Winter Garden

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘Mr Douglas,’ called Olga Fiodorovna, ‘we are waiting.’

  The rug was necessary, thought Ashburner, retracing his steps. It was to cover some mark, some stain not yet removed.

  He was silent in the car. They talked about him as if he wasn’t there.

  ‘I have a surprise for him in a little while,’ said Olga Fiodorovna. ‘Something of great importance. I feel he is not interested in paintings.’

  ‘As long as it’s not another visit to a metal worker,’ Bernard said. ‘He’s up to here with metal workers.’

  ‘He’ll go down with pneumonia,’ said Enid. ‘He needs something for his head.’

  The car stopped outside a palace. A soldier with a gun on his back walked up and down in front of a flight of monumental steps.

  About to leave the car, Ashburner was told by Olga Fiodorovna to stay where he was. ‘You are going somewhere else,’ she said. She spoke to the driver who grunted and nodded his head. ‘You are expected, Mr Douglas,’ said Olga Fiodorovna. ‘Professor Valentina Sochnikova will meet you at the door. There will be no need of an interpreter.’

  ‘But where am I going?’ asked Ashburner. He looked helplessly at the others and kept his hand on the door as if he might yet make a break for it.

  ‘Search me,’ said Bernard. ‘It’s supposed to be a surprise.’

  Ashburner, whose whole existence since arriving on foreign soil had been a series of surprises, was dismayed at the news. He couldn’t bring himself to wave as he was driven away down the street.

  The journey was short and ended outside a multi-storeyed building within an enclosed wall. The driver stayed at the wheel and indicated that Ashburner should get out. There were several cars and a white van parked in front of the entrance. Some slogan on the roof, insecurely battened, swung to and fro in the wind.

  As soon as he set foot in the building, Ashburner knew he was in a hospital. There was no mistaking the tick from the clock on the gleaming wall, and the smells of ether and fear, surgical spirit and beeswax that filled the air he breathed. He was convinced he was going to see Nina. A small woman in white tennis shoes and a young man with a stethoscope dangling about his neck greeted him with affection; he was embraced by each in turn and kissed on both cheeks. Reluctantly removing his overcoat – the cleanliness of his surroundings made him conscious of his crumpled suit and his torn sleeve – he was led along a succession of tiled passages. It was only when he was ascending in the lift that it occurred to him that Nina couldn’t possibly be here. They were four hundred miles from Moscow. He was still trying to work out what day it was and how many nights ago Nina had been spirited away when he found himself in a small ante-room, where he was handed a white coat and a cotton skull cap. Startled, he put them on and feeling like a pastry chef in a restaurant was directed through a green door with a red bulb burning above it.

  He was in a dimly lit cubicle, alone, with a glass panel let into one wall. There were two television monitors in a corner, both screens blank, and in front of them an upright chair and a low tubular table on which was set an enamel basin and a paper towel. When he approached the glass panel and stared down, he saw that he was overlooking an operating theatre. A group of people, masked like terrorists, were hovering above a naked figure spreadeagled on a raised black couch. Even as he watched, the angle of the couch altered and an attendant, steadying himself by placing his finger on the figure’s cheekbone and his thumb on the peak of its shaved head, drew with a marking pen a freehand line in purple ink, bisecting the skull from ear to ear. The figure was so tormented with tubes and catheters, limbs so mangled with surgical apparatus, buttocks supported on a copper plate, flesh daubed with chemical dyes of livid green and yellow, that it was impossible to tell whether it was a man or a woman. Trembling with disgust and excitement, Ashburner retreated into a corner. Plainly he had been mistaken for Nina’s husband, the brain specialist. The appalling prospect of being asked for his opinion, or worse, his assistance in the abattoir below, unmanned him.

  He had no idea how long he stood there, cowering against the wall. The extreme silence in the sound-proofed room was in some way interfering with his breathing. He was just gathering his strength to wipe away the sweat that trickled into his eyes when the twin monitors flashed into colour and with the images on the screens came the frightful noise of a high-speed drill.

  After a while, considerably calmer, for the piglet whine of the drill had shocked him into filling his lungs with air, Ashburner sat down and wiped his face with the paper towel. In close-up he viewed a hand in a glistening plastic glove wielding a scalpel. He couldn’t see any gory fragments, or blood in tones of technicolor red, merely a pinkish pulp like the inside of a peach, palpitating beneath a strip of transparent gauze. Now that the barbarous reality beyond the glass panel had been transferred to that familiar, reassuring box, he watched the proceedings with interest.

  In time, the gauze was removed and numerous pairs of slender silver scissors were inserted into the tissues and lifted and replaced with such rapidity that Ashburner was reminded of a display of lace-making he had witnessed in Venice, given by an old woman in a doorway, the bobbins leaping like fish between her fingers. He could hear the magnified beat of a pulse and voices speaking in Russian and an unidentifiable crackling and rustling. Once he was shown, suspended from a steel armature, a pleated bladder sagging in and out like an accordion. The images on both screens were identical. He was in the middle of studying the probing of some tropical fruit, oyster grey and pink at the core, when quite suddenly the picture on the left-hand monitor wavered and slipped, to be replaced by a recognisably human chin and a mouth pegged cruelly open. Zooming in from above, the camera recorded a nose from whose nostril dangled a thin tube resembling a string of snot, and above it two eyes mercifully shut with white tape, and above the eyes a swollen band of forehead stained apricot yellow, in the centre of which and close to the hairline, if the head had not been shaved, was the distinct impression of a star-shaped scar.

  14

  Following his collapse at the hospital – he was found lying in the passage outside the viewing cubicle – Ashburner was transported, wrapped in a cosy blanket, to his hotel. There he was helped to bed and slept for almost eighteen hours. Once or twice he imagined that he was visited by his wife and her Uncle Robert. Both of them reeked of chloroform.

  When he finally awoke he saw Enid tiptoeing about the room. She told him everyone had been most concerned at his fainting like that. Mr Karlovitch had sent up a lavish bunch of tulips, but Olga Fiodorovna had given them to the chambermaid because she said they’d use up the oxygen. Bernard had popped in several times. Last night they had gone to a dinner given by the Artist’s Union of Leningrad. They had come home early in order to keep an eye on him.

  ‘I was just exhausted,’ said Ashburner. ‘All I needed was to get my head down.’

  ‘Nina telephoned last night,’ Enid said.

  ‘You spoke to her, did you?’ asked Ashburner.

  ‘Olga did,’ said Enid. ‘Nina sent you her love.’

  ‘How kind,’ said Ashburner, and he lay back on the pillows.

  At midday he dressed and was fetched downstairs by Bernard and taken to the restaurant. He drank a bowl of soup and ordered a large steak. ‘Did you enjoy the Hermitage?’ he asked politely.

  ‘It was a bloody knockout,’ said Bernard. ‘I’m going back there this afternoon. We were just hanging around to see how you were.’

  ‘There was no need,’ Ashburner said, but he was touched.

  ‘Olga took me to the Botanical Gardens,’ said Bernard. ‘She insisted on showing me some plant with bloody big thorns all over it. She slipped up on her English, though – she said she wanted to show me the biggest prick in the Soviet Union. And you missed a good do last night. It was well up to standard. Karlovitch fell over. I even did some work this morning. I gave the guards the slip and nipped out for an hour before breakfast. I did a drawing of the Peter-Paul Fortress.’

>   ‘Jolly good,’ said Ashburner. He couldn’t think why Bernard was so keen on fortresses, particularly after his experience in Red Square.

  ‘It’s on the Neva,’ explained Bernard. ‘It was built to guard Russia’s access to the Baltic.’

  ‘I should have come with you,’ said Ashburner. He thought his voice sounded uninterested. He tried to smile.

  ‘You’re sure you’re all right now?’ asked Bernard.

  ‘Perfectly all right,’ said Ashburner.

  ‘You haven’t got a dicky heart or anything, have you?’ persisted Bernard.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my heart,’ Ashburner said. He shifted uncomfortably on his chair. There was something else bothering him but he kept it to himself.

  Olga Fiodorovna came into the restaurant and told Bernard she wanted a quiet word with Mr Douglas. ‘Fire away,’ said Bernard. ‘I’ll pretend I’m not here.’

  She reminded him that they were going out in one hour. Perhaps he would be so good as to run along and see if Miss Dwyer was preparing herself. ‘She is without means of telling the time,’ she said.

  Muttering, Bernard took his cup of coffee to another table and sat with his back to them.

  ‘You will understand,’ began Olga Fiodorovna, ‘that I am responsible for your welfare. I do not wish to sound like a schoolmistress with a recalcitrant pupil. I speak from the heart and not from malice. I think you understand what I mean.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Ashburner, though he was totally foxed.

  ‘I will tell you a little parable, Mr Douglas. You may have noticed that I am not myself. I have had problems, domestic matters that have affected me.’ She moved a plate irritatingly around the tablecloth. ‘I am very sensitive, too sensitive perhaps. You had a mother?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Ashburner.

  ‘Then you will understand. My mother is very Russian, very beautiful, very impulsive. When I was a small girl she would hug me so passionately that I would cry out. If I did not eat up my food she would shake me. It was for my own good, you understand. She wanted me to have my vitamins.’

  Ashburner was a little out of his depth. He had been sent away to school when he was seven and his own mother was something of a stranger. Her hugs, such as they were, could be described as lukewarm.

  Suddenly Olga Fiodorovna leaned across the table and seizing hold of his upper jaw between thumb and forefinger, painfully squeezed it. ‘Eat, eat, eat,’ she cried, increasing the pressure cruelly. Abruptly she released him. ‘But now,’ she continued, ‘it is I who am in charge of my little Mamotchka. She is very old and refuses to swallow her food. Things have swung full circle.’ Holding an imaginary fork, she stabbed it in the direction of Ashburner’s mouth.

  Alarmed, he pushed his chair further back from the table. She was certainly very like her mother, he thought.

  ‘We are all responsible for one another,’ said Olga Fiodorovna. ‘I think you have a strongly developed sense of duty. Am I right?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ he agreed. He knew she was humouring him.

  ‘I think you are sensitive like me, Mr Douglas. For people with an artistic temperament, life is not easy. You recognise more than most your duty to yourself, your dependents, your country.’

  ‘You may be right,’ he said. He thought she was overdoing the patriotic bit. He wondered whether, in slyly mentioning his dependents, she was alluding to his wife. He felt ashamed, and then he remembered that she was always mistaking him for someone else.

  ‘Though of course,’ said Olga Fiodorovna, ‘duty shouldn’t preclude a sense of fun.’

  ‘Fun!’ he said.

  ‘It is advisable, however, to keep one’s high spirits within bounds, particularly in a country other than one’s own.’

  ‘I don’t quite follow you,’ said Ashburner stiffly. ‘In what way have I been high-spirited?’

  The interpreter looked him firmly in the eye. ‘There have been reports,’ she said, ‘of pranks at the home of Mr Shabelsky’s friends.’

  ‘I was savaged by a dog,’ he contested. ‘It was hardly an occasion for high spirits.’

  ‘The manager of the Peking hotel,’ Olga Fiodorovna told him, ‘received a complaint from a woman guest on the same floor as yourself.’

  ‘I admit it,’ Ashburner cried triumphantly. ‘But the reasons for such a step were beyond reproach.’

  He thought she was being very unreasonable. Though pale, he no longer looked like a man on the run. The plaster had gone from the bridge of his nose and the scratch had almost healed. He had at last changed his clothes and was now wearing a tweed jacket and a pair of crumpled flannel trousers. About to argue with her, pull her down a peg or two, he recollected that he was obligated both to the interpreter and to her employers and it would be a breach of good manners to justify himself. If nothing else, he thought, he still had a fair idea of what’s what.

  It was only when Enid came downstairs that Olga Fiodorovna sprang it on them that they were scheduled to visit the Piskarevsky cemetery, built to commemorate the six hundred thousand Russians who had perished in the Siege of Leningrad.

  ‘That’s all very well,’ protested Bernard, ‘but I’m supposed to be an artist, not a bloody vicar. I don’t want to see any graves.’ He was disgusted and flatly refused to go. He had, he said, every intention of returning to the Hermitage Museum. ‘I’ve only looked at one tenth of the paintings,’ he complained. ‘It’s potty to come all this way and not spend more time there.’

  ‘Who worked out where we should go?’ asked Enid. ‘Does everyone visit the cemetery?’

  ‘Not everybody,’ admitted Olga Fiodorovna. ‘Dignitaries from the armed forces, statesmen.’ She was on the point of adding that in this particular instance it had been Mrs St Clair who had expressed a wish to go there, when she remembered how the mention of her name seemed peculiarly to distress Mr Douglas. He was badly affected by his separation from her.

  ‘I’d love to go to the cemetery,’ said Ashburner. He didn’t want to crawl, but he thought Bernard had gone a little too far. It was like somebody speaking scathingly of the cenotaph in Whitehall.

  Olga Fiodorovna was in a dilemma. It wasn’t possible that Mr Douglas should wander about on his own, but then neither could she allow Mr Burns out of her sight. The fact that Mr Douglas was apparently the more extrovert of the two didn’t prove anything. It was early days.

  ‘I think I’d like to go to the cemetery,’ said Enid. ‘I often go to the one at Highgate.’ She had once wandered into a churchyard, by mistake, on the island of Crete, in which the bodies had been left lying in open pits, under sacking. Tacked to pieces of driftwood were passport photographs of the deceased in life, all of them staring as though surprised by ghosts. She hadn’t seen much, just the odd boot sticking out, but the sea was quite near and it was very hot and she was wearing shorts, and it was a disturbing thing to stumble upon under a blazing sky.

  ‘I will ask for another interpreter,’ said Olga Fiodorovna, making a decision. ‘She is quite a nice lady, called Valentina, who will explain to you the facts of the cemetery. I will accompany Mr Burns to the Hermitage.’ She went away to make her arrangements.

  Ashburner apologised to Bernard for landing him with Olga. ‘But as you may have guessed,’ he said, ‘I’m not terribly keen on Art. And it would be better for me if I was in the open air.’

  He longed to have a man’s talk with Bernard, but it wasn’t the right moment. In the circumstances it would be easier if they were alone.

  Bernard told him not to worry, he could handle Olga. She wasn’t only stunning to look at but bright into the bargain. ‘You just have to keep her off the subject of her Mum,’ he said. He didn’t know if it was all that wise, Ashburner being taken off to gaze at a load of tombstones. It was pretty morbid, carting him from hospital to grave.

  Valentina, the hired help, wasn’t as good at her job as Olga Fiodorovna. Twice Enid pointed at buildings and enquired what they were and both times Valentina said she
didn’t know. She seemed nervous and she wasn’t suitably dressed for the weather. Her coat was thin and she wore high-heeled court shoes over woollen ankle socks. She kept repeating that they mustn’t stay long at the cemetery. Miss Fiodorovna had ordered her to be brisk; in the evening the English visitors were going to the Opera.

  After half an hour’s driving the car stopped. Ashburner had expected a church, but all he saw was a concrete blockhouse and a turnstile and, beyond, a flat white landscape cut with symmetrical paths swept clear of snow and edged with withered shrubs encased in envelopes of polythene to protect them from the frost. Between the paths jutted squares of polished granite, identical in size and each one no larger than a box of chocolates, planted row upon row, stretching endlessly to the horizon. Under glass cloches lay cardboard scrolls, printed with names and numbers, tilted to the sky. The place had the appearance of a garden centre closed for the winter. It was bitterly cold.

  Enid told Ashburner he should tie Nina’s pink scarf round his head, turban fashion, to cover his ears.

  He said it wasn’t necessary, but then almost immediately he took it from his pocket and did as she suggested.

  ‘It makes you rather Indian,’ said Enid, but she was being kind; she thought he looked like a brutal housewife.

  Valentina, shuddering in the icy wind, garbled a melancholy account of death by torture, bombardment, hypothermia and starvation. Orchestral music, relayed from loudspeakers, regulated their steps to a funeral pace as they marched along the path.

  ‘The music helps,’ said Enid. ‘It makes it sadder.’

  ‘They’ve got piped music in my local supermarket now,’ Ashburner told her. ‘I don’t find it altogether helpful.’

  There was nothing really to see, nothing dramatic to catch the eye.

  ‘They should have marble angels,’ said Enid, close to tears. ‘And crosses and ornamental urns.’ She would have liked to have taken her time, wept, let her mind form pictures of the dead and the manner of their dying, but Valentina was racing ahead, her stout legs whipped purple, desperate to get it over with.