Winter Garden

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ agreed Bernard, flinching under the chummy pressure of her arm and determined the moment he was rid of her to make for the swimming pool in the moat.

  Some minutes later the car came to a halt beside the steps of St Basil’s Cathedral. Helping Bernard from his seat as though he were an invalid, Olga Fiodorovna pointed diagonally across Red Square towards a large Gothic edifice, turreted and towered, situated lower down the hill. She stipulated that in one hour’s time they should meet in the English bar of the Hotel Nationale.

  ‘One hour,’ repeated Bernard, thrusting his fists deeper into his pockets lest they should fly out and punch her to the ground. Normally a solitary man, he wasn’t used to taking orders.

  Ashburner, dragged from the interior of the car, staggered under the onslaught of the wind. He waved uncomprehendingly as Olga Fiodorovna was driven away. He was all at sea. Within seconds his ears turned purple, and so fierce was the pain that he shuffled on the spot like a tap dancer. Upon learning from Enid that Bernard wanted to go to some outdoor swimming pool, he was flabbergasted. ‘My dear fellow,’ he shuddered. ‘You can’t. The shock would kill you.’ He looked wildly about him for shelter. Clutching his incendiary ears and calling for the others to follow, he jogged tormentedly up the steps of St Basil’s.

  Bernard walked off in a northerly direction. He saw no reason why he should enlighten Ashburner; he hadn’t any intention of swimming, only of sketching the surroundings of the pool.

  Cowering behind a stout pillar at the entrance of the cathedral, Enid and Ashburner watched his progress. But for a flock of pigeons he was alone in the centre of the Square. A line of people, plodding two by two, heads bowed, wound in a straggling procession about its perimeter. Directly opposite the cathedral the wooden doors of the Fortress opened on to a courtyard. A squad of soldiers, fur-capped and muffled from throat to ankle in top-coats of olive green, stood to attention on the cobblestones. Above them the golden domes burned in the grey sky. The soldiers, responding to some unheard shout of command, tramped into the square and advanced towards Bernard. Unaware that he was outflanked, mackintosh flapping, he limped onwards. Ashburner called his name. Alerted, Bernard looked back and faltered; attempting to run for it he slipped and fell on all fours in the snow. The pigeons lifted into the wind and circled above the square. The troops strutted past. Picking himself up and changing course, Bernard headed for the street. He raised his arm as if hailing a taxi.

  ‘Better pretend we didn’t see that,’ said Enid, as they stumbled down the steps in pursuit. ‘I expect he’s in pain.’

  Nobody could be sure they would recognise a taxi if they saw one. Ashburner thought taxis probably didn’t exist; such things were surely out of place in an equal society. When a large white car stopped at the kerb he hesitated but then, nudged forward by the others and galvanised by the cold, clambered inside.

  ‘Hotel Nationale,’ said Bernard.

  The car drove off so fast they all fell backwards in their seats. Almost at once the driver held up his arm and rubbed his fingers together suggestively.

  Enid was the only one who had any roubles. ‘This isn’t a taxi,’ she whispered. ‘There’s no meter.’ She was fearful they were being hijacked.

  Ashburner didn’t care what sort of vehicle it was; he would gladly have ridden in a cattle truck to be out of the frightful blast of the wind. His ears, previously frozen, now throbbed exquisitely.

  They waited for two hours in the English bar before Olga Fiodorovna arrived. She had spent a banal morning holding on to the end of a telephone.

  ‘Somewhere outside,’ she said, gesturing towards the windows, ‘people are conducting their lives in a simple, uncomplicated manner.’

  Ashburner nodded doubtfully and fetched a chair to the table.

  Telex messages were stuttering back and forth between Sheremetyev airport and Heathrow, she said, but as yet there was no news of his elusive suitcase. Ashburner’s signature was required on several new forms. Her life, she implied, was a paper chase. Even so, she had managed to purchase some little commodities; taking from her handbag a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste and a bar of soap, she laid them in front of Ashburner.

  ‘I’m much more concerned about head-gear,’ he said ungraciously, and began to question her as to where he could buy a fur hat or a cap with ear pieces and the relative prices of such items here and at home. It wasn’t until Enid put her oar in and mentioned balaclavas, recounting a gruesome incident on the Polar trek north when sweat soldered wool to the head, necessitating medical treatment, that he remembered the absent Nina and cried out her name. His energetic rise from the table spun a dish of sweet gherkins to the floor.

  Olga Fiodorovna said there was no need for alarm. At this moment Mrs St Clair was lunching with Boris Shabelsky in the Artists’ Union Club, once the home of Prince Nevsky, and afterwards she would be driven by him to her next appointment. This afternoon they would all be reunited in the studio of the illustrator, Andrei Petrov.

  Reassured, Ashburner went into the washroom to clean his teeth. The paste lathered like soap and the brush disintegrated in his mouth. Spitting nylon stalks into the basin and examining his ears for frostbite, he dwelt on an image of Nina, blue eyes wantonly regarding her companion as they talked meaningfully about Art. This Boris character was obviously one of those clever chaps who spoke English; otherwise the interpreter would have been present. Perhaps Mr Karlovitch was chaperoning them. It’s just possible, thought Ashburner, that she will mention me. Holding the remains of his toothbrush in one hand and still frothing at the lips, he ran back into the lounge bar and seizing Bernard by the shoulder exclaimed, ‘Boris!’

  ‘He is, I think, a friend of yours,’ said Olga, when she had fathomed the cause of his excitement. ‘He contacted Mr Karlovitch this morning and was most insistent that you should attend the exhibition.’

  ‘I thought we were having tea with a metal worker,’ Bernard said.

  It was important, Olga Fiodorovna stressed, to realise that arrangements were flexible. A great deal of care had gone into the organisation of their visit, but if Mr Douglas thought fit to make alternative plans it wasn’t in her nature to dissuade him.

  ‘I’m quite in the dark,’ protested Ashburner. ‘I really don’t know the fellow from Adam.’ He felt in some undefined way that he was at fault and wished his wife was at his side. In company she had been known, once or twice, to back him up. He thought she might have found the exact, light-hearted phrase calculated to put Olga Fiodorovna in her place.

  He was further discomfited during lunch to be handed an envelope containing a hundred roubles.

  Olga Fiodorovna seemed annoyed when he argued that he wasn’t a guest of the Soviet Union. ‘Mr Douglas,’ she said, ‘You are destined to be awkward.’

  Blushing, he pocketed the money. He felt like a kept man.

  Later they drove to a tourist’s shop to buy him a hat. Bernard refused to step inside. Shopping, he said, was anathema to him and he didn’t want anything for his head. If need be he’d wrap an old newspaper about his ears. After a whispered consultation the driver was instructed to take Mr Burns to the artist’s studio and return without delay.

  Inside the store, Ashburner changed his mind. He was disinclined to spend eighty pounds worth of traveller’s cheques on a fur hat which would have to be abandoned long before he arrived in Chelsea. He was forced to loiter in the wake of the two women as they wandered from counter to counter. Shocked, he examined his reflection in a mirror; his complexion flared pink and mauve. Far from resembling a stone carving he thought his face looked like something stamped on the lid of a biscuit tin.

  At the last moment, when the car was actually at the kerb, Olga Fiodorovna, murmuring that she had business to attend to, turned back and was gone for quite ten minutes.

  Ashburner, waiting in the car with Enid, dwelt on the events of the previous day. In the aeroplane Nina had asked him if he was happy, though she herself had looked rather mise
rable. But then, frankly, it had never been apparent that Nina had any capacity for happiness or that she appreciated it in others. In the restaurant she had told him to stop laughing, that the sound he was making was absurd. It was difficult to think of an acceptable way of laughing when she behaved so distantly yet lay so close to his heart, and of course he had been suffering from the effects of that unusual afternoon tea. He imagined the squeal, so repugnant to Nina, that had issued from his lips had been the result of repression rather than amusement. One way or the other, he had been repressed for the last twenty-four hours.

  ‘I could wring Nina’s neck,’ he said. ‘I really could.’ He was astonished at the ferocity of this outburst.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Enid said. She was thinking of the unobtainable Bernard. ‘It would be more peaceful if she was dead.’

  ‘Good God,’ cried Ashburner. ‘What do you take me for?’

  ‘Or in prison,’ ventured Enid. ‘At least you’d know where she was.’

  There was a second, unexplained halt when they reached the outskirts of the city. They drove into the courtyard of a block of flats. Ashburner, fancying that they had reached their destination, was manoeuvring himself to follow Olga Fiodorovna from the car when she shut the door in his face. She turned once to look back, hand held up like a traffic controller, and then, silk scarf fluttering in the wind, ran across the yard. The driver took out his cigarettes.

  ‘She’s always on the go, isn’t she?’ remarked Ashburner, irritated by the high-handed manner in which the interpreter had departed.

  ‘She’s probably visiting her Mamotchka,’ Enid said. ‘She’s having a spot of bother with her at the moment.’ Enid herself had been bothered by her own mother for many years. ‘I suppose,’ she said, looking out at the bleak vista of concrete and snow, ‘that you get on well with your Mum.’

  ‘Not too badly,’ admitted Ashburner. ‘Though she’s frightfully shy.’ He was telling Enid how his wife still went down with raging headaches on the anniversary of her mother’s birthday when the driver, who had been slumped contentedly in a cloud of smoke, sat up abruptly and stubbed out his cigarette. A car was nosing into the courtyard behind them.

  ‘After her mother’s death’, said Ashburner, ‘she perked up for a year or two. She wouldn’t let me go to the funeral. I sent a wreath of course. But then her Uncle Robert died and she became depressed again.’

  ‘The uncle with the money?’ asked Enid. The light was going from the sky. She watched as two men, one carrying a suitcase wrapped in canvas against the weather, passed the windows of the car.

  ‘I don’t understand depressions,’ said Ashburner. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Only when my work’s not going well,’ Enid said.

  Ashburner gathered she was alluding to her art; Nina often referred to her painting as work. ‘I’m afraid I’m far too active to give way to it,’ he said. ‘I’m always doing things, mending sash cords, making fires.’ But even as he spoke a peculiar feeling of lassitude stole over him. He peered out of the window of the car as though from the interior of a cave and had the greatest difficulty raising his eyes from the footprints in the darkening snow. A little church music would have reduced him to tears. He was far too worldly to imagine that his mood had anything to do with his separation from Nina. What I’m experiencing, he told himself, isn’t unhappiness but fatigue.

  10

  The studio of the illustrator Andrei Petrov was housed in a five-storey building surrounded by trees and set beside a frozen lake. There was a bicycle shed in the grounds and the statue of a man bending down to admire a leaping fish.

  The short journey from car to entrance hall was sufficient to chill Ashburner to the bone. In the lift he thought he heard someone groaning but it was merely the chafing of the ancient cable.

  Olga Fiodorovna escorted them to the artist’s door and then, explaining that she had visited Mr Petrov on numerous other occasions, left them. She didn’t use the lift. They heard her running down the stone stairs.

  The room they entered was more like an English bedsitter than a studio. Though there was a couch, table and chairs, and a small kitchen half-concealed behind a curtain, it contained neither easel nor drawing board. A collection of cotton squares printed with koala bears, maps of Tasmania and kangaroos, some framed behind glass, some stretched on wooden battens, hung on the wall above the fireplace. The artist’s wife, a motherly woman in a pinny, was cutting a chocolate cake into portions. Introduced to the visitors by her husband, her hand shook noticeably and she was too bashful to look them candidly in the eye. Andrei Petrov, though more confident than his wife, spoke with one hand partially covering his mouth as if he hardly believed what he was saying. The Secretary of the Union, Mr Karlovitch, was strolling in the grounds and would join them shortly. In the meantime he himself, with the limited amount of English at his disposal, would try to acquaint his distinguished guests with his work and aspirations: as could be seen, he wasn’t only an illustrator but something of a connoisseur of folk-art. ‘Them’, he said, indicating the cloths above the fireplace, ‘I unearthed in Sydney, Australia.’

  ‘Charming,’ Ashburner said.

  Encouraged, the illustrator pointed to the table on which lay a small charcoal drawing of a child hugging a teddy bear. He said deferntially to Ashburner: ‘That is the frontispiece of my latest book. I hesitate to show it to a man so forward in his field.’

  Bernard was no help. He sat morosely in an armchair, balancing a plate of crumbs on his knee.

  ‘It is for the six- to nine-year-olds,’ elaborated Andrei Petrov.

  ‘It’s awfully good,’ Ashburner said. He was to remember later the exact positioning of the white woolly rug he so thoughtfully side-stepped as he advanced across the polished wooden floor.

  On his return to the Peking Hotel he immediately telephoned Nina’s room. As he had expected, he received no reply. There wasn’t any point in his going upstairs; he had nothing to change into and his shower didn’t work. Disturbed, he prowled the lobby, buffeted by numerous women who, swaddled in furs, waited in a disorderly queue for the services of the cloakroom attendant. It was impossible for Ashburner to tell to which class they belonged. If he had been at home he might have referred to them as day trippers; his own wife, in winter, beyond a faint reddening of the nostrils, remained inescapably Kensington. Divested of hats and coats and scarves, the women emerged several inches thinner though still formidably stout-busted in layers of brightly coloured jumpers worn above minuscule skirts. It wasn’t surprising, he thought, that there had been an October Revolution: really cold weather was a great leavener of society. It was also possible that arctic conditions affected people in much the same way as heat waves; the Secretary of the Union had certainly behaved very oddly, going for a stroll in sub-zero temperatures, but perhaps that had something to do with his Siberian background.

  Entering the restaurant and choosing a table nearest to the swing doors, Ashburner took from his pocket the large brown envelope Mr Karlovitch had given him earlier. Opening it, he draped Nina’s pink scarf across his knee and read her note again. Sweetheart, wear this and keep your little old head warm in memory of me. See you when you get back. Though she had never written to him before the levity of her message struck him as characteristic. It was the wording of the last sentence that he found peculiar. How convenient that she had happened to have a large envelope handy. Picking up the scarf he held it to his cheek and was sitting in this vulnerable attitude when Bernard came into the restaurant.

  ‘Listen, Douglas,’ Bernard said. ‘I’ve been up to her room and she’s not there. I’ll tell it once more and then leave me alone. I’ve just about had it.’

  ‘I don’t need to hear it again,’ said Ashburner. ‘I know your side of it.’ He folded both note and scarf and stuffed them in the pocket of his jacket. ‘But just answer me this if you can. Why did Olga say there was no need to disturb Nina this morning when she already knew Nina was having lunch with Prince Nevsky and
that Boris chap?’

  ‘What Prince?’ said Bernard. ‘He’s as dead as a dodo.’

  ‘Well, why didn’t she give the note to you?’ asked Ashburner.

  ‘I told you, mate. She was leaving when I got there. They both were. He was taking her to see Pasternak’s grave. I wish to Christ I’d gone with them.’

  ‘She was looking quite well, was she?’ persisted Ashburner.

  ‘As well as could be expected after seeing that bloody folk-art,’ shouted Bernard, exasperated.

  ‘I gather they were only tea-towels,’ Ashburner said. ‘Even so, I thought one or two of them were rather pretty.’

  Enid, when she joined them, was wearing a black taffeta dress and carrying a dorothy bag made of threadbare velvet. When she sat down she rustled like falling tissue paper.

  ‘Smashing texture,’ enthused Bernard, and he stroked the surface of her bag as though it were a cat.

  Ashburner, complimenting Enid insincerely on her smart appearance, considered her frock outmoded, to say the least; it was beginning to irritate him the way they all affected to admire anything old and second-hand no matter how appalling its condition. His wife had inherited an evening reticule embroidered with seed pearls from Uncle Robert’s aunt. It was as good as new, strictly for show and insured for one hundred pounds. He was in the middle of telling them about it, describing the silver clasp, the flawlessness of its inner lining of ivory-coloured silk, when Bernard cried out belligerently, ‘I’m warning you both, if the work exhibited this evening is of the same standard as that crap we were subjected to this afternoon, I’m walking out.’

  Ashburner was both bewildered and offended. It was true that his wife sometimes acquired a far-away look in her eyes when he spoke to her for longer than a minute, but that was understandable, and though it would have been an exaggeration to pretend that his professional colleagues hung on his every word they would never had interrupted him in mid-sentence. It was part of his job to assess character and from what he had observed of Bernard over the last forty-eight hours it was difficult, despite his often boorish behaviour, to dismiss him as merely an ignorant fellow. There were depths of sensitivity in Bernard which, if the man had not been an artist, Ashburner would have found disconcerting. There were only two rational explanations for his display of rudeness: either he was overtired from being up or down all night with Enid, or he was more worried than he cared to admit at the continuing absence of Nina.