Lynn Orley and Dana Lawrence made a great effort to keep the cheerful chitchat going until Olympiada Rogacheva set down her glass and said, ‘I’d like to talk to my husband now.’
The others fell silent. Clammy consternation settled on the gathering. She had just broken an unspoken covenant that they should not worry, but somehow everyone seemed happy about it, particularly Chuck, who had already had to tell three miserable jokes just to drown out the sound of his menacingly grumbling belly.
‘Come on, Dana,’ he blustered. ‘What’s going on? What are you not telling us?’
‘A satellite breakdown is nothing serious, Mr Donoghue.’
‘Chuck.’
‘Chuck. For example a mini-meteorite the size of a grain of sand can temporarily paralyse a satellite, and the LPCS—’
‘But you don’t need the LPCS. Armstrong’s gang didn’t have an LPCS.’
‘I can assure you that the technical defect will soon be repaired. That will take a while, but soon we’ll be in contact with the Earth exactly as we were before.’
‘It’s odd, though, having no sign of them,’ said Aileen.
‘Not at all.’ Lynn gave a strained smile. ‘You know Julian. He’s organised a huge schedule. He said even this morning that they’d probably be late. And by the way, have you seen the system of grooves between the Mare Tranquillitatis and the Sinus Medii? You must have done, when you flew to Rupes Recta.’
‘Yes, they look like streets,’ said Hsu, and the whistling in the forest resumed.
Olympiada stared straight ahead. Winter noticed her catatonia, stopped licking at the sugar rim of her strawberry daiquiri, edged closer and put a tanned arm around her narrow, drooping shoulders.
‘Don’t worry, sweetie. You’ll have him back soon enough.’
‘I feel so shabby,’ Olympiada replied quietly.
‘Why shabby?’
‘So miserable. So useless. When you really want to talk to somebody you despise, just because there’s no one else there, it’s pitiful.’
‘But you’ve got us!’ Winter murmured, and kissed her on the temple, a seal of sisterhood. Only then did she seem to understand what Olympiada had just said. ‘So what do you mean, despise? Not Oleg, surely?’
‘Who else?’
‘Hmph! You despise Oleg?’
‘We despise each other.’
Winter considered those words. She tried out, one at a time, a collection of suitable-seeming facial expressions: amazement, reflection, sympathy, puzzlement; she studied the outward appearance of the Russian woman as if seeing her for the very first time. Olympiada’s evening wear, a catsuit, one of Mimi Parker’s, that changed colour according to the wearer’s state of mind, hung on her as if it had been thrown over the back of a chair, eyeliner and jewellery competed to remove the traces of years of neglect and marital suffering. She could have looked so much better. A bit of botox in her cheeks and forehead, hyaluron to smooth the wrinkles around her mouth, a little implant here and there to firm up her confidence and her connective tissues. At that moment she decided to have the implants in her own bottom changed as soon as they got back. There was something wrong with them, if you sat on them for too long.
‘Why don’t you just leave him?’ she asked.
‘Why doesn’t a doormat leave the front door that it lies outside?’ Olympiada mused.
Oh, God almighty! Winter was puzzled. Of course she found herself irresistible in all her firm glory, but did you really have to look like a gym-ripped Valkyrie to be spared the sorts of thoughts that Olympiada wallowed in?
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I think you’re making a mistake. A big fat error of reasoning.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. You think you’re shabby because you think no one wants you, so you allow yourself to be shabbily treated, just to be treated at all.’
‘Hmm.’
‘But the truth is that no one wants you because you feel shabby. You understand? The other way round. Casuality, causality or whatever it’s called, that thing with cause and effect, I’m not that educated, but I know that’s how it works. You think other people think you’re crap, so you feel crap and look crap, and in the end what everyone sees is crap, so it comes full circle. Am I making myself understood? A kind of inner – prejudgement. Because in fact you’re your own biggest, erm… enemy. And because at some level you enjoy it. You want to suffer.’
Wow, that sounded awesome! As if she’d been to college.
‘You think?’ Olympiada asked, and looked at Winter from the gloomy November puddles that were her eyes.
‘Of course!’ She liked this, it was getting really psychological. She ought to do this kind of thing more often. ‘And you know why you want to suffer? Because you’re looking for confirmation! Because you think you’re, as we’ve seen, you think you’re—’ Vocabulary, Miranda, vocabulary! Not just crap, what’s another word? ‘Shit. You think you’re shit, nothing else, but being shit is still better than being nothing at all, and if someone else thinks you’re shit too, you understand, then that’s a crystal-clear confirmation of what you think.’
‘Heavens above.’
‘Misery is reliable, believe me.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘No, it is, feeling shit gives you something to depend on. What do people say when they go to church? God, I am sinful, worthless, I’ve done terrible things, even before I was born, I’m a miserable piece of filth, forgive me, and if you can’t that’s okay too, you’re right, I’m just an ant, an original ant—’
‘Original ant?’
‘Yes, original something or other!’ She gesticulated wildly, as if intoxicated. ‘There’s something like that in Christian stuff, where you’re the lowest of the low from the get-go. That’s exactly how you feel. You think suffering is home. Wrong. Suffering is shit.’
‘You never suffer?’
‘Of course I do, like a dog! You know that. I was an alcoholic, I was described as the worst actress ever, I was in jail, up before the court. Wow!’ She laughed, in love with the disaster of her own biography. ‘That was out of order.’
‘But why does none of that matter to you?’
‘It does, it does! Bad luck really matters to me.’
‘But you don’t think that from the outset you’re, erm—’
‘No.’ Winter shook her head. ‘Just briefly, when I was drinking. Otherwise I wouldn’t know what I was talking about here. But not fundamentally.’
Olympiada smiled for the first time that evening, carefully, as if she wasn’t sure that her face was made for it.
‘Will you tell me a secret, Miranda?’
‘Anything, darling.’
‘How do you become like you?’
‘No idea.’ Winter reflected, thought seriously about the question. ‘I think you need a certain lack of… imagination.’
‘Lack of imagination?’
‘Yes.’ She laughed a whinnying laugh. ‘Just imagine, I have no imagination. Not a scrap. I can’t see myself the way others do. I mean, I can see that they think I’m cool, that they undress me with their eyes, fine. But otherwise I see myself only through my own eyes, and if I don’t like something I change it. I just can’t imagine how other people want me to be, so I don’t try to be that way.’ She paused and indicated to Funaki that her glass was empty. ‘And now you stop seeing yourself through Oleg’s eyes, okay? You’re nice, really nice! Oh, my God, you’re a member of the Russian – what is it again?’