Pack of Cards

by Penelope Lively

  They had caught up, now, with the rest of the group. Caroline explained her companion's familiarity with England; the conversation became more general; the Intourist guide said, ‘And now we are making our visit to Chekhov's villa.’ To Caroline she added, ‘I think this is a very boring man, we must get rid of him.’ ‘No,’ said Caroline. ‘He's rather nice.’ ‘I do not think so,’ said the girl. ‘Good, here is our bus. Get on, please.’

  The man, when Caroline looked out of the coach window, had vanished into the crowd. The woman beside her, wife of a prominent Middleton headmaster, said, ‘How interesting- someone turning up like that and talking English. Hull, of all places!’ Her husband leaned across the aisle: ‘Mind you, their language teaching is a sight better than ours, it seems to me. But that chap had learned his on the job, one gathered. You had quite a chat, Mrs Oakley?’ ‘Yes,’ said Caroline. ‘We did.’ The coach was squeezing through narrow streets; large Edwardian houses sheltered behind high walls and foliage; people clutching plastic carrier bags were queueing beside a lorry that had tipped a heap of potatoes on to the pavement.

  The Chekhov villa was reached by way of a museum displaying memorabilia and photographs. Letters in glass cases; early editions of the works; a very long black coat, a pair of gloves, a handkerchief. A photograph showed the writer wearing what appeared to be that very coat, standing with two dogs beside a large watering-can. The dogs, prick-eared curly-tailed creatures, stared alertly at the camera; Chekhov looked sad. Caroline examined it for a couple of minutes, wondering if the dogs related at all to the dog in the story. She found their beady, interested eyes, gazing at one from eighty years ago, curiously moving. So, in some humdrum way, was the watering-can. The Intourist girl was recounting, in an uninterruptible monotone, the story of the last years of Chekhov's life: the tuberculosis, the exile to Yalta's beneficial climate, his loneliness separated from Olga Knipper and his Moscow friends. The Middleton party moved repectfully through the villa, fenced off by velvet ropes from the desk, the dining-table, the favourite chair. Caroline, alone for a moment in a small room overlooking a tree-filled garden with which little winding paths disappeared into greenery, could hear nothing but the creak of a floorboard and a clock ticking. She thought of long aching afternoons in an empty house.

  That evening in the hotel a vocal group appeared in the immense dining-room; conversation was blotted out by the crash of amplified music. The Lit. and Phil., grimacing, ate without speaking, while rainbow shafts of strobe lighting swept across them. Caroline went to bed early with a headache and lay awake for a long time. She felt as though she had been sleeping in this room for many weeks. Its landscape was infinitely familiar: the matching orange-patterned curtains and bedspread, the cheap veneer dressing-table, the glass-topped chest, the squat fifties-style armchair. Above, below and on all sides were a thousand similar rooms, like the cells of a honeycomb, each with its embedded occupant or occupants, lying there dreaming in assorted languages. Eventually she got up, put the light on and fetched a book from her suitcase. Before getting back into bed with it she stood for a while looking at the map of the Soviet Union thoughtfully supplied by the hotel in a folder along with the list of charges for laundry, hire of a refrigerator, use of the sauna, etc. She saw a great shapeless mass cementing Europe to China; there were the familiar almost cosy outlines of Scandinavia, the Germanies, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, neat and small, and then this immense sprawl of space – emptier and emptier of place-names – reaching across the top of the world with India and the Malaysian archipelago dangling from it. She put her finger on the Crimea and thought: there am I.

  They visited the Botanical Gardens. They tasted Crimean wines at a vineyard. They walked or plunged in the lift down to the beach and swam in that tepid sea. People kept saying Russia somehow wasn't at all as one had imagined. On the fourth day they climbed once again into the coach to be taken to the Livadia Palace, scene of the conference. The Intourist girl recited recent history to them, doggedly, through the megaphone. Harold Innis, the headmaster, became irritated, interrupting sotto voce: ‘Yes, yes, my love … we're not complete ignoramuses.’ Inside the palace the party stood before glass cases and inspected the signatures of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill; the conference table, at the far end of an expanse of parquet, looked deceptively homely, like something you might have breakfast at. There is now exhibition of photographs,’ announced the girl. This way, please.’ ‘Well, I don't know …’ said Rosemary Innis. ‘I'm not that mad about photography. I may just slip out and enjoy the gardens a bit.’ ‘Everyone comes, please,’ said the girl sternly. ‘It is very interesting. You will wish to see.’

  They were war photographs. Caroline, absorbed, moved from one grey scene to another: a towering mound of German helmets, a man sitting head in hands beside the shot bodies of his wife and daughter, people digging in the rubble of Berlin, an aircraft embedded in the facade of an eighteenth-century Belgrade house, the lunar landscape of destroyed cities. A great bleakness crept over her; when someone spoke she could not reply but moved away to the window. Outside, some small children ran round and round on the gravelled paths of the palace gardens. One of the photographs had shown people sunbathing amid the ruins of Sevastopol. Caroline thought again of an illustration in that book about Florence Nightingale; soldiers laid out on stretchers, row upon row of them, mummy-like with bandaged arms, legs, heads.

  They came out into the sunshine. ‘We walk a little, I think,’ said the Intourist girl. ‘It is very nice to walk in these gardens.’

  It was indeed. Caroline, though, still chilled by the photographs and feeling tired, sat down on a bench, saying to the guide that she would wait there until the rest of the party finished their tour. ‘I think you will not like to be alone,’ said the girl. ‘It is better you come also.’ ‘I'll be fine,’ said Caroline firmly. ‘Please …’ The group moved away among the trees.

  It was hot. She lay back, her head against a tree, and closed her eyes.

  After a few moments, though, the sense of a presence made her open them. A man was standing over her – sprung, apparently, from behind the tree for there had been no one near when she sat down. He wore only a pair of bathing-shorts and glistened with sweat. It was, she realised with amazement, the man from the promenade at Yalta – the English-speaking engineer. He was smiling broadly.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning,’ said Caroline.

  ‘I am very pleased to be seeing you again.’

  She continued to stare at him, quite nonplussed. He carried a rolled bathing-towel under one arm which he shook out and applied vigorously to his shining bronzed torso.

  ‘I am very hot. I have done much walking. I may sit down?’

  ‘Yes – of course.’

  He sat beside her on the bench. ‘You have enjoyed your visit to the Livadia Palace?’

  ‘Well … I'm not sure that enjoy would be quite the right word. It's certainly very interesting. Those war photographs are rather … disturbing.’

  ‘Ah …’ He appeared to ponder. ‘I too have seen.’

  There was a silence. ‘Where were you in the war?’ Caroline asked. Wondering, at once, if this was tactless.

  It was not, apparently. He began to talk with animation about his service on a destroyer in the Barents Sea off Murmansk. Caroline sat listening in the sunshine; around her carefully tended trees and shrubs shifted in the breeze and a squirrel ran across the grass. Images flickered before her eyes – figures in oilskins battling along tipping decks, bearded faces iced with spray – derived, she realised, from old Pinewood Studios films. When he stopped speaking she said, ‘I'm afraid I find it almost impossible to …’ – not to imagine, that was wrong, imagining was what one did, so ineptly – ‘… to have any idea of,’ she ended lamely.

  ‘You are child in the war, I think?’

  ‘Well … adolescent. I was at a boarding school in Devon.’

  ‘Please tell me how that was. You were happy?’
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br />   ‘It's hard to say. I missed my parents a lot. I was only eleven when I went there. I suppose it was like many adolescences – happy some of the time, rather wretched at others.’ The school re-created itself and hung invisible around them in the Crimean park: expanses of shiny linoleum, Spam, powdered egg, the smell of metal polish, the thin high cries of girls playing hockey. The man was gazing at her with kindly, puzzled brown eyes: ‘Wretched?’ ‘Miserable. Unhappy.’ He nodded, ‘I am like so too. I am very difficult as boy, my mother say. I think perhaps boy is more difficult than girl, always? Yes?’ ‘I've never had children, so it's something I'm a bit ignorant about.’ ‘I too have not children – not wife either. I would like wife, several times, but it is not good life for woman, husband always going away on ships. So I am not marry.’ ‘Married,’ said Caroline. ‘You did not marry or you were not married’; really! she thought, how pompous! And blushed. ‘I am sorry – I speak English very badly.’ ‘No you don't,’ Caroline exclaimed. ‘You speak it very well – extremely well. And I don't speak a word of Russian.’

  The man lit a cigarette. ‘We are coming from very different countries.’

  She glanced at him, wondering.

  He waved the cigarette – at distant mountains, at the hammer and sickle rippling above the wedding-cake palace. Sparks of sunlight snapped from his chrome watch-strap. ‘You are not seeing young sailor on a destroyer. I am not seeing this school in … where it is?’

  ‘Devon. Yes – I understand what you mean. But in a way isn't it a more general difficulty. I mean …’ – she groped, surprised at herself – ‘… in fact even where people one knows well are concerned, my husband even, you see he used to go to an office every day – he was a solicitor – and after he died I realised I had very little idea of what it was like for him. Really like. He wasn't a person who talked a lot about himself. It upsets me sometimes, now – feeling that I had so little idea.’ She couldn't think what had come over her – talking like this to a complete stranger.

  ‘Russian people are talking more about themselves, I think.’

  ‘Are they? Well, I should imagine that's a good thing.’

  ‘I am not talking so much because there is my sister only to listen and she has heard much already. Here now are your friends coming again.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Caroline. ‘So they are.’ The Lit. and Phil., herded by the Intourist girl, straggled from the woodland path.

  ‘I am going now.’ He stood up. ‘Perhaps we meet again on the beach. I am swimming there tomorrow early. Before breakfast. Do you like to swim before breakfast?’

  Caroline did not look at him. ‘I do quite like swimming before breakfast,’ she said. He walked away. She picked up her bag and rejoined the group. ‘Miles of trees with little labels,’ said Rosemary Innis. ‘You were wise to stay behind.’ ‘I say!’ exclaimed her husband. ‘Wasn't that the same chap we talked to in Yalta?’ ‘Yes,’ Caroline replied. ‘It was.’ ‘What an extraordinary coincidence! I suppose it was a coincidence?’ ‘I don't know,’ said Caroline. ‘Do you think it was?’ The Intourist girl, restive, was trying to head them towards the coach.

  Caroline sat at the front, a position that gave you the best view. Within the coach's shell of tinted glass you moved between sea and mountains, gazing dispassionately down at people, houses, cars, knowing that you would never see them again: the place passed by like a film, unreachable and impinging only on the vision. You saw it but did not feel it. Indeed, since the coach was air-conditioned you forgot even that it was hot outside.

  There were only two more days to go. The Lit. and Phil. had fallen by now into small interior groupings; Caroline found herself frequently with the Innises. ‘I've enjoyed it,’ declared Rosemary, at dinner that evening. ‘But I don't think I'd want to come back. Once is enough. It's another country all right – I mean in a way that others aren't.’ Her husband turned to Caroline, ‘I've been thinking about that chap again. Very odd – him turning up like that. I mean – things may not always be quite what they seem. You don't know what he may be after. It's probably innocent enough – spot of hard currency, that sort of thing. Or it may be more complicated. I'd steer clear, if I were you, if he shows up again.’

  ‘But how could he possibly have known we'd be at the Livadia Palace at that moment?’ said his wife. ‘Surely it was coincidence?’

  Harold Innis shrugged. ‘I daresay.’

  After the meal they wandered for a while in the warm darkness of the hotel grounds, amid polyglot crowds. Moonlight glittered on the sea, as it had on the first evening; the hotel, a white cliff packed with light, rose against the black mountainside; music thumped from one of its several discos. It had been built, apparently, ten years ago but its positive occupancy of the night seemed immutable, solid and confident in a different way to the Tsarist palaces along the coast. It was as though complacent nights like this, moonlit and stormless, reached away forwards and backwards in an uninterrupted succession, giving the lie to those photographs and to the Sevastopol soldiers on their stretchers.

  Caroline got up at half past six. There was no one waiting for the lifts; she descended alone to the vast entrance hall, where cleaning women operated huge polishers. She walked down the winding cliff path to the beach; a few swimmers bobbed in the water and joggers pounded up and down the promenade. She sat on the beach and presently, when she looked up, there he was coming down the stone steps, a bathrobe over his swimming costume.

  They went together into the sea and swam out. He was a strong swimmer, forging through the water with a purposeful breast-stroke, holding back from time to time to allow Caroline to keep up. Turning, she saw the beach now disconcertingly distant and felt slight panic: ‘I think this is as far as I'd better go – I've not done much swimming lately.’ He said, ‘It is quiet, this sea, it has not strong … how do you call it? Forces?’ ‘Currents,’ said Caroline. ‘But even so …’

  Back on the beach they dried themselves off. ‘I am finding at last a map of England,’ he said. ‘It is not easy but at last I am finding a person who has. So I see Devon where is this school is at one end … so’ – he drew in the air a shape, and stabbed – ‘there …’

  The sea was almost empty, and the beach: a couple of lazily bobbing heads, someone a few hundred yards away doing press-ups on the shingle. They were alone. ‘I looked at a map too,’ said Caroline. ‘To find Murmansk. I hadn't realised how very far north it is. Almost in the Arctic Circle.’ She turned to him; he had nothing with him except for his towel and the bathrobe. She had only her towel and the dress she had now slipped on over her damp bathing costume. If either of us could be thought to have something to give to the other or something to receive, she thought, then it is clear by now that we haven't got it. We neither of us have anything but towels, bathing costumes and whatever is in our minds.

  He said, ‘I think you are going back to your home tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He too now turned and faced her. ‘I am,’ he stated, ‘a man who is very much lone.’

  ‘Lonely,’ she said. ‘We say lonely, not lone.’ She got to her feet and stood looking down at him. ‘I am lonely too. Quite a lot of the time. So I do understand. And now I think I had better go.’ She held out her hand. He rose, took it, and they stood there thus until Caroline took a step backwards, turned away and began to climb the stairs to the promenade.

  When she was half-way up she looked back. He was still there, sitting on his board and gazing at the sea. The sun was up now, and the heat of the day beginning to concentrate. Caroline climbed on towards the hotel which now, at nearly half past eight, was spilling scantily clad people on to the concrete concourses which surrounded it.

  A Dream of Fair Women

  RICHARD SWINTON listened to the chairman's introduction, which was satisfyingly eulogistic. He allowed the applause to die down, went to the lectern and arranged his papers in front of him. A full house, he observed, an audience of eighty to a hundred or so filling the panelled carpeted
upholstered interior of one of the most agreeable public rooms in London. Naturally, for the Brent-Caxton lecture. And for himself. More women than men; his glance swept over the rows of faces – spiky-haired art students, female academics, the smarter coterie from galleries and museums. Provocative black leather, colour-supplement chic, the careful neutrality of tweed and muted patterns. Ah, women were so endearingly self-revealing, clothed or unclothed.

  He looked quickly at the screen and then at the girl in charge of the slides. The lights were dimmed. He began to speak. This was his The Nude in Nineteenth-Century French Painting’ talk, touched up a little for the occasion, but as familiar as an old coat. As he slipped into the opening paragraph he allowed himself to inspect the audience more closely, his eye roving over the faces of strangers and alighting, almost at once, bang in the second row, on that of his third mistress.

  There she sat, her hands folded in her lap, gazing at him impassively. Well, no; not at him but at a point about eighteen inches behind his left ear. She wore a lilac-coloured suit, white silky shirt and a rope of pearls; she looked very nice – healthy, complacent, older naturally – though not perhaps all of … let's see now … fifty-one – no fifty-three more like.