The Steppes of Paris (12 page)

The rice pudding she produced next was a fitting end to the pre-digested dinner; it was milkier than an English one and enlivened by a few pieces of candied fruit but still a near relative. Unenthusiastically, Edward manoeuvred it around his plate.

Great-Aunt Elena, apparently intent on rebuking Irina for her rash behaviour over the flat, continued mercilessly. “Irina has the emotional problems of a disorientated person too, I believe. She doesn’t like Frenchmen, she doesn’t like Russians; she can’t settle for anybody, it seems.” She scooped up a bit of angelica and chewed it vindictively.

Irina said something grumpily in Russian, which she translated for Edward as, “What a marvellous song; sing it all over again from the beginning.”

“Italians, Hungarians, Brazilians,” Great-Aunt Elena went
on. “Never anybody too suitable, too close to home. Africans, Chinese –”

“I have
never
,” Irina said with frigid dignity, “had anything to do with a Chinese.”

They all three started laughing, including Irina, but she added, “Anyway, I have Mama and you to thank, don’t I, for bringing me up such a sophisticated and cosmopolitan person that I can’t find satisfaction anywhere on earth. I’m following in Mama’s fine tradition; I’m sampling the fruits of the earth.” She concluded, with an unnerving mixture of flattery and spite, “We can’t all be as clever as you, Elena, and pick a saint like Borya first time round.”

The teasing and bickering subsided as they scraped their pudding plates clean and simultaneously realised it was nearly one in the morning.

Irina announced, “In eight hours’ time, I have to analyse Turgenev with my
Terminale
,” and she shuddered.

Great-Aunt Elena was reluctant for them to leave. “No coffee?” she protested. “No
petit digestif
?”

She kept hold of Edward’s hand in both of hers when they shook hands at the door. “It doesn’t matter you’re only going to be here for a year,” she reassured him earnestly. “We shall still treat you as a member of the family so long as you’re living in Volodya’s apartment. I’ll telephone you to make sure you’ve got everything you need. And maybe you can come over here from time to time and talk English to me. I’ll look after you better than Irina.”

Irina was uncharacteristically silent in the taxi on the way home. Edward said little either, browsing through some of the odder images of the evening: the grandmother’s journey; the Scottish accent of a woman long dead incongruously preserved in Great-Aunt Elena’s poem; Volodya failing to recognise a poisonous species of American woman and, in his gastronomic fervour, consuming her, with fatal results. He reflected drowsily how many of the evening’s participants were in fact dead, yet how tenaciously they kept their places among the living.

Eventually Irina said, “I suppose you’ve had enough of my family now to last you the whole year.”

“Why d’you say that?” Edward asked.

Irina gave a single hard laugh. “Isn’t it obvious? Who, in their right mind, would put up with such a performance all year round? And you’re so
much
in your right mind.”

“I found this evening very interesting,” Edward said feebly.

“Interesting!” Irina repeated bitterly. “Yes, I suppose for you it was
interesting
.”

They both stayed silent to appreciate the drive across the Pont des Invalides. The taxi entered the Boulevard de Latour-Maubourg. Edward briefly enjoyed the novelty of driving companionably between the dark shuttered apartment houses.

“You’re sure you don’t want to be taken home first?” he asked Irina. “You’re sure you don’t mind if he drops me off first?”

Irina shook her head. “You’re sweet,” she said bleakly.

The taxi pulled over opposite the rue Saint Dominique.

“Well, thank you again,” Edward said a little awkwardly. “I did enjoy this evening.” He extended his hand, uncertainly, to shake Irina’s. She didn’t even reach forward to take it. She raised hers in an offhand little wave. “
Au
revoir
, Edouard,” she said limply. “We’ll be in touch.”

He looked after her as he waited for the lights to change so he could cross the boulevard. Huddled in her furs, Irina was a gloomy but unmistakably a romantic figure as the taxi bore her away.

Henry and Mai’s party, for the “holiday season” as Henry put it, for the “
fêtes de fin d’année
” as Marie-Yvette put it, was on the last Saturday before Christmas. Although there were still a couple of working days before the public holiday, Marie-Yvette and Aurore were both treating themselves to the following week off and as Edward overheard them discussing the party in the office, he got the impression that it was going to be quite an occasion for letting one’s hair down, comfortable in the knowledge that most of them wouldn’t have to face their colleagues for several days afterwards. He would have liked to ask them for further details – Henry’s party was a hardy annual event – but it seemed undignified. From what he could hear, it sounded as though it would be a fairly smart event; there seemed to be a good deal of dressing-up on the cards. But from his three months’ exposure to Parisian females and their propensity for dressing themselves up at the slightest excuse, he acknowledged wryly that this was not a reliable indicator of the smartness of the party. He noticed also that no one made much of its being Christmas. At first, he wondered if this were out of polite consideration for Henry’s Jewishness, not that that seemed to consist of much more than a wicked sense of humour and knowing where the best restaurants were. Then he realised it was general; Christmas in Paris didn’t seem to
have the obscene quality of a sexless orgy which it had in England. There was a welcome lack of spray-can snow and piped carols. Monitoring the office conversation over the last couple of days before the party, and noting the absence of commentary on who was going to give what to whom, on who was going to eat which of the series of monumentally tedious meals at whose house, Edward decided that Christmas here had a non-committal cosmopolitan flavour to it, which he rather approved of.

He wore a tie, as a precaution, and arrived punctually half an hour after the time Henry had said, bringing a gift-wrapped box of
marrons
glacés.
Mai, who opened the door to him, accepted it with a little giggle of amusement, “Oh, Edward, so
traditional
!” and while he was idiotically wishing that he had had the wit to bring something else instead, steered him down the picture-hung corridor, exclaiming, “Henry wants you to meet somebody here. Let me introduce you right away before I forget.” Following her, Edward felt slightly ruffled; surely he wasn’t such a pathetic figure that even his boss felt obliged to introduce him to single women? The now familiar living-room was already fairly lively with an intriguing assortment of guests, of whom he recognised only Marie-Yvette and Aurore, and an Indian couple whom he had met there once before at dinner. But the person Mai was enthusiastically steering him towards was not a woman.

“Arnold,” she said to a large sun-tanned man, who was stooping, a look of forced attention on his face, to listen to the Indians. “Meet Henry’s new colleague, Edward Wainwright.” And to Edward, she added, “You may talk about work. Arnold is your man in Kabul.”

With a whisk of silky Oriental fabric, she spun away to answer another ring at the front door, and Edward urgently tried to remember all he knew about Arnold Elgood. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t very much because Arnold, presumably relieved to be rid of the Indians, started to question Edward vigorously about himself.

He regretted afterwards, when they had been separated by the party, that he hadn’t had a chance to put a few questions to Arnold about life in Kabul and maybe make a good impression on him. But the next arrivals turned out to be a couple, old
friends of Arnold’s, and the three of them plunged across the room towards one another with cries of recognition and delight.

Edward fell back on Marie-Yvette and Aurore. Marie-Yvette had made only a slight concession to the party, changing her perpetual jeans for a pair of black leather trousers and weighting her, Edward thought, singularly unsexy ears with a pair of immense, apparently scrap metal earrings. But Aurore was a vision; she was wearing a striking turquoise and navy jumpsuit, finished off with unbelievably high-heeled turquoise shoes and what looked like turquoise kitchen foil electrifying her hair. Edward would have paid her a compliment if she hadn’t introduced a thickset West Indian man, standing beside her looking distinctly resentful and ill-at-ease, as her
fiancé.
The four of them stood and spoke stiltedly until Mai bustled over again, exclaiming, “
Alors
, Monday to Friday, nine to five isn’t enough for you lot? Aurore, come and tell my friend Madeleine what she should know for her holiday in Martinique.”

Idling across the room in the hope of refilling his glass, Edward came face to face with the Hirshfelds’ daughter Dinh. She was standing by herself in the middle of the animated crowd, surveying her parents’ party with an expression of serene aloofness. Both faintly embarrassed, she and Edward rather woodenly wished each other “
Bonsoir
”.

‘Great,’ Edward thought sarcastically. ‘First the secretaries from work, now the boss’s infant daughter. I’m really doing well here.’

Without any loss of dignity, Dinh offered to refill his glass for him. “What are you drinking?”

When he answered, “Scotch”, she wrinkled her small nose disdainfully.

She brought him back an exceptionally strong measure and, at a loss for anything else to say to her, Edward asked, “Have the school holidays started yet?”

“Of course. The
lycée
broke up on Thursday.”

At the mention of the word
lycée,
Edward realised the girl must be a fair bit older than he had imagined. Simultaneously, a more complex thought occurred to him.

“Do you go to the same
lycée
where your mother teaches?”

Dinh nodded. A tense, defensive look came over her face. But Edward’s next question was obviously not what she expected.

“Do you know the Russian teacher?”

She frowned in puzzlement. “The Russian teacher? I don’t do Russian.”

“Mademoiselle Iskarov,” Edward volunteered, reproaching himself fiercely for what he was doing.

Dinh still frowned. “I don’t know all the teachers. It’s a big place.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Edward said hastily. “I was just wondering.”

“Wait a minute,” Dinh added. “There is one foreign lady there. She’s quite fat and fierce-looking.” She blew out her utterly smooth cheeks and glared at Edward grotesquely.

Appalled, Edward stared at her; it couldn’t be. Renowned as little girls were for nastiness, he simply couldn’t believe they considered Irina “fat and fierce-looking”.

Dinh’s cheeks collapsed. “
Ah
non
, I’ve just remembered; that’s Madame Braun who teaches German. I don’t know Mademoiselle Iks – Isk – the Russian teacher.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Edward repeated rather sternly. “It’s of no importance.”

After an awkward silence, Dinh asked, “Are you hungry? Maman’s prepared the most tremendous self-service supper next door.”

Only a Parisian child, Edward reflected ruefully, would have the
savoir-faire
to get out of a tight corner so skilfully. Before he managed to shed her in the developing scrimmage around the buffet table, Dinh asked, “How come you know our Russian teacher?”

“She’s my landlady,” Edward replied crisply.

Considering it was his first party for three months, he could hardly say he was making the most of it. All else failing, he scanned the sitting-room for fanciable women under thirty. There seemed precious few of them. As he perched on the arm of a settee to eat his second plate of supper, a lone press officer from the Japanese Embassy came up and gave him a beseeching little introductory bow. The man’s French and English were both so cumbersomely accented that any conversation was
laborious. Later, Edward talked to a glamorous, flamboyant but middle-aged Greek woman, who asked him to find her an ashtray, and subsequently to a man from New Jersey with whom he thoroughly discussed Bruce Springsteen. He saw Aurore laughing uproariously and flirting with Arnold Elgood, while her sullen boyfriend watched her bad-temperedly from the wall. Edward didn’t get near Arnold again.

Going over the party dispiritedly as he travelled home late with a silent taxi driver, he wondered about the factors behind his failure to enjoy himself as he had intended. There were, first and foremost, the well-known shortcomings of Paris. At the same party in some South American capital, he would, of course, have shone. But he hadn’t put his back into it. Was it possible that after only three months he was getting rusty; out of practice at having a good time? There was something else actually, too, but he refused to admit that could be a factor. He had dreaded that Irina might be at the party and then was slightly let down when she wasn’t. Perhaps he had hoped that he could prove in public that their relationship was merely that of landlady and tenant and thereby return it from now on to more manageable proportions. He felt done out of the opportunity. But, after all, it was silly to have expected Mai to invite her colleagues from the
lycée.
For that was all Irina was; Mai’s daughter didn’t even know her name. And it simply hadn’t been the sort of party where Mai would include all and sundry from the staffroom.

Still he was concerned that he should be even the slightest bit disappointed. It wasn’t as if he would have enjoyed the party any more if Irina had been there. He imagined how she would have flirted with Arnold Elgood, sweetly mispronouncing his name. She would have worn her pink dress no doubt, although maybe she had half a dozen others of that voltage. Out of discretion, surely, she would not have paid much attention to her tenant.

He was planning to fly home for a bare forty-eight hours, although he could easily have stayed for longer. The only way he could convey that his life in Paris contained anything of any importance, either professional or personal, was to fly hastily in and fly hastily back. Besides, the thought of a prolonged family Christmas filled him with such complete aversion that
he thought he preferred the empty silence of the rue Surcouf. In the last couple of days before his departure, he made a few perfunctory preparations. He bought easy, unimaginative Christmas presents all round. He considered, just briefly, telephoning Guy and Roland to find out where they would be spending Christmas but decided against it pretty quickly. They were the only people from whom he knew he couldn’t successfully hide how poorly Paris was turning out.

The night before he left, on an impulse, he telephoned Irina. He would warn her the flat was going to be empty for two days. He would wish her a Happy Christmas. As soon as the phone started ringing at the other end, he had second thoughts but hanging up seemed even more of a give-away. It rang for a long, long time. If Irina were out, why didn’t her grandmother pick up the phone? He glanced at Volodya’s clock on the bookcase. It was ten o’clock. Could the grandmother have gone to bed already? He counted six more rings; she was, after all, a very slow walker. Then he put down the receiver. He wondered where Irina was. He wondered what, in the unknown turbulence of her private life, she might be up to.