The company struggled to its feet, some swaying, some holding on to one another for support. ‘Mrs St Clair,’ they chorused.
‘What does it mean?’ asked Ashburner of Enid. ‘How do they know her?’
‘Hush,’ said Enid, for the stockbroker was now taking a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolding it. ‘I will read this in Russian,’ he said. ‘Our interpreter will translate to you its original flavour.’ He commenced to recite what appeared to be a poem.
Ashburner hadn’t cared for the wording of the toast. It had been altogether too familiar. He wanted to make some protest, like sitting down, but he wasn’t sure if he was in the right and even if he had been he wasn’t brave enough to show active displeasure. Inwardly he growled like a tiger.
When the stockbroker had finished declaiming, there was laughter and applause.
‘I can’t stand poetry,’ grumbled Bernard. ‘It’s usually bloody rubbish.’
‘This is a work,’ announced Olga Fiodorovna, studying the scrap of exercise paper handed to her, ‘dedicated to Mrs St Clair. It begins, Nina, Nina, your window is always open. Then there is a pause. It goes on, Oft have I waited in the hours that are small, waited for the light that will shine through the trees. Drawn through the darkness to that port of call in Holland Park—’
‘My God,’ exclaimed Ashburner. ‘She has a studio there.’
‘I have not been disappointed,’ continued Olga Fiodorovna. ‘I have not been let down. The heart’s warmth, like a candle flame, is not easily extinguished. For Nina, Nina, your window is always open.’
‘See what I mean?’ said Bernard. ‘Candle flames go out all the bloody time.’
There were several more verses, but Ashburner didn’t hear them. There was no doubt in his mind that the stanzas so merrily received were totally suspect. What was being read aloud bore more relation to a rendering of Eskimo Nell than to an ode to a visiting dignitary. If I telephone her later, he thought, I will guard my true feelings. I mustn’t make an ass of myself.
When the luncheon was over, Enid, who earlier had expressed a wish to look more closely at a painting of Lenin inciting some shipyard workers to rebellion, was seen climbing the Gothic staircase to the gallery, supported by Mr Karlovitch. Olga Fiodorovna followed discreetly.
Ashburner and Bernard, without warning, were driven off in the official car to a palace to take tea with a metal worker. The glass dome in the banqueting hall that now served as a workshop had cracked under the weight of successive winter snows and the mouldings above the doors were stained with damp. Within minutes of arrival Bernard fell deeply asleep while studying a portfolio of preliminary drawings. Ashburner was obliged to enthuse, single-handed, over a series of raised reliefs of naked women with rippling hair. Later he was subjected to a demonstration of the artist’s skill. The metal worker, unable to speak English, performed his task in silence save for the muted blows of his hammer. Perched on a rickety stool Ashburner gazed intently at the surface of the work bench shimmering under a layer of zinc and copper filings, and reflected on the curious fate of the previous occupant of the studio beside the frozen lake. Unknown assailants had entered the premises in daylight and surprising the artist, a specialist in humorous cartoons, at his desk had clubbed him to death. Nothing had been stolen. Boris Shabelsky had vehemently denied the existence of hooliganism in the Soviet Union. It had been a crime passionnel. Ashburner was uncertain why he himself should feel so shocked by an incident that had become commonplace in England. He was after all used to eating his breakfast, without loss of appetite, to the accompaniment of that breezy voice on the radio listing arson and mugging and rape. He thought that perhaps his feeling of unease was due in part to Bernard’s dissertation on their first night in Moscow when, in response to a facetious remark of Enid’s regarding the poor quality of the service in the restaurant, he had referred to Mother Russia as a ‘concept above and beyond their experience’. They were visiting the first country to embrace Communism; sympathy or disagreement with the political theory was unimportant. The myth, right or wrong, had become reality. According to Bernard it was as if they were visiting a country in which the teachings of Jesus had been put into practice. He insisted he was the last person to have any truck with either Bolshevism or Christianity, but there was no denying the fact of the ‘reality’. At which point Ashburner had lost track of the argument – in any case he was too busy wondering whether or not Nina would allow him to her room – but it had something to do with bread queues and Enid having been rung up by the Press last year and asked how many pairs of knickers she owned, simply because the Tate Gallery had purchased one of her paintings. The discussion had continued at the home of Boris’s friend Tatiana, but there again Ashburner had been preoccupied, this time with the elderly husband, though he had heard Boris explaining that queues were caused because bread and other such things were subsidised by the State. Boris had also admitted that as an artist, and therefore a privileged and respected member of society, he had never had to queue for anything. Nor was it likely that Pravda would dream of enquiring about the number or colour of his underpants. The exact meaning behind this discourse had eluded Ashburner, but the general idea remained with him like a fishbone in the gullet. The murder of an artist was an attack on the State. Startled, he rocked on his stool. He realised that until this moment he had never been stimulated by abstract thought. He had always known, even before Nina put it into words, that his schooldays had crippled his development. Equally he had always understood that his strength of character, his honesty, the stability of his marriage and his acceptance of responsibility were a direct result of this emotional damage. In his case, the ends had more than justified the means. If the world hadn’t changed so drastically in the nineteen-sixties – he dated the onset of the permissive society as preceding the Profumo Affair and following the case of the Duchess of Argyll – he would never in the nineteen-seventies have gone off the rails. Unlike Nina, whose window was always open, he had been content with his enclosed existence. His involvement with her, furtive and inconclusive in the sense that he could never protect her, father her children, foot the bill for her private dental treatment, had left his attitude to life unaltered. She had bothered him, frustrated him in much the same fashion as his wife continued to bother and frustrate him, but he hadn’t been shaken to the core. Now, alone in a foreign country and inexplicably functioning more or less normally without the support of either wife or mistress – he hadn’t even missed his dog – he began dimly to rediscover that lost boy who, compelled at school to read certain set novels of Dostoyevsky, had for a brief twelve months feebly wrestled with the notion of divine justice and self-punishment. Can it be, he thought, smiling and nodding appreciatively at the metal worker, that Mother Russia is a catalyst?
At midnight, reunited with his suitcase, he was the most alert member of the small party that wearily boarded the night express to Leningrad.
13
In the morning, travelling from station to hotel, no one spoke. Olga Fiodorovna was too tired to deliver an historical lecture on the architectural splendours of the city. The hired car bounced over numerous bridges above canals edged with ancient houses washed in pastel shades of blue and pink. They drove through falling snow along cobbled streets and passed in silence the monumental columns of malachite and lapis lazuli that fronted St Isaac’s Cathedral. When the car halted, blocked by a barricade of thrown-up earth and concrete mixers, it was some moments before the interpreter realised that they had stopped. The ground in front of the Hotel Metropole was being dug up by lady road-menders. A woman in a crash helmet of acid yellow, grey hair netted in snowflakes and hanging limply to the shoulders of her quilted jacket, was manoeuvering a bulldozer backwards and forwards in the ruined street.
Mr Karlovitch suggested they should get out and walk the few remaining yards. Olga Fiodorovna wouldn’t hear of it; defying the raised fists and warning flags of the construction workers, she goaded the driver to mount the embankme
nt of rubble. Lurching down the far side and dipping under the maw of the dirt-shifter, which at that very moment was lowering to grab and pulverise, the car rocked and juddered over the potholes to the smashed kerb at the entrance of the hotel.
The Metropole, smaller than the Peking and more luxurious, provided Ashburner with a hot bath. No matter that the water gushing from the hot taps was a brackish brown. There was even a bath plug. Refreshed, he opened his suitcase and found its contents in disarray. One of his waders was missing. The tops had gone both from his tube of shaving cream and from his Colgate toothpaste. The turn-ups of his old tweed trousers had been interfered with and the pockets pulled inside out.
He wished he had time to sit quietly in a corner and think everything over, but Olga Fiodorovna had said they must be downstairs in the lobby by nine-thirty sharp. They were going to the Hermitage to look closely at the Impressionists. The business of the suitcase is puzzling, he thought, adjusting his tie with hands that trembled from fatigue, but can’t be compared with the perplexing events on the midnight express. He had begun by sharing a sleeping compartment with Mr Karlovitch. The women occupied the one next door. Bernard had been installed in a single-berth cabin at the end of the corridor; after only a few moments he had reappeared, complaining that he couldn’t settle until the train had actually started. The men had remained fully clothed and upright, enjoying two bottles of wine provided by the Committee of the Artists’ Union. Presently Enid had emerged from her compartment barefooted and wearing a long white nightgown beneath something she referred to as a ‘happy’ coat. They had asked her to sit with them, but she was worried lest a ticket collector or guard should take exception to her state of undress. Instead she had loitered exotically in the doorway, drinking out of a paper cup – the voluminous sleeve of her coat, embroidered with gold and scarlet thread, falling back to expose an arm flecked to the elbow with green paint. Now and then she had exchanged glances with the Secretary of the Union. When an hour or so had passed and the train was at last clanking slowly through the suburbs of Moscow, Mr Karlovitch had asked Bernard if he would mind changing compartments with him. ‘I am a sickly sleeper,’ he had told him. ‘The least noise and I am jumping up. I am afraid I will disturb the good Mr Douglas.’
‘I don’t care where I doss down,’ Bernard had said. ‘I can sleep on the edge of a cliff.’
There had been some horseplay with Ashburner’s fishing rod. Bernard had mentioned that its canvas cylinder was the ideal container for transporting drawings. He had insisted on fitting the rod together so that it buckled against the roof. After wrestling with Bernard for possession of his rod, Ashburner had gone to the lavatory and then for a stroll along the corridors. In his estimation the view from the windows had been much the same as from any train going through the outskirts of any city in the small hours; a few fitful lights, a stretch of darkness, the green and livid glow of an industrial complex working through the night. He had pressed his cheek to the cold glass – the heat inside the train was oppressive – and had felt for a brief moment a sense of loneliness or adventure, which in his case he thought was probably the same thing. On his return he had found both men lying on their respective bunks, fully clothed and inert. Mr Karlovitch was clutching an empty bottle of wine to his chest and had evidently been guilty of exaggeration. Shaken quite roughly, he hadn’t stirred. Switching off the meagre light, Ashburner had made his way to the single berth cabin.
At first he had been unable to sleep. Earlier in the evening, when he had reminded Olga Fiodorovna of her promise that he should speak to Nina at the sanatorium, she had fobbed him off with a preposterous story of peak-hour telephones and unobtainable numbers. He hadn’t been in a fit state to argue with her. He was childishly deflected at the sight of his suitcase in the lobby, and neither Bernard nor Enid had backed him up. The moment had passed and he had realised he would have to wait the four hundred miles until they arrived in Leningrad. Lying on his bunk he had thought he couldn’t wait and he did remember worrying about his lack of backbone. Then, he supposed, he had dropped asleep, because the next minute he was dreaming he had fallen out of a hammock; he could see the black strings trembling and criss-crossing above his head. At the same time he had become aware that his wife was caressing him in a violent manner. In his dream he had rolled on top of her, penetrated her, and it had all been over in the flick of a cow’s tail. He imagined it had something to do with the motion of the train on the track. He had only known he was awake when he distinctly heard the door sliding shut and found himself lying on the floor of the compartment with his vest rolled up to his navel. For at least three hours after the incident he had knelt on his bunk, staring out at the flying night.
He could be forgiven for thinking the whole matter had been a dream. In twenty-three years his wife hadn’t made the slightest attempt to arouse him, not since returning from that New Year’s Eve party at the Hammerskills when she had accused him of lasciviously eyeing Marjorie Hammerskill. Stung by the injustice of her insinuation, he hadn’t a thought in his head but to get his own little wife between the sheets – seeing that he paid for the food she ate and the clothes she wore – he had slapped her cruelly across the face. Before the cry of remorse had left his lips she had responded in a manner both wanton and surprising. He tried slapping her again, a month later, but on that occasion the result had been her refusal to speak to him for several weeks.
He still had no idea of the identity of the woman who had so abruptly seduced him. Was it Olga Fiodorovna or Enid? He wasn’t prudish, but he did like to know with whom he was being intimate – and then again a man preferred to do some of the running. It was in his nature. It wasn’t as if he was a nocturnal animal, doomed like a hamster to couple in darkness. To be accurate, he realised he hadn’t often coupled in daylight – beyond a few countable summer evenings before the children were born and those unsatisfactory noon-times spent with Nina.
When he went downstairs he found the others assembled at the booking desk. He apologised for keeping them waiting. ‘Someone’s been messing about with my case,’ he said. ‘They’ve taken one of my wellies.’
‘You haven’t kept us waiting,’ said Bernard. ‘Olga doesn’t like her room.’
‘I love beauty,’ explained Olga Fiodorovna. ‘I cannot bear the commonplace. I will not sleep a wink unless my room is well proportioned and furnished with taste.’ She had changed into an elegant black trouser suit and was wearing ankle boots of scarlet leather.
‘About phoning Nina,’ began Ashburner, but already she had turned away from him.
Enid told Ashburner he looked dreadful. ‘You’ve got great black circles under your eyes,’ she said.
He didn’t think she was hinting at anything. She wasn’t winking at him or leaning against him in a familiar manner. ‘I’m all right, my dear,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I’m not yet in my stride.’
He was convinced it hadn’t been Enid who had come to his compartment. She was looking at him with genuine concern. But then neither did it seem likely that Olga Fiodorovna, with her love of beauty, would roll about on the dusty floor of an express train. Was it possible that he had been ravished by a random traveller? He wondered if he should confide in Bernard. Bernard would obviously have more experience of this sort of thing. If in fact he had been pestered by a complete stranger, oughtn’t he perhaps to wash himself in disinfectant?
Olga Fiodorovna went upstairs to inspect her new accommodation and returned smiling. She had managed to procure a suite overlooking the Summer Gardens. It would of course cost a great many extra roubles, but that was unimportant. She led them through the hotel to the tradesmen’s entrance at the rear where the car was waiting. Directing Bernard to sit in the back with Ashburner and Enid, she sat beside the driver. She was now wearing a long sable coat which she spread out on either side of her and stroked continually. Everyone assumed that Mr Karlovitch was either asleep or attending to his paperwork.
Before going to the Hermitage Museum
they were driven to a cobbled street beside a canal to gaze at the house in which Pushkin had died. Olga Fiodorovna made them all get out, though she herself remained in the car. She wound down the window and shouted instructions at them. They must walk on to the middle of the bridge to feel the atmosphere of the place. The street was deserted and the canal frozen over. A black barge was caught in the ice.
‘The duel was enacted over there,’ she called, pointing into the distance. ‘He was carried over the bridge and expired in the house.’
‘Bugger Pushkin,’ said Bernard.
‘She must be awfully well off,’ murmured Enid, looking enviously at Olga Fiodorovna’s hand stabbing the air in its black leather glove. Enid was wearing woollen mittens. After only a few seconds she and Bernard hurried back to the car.
Ashburner lingered on the bridge. No longer conscious of the cold, he had the oddest feeling that he was all head, that his body had floated somewhere further off. Chin held at a curious angle, eyes shut, he stood in the attitude of a man straining to detect the enemy that stalked him. Snow collected on the shoulders of his overcoat. Then out of the silence in which he was so peculiarly suspended he heard the faint, high ring of steel on steel and louder, closer, the half-choked cry of a man run through.
Coming to himself, he fully understood that he had conjured up these sounds out of his mind. Nothing like it had ever happened to him before. In his case, he thought, lack of sleep was having a reverse effect. He had never felt so wide awake. Shaking the snow from his collar he leant against the parapet and looked down at an old newspaper flapping on the surface of the canal. In that instant, caught in a gust of wind, the paper shifted, exposing the blackened leaves of a rotting cabbage. For some reason he was reminded of the white rug on the floor of the illustrator’s studio, placed neither in front of the fireplace nor in the centre of the room.
Winter Garden Page 9