiled overcoat flapping, gloves in hand, staring at the ground. Prim and proud and gullible. The affection which Randall felt surprised him. He retained it, examined it and put it aside. And guided Mortimer into his entrance.

      Then he tore up the cocktail party invitation and walked around smoking and drinking whisky. The flat seemed more empty than ever before, resonant, washed with restless shadows. The children’s room was now the lumber room. In one corner stood a pile of broken toys. In a drawer of a filing cabinet he found last year’s Christmas cards. One of them was a Russian New Year card from his wife, a gold bust of Lenin on a blue background scattered with stars. ‘A happy Christmas, darling, and a happy New Year.’ But it had all been over even then. And two more Russian cards, bright, beaming dolls linking arms, from the children. There was a film of dust over the cards.

      More whisky and ice from the freezer. He switched on the record player and listened to ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ played by the Bolshoi orchestra, a present from his wife. He opened the window and smelled the night, cold and cruel. Lights glittered in the hotel opposite but they had no warmth.

      He went to bed and dreamed that it was the last day on earth. He and his family were trying to climb a slope to escape a wave of radioactive gas sweeping towards them They ran but they were on rollers. The smaller boy fell and the gas engulfed them. He tried to speak to his wife, to apologise for what he had done. She laughed.

      The big man lying on the bed whimpered and tried to embrace the emptiness beside him.

CHAPTER TWO

      The beer hall was a basement in a side street of small offices, cemented together and uniformed with flaking mustard paint. Thirsty men queued on the hollowed steps nipping at bottles of vodka so that often they were drunk by the time they got inside. Vodka and brandy were banned in the beer hall since the Kremlin ordered a drive to keep the drunks off the streets but the lure of forbidden booze was stronger than the fear of punishment. At night shadows on the sidewalks reared up and walked under cars and wayward, homeward men sang ballads and fighting songs as tearfully and defiantly as any Dublin taproom tenor.

      The women who served in the beer hall were bruisers arrogantly confident of their ability to eject the slurred men who sometimes tried to fight. They regarded their customers with contempt, but allowed them to bring in vodka because they took the empty bottles and sold them. They served chipped tankards