I said to him, "Nicholas, there's two of us here who don't need more company."
But having solved the immediate problem, his mind was wandering away to look for thicker gloom. "The generals should get a proper grip on their men—shoot as many of them as they need to. And Stolz and the chalice—I still can't believe it. Russians just aren't capable of such an act, not our sort. I suppose Stolz was one of the urban scum. That's the difference. You take any city regiment and you'll find it riddled with Stolzes. But in the villages you'll get Russians of a very different colour. Look at Popovka. I know, a tiny example, but that's what our country is made up of, lots of tiny examples. Our friends should have no difficulty recruiting in the villages with a story like theirs. What was the head money again?"
I told him—ten roubles. Immediately he reverted to his usual preoccupation with money. He was like a shopkeeper worrying himself to death over a missing pair of bootlaces. He talked of getting the Cossacks from their base in Smolensk to beat through the forest. How much he'd have to pay them, what the bag might be. . .
I asked him how he thought he'd get the bounty money actually paid to him. His mouth turned down. "It's that arsehole Trepov at the Treasury, not a rich godfather," I said.
"I'd forgotten about him ... It was only an idea. These are hard times and I must consider everything . . . well, that brings us up to date. Tell Louis the attic'll do, where those parasites spent their lives devouring my inheritance. That's where it's all gone, Charlie, I'm telling you. This is how my father reasoned: what shall I do today? Answer, have a good time. Tomorrow? Have a better time. Next week? Have the best time ever. At least I don't have that cross to bear. It's become impossible to amuse myself however hard I try. Nothing's funny any more . . . Oh, just see to it all for me."
Fifty
Glebov and Shubrin were in the kitchen. Misha was having breakfast at a little table in the drawing room, in front of a weak fire: ham, two sorts of yellow cheese, both from Popovka, a bowl of apples from the loft, tea with cherry jam. His napkin was tucked in at his neck. He wiped his mouth, reached up and kissed me.
Louis was slapping up the cushions. They'd obviously been carrying on the chat they were having last night. I told them what had happened in the garden.
"Pah! You Russians!" said Louis angrily. "Don't you have any other speed beside fast and slow? I want to get things straight again. I have the plan laid out in my head better than any general. This room first, having moved the furniture, then move the furniture back . . . Now here are two more men stamping round the house calling for God knows what. Russians! Is there nothing in the middle rank of speeds that'll do? I'll leave and then you'll wish you knew how to behave better."
Misha said calmly, "Sit down with me, my fine friend. It's the snow that's putting you out of sorts . . ."
"Never! It's the mess." Louis shaped his waxen hands expressively. "The snow's like a virgin! A bride!" He touched my sleeve. His dark fat face was suddenly alive with pleasure, from ear to ear, as if he was going halves with me in my romance. He said, "I saw her! I was passing her door. The chevalier in me cried out—I couldn't resist! She said, 'Are you trying to starve me?' I had a tray sent up immediately. Oh, Mister Charlie, what are you doing down here when the most delicious winter peach is waiting for you?"
I took the stairs two at a time. Nine strides across the landing where the pensioners were wont to gossip. Whoof! I flung myself across the bed with a thump, at which she rose involuntarily, pillows, magazine and all—levitated.
She'd finished eating. There was a fleck of egg yolk at the corner of her mouth, which I scraped away with my fingernail. A zest of chocolate was on her breath.
The tray was on the floor. She was lying propped against half a dozen pillows and cushions, reading a copy of Country Life with an advertisement for Fry's cocoa on the back cover. She had a shawl round her shoulders. She looked at me over her scarlet-framed spectacles. They came from Paris, the same train of thought as the scarlet walls of her room, and the black bookshelves and the painted ceiling.
The shutters had been folded back. The snow was falling thickly, making the air completely white except when an eddy of wind burst a gap in it through which one could glimpse the speckly darkness of trees. The fire had been lit and was in good shape. There were two full buckets of coal—enough until the evening. Between the fire smell and the breakfast smell was her perfume: Soir de Paris, light, sharp, delicate, like a tangerine.
And when I undressed I found another smell, that of her body, which was imprinted upon the sheets and the pillows and rose to my nostrils like the aroma of warm pancakes. Was it of her skin or was it of the organs that her skin enclosed? Had sleep stoked them with energy? Was this what I could feel, radiating through her pores? I stuffed my nose into the crook of her neck, casting off her shawl.
Reading, or pretending to read, anyway affecting disinterest, she stared hard at the page.
"It's for my English, for when we get to Chicago. This is a report on a motoring tour from the tip of Scotland to the bottom of England—the left-hand corner. 874 miles, or Moscow to Petrograd and back again. That's all it is! Puny! Like living in a cupboard!"
"My mother said exactly the same when Pushkin told her we were going to live there."
"I read it and I said to myself, Is that really all there is? They must have missed out some provinces. I've changed my mind. I don't want an English rose garden. I want a ranch," which she said with curling lips. I raised her spectacles and put my hand over the eye that was peeking at me. She fluttered the lashes against my palm.
"So, only a ranch," I said.
"It's putting a very reasonable price on my virtue. I'm a ruined woman now."
"Not even Pushkin went that far. Mother got a first-class rail ticket to London, a new wardrobe and fistfuls of red notes but no ranch. I saw the notes, helped her count them. Then she wodged the lot into her purse and went shopping alone." I was slobbering into her neck and her ear, taking nips of skin here and there. "Ruined! On the contrary, my soul, brought to perfection."
"Sensible her. Where did she go shopping? Paris or round the corner to Muirka's?"
"Oh, Muirka's. We always aimed for the blue flag when we needed anything. We could never have afforded Paris."
"Afford didn't come into it with my family until our generation—Nicholas, Viktor and myself ... I always liked your mother. When she told us a fairy story you knew she believed it as well. She would start to cry before we did . . . ooh, you do that so tenderly ... I must concentrate on the magazine or I'll never be able to speak English properly. I'll be a disgrace to you. Here are some photographs, look, Charlie. The man wearing a driving apron—-it wouldn't be difficult to create something more stylish. I could do that. Make the design and find some poor people who want sewing work ... Or do you suppose it's really an old coaching apron he's got on? In which case he needs another. Cars aren't the same as coaches. How do I get hold of Igor's Astro-Daimler?"
"Hard to ship it from the Crimea to Chicago. There's a war going on at sea."
"You have to use your hands in a quite different way in a car," she said. "Have you ever driven one?"
I was growing impatient. I spoke in a droning mutter through lips glued to her ear: "One day I'll drive you through Chicago naked except for a fur coat."
"Who's naked, you or me?"
"You. I'm wearing a yachting cap."
"Open tourer? Like this one here, the Dion . . . ?" She speared a trembling finger at the magazine, stirring up her perfume and driving me to the edge.
"Yes. I want to boast about you, show you off to the crowds."
"So I'm half naked in the car and you've got that cap on with the badges. Bound to have flags and anchors somewhere. You can't do nothing to me now, not looking like an admiral." The red frames tilted, slipped an inch down her long nose. The lovely truffle-dark eyes were liquid with mirth and love. "I'm getting cold. The wind's rushing up under the fur coat—into the sacred grove. No one's
watching us. There's no big scandal. People just want to get home. It's winter. What happens next?"
"I'm unbuttoning your sable from the top. Like a lecher. People are certainly looking now ... Remember, it's only a three-quarter coat. We're all thinking about the grove and hoping, No goose pimples. For your sake."
"Is that the third button you've just undone? Is the crowd panting now that they can see my little bosoms? They're all rosy in the cold." This came out of her in a low murmur. The magazine was drooping.
"Tell them to stand back from the car, to give us some air if they want to see the performance. I'm too occupied. Be strict. Issue a commandment. They'll like that."
The magazine flopped to the floor. I heard the double click of her French spectacles being folded away.
I threw back the covers to expose her belly—the vital dimple and the ivory skin beneath which Dan Doig's soul was flexing. I kissed it, I kissed everywhere, and then her tufted breasts and back to her throat. "Are they standing back yet?"
"That's it, folks, you've seen enough for the time being— stand back from the car—please—please stand back. High explosive is being carried."
I cupped my hand between her legs. She was as wet as a pail of oysters.
"Come inside me, my sweet Charlinka. Fill me, blot out the daylight."
Fifty-one
I held her fingers at shoulder height as we descended the polished elm wood staircase, matching each other's steps.
"As if you were leading me out for a quadrille," she said, smiling across.
Steam was coming off me like a horse. I could feel it blowing through my pores: pride, vanity, conceit, hope, ambition all driven to the surface by the ardency of our love. I was dripping with happiness. We would conquer the world! We would live to a combined age of 180 years and die simultaneously, a multitude of bold deeds behind us, in the presence of an untold number of spawn and underspawn.
Pace by pace we came down those gleaming bare planks, wide and shallow, that had been hewn to the Founder's specification almost exactly a hundred years before. Four generations of Rykovs had come down them, three of them in their coffins. But I refused to think of Nicholas. My bride was sparkling with the dew of love. Her lips were shining with its droplets, were puffed out so that they had the appearance of some tropical fruit that grows so extravagantly in the lull following a downpour that a foot-traveller yearns to plunge his teeth into the succulence of its creamy flesh and gorge himself, sticking his nose right into it and coating his whiskery chin with its juices.
I have lived in the Kizil Kum desert in temperatures of no. I have ridden my donkey Bathsheba out of it and so arrived in the shaded gardens of Samarkand among peaches and apricots and vinous products. I know what ripe-breasted fruit can do to a man already turned by mirages. I know about visions, both for myself and how they take others. On that evening the opulent lips of Elizaveta were telling a story that was an epic, and I was the only man there who could read it.
Thus did she come down the stairs from our marriage bed: slim, dark, glowing, generous—perfect.
In a skirt of dark brown houndstooth from London (a gift from Andrej Potocki—ha!), a blouse of peony pink to set off her short raven's hair, and with the Rykov pearls in a double loop round her long bare neck. "Too ostentatious?" she'd asked, playfully working the pearls round her palm like a salesman. Not today, we'd agreed, not on this of all afternoons.
Not this afternoon, not any other! Elizaveta my pearl, my angel, my very world. I loved her above all the Creation. Had I had only one empire, it would have been hers in an instant. There, take it! Take my map chest! Take my ingots, my navy, my regiments of grenadiers! She was more beautiful to me than the sum of all the most beautiful women to have existed. Tap tap went our feet in unison on the polished boards. We halted for the tenth time, both conscious of the moment, desperate to prolong it. Her knuckles came easily to my lips. As I kissed them, one by one, I looked along the sleeve of her pink blouse into her eyes. Can I say that for the first time in my life I understood womanhood? Unbleached, in its only true form? Can I be trusted on this, I with my coarseness and big bones and lumpy knees, to recognise what is not made plain to all men?
I'm not saying that every secret door was opened for me. I wouldn't know what the whole amounts to. A woman will proffer different things to a man than to another woman. But that was the notion that came to me from her staunch black eyes as we descended the staircase: that she was the top woman. I was as proud as a pig of her.
Louis, the romantic, had removed the five-stemmed candelabra from the dining room and placed them in the alcoves on the stairwell. Their flame-tipped fingers flickered in the draughts and put a shine on the dense grain of the panelling. They imparted an aura of holiness, too, reminding us that it was only yesterday we were married.
In recognition of this I stiffened my back, imagining that I'd swallowed an umbrella, which was what Nanny Agafya had ordered me to do whenever I slouched. Smiling, replete, upright—I cocked my chin.
Then I did a stupid thing and afterwards said a stupider.
The face I made at Liza can only be described as a smirk. I knew it for that the moment my words came out: "Potocki wouldn't have been up to it. It's one thing to look up the skirts of a girl on a swing—"
"He's dead, don't say that." She crossed herself, humbling me with her dignity. Then she whispered, "Thanks be to God."
I took this for a public communication between her and me, as confirmation of the thought behind my ungracious words. I blew out my chest. I was the man who'd won the hand of Elizaveta Rykov. The rest of them—nowhere! I'd smashed up the pack of her suitors, I, Charlie Doig, the son of a cotton-broker—the winner, number one. I snatched up her hand and whisked her down the four remaining steps as lightsome as a bird. Footsteps sounded in the corridor from the kitchen— entered the hall. With a sweep of my free arm, I said to Glebov, "Meet Mrs. Doig, the lady all other men must dream of in vain. Count yourself lucky to have seen such beauty." (She started to put pressure on my arm, uneasily.) "In the entire library of wives, there is only one frontispiece—my Lizochka. "We were married yesterday."
He'd put on a fresh uniform, crumpled but clean. He'd gone to the baths, slept, shaved, eaten and was standing there plumply, depopulated of lice and with his dampened eyebrows arching upwards at the tail like horns.
To Liza I said, "This is Junior Captain Prokhor Fyodorovich Glebov, our guest for the next two nights. When last I saw him he was less presentable."
Glebov bowed to me. He bent his head over Liza's hand. I studied him closely.
What I saw was not different from the morning. I knew that as soon as he straightened and I looked into his eyes, which were a hard, mineral blue-green. Perhaps he was small for a cavalry officer, I don't know enough about that. Certainly Liza was taller than him by two or three inches. Well muscled for now but would probably go to fat. Feet not much bigger than a woman's. Face—short, round and made heavy by a constant air of disapproval. His hair was black and thick, starting to go off in the centre, like Andrej's. I supposed him to be about thirty. There was a caged vigour about him; not in any particular detail but in a general emanation of purpose, of energy being held in storage. Even here, when he should have been rested and relaxed, he put forth an aura of tension.
He looked Liza up and down as he released her hand. I thought, I was right to hate this man.
I said, "Better than Madame Glebov, I'll be bound."
That's what I mean by saying something stupider. I should have kept my trap shut and my head down; hidden away my bride; let Glebov pass through my life, opening the window for him to leave as one would for an insect.
He looked right into me. He opened me up, not prying but scrutinising, like an inspector of souls. He was trying to get something away from me. Had he selected me personally? Had he and Shubrin turned up at the Pink House by design? I was swept by the conviction of danger pending. It wasn't going to be money, my revolver, my travel permits, a
nything simple. He was out for something altogether less easy to protect.
There were complicated issues in those eyes, which now that the light was coming onto his face from a different angle I saw to be bluer and paler than I've stated. I thought to myself, But perhaps he has such an air on him all the time. Maybe his parents were cruel to him and he regards the entire world with suspicion. Perhaps it's not me, or Liza, or the Pink House that he's after.
Lizochka took my hand. She pressed against me, shivering. I said, "I'll get your house jacket in a tick, my sweetheart."
Glebov said, "About your enquiry concerning Madame Glebov, she was killed two days ago in the defence of Russia. A few hours before you were married, I believe. As for her beauty, no one can be beautiful in a grave."
"I could never have known."
"No? I shall go for a walk before the light disappears completely. I wish to see more of my host's property."
"What nerves he must have," said Liza as he walked away. "Two days ago. I wonder how she was killed."
"If it's true."
We watched as he went out of the hall into the vestibule. He had on a mallard-green tunic (from which he pulled his shapka), baggy grey-blue breeches with red piping, bast slippers. He began to rummage through the assortment of boots and coats that had piled up over the years. He attired himself in a cloak; chose a blackthorn from the stick rack and stepped into the snow without a backward glance.
"It's not often that you see a cavalryman actually walking," Liza remarked. "They prefer to do everything from the back of a horse. Andrej had short fussy steps, as if he was afraid of falling over. And that was even after two years of desk work."
I closed her mouth with mine, hurriedly, smudging her lips, for Misha was coming out from the drawing room. He was sketching a catchy little melody, something by Mozart.
"Well, dearest Liza, what do you make of our new friends?" said Misha. "I looked out of my bedroom window this morning and I saw this young man hurrying to the house when he should have been dealing with his horse. I thought, The scamp!—and went back to bed. It was far too early for me."
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