The song had many verses, during which time they approached the university area. The streets became grander, more neoclassical, all domes and porticoes, fluted columns and elegant wide steps.
“And the last fight let us face/The Internationale/Unites the human race,” Valentine finished, with a wave of a clenched fist. “Ooh,” he groaned, as if suddenly remembering he was meant to be injured.
As they passed a porter’s lodge, a bowler-hatted figure within rose to his feet.
“Mackenzie!” Valentine slapped the college servant convivially on his dark-suited shoulder. “And how are you this fine evening?”
The college servant looked unmoved by this blast of charm. “I’d be better if you’d pay those fines you owe, sir.” He rolled a jaundiced eye up and down Marion. “No young ladies staying the night again either.”
Flashing him an uneasy smile, Valentine hurried off across the lawns, his limp miraculously eased. Marion hurried after him. “What does he mean, no young ladies staying the night again?”
“Haven’t the faintest idea. Got me confused with someone else,” Valentine threw over his shoulder as he picked up speed. They were practically running now. The grassy quadrangle was surrounded with imposing gray buildings. He hurried up the steps into one of them—a hall of residence, Marion guessed, seeing pigeonholes in the hallway. One seemed particularly stuffed with cards and invitations. Valentine paused and shoved the entire handful into his pocket before clattering up a flight of wooden stairs.
His room was disgusting. A wardrobe door hung open, revealing a confusion of papers. His actual clothes were on the floor, all looking more dirty and creased even than those he had been beaten up in. There were newspapers everywhere, empty bottles lying on their sides along the skirting board, heaps of books and overflowing ashtrays. Above it all hung the horrible vinegar stench of stale smoke.
“Can’t you open a window?” she asked, using the challenge to conceal her awkwardness. What was she doing here? She had vaguely intended to leave him at the porter’s lodge, but somehow she had followed him in.
He pushed back the half-drawn curtains. The way he rattled and struggled at the pane suggested this was the first time he had ever tried. She went over to help. “You have to move this back,” she said, operating the lever holding the sash down. “It won’t open otherwise.”
He seemed as unabashed by his lack of practical knowledge as he was about the general mess and lack of facilities. “I don’t have any tea,” he said, rummaging in the bottom of a half-open drawer, “but I can offer you this.” He produced a bottle of whisky and waved it at her.
She looked at it doubtfully. “Haven’t you got any glasses? Cups?”
He shook his head, airily. “They’re a bourgeois construct. We’ll just have to drink straight from the bottle.”
He passed it to her. She braced herself and took a swig. It was even worse than what they had drunk in the pub, but after the initial scorch of contact, a warm, relaxed feeling spread through her. Her awkwardness vanished. She looked around, taking it all in.
Beyond the mess, the prevailing aesthetic was Soviet culture. Posters of muscular peasants waving spades or sitting on tractors were stuck haphazardly on the walls.
“Do sit down.” Valentine interrupted her thoughts.
She glanced around and laughed. “Where? You don’t have any chairs.” They, too, were a bourgeois construct, presumably.
“Plenty of room here.” He was sitting on the bed, which was unmade, the sheets twisted, the blanket half-disappeared underneath. He patted the mattress beside him invitingly. “Come on.”
The outrage she felt was mild compared to the accompanying violent pang of longing. She backed against the wall, folding her arms tightly, trying to appear insouciant. “No young ladies staying the night again, remember.”
He rose to his feet, exasperated. “He got me confused with someone else, I tell you.”
“All the same, I’m going.”
He was close to her now, and, quite suddenly, he kissed her. No one had ever kissed her like this, with a tenderness that became urgency. She clung to him. When her lips left his, they felt twice their usual size. His already were, of course, thanks to the beating. “Didn’t that hurt?” she asked, when the power to speak returned.
“Not at all. Desire is an anesthetic. Don’t you find?”
“I’m . . . not sure.”
His dark eyes had a wolfish gleam. “Don’t you want to find out?”
She found herself being led back toward the twisted bed. Before she knew it, he had pulled her down and nudged her knees apart.
“Stop!” cried Marion, sitting up with difficulty. Her cheeks burned and her heart crashed in her chest. She glanced at him hotly from under her hair.
He grinned at her from the pillow, hands behind his head. “Sorry. My mistake. I thought you were an independent woman. Making your own decisions.”
“I am!” she said, crossly. “And one of my independent decisions is not to let you do that.”
She buttoned herself up and, flustered, stepped over the rubbish toward the door.
There was a small stone bust on the mantelpiece. Passing, she glanced at it. It was of a stern-looking bearded man.
“Vladimir Ilyich,” said Valentine, still lounging on the bed.
“Who?”
“Lenin. The greatest revolutionary leader the world has ever seen.”
She stared at the carved face. “Really? Why was he so great?” Lenin had been in charge when the czar and his family were shot in the cellar. She recalled the ghastly details: the diamonds sewn in the corsets, the girls’ shorn hair, the frightened little boy.
“It would,” Valentine said loftily, “take me far too long to explain.”
She glanced at him suspiciously, remembering the Fascist-Communist discussion. How much did Valentine really know about revolutionary politics?
“What was so great about murdering the Romanovs?” she asked.
“They were enemies of the people.”
“But why?” They had been teenage girls, most of them. The thought made her stomach churn.
“They just . . . were.”
She was about to impatiently accuse him of ignorant dogmatism when Miss Golspie slid into her mind, glowing scarves, green glasses and all. She recalled the conversation earlier that afternoon in which she had declared herself uninterested in teaching aristocrats. Perhaps she was guilty of dogmatism herself.
She stared into Lenin’s sharp little eyes. Perhaps she should take the job with the Leveson-Gowers. There were good reasons to do so: the money, the compliment from Miss Golspie it represented and all those earlier, ingenious arguments about how the children of the wealthy needed to know about the poor, for the benefit of society in general. She considered the Bolshevik leader’s hard, intransigent face. Had that happened in Russia, perhaps Lenin wouldn’t have been the greatest revolutionary leader the world had ever seen. If indeed he had been.