Winter Garden Read Free Page B

ham sandwich – Ashburner would have been hurled forward on to the scrubbed pine table, ready for carving. Nina herself pretended to require that added edge of danger. She told him a ridiculous story about D.H. Lawrence who, disguised as a character in one of his novels, actually made love to a lady called Clara on a railway line. ‘We should do it in all sorts of places,’ Nina had cried, remembering something else she had read. ‘In shop doorways and on the tops of buses.’ ‘Perhaps,’ Ashburner had replied doubtfully. He knew for a fact that Nina hadn’t used public transport for at least ten years. All he required was a decent mattress. If she had truly wanted him to give her pleasure she would have arranged things differently, he felt. He had come to this conclusion on the frantic occasion when, imagining she heard footsteps climbing the stairs, Nina had manhandled him into the lobby and thrust him inside a fitted cupboard near the door. As it happened, it had been a false alarm; but, cowering there, his bare knees pressed against the brain specialist’s summer overcoat, a faint smell of anaesthetic clinging to the fabric of the collar, Ashburner had been frightened enough to become introspective. In this sort of affair, he had realised, there was always someone who loved and someone who played the clown, and possibly they were the same person. She takes me for granted, he’d thought. It’s not a thing a man can tolerate.
    ‘When we took off,’ he observed sadly to Enid, ‘he held her hand.’ He looked sideways in the general direction of Bernard. The man with the briefcase, a miniature bottle of vodka at his elbow, raised his glass ingratiatingly.
    ‘It doesn’t mean much,’ said Enid, though she didn’t like to be told. ‘Neither of them likes flying.’ An hour ago she had cherished the illusion that it would be she who sat beside Bernard, shoulder to shoulder, as they were hauled upwards through the clouds.
    ‘His nails are filthy,’ Ashburner said. ‘Quite indescribable. He must have mended a puncture on the way.’
    ‘Inks,’ informed Enid. ‘You can’t avoid it if you’re etching.’ She would have liked to sleep, but people kept handing her trays of food and offering her drinks. It was like being in a hospital ward.

4
    Ashburner had once been interviewed on the radio, from a prepared script, about an explosion in the North Sea and had felt throughout that his chin was welded to his chest. For the life of him he couldn’t look up. He’d been able to continue only by thinking that he would treat himself, later, to a pickled onion.
    He was in the same agonising position now, head lowered as he read the duty-free list over and over, hemmed in by Enid, who was dozing, and the man on the other side of the aisle who, during the last quarter of an hour, had added winking to his repertoire of nodding and smiling.
    When Nina had first suggested that Ashburner accompany her to Moscow, she had jokingly remarked that it might be better if he kept quiet about what he did for a living; he wouldn’t want the Russians to think he’d come to spy on their shipping fleets in the Baltic. If asked, she said, perhaps he ought to imply that he was an engineer or a banker. He hadn’t liked the idea. He wasn’t any good at lying, and besides, as he told her, the particulars of his profession were quite clearly stated on his passport. Moreover he suspected, from what he read in the newspapers, that his background had been thoroughly investigated without his knowing. He had nothing to hide from the Russians apart from the fact that he was a family man. They would surely not hold it against him; he gathered that the Communists had practically invented free love.
    The chap on his right was far more dangerous than a member of the KGB. He was one of those hearty and gregarious men who, if left alone even for a short while, behaved as though they were drowning. He would cling to Ashburner as to the proverbial