Christmas Holiday (26 page)

“Well, begin.”

He played well at sight and the music was not difficult. He thought he acquitted himself of his task without discredit. Having struck the last chord he waited for a word of praise.

“You played it very nicely,” said Lydia, “but where does Russia come in?”

“What exactly d’you mean by that?” he asked, somewhat affronted.

“You play it as if it was about a Sunday afternoon in London with people in their best clothes walking around those great empty squares and wishing it was time for tea. But that’s not what it is at all. It’s the old, old song of peasants who lament the shortness and the hardness of their life, it’s the wide fields of golden corn and the labour of gathering in the harvest, it’s the great forest of beech-trees, and the nostalgia of the workers for an age when peace and plenty reigned on the earth, and it’s the wild dance that for a brief period brings them forgetfulness of their lot.”

“Well, you play it better.”

“I can’t play,” she answered, but she edged him along the bench and took his seat.

He listened. She played badly, but for all that got something out of the music that he hadn’t seen in it. She managed, though at a price, to bring out the tumult of its emotion and the bitterness of its melancholy; and she infused the dance rhythms with a barbaric vitality that stirred the blood. But Charley was put out.

“I must confess I don’t see why you should think you get the Russian atmosphere better by playing false notes and keeping your foot firmly on the loud pedal,” he said, acidly, when she finished.

She burst out laughing and flinging both her arms round his neck kissed him on the cheeks.

“You are a sweet,” she cried.

“It’s very nice of you to say so,” he answered coldly, disengaging himself.

“Have I offended you?”

“Not at all.”

She shook her head and smiled at him with soft tenderness.

“You play very well and your technique is excellent, but it’s no good thinking you can play Russian music; you can’t. Play me some Schumann. I’m sure you can.”

“No, I’m not going to play any more.”

“If you’re angry with me, why don’t you hit me?”

Charley couldn’t help chuckling.

“You fool. It never occurred to me. Besides, I’m not angry.”

“You’re so big and strong and handsome, I forget that you’re only a young boy.” She sighed. “And you’re so unprepared for life. Sometimes when I look at you I get such a pang.”

“Now don’t get all Russian and emotional.”

“Be nice to me and play some Schumann.”

When Lydia liked she could be very persuasive. With a diffident smile Charley resumed his seat. Schumann, in point of fact, was the composer he liked best and he knew a great deal by heart. He played to her for an hour, and whenever he wanted to stop she urged him to go on. The young woman at the cashier’s desk was curious to see who was playing the piano and peeped in. When she went back to her counter she murmured to the porter with an arch and meaning smile:

“The turtle doves are having a good time.”

When at last Charley stopped, Lydia gave a little sigh of contentment.

“I knew that was the music to suit you. It’s like you,
healthy and comfortable and wholesome. There’s fresh air in it and sunshine and the delicious scent of pine-trees. It’s done me good to listen to it and it’s done me good to be with you. Your mother must love you very much.”

“Oh, come off it.”

“Why are you so good to me? I’m tiresome, dull and exasperating. You don’t even like me very much, do you?”

Charley considered this for a moment.

“Well, I don’t very much, to tell you the truth.”

She laughed.

“Then why do you bother about me? Why don’t you just turn me out into the street?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Shall I tell you? Goodness. Just pure, simple, stupid goodness.”

“Go to hell.”

They dined in the Quarter. It had not escaped Charley’s notice that Lydia took no interest in him as an individual. She accepted him as you might accept a person with whom you find yourself on a ship for a few days and so forced to a certain intimacy, but it does not matter to you where he came from and what sort of a man he is; he emerged from non-existence when he stepped on board and will return to it when, on reaching port, you part company with him. Charley was modest enough not to be piqued by this, for he could not but realize that her own troubles and perplexities were so great that they must absorb her attention; and he was not a little surprised now when she led him to talk about
himself. He told her of his artistic inclinations and of the wish he had so long harboured to be an artist, and she approved his common sense which in the end had persuaded him to prefer the assured life of a business man. He had never seen her more cheerful and more human. Knowing English domestic life only through Dickens, Thackeray and H. G. Wells, she was curious to hear how existence was pursued in those prosperous, sober houses in Bayswater that she knew but from their outside. She asked him about his home and his family. These were subjects on which he was always glad to talk. He spoke of his father and mother with a faintly mocking irony which Lydia saw well enough he assumed only to conceal the loving admiration with which he regarded them. Without knowing it he drew a very pleasant picture of an affectionate, happy family who lived unpretentiously in circumstances of moderate affluence at peace with themselves and the world and undisturbed by any fear that anything might happen to affect their security. The life he described lacked neither grace nor dignity; it was healthy and normal, and through its intellectual interests not entirely material; the persons who led it were simple and honest, neither ambitious nor envious, prepared to do their duty by the state and by their neighbours according to their lights; and there was in them neither harm nor malice. If Lydia saw how much of their good nature, their kindliness, their not unpleasing self-complacency depended on the long-established and well-ordered prosperity of the country that had given them birth; if she had an inkling that, like children building castles on
the sea sand, they might at any moment be swept away by a tidal wave, she allowed no sign of it to appear on her face.

“How lucky you English are,” she said.

But Charley was a trifle surprised at the impression his own words made on him. In the course of his recital he had for the first time seen himself from the standpoint of an observer. Until now, like an actor who says his lines, but never having seen the play from the front, has but a vague idea of what it is all about, he had played his part without asking himself whether it had any meaning. It would be too much to say that it made him uneasy, it slightly perplexed him, to realize that while they were all, his father, his mother, his sister, himself, busy from morning till night, so that the days were not long enough for what they wanted to do; yet when you came to look upon the life they led from one year’s end to another it gave you an uncomfortable feeling that they, none of them, did anything at all. It was like one of those comedies where the sets are good and the clothes pretty, where the dialogue is clever and the acting competent, so that you pass an agreeable evening, but a week later cannot remember a thing about it.

When they had finished dinner they took a taxi to a cinema on the other side of the river. It was a film of the Marx brothers and they rocked with laughter at the extravagant humour of the marvellous clowns; but they laughed not only at Groucho’s wise-cracks and at Harpo’s comic quandaries, they laughed at one another’s laughter. The picture finished at midnight, but
Charley was too excited to go quietly to bed and he asked Lydia if she would come with him to some place where they could dance.

“Where would you like to go?” asked Lydia. “Montmartre?”

“Wherever you like as long as it’s gay.” And then, remembering his parents’ constant, but seldom achieved, desire when they came to Paris: “Where there aren’t a lot of English people.”

Lydia gave him the slightly mischievous smile that he had seen on her lips once or twice before. It surprised him, but at the same time was sympathetic to him. It surprised him because it went so strangely with what he thought he knew of her character; and it was sympathetic to him because it suggested that, for all her tragic history, there was in her a vein of high spirits and of a rather pleasing, teasing malice.

“I’ll take you somewhere. It won’t be gay, but it may be interesting. There’s a Russian woman who sings there.”

They drove a long way, and when they stopped Charley saw that they were on the quay. The twin towers of Notre-Dame were distinct against the frosty, starry night. They walked a few steps up a dark street and then went through a narrow door; they descended a flight of stairs and Charley, to his astonishment, found himself in a large cellar with stone walls; from these jutted out wooden tables large enough to accommodate ten or twelve persons, and there were wooden benches on each side of them. The heat was stifling and the air gray with smoke. In the space left by the tables
a dense throng was dancing to a melancholy tune. A slatternly waiter in shirt-sleeves found them two places and took their order. People sitting here and there looked at them curiously and whispered to one another; and indeed Charley in his well-cut English blue serge, Lydia in her black silk and her smart hat with the feather in it, contrasted violently with the rest of the company. The men wore neither collars nor ties, and they danced with their caps on, the end of a cigarette stuck to their lips. The women were bare-headed and extravagantly painted.

“They look pretty tough,” said Charley.

“They are. Most of them have been in jug and those that haven’t should be. If there’s a row and they start throwing glasses or pulling knives, just stand against the wall and don’t move.”

“I don’t think they much like the look of us,” said Charley. “We seem to be attracting a good deal of attention.”

“They think we’re sight-seers and that always puts their backs up. But it’ll be all right. I know the patron.”

When the waiter brought the two beers they had ordered Lydia asked him to get the landlord along. In a moment he came, a big fellow with the naked look of a fat priest, and immediately recognized Lydia. He gave Charley a shrewd, suspicious stare, but when Lydia introduced him as a friend of hers, shook hands with him warmly and said he was glad to see him. He sat down and for a few minutes talked with Lydia in an undertone. Charley noticed that their neighbours watched the scene and he caught one man giving
another a wink. They were evidently satisfied that it was all right. The dance came to an end and the other occupants of the table at which they sat came back. They gave the strangers hostile looks, but the patron explained that they were friends, whereupon one of the party, a sinister-looking chap, with the scar of a razor wound on his face, insisted on offering them a glass of wine. Soon they were all talking merrily together. They were plainly eager to make the young Englishman at home, and a man sitting by his side explained to him that though the company looked a bit rough they were all good fellows with their hearts in the right place. He was a little drunk. Charley, having got over his first uneasiness, began to enjoy himself.

Presently the saxophone player got up and advanced his chair. The Russian singer of whom Lydia had spoken came forward with a guitar in her hand and sat down. There was a burst of applause.

“C’est La Marishka,” said Charley’s drunken friend, “there’s no one like her. She was the mistress of one of the commissars, but Stalin had him shot and if she hadn’t managed to get out of Russia he’d have shot her too.”

A woman on the other side of the table overheard him.

“What nonsense you’re telling him, Loulou,” she cried. “La Marishka was the mistress of a grand duke before the revolution, everyone knows that, and she had diamonds worth millions, but the Bolsheviks took everything from her. She escaped disguised as a peasant.”

La Marishka was a woman of forty, haggard and sombre, with gaunt, masculine features, a brown skin, and enormous, blazing eyes under black, heavy, arching brows. In a raucous voice, at the top of her lungs, she sang a wild, joyless song, and though Charley could not understand the Russian words a cold feeling ran down his spine. She was loudly applauded. Then she sang a sentimental ballad in French, the lament of a girl for her lover who was to be executed next morning, which roused her audience to frenzy. She finished, for the time being, with another Russian song, lively this time, and her face lost its tragic cast; it took on a look of rude and brutal gaiety, and her voice, deep and harsh, acquired a rollicking quality; your blood was stirred and you could not but exult, but at the same time you were moved, for below the bacchanalian merriment was the desolation of futile tears. Charley looked at Lydia and caught her mocking glance. He smiled good-naturedly. That grim woman got something out of the music which he was conscious now was beyond his reach. Another burst of applause greeted the end of the number, but La Marishka, as though she did not hear it, without a sign of acknowledgement, rose from her chair and came over to Lydia. The two women began to talk in Russian. Lydia turned to Charley.

“She’ll have a glass of champagne if you’ll offer it to her.”

“Of course.”

He signalled to a waiter and ordered a bottle; then, with a glance at the half-dozen people sitting at the table, changed his order.

“Two bottles and some glasses. Perhaps these gentlemen and ladies will allow me to offer them a glass too.”

There was a murmur of polite acceptance. The wine was brought and Charley filled a number of glasses and passed them down the table. There was a great deal of health drinking and clinking of glasses together.

“Vive l’Entente Cordiale.”

“À nos alliés.”

They all got very friendly and merry. Charley was having a grand time. But he had come to dance, and when the orchestra began once more to play he pulled Lydia to her feet. The floor was soon crowded and he noticed that a lot of curious eyes were fixed upon her; he guessed that it had spread through the company who she was; it made her to those bullies and their women, somewhat to Charley’s embarrassment, an object of interest, but she did not seem even to be aware that anyone looked at her.