Pravda (24 page)

"My pleasure."

"I feel a lot better now than I did a few hours ago," he said. "My painting doesn't matter."

"Then I am a success. A top-up, please." She propped her chin on his chest, holding her glass out in the direction of the bottle.

For the first time, and with all the attendant surprise of a new idea, it occurred to him that he could remarry.
There
was a novel thought. Move Alessandro out, move Chloe Martin in. He could get by on a single piece of tight male arse a month, say. Or even pay Alessandro a fixed fee to visit. (The idea of turning that deluded little Roman into a whore certainly appealed.) Though would Chloe Martin actually say yes? He thought not. Except, perhaps, for the money.

"Did you lie to your wife when you were together?"

"Every day. Every hour. Every minute."

"You have never said anything about her."

"Ask—if you wish to know."

"Where does she live?"

"My wife died a few weeks ago." Nicholas drank more deeply. "I am sorry."

"We were separated for the last ten years or so. We didn't speak
for most of that time. But—to answer your next question—I loved her dearly. I never said it, of course. But then you must hold something in reserve against the final reckoning, wouldn't you say?"

"No."

"Ah, but in reality you do ... you hold many things back." He scratched her back with gentle fingers.

"You never saw her again after you left?"

"Actually, I did—just before. I was lucky—I was able to spend a few good days with her. She lived in Russia. You can still buy the necessary pills there. They ease the pain. She had cancer. I bought her a whole stack. She was going into hospital. I had arranged for the best doctors."

"She lived in Moscow?"

"St. Petersburg."

"But you didn't tell her that you loved her then—when you saw her, I mean."

"No.I ... I assumed I would see her again. We hardly said a word to each other while I was there, in fact. I regret that very much now. There was a great deal that I would have liked to talk to her about. I suppose I thought it was the start of ... of our reconciliation. I tried to persuade her to come back to our old home in London—to be treated there. But she said she would not leave Russia again. She was the most stubborn woman I ever knew. Would die to prove her point. In a way, she
did
die to prove her point." (Why? What perverse gene had made it thus all his life: so much easier to speak to friends than to family, to his lovers than to his wife?) "Anyway I booked my flight back two weeks later. I was going to surprise her—visit her in the hospital. She died a few days after I left."

"What did you do while you were there?"

He found himself admiring the lack of melodrama in Chloe's voice: that she did not become stagy or overcareful or otherwise false-toned around the subject of death. Odd, especially for an actress. Perhaps she had lost someone. Odd too how close to Masha he felt, just talking like this. He realized with some shock that he hadn't spoken properly to anyone since. Since.

"We went to the Hermitage once, when she felt she could make the trip. She was in a lot of pain. Though the pills helped—helped enormously. The other days we just played these six-hour games of chess and listened to music. Sat together. Nothing much. I went to see the doctors to arrange things with the hospital." He raised his glass but paused to speak before he drank. "They feel as if they were
the best three days of my life. Just to be near her. She might have been going slowly mad all her life but, my God, that woman had
so
much raw courage."

"Why didn't you live together?"

"We did. For a long time. Until the 1990s. Until the children were gone."

"And you were close?"

"Always."

"Why? I mean, you say you were separated. So why do you feel you were always close?"

He had never asked himself this question, but now he was struck by its importance. And suddenly, at ease here in his soul's only rest, he could see the answer quite clearly.

"Because my wife understood the geometry of things."

"I don't understand."

"She understood how people are—how people are
really.
She understood what lies hidden beneath ... and how our falsities are more eloquent than our truths."

"This was the reason you loved her?"

"This was the intellectual reason, I suppose."

"And in your heart?"

"If you are asking me the emotional reason ... I would say because ... because the shape of our needs always seemed to tessellate. To fit together, wherever they met."

"Like crazy paving."

"Exactly so."

"Did she lie to you?" Chloe kept her eyes on his, a frown of sincere concentration on her brow, her glass pressed down onto the bed in the space between them, her little finger free and circling his thigh. "Did she deceive you as you deceived her?"

"We deceived each other throughout—from the very beginning. Yes, in a way she deceived me as much as I her. She did not realize, for example, that I knew she had a child before we were married. I waited for her to say something ... but she never did. And so I assumed that the child was dead or that she simply did not wish to talk about it. I felt no need to pry. There were a thousand things I did not tell her in return—many, many things about myself, about what I was doing, more and more as time went on. But the lies never mattered—they often don't. That's what these psychologists will never tell you. Indeed, that's what the new world will never understand about the old. She recognized mine, and I hers. And we both subtracted them from what was really being said. We could never remark upon this recognition, though. It could never be explicit. Instead we lived out our complexities and our mutual understandings, as if they were continual tributes to each other's love and at the same time continual tests."

Her finger circled. "So why did you split up, then?"

"She had become too mad for me—there was no meaning left in any of our conversations. Not mad—that's not quite right. I mean obsessive and compulsive—obsessive in her need to repeat and repeat these prejudices and opinions, these fantasies about what was happening in the wider world. And yet ... and yet she knew well that she did not have any idea what she was talking about—and worse, that the opinions she pretended to were not real either. She didn't believe a word of what she herself was saying, but she was compelled to go on saying it. It's a strange thing, Chloe, it's ... it's very
Russian."
He shook his head. "And somehow we just lost our route back. I found that my own sense of sanity was going in her presence. I could not listen to her anymore. Marriage is a generosity contest, and she won. Perhaps I was going mad in a different way. And I was ... I was—"

"Mad ... physically."

"If you like."

"Were there many others?"

"Yes."

"The reasons for your lies?"

"Not the reasons. The occasions."

Her knee found his leg. "The occasions."

"I always felt the need to be free."

"Why?"

"I don't know. Perhaps this is what drove her mad. I couldn't live with her in the normal way, I suppose. I ... When my father died, I had the money and ... after a few years of trying ... I...I took my freedom."

"You needed these others?"

"I needed them."

"Because..."

"DNA."

"No."

Nicholas raised an eyebrow. "No?"

She moved her knee softly up and down a fraction. "You needed them because ... if you believe that you can still make love with
other women, then it feels as though not every issue is settled—that your life isn't bound in iron."

"Something like that."

"That you are still
alive."

"Perhaps." He wanted to drink and fuck and talk and drink and fuck and talk forever. And why could he not paint this pretty, ugly, pretty, ugly, ugly-pretty, pretty-pretty face? He would bet that Chloe had passed the first thirty years of her life entirely innocent of the damage those pale dreamy green eyes could do; rather, she had grown into this look, this manner. All the same, it worked. He wanted her, wanted physically to be inside her, to go and fetch her consciousness and compel her into the moment with him. Share the endless present.

"And you did not love these others?"

"Very few."

"How many?"

"There were some I did love. Never as I regarded ... as I
loved
my wife, though. But there are as many kinds of love as there are people. You know that."

She finished her wine and smiled. "Do I? Some people would say that love and sex are one and the same. You are not loving your wife while you are sleeping with another."

"Only the ignorant or the childish."

"Unfair."

"I have nothing against the ignorant or the childish."

"And that's another lie." Her knee moved over his leg all the way so that he could feel her warmth against his hip.

"No, they are not half so bad as the dinner-party vermin who believe they are sophisticated and who claim to think that sex and love are separate things."

"And you, Nicholas, what do you think?"

"Really what do I think?"

"Yes, really. Tell me."

She bent to kiss his stomach, the base of her empty glass now cool on his chest.

"I would say that sex and love are like ... like the two principal dancers of the ballet: sometimes they are magnificently, beautifully, indissolubly together, through the great centerpieces of the pas de deux—and make no mistake, this is what the audience pays to see; but sometimes the one will dance while the other watches in the wings; or sometimes they will dance in parallel, on opposite sides of the stage, together yet apart, a curtsey for a bow, an arabesque for a
tendu;
sometimes one is alone while the other is forgotten for long acts at a time; sometimes the one dances with the chorus to make the other jealous; sometimes one leaps on moments after the other has left; sometimes one dies while the other lives; and of course sometimes they go on separate exhibition tours."

She laughed.

He took her glass, half turned away, let it fall noiselessly to the floor. He held a last sip of his own and reached for the tiny pill that he had already popped and readied discreetly on the walnut side table.

When he turned back, her hand was on him, her eyes bewitching him. And his kiss was chaste as pure intention.

The crane outside the window had begun to sink into the mud below, or rather had begun to subside, so that the long skeleton finger no longer reached true to heaven but listed dangerously toward their tower block as if enacting some strange and terrible slow-motion death strike.

Everything was sinking.

Everything was always sinking.

Back into the Neva. Back into the sea. The people, the city, St. Petersburg itself, forever sinking. And Henry's guilt was as raw and saturating as the sewage marsh into which everything sank.

In those few moments back from the football—that gaping and ragged hole in the wall, the taste of grime on his lips as he opened the front door, the corridor strewn with masonry and rubble, his bedroom trampled and destroyed, his money stolen, the semidarkness as he entered their main room, the smell of sawn wood, his eyes adjusting, the piano vanished, Arkady on his knees—in those few moments, Henry had known that he must give everything he had left to his friend. Complete divestiture. Because that heap of jagged shards and the Russian's ghostly face were the last scene of his life in its current incarnation. Nothing worse could happen. It was over. Something else must now begin.

Though he continued to lean against the wall and look out at the docks and the sea beyond, there was therefore urgency in his voice as he addressed his flatmate: "How will we know if the passport and the visa look real enough?"

Arkady lay on the sofa, half dressed in jeans and open shirt. "We won't," he said.

"Can we order a passport without specifying where we want the visa for?"

"It does not work like that. It is not a pizza."

"I appreciate that."

"Anyway, forget Paris. The bitch divorced him. He divorced the bitch."

"Not necessarily."

Aware that it was pointless to do so, Henry had found himself repeatedly pushing Paris as Arkady's putative destination. Partly because that was the only sure address they had been able to Google immediately—through an expatriate bridge club. Partly because any conversation with Arkady was better than the ever-expanding silence, whatever the price. And partly for mortal fear that the Russian's resolve would slump, that somehow there would be born between them some whelpish failure of nerve.

"Not necessarily." Henry turned. "And you know, it might be easier to get into France for ... for a Russian."

"She lived here." Arkady began to button his shirt. "He lives there."

"We don't know why they split. We mustn't judge. There are—"

"Divorced. Separate. Different lives. They don't f—"

"Actually, many people who are divorced remain in amicable contact with each other." Through the crack in Arkady's bedroom door, Henry caught sight of the woman moving inside. Suntanned legs. Dark pubic hair. He looked away and began walking in irregular circles around the sofa, stepping carefully over the fallen disks. "You don't know, Arkady. And we have to try everything."

"He is not my father. I am his wife's virgin-fuck child. He gets a letter from me. He does not even wipe shit with it. Why would he care?"

"There are a million good ... good people out there." Henry stopped and retraced his steps around the back of the sofa, wanting to stay out of Arkady's line of sight. Somehow, with the centripetal pull of the piano gone, the room felt hollow. And even as he continued to speak, he could hear the priggishness of his old self recolonizing his voice. Pompous Henry, prudish Henry, prim Henry—these old Henrys, they were all openly pursuing him now. He began again. "We can at least try a letter."

"I think he does not know I exist."