The Villa Golitsyn

by Piers Paul Read

  ‘For God’s sake Will,’ shouted Priss. ‘Can’t you be your age?’

  Simon and Helen ran to pick up her things and Willy returned towards them, crestfallen, taking the bag from Charlie and returning it to Priss. He said nothing. She said nothing more but gave a kind of snorting sigh. There was no breeze so they recovered everything except perhaps a few of the bronze-coloured coins – ten- and twenty-centime pieces.

  ‘I’m going to walk back,’ said Willy when they reached the car.

  ‘You can’t,’ said Priss.

  ‘I can,’ he said with unusual vehemence.

  ‘It’s too far,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve done it before. It takes an hour.’

  ‘You’ll pass out on the Promenade,’ said Priss, ‘and the gendarmes will pull you in and we’ll have all that boring business over the permis de sejour.’

  ‘I will not pass out,’ said Willy quietly, and with a certain dignity. ‘I am neither an invalid nor a lunatic. I just sometimes get drunk. This evening I am a little drunk but not very drunk and a walk will do me good.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Simon.

  ‘So will I,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Willy, ‘but I would rather go alone.’ And such was the authority he still retained from the old days that none of them argued with him any more, but all got into the Jaguar and left him on the quai.

  ELEVEN

  When they got back to the Villa Golitsyn Helen went straight to bed. She was drunk, and made a comic sight trying to take her leave of the others in what she thought was the suave style of an adult but only came across as the play-acting of a much younger girl.

  Simon, Priss and Charlie sat down to play a game of Scrabble. They were silent, concentrating on the game, yet because they too were slightly drunk they found it hard to piece words together from the seven letters in front of them. After only a quarter of an hour, Charlie gave up. ‘I’m going to bed,’ he said. ‘Wake me if you need me.’

  Simon and Priss were left alone and went on with the game, but soon after Charlie had left it seemed to Simon that Priss changed her behaviour. Whereas before she had sat forward, biting her lower lips, her eyes only on the board, she now sat back on the sofa, crossed her legs under her pale pink skirt, and every now and then looked up at Simon with an easy, friendly smile.

  ‘Are you worried about Willy?’ he asked.

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Yes, of course, but it’s happened before.’ Then she added, pointedly: ‘One can’t let it ruin one’s life’ – as if to emphasize that she and her husband were separate people.

  They went on with the game, but as they played Simon started to feel uneasy in her presence. Because of what he had gone through with his wife, he resisted any feeling which might be called love; but it was difficult to suppress the attraction he felt for her. Simon, who at first had thought that Priss might feel a Lesbian attraction for Helen, and who only an hour before had agreed with Charlie that her marriage to Willy seemed happy and complete, now felt that her smile and her limbs were drawing him towards her. Only four or five feet of empty air separated them. He felt a strong impulse to move from his armchair to the sofa, take hold of her body, draw back her clothes and kiss her skin. Yet the very act which was unimpeded by any physical obstacle was at the same time impossible for him to achieve. She was the wife of his friend. They had only met the day before. Was he so sexually deprived that he should make a pass at Willy’s wife under Willy’s roof? Was she so desperate to escape from her alcoholic husband that she was now offering herself to the first heterosexual to come into her house? Was that why she had asked him to stay – not to play bridge but to make love? Or was it all part of the play, with Simon cast as Herwegh, the perfidious friend?

  Priss looked up at him with a quizzical look on her face. ‘Is “golt” a word?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘How annoying. There’s colt, bolt and dolt but not golt.’

  ‘It might pass for “gold” in Willy’s play.’

  ‘So will you allow it?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Don’t expect any favour in return.’

  ‘All right.’

  She leaned forward and put three letters on the board. ‘Now it’s your turn,’ she said – and then noticing that Simon’s eyes were not on his letters but on her, she said: ‘It’s difficult to know what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Your face is a mask, or rather it’s two masks – the gloomy one, when no one’s looking, and then the smile, the disillusioned smile.’

  ‘It’s no easier for me to know what’s going on in your mind.’

  She looked perplexed. ‘No, I suppose it’s not.’

  ‘I can’t even make out if you’re happy or not.’

  ‘Sometimes I am and sometimes I’m not. Isn’t that true of most people?’

  ‘Yes, unless there’s something in particular which makes you one thing or the other.’

  ‘Well, there’s Will, of course. His moods affect mine.’

  ‘You’re very involved with him.’

  She smiled wryly. ‘I haven’t much choice.’

  ‘No, but if you had children or a job or …’

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘Well, friends. You don’t seem to have many friends in Nice.’

  ‘No, we don’t. We had one or two, but Will always ends up insulting them, and the French are incredibly touchy.’

  ‘Perhaps you should find a Latin lover?’ he said with a slightly sarcastic smile.

  ‘They’re not my type,’ she said, looking straight into his eyes.

  ‘An expatriate, perhaps?’

  She did not look away but said, quite slowly: ‘It’s your turn.’

  For several seconds Simon sat looking into Priss’s eyes, the semi-scoffing expression frozen on his face. He was paralysed by the double meaning of her words; but then he blushed and looked down again at his letters. ‘I haven’t really got anything,’ he said. ‘Not even a “golt”. I think I’d better concede the game.’

  ‘Very well.’ Her expression did not change.

  He stood. ‘Will you wait up for Willy?’

  ‘I might, but don’t worry. It’s happened before.’ She smiled at him, but not reproachfully, and with that smile in his mind he went to bed.

  Simon was woken by Charlie at three in the morning. ‘He isn’t back,’ he said. ‘Priss wants us to go out and look for him.’

  Simon quickly got dressed and came down to find Priss sitting on the sofa where he had left her, but dressed now in an old-fashioned, dark-blue dressing-gown over a white, lace-edged nightdress. ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I worry.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Simon. ‘We don’t mind.’

  ‘Charlie knows the likely places. I’d come too, but I think you might find him easier without me.’

  There was still some traffic on the Promenade, and people stood around on the pavement outside Rhul’s Casino. They parked the car in the market place and walked through into the Old Town, peering into five or six squalid cafés and bars which were still open. Willy was not to be found, and no one had seen their ami anglais.

  They returned to the Jaguar and drove up the Avenue Jean Mededin, under the railway line and into some of the sidestreets behind the station. Here too one or two bars were still open but Willy was not in any of them. It then occurred to them that perhaps he had never left the Port, so they drove back to the quai where they had left him and looked in some of the cafés and bars between there and the Place Garibaldi. In none of them was Willy to be found.

  Simon then telephoned Priss to see if Willy had come back while they had been out looking for him. He had not, and Priss told them to give him up. ‘You might try the police station on the way back,’ she said. ‘He might be there.’

  They got into the car and were driving back towards the centre of Nice when Charlie suddenly said: ‘I know where he i
s.’ He drove right around the Place Garibaldi and went back towards the port, but instead of going down to the quai he turned up a narrow lane which led up towards the castle. ‘I hope you’re feeling fit,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to climb over a wall.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  They came to a terrace about halfway up to the castle where the road was straight and wide enough to park the car. Here they got out and stood under a line of plane trees looking out over the parapet at the lights of the city below. They were like gems strewn on a black velvet cushion. Above them, less bright but more beautiful, was the near-full moon.

  They turned and crossed the road. Simon followed Charlie along the side of the tall, white wall. They reached a gate through which he could see the white slabs of numerous tomb stones.

  ‘We’ve got to get over this,’ said Charlie. He looked over his shoulder at the Guardian’s house on the other side of the road. All the windows were dark.

  ‘It might be easier around the corner,’ said Simon.

  He now led the way back along the wall to a place where Charlie, by standing on his clasped hands, could climb into the wall, and afterwards pull Simon up behind him. They both jumped down onto the gravel on the other side. Simon felt a great jolt in his spine as he landed, and for a moment gasped for breath.

  ‘We are getting too old for this sort of thing,’ said Charlie.

  ‘I don’t see how Willy could have got in here on his own,’ said Simon.

  ‘He must have a special way.’

  ‘You’ve found him here before?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There were paths between the graves and mausoleums of the Niçoises which – being built at different levels of the ground – loomed above them in the moonlight. At first Charlie seemed lost, and it was only by following the wall to the main gate that he found his bearings. ‘It’s like a maze,’ he said setting off again into the cemetery.

  He climbed some steps, turned a corner, then stopped. ‘There he is,’ he whispered.

  Simon followed the line of his outstretched arm but for a moment could only make out the rectangular and triangular shapes of the tombs. One figure, which he thought for a moment was Willy, had white wings. It was the statue of an angel.

  ‘Where?’ he asked Charlie. ‘I can’t see him.’

  ‘There.’ Charlie pointed again.

  Simon peered into the strange light and suddenly saw the figures of two men – one standing on a pedestal, the other seated on a stone and looking up at the first.

  ‘Who’s with him?’ Simon whispered.

  ‘Herzen.’

  Simon had never thought of himself as either psychic or superstitious, but in this eerie geometric maze, where shadows turned out to be black marble memorials and the figures of friends the statues of angels, he felt a twinge of fear as he was told that Willy was with a man who had been dead for more than a hundred years. Charlie, however, did not seem frightened and crept closer to the two men. Simon followed and, because the tomb was on a higher level which they could only reach by passing directly below, stopped behind Charlie to listen to what Willy was saying to his companion.

  ‘In the light of experience,’ he heard Willy say in a clear, casual and sober tone of voice, ‘wouldn’t you agree that we carried scepticism too far? Wouldn’t you concede that people must have values, and that if you take away those they have without providing others, then someone less sceptical will step in and give people his values which may be brutal and absurd, like Hitler’s, but are accepted by the people in preference to none at all?’

  He stopped, as if waiting for the other man to answer, but when no answer came, he continued: ‘Oh, I know, I admit it. You had more values than I did, but they were values based upon an optimistic view of human nature which you could hardly hold today. You had seen what the middle classes could do to the proletariat, but not what the proletariat could do to the middle classes. Or the Marxists to the anarchists. Or the Germans to the Jews. You knew that God was dead, but not that Man was dead too.’

  Simon felt uncomfortable eavesdropping in this way, so he walked past Charlie, kicking the gravel to make his presence known. He climbed the steps that brought him onto the same level as Willy and his friend. Willy must have heard him because he stopped talking and, when Simon came into view, stood up and came towards him. His companion was left standing on the tombstone.

  ‘Simon? Is that you?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Come and meet Herzen.’

  Simon stopped beside Willy and looked up at what he could now see was a life-size statue of the Russian revolutionary, standing on a pedestal and striking a somewhat pompous pose.

  Willy bowed towards the statue. ‘May I introduce an old friend of mine, Simon Milson, of Her Majesty’s Foreign Service?’

  Simon looked up at the bronze, bearded face, half-expecting it to lower its gaze like the statue of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, but Herzen continued to look over their heads towards the sea.

  ‘Short fellow, isn’t he?’ said Willy. ‘Perhaps that’s what made him a revolutionary.’ He walked a few paces away and sat down on the same tomb as before, crossing his legs as if he was in Herzen’s drawing-room. ‘You usually find some personal detail in the lives of those Russian revolutionaries,’ he said, ‘which explains their rebellion. If Lenin’s brother had not been hanged by the Tsar, would Lenin have been what he was? If Herzen had not been short, or illegitimate, would he have turned against the government of the time? That is the irony of life. We think that our ideas are the product of dispassionate reasoning, and they turn out to be just the refined expression of our complexes, prejudices and emotions.’

  Simon was not sure whether Willy was speaking to him or to the statue of Herzen, but since the statue did not reply he interposed his own opinion. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘our feelings lead our thoughts in certain directions, but once they have set off, they can only make progress if they keep up to the common rules of reason.’

  ‘But reason will lead you anywhere you want to go,’ said Willy. He spoke sourly, like a man talking of his promiscuous mistress.

  ‘There was a time when you thought reason the key to all wisdom.’

  ‘The folly of youth.’

  ‘What has replaced it?’

  He laughed. ‘Nothing. A chaos of doubt.’

  ‘You don’t believe in any system any more?’

  ‘Did I believe in a system?’

  ‘I thought you were a Marxist?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head, then looked up at Herzen. ‘An ideology can be useful. I always thought that. But that’s all.’

  ‘Useful for what?’

  ‘There are times and places – Herzen’s Russia, for example – where the injustice is so great that reform is impossible. You must have a revolution, and for a revolution you need a justifying idea. Marxism was useful in that respect. It inspired people to abandon the fatalism of the past and achieve great improvements in their wretched material conditions.’

  ‘So you never believed in Marxism but saw it as a politically effective idea?’

  ‘Yes. Not just in Russia, but in China and Cuba …’

  ‘And Indonesia? Would it have been useful there?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Willy. ‘At least that’s what I thought at the time.’

  The first rays of the sun were appearing over Mount Boron, slowly replacing the light of the moon on the three flesh faces and the one of stone. Charlie, who had been listening silently to the conversation, now turned to Willy and Simon and said: ‘I’m worried about Priss.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Simon. ‘We’d better get back.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Willy. He stood, brushed down his trousers and with a last look at Herzen set off along the gravel path between the graves. ‘I’m sorry to bring you up here,’ he said, half-turning to address the two younger men. ‘You needn’t have come. I would have found my own way home.’

>   ‘Priss was worried, that was all,’ said Simon.

  ‘That’s the worst thing about drinking,’ said Willy. ‘It gives women the excuse they’re always looking for to treat you like a child.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s not that,’ said Simon. ‘If you love someone, you’re naturally anxious.’

  ‘Don’t take her side,’ said Willy quietly.

  ‘Are there sides?’

  ‘Always. “When you go to women, don’t forget your whip.”’

  ‘Zarathustra?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘But you love her, don’t you?’ asked Simon.

  ‘Of course I love her,’ said Willy. ‘Haven’t I proved I love her? If only I loved her less.’

  ‘You’re more enigmatic than Nietzsche,’ said Simon.

  ‘Love is a bond, Simon, and bonds are constricting. You can love someone without understanding her or sympathizing with what she suffers. I often wonder if men and women ever really sympathize with one another. They think and feel in such different ways, and always at the back of their minds there is a mild contempt for what the other thinks is important. That’s why I come up here – just like a pilgrim going to pray at the tomb of a saint. I can talk to Herzen because he would have understood the fears and thoughts that go round and round in my head.’

  ‘Couldn’t I understand?’ asked Simon.

  He stopped and pointed to a simple tombstone. ‘That’s the grave of Garibaldi’s mother,’ he said. ‘Herzen helped carry her coffin up here.’

  ‘Couldn’t I understand?’ Simon asked again.

  ‘I’m not sure, Simon. You’re like Priss. English and sensible. You can’t see what all the fuss is about. Why bother about the meaning of life – just live it. Whereas Herzen – he was emotional, egotistical, self-dramatizing. Like me. I often feel that I must have Russian blood, or that I’m the reincarnation of a Russian – Herzen, perhaps, or a character out of Dostoievsky.’

  ‘Why not an Englishman?’ asked Simon. ‘Byron, for example?’

  Willy stopped and turned just as they reached the wall which enclosed the cemetery. His face, quite clear now in the light of the dawn, had an expression of cold, amused curiosity. ‘Byron, did you say?’