The Steppes of Paris (13 page)

The vintage Brie had been in the fridge before, but he was sure the pâté hadn’t. Nor had there been an unopened carton of milk in the fridge door and a fresh
baguette
on the kitchen table. Someone had been in the flat while he was away. Perplexed, Edward went from room to room, searching for further signs of the mystery visitor. Nothing seemed to have been taken; it definitely wasn’t some sort of bizarre burglary. Had someone illicitly been staying here, a very transient squatter? Or had the Iskarovs sneakily put someone up while he was gone? He came to his bedroom. Had whoever it was been through his things? Nothing looked as though it had been touched, although it was true he did not have much here to go through. Had they slept in his bed? It all seemed pristine, but now the mystery presence filled the whole flat. He went back to the living-room and imagined who on earth might have been sitting in Volodya’s chair, listening to the inordinately loud ticking of Volodya’s clock, which he had forgotten was quite so ludicrously loud. It was only when the spooky nervous prickling had spread all over him that he went into the kitchen again to take another look at the only clues, noticed more gifts of food distributed around the room and realised that, of course, it could only have been Irina.

“Edouard!” she exclaimed joyfully, when she answered the telephone. “You’re back!”

“Thank you for all the food,” he ventured. “It is from you, isn’t it?”

Irina gave an ever-so-slightly offended laugh. “Who else? Is there some other woman I don’t know about who has the keys to your apartment?”

“Thank you very much,” Edward repeated laughing. “It’s really awfully nice of you. I noticed in the taxi on the way back here that most of the shops are still shut. But tell me, how did you time it right? How did you know when I was coming back?”

Irina marked a minute pause. “I took a liberty,” she said. “I hope you won’t mind. But as you left me completely in the dark like that, just going off without a word, I had no choice. I had to know for the post and the
concierge.
You didn’t turn the gas off at the mains, you know. I telephoned Monsieur Hirshfeld to find out when you were expected back at work.”

“I did try to let you know,” Edward answered sorely. “I telephoned you the night before I went away. But you were out. Why doesn’t your grandmother answer the telephone?”

“How could she?” Irina exclaimed. “She doesn’t hear properly half the time and she’s never exactly sure who it is at the other end. She wouldn’t know who you were.”

“But she’s met me,” Edward said indignantly. “And she knows I live in Volodya’s flat.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Irina said coldly. Marginally more gently, she added, “When you have that many generations piled on top of one another in your brain, it’s easy to get them muddled up. She might have realised who you were, but she might have thought you were somebody completely different too: someone’s nephew or some boy she remembered from somewhere you’ve never even heard of.”

“Thanks a lot,” Edward retorted.

Irina laughed. “Anyway, she doesn’t like answering the telephone. She thinks it always brings bad news. Well, after all that’s happened to her in her life, you can understand it.”

They observed a brief truce.

“Did you have a good Christmas?” Irina asked. “How was
perfide Albion
?”

“Pretty terrible,” Edward answered. “How was yours?”

He did surprise himself somewhat by his admission. He was sure that not so long ago he would have answered blithely, “Oh fine” or, “Great”. But Irina’s flagrant lack of restraint or pride when things went wrong encouraged him to come clean. He expected she would reciprocate with some tale of woe.

Sure enough, she gave a groan. “Mine was perfectly awful,” she pronounced. “You want to know what happened? Great-Aunt Elena and her protégée, Varvara Stepanovna, came round for dinner on Christmas Eve, the same as always, and an old family friend called Nikolai Grigoriev, who was my mother’s last attachment, and I slaved away to make them all a delicious dinner, the same as always, and what did they do? Just what they did last year, and the year before, and the year before that; down to the seasonal witticisms and the compliments about the meal – they always say precisely the same things to me even though the dishes are totally different – and they brought up the same dreadful subjects and had the same old squabbles. And in the middle of it all I went out to the kitchen and I thought, ‘I can’t bear this.’ I couldn’t even ring my good friend Lyova, the one who sits with Babushka, because he was shut up enduring his own hell with his dear ones. I thought, ‘How much longer is this going to go on? How many more years of the same voices having the same conversations will I have to put up with? Will no one ever come along and get me out of this misery?’”

“Mine was pretty much a re-run too,” Edward answered.

“Tell me about your family,” Irina asked.

But he could think of nothing to say. When he recalled his two boring, married, elder brothers and his two boring, married, elder sisters, and his mother fussing over the whereabouts of the gravy boat, and his father making a pedantic performance out of sharpening the carving knife, they didn’t yield a single worthwhile anecdote.

“Oh,” he said. “They’re not like your family. They’re not
interesting
.”

“Lucky you,” said Irina. “So is that why you came racing
back to Paris so quickly? You were bored? You couldn’t wait to get back to the excitements of the metropolis?”

Edward wondered what she was getting at. Had she come upon his humiliatingly blank diary during her visit to the flat? Did she guess he had come back to spend the weekend reading and watching television within his four walls and resorting to the old Nicolas gut rot if he thought he was going to get depressed?

“You could put it that way,” he answered, and then he waited. Irina, he felt already confident, would make her meaning only too clear.

“Any particular excitements?” she pressed. “Or just the proximity of the Eiffel Tower?”

“Nothing special.”

“Nothing special? You just prefer the air here, I suppose, the
ambiance
? And what are you planning to do with yourself all weekend, if I may ask?”

“Oh,” he said. “Odds and ends.”

“I’m still on holiday for ten days,” Irina told him. “I’ve got plenty of free time, for once.”

And, so he justified it to himself afterwards, at that stage it became quite impossible, unless he wanted consciously to offend Irina, not to suggest that at some point over the weekend they could perhaps see each other.

It did certainly change the whole prospect ahead of him radically to have a date for dinner on Saturday night. Whoever it was with, this would still have been the case. All that day, as he pottered around – taking his washing to the launderette only to discover it was still shut, greedily eating Irina’s pâté and
baguette
for lunch – he was far more conscious of the rounded satisfaction of having an engagement at the end of the day than of any worry because the engagement was with Irina.

She had suggested they meet in the Taverne Tourville. Edward had never been inside it but he knew it well by sight; a big, solemnly respectable
brasserie
on the corner of the Avenue de Tourville and the Avenue de la Motte Picquet, almost exactly halfway between his and Irina’s apartments. Unnecessarily early, he showered and got changed, making a midway concession between actually dressing up and going as he was. Unnecessarily early, he set out for the Taverne
Tourville. It looked both welcoming and at the same time faintly stand-offish in the winter darkness, as he entered the Place de l’Ecole Militaire. Warm light shone from its large windows, but the waist-high wooden barrier outside it, which fenced off a small enclosure where in summer there would be tables, gave it an aloof appearance, like a house in a suburban street set further back behind a bigger front garden than its neighbours. He wondered why, for all its useful location, Irina had suggested such a stuffy meeting place.

The interior was the explanation. Edward took a seat in the window and looked around in surprise at what turned out to be a perfectly preserved Art Nouveau museum. Even the other customers were talking to one another in the low reverential voices reserved for cultural haunts. The large restaurant was only discreetly lit by the most lush lamps: white-glass globes painted with bunches of grapes and vine leaves, and over the bar bunches of yellow-glass grapes with weak electric light bulbs inside them. The bar itself was an immensely long and curving one, which shone like glass. He ordered a double Scotch and he started to wait for Irina.

He had got there fifteen minutes early intentionally, of course, but now his good manners rebounded on him. He had ample time to sit, sip his drink, and ask himself what the hell he was doing there. What in God’s name was he getting into? He had come early because he was certain Irina was the sort of woman, however she behaved herself, who wouldn’t take kindly to being kept waiting alone in a café. But, though her old-fashioned side might be quaint, it wasn’t the crucial aspect of her; the crucial aspect was that Irina was ravenous for manflesh and she didn’t care to hide it. She was hungry and she was after him. Edward only now began to wonder, belatedly, why he was putting himself in harm’s way. It couldn’t only be that something was better than nothing, surely? OK, the tendency was not to pass up any opportunity so frankly offered, but in the whole of Paris, for Christ’s sake, there had to be an opportunity less obviously fraught right from the start with the potential for farcical disaster. Was it possible that, so far unrecognised by him, he actually fancied Irina? Did the offstage chomping of the lioness’s teeth excite him? Or was it just the unbelievably
bizarre domestic circus around her which drew him; Russia
c.
1917 being intrinsically more interesting than Paris of the early eighties? Whatever it was, he had no doubt in a moment of unpleasantly cold lucidity that he was on the verge of doing something unbelievably stupid. He could, of course, not do it. But that would be the wimp’s option.

By the time they had agreed on, he was ready for his second drink. He ordered it quickly before Irina put in an appearance. He wondered in what shape and form the moment of decision would present itself. And he did then allow himself to wonder, things having already gone so unwisely far, what it might be like; what it might be like if he just let things take their course and went along obligingly with Irina’s transparent wishes. It would be, in a word, a catastrophe.

The catastrophe came in through the nearest stained-glass door. She stood there for a moment, poised, looking around across the tables for her prey, and she looked so elegantly in keeping, making her entrance between the spiky bamboo plants in their fancy white tubs that in that moment Edward’s fears became schoolboy immaturity and Irina a graduation ceremony.

She was wearing her fur coat with a vivid silk neck scarf which, as she saw him and came sailing self-consciously forward, worked its way a little loose and fluttered at her chin. She reminded Edward suddenly of the Alphonse Mucha posters his elder sisters had been so keen on as teenagers; with just the same enraptured expression and porcelain complexion, they had gazed down on him from bedroom walls, enhanced as here by stylised vegetation and artificial harvests. Hugging her coat exaggeratedly close, Irina made her way past the hat stand and the glass cabinet displaying jaded desserts. People looked up as she passed their tables, and Edward hoped childishly that they would notice whose table she was heading for. She covered the last stretch of exposed aisle as though it were open sea, her fur toque bravely high, and her boots treading resolutely across the uncertain deck. She drew to a halt in front of him and beamed.

“You look very fetching tonight,” said Edward.

“Do I?” asked Irina. She preened herself for a second or two, smoothing her fur-clad flanks with one hand as if wishing
symbolically to slim them down, and tweeking anxiously at her neck scarf with the other. She subsided, after the exertion of her entrance, into the chair opposite Edward and sat back with a satisfied smile. As she crossed her legs in the confined space beneath the table, the sharp, shiny toes of her boots emerged to the side of the draped peach cloth.

“You look especially Russian,” Edward added. “The fur and the boots. It’s great.”

Irina laughed. “Babushka got so worried when she saw me going out dressed up like this. She wanted to know where I was going, whom I was going to meet.”

“Did you tell her?” asked Edward.

Irina puckered her lips. “What d’you think?”

Edward hesitated. “Yes, I think you did. To reassure her it was a perfectly innocent meeting with your tenant.”

“Well, I didn’t,” said Irina. “It wouldn’t have stopped her worrying anyway, you realise. She worries the way other people breathe; it’s a natural condition. And as for the private lives of people she cares about – do you know she’s still worrying about marriages which finished in the divorce courts years ago?”

“You mean,” said Edward, “if you’d told her you were meeting me, she would have thought that a cause for concern?”

Irina sized him up. “Would she have been so wrong?”

Edward beckoned to the waiter to order Irina’s drink. She chose, a little surprisingly, a port and while she was waiting for it she took off her hat and scarf, like props whose scene was over. But a new scene seemed to be getting under way, for when the port arrived, she didn’t set about it with characteristic gusto but just dipped her lip into it affectedly and set the glass down barely touched.

“So?” she said to Edward. “You’re glad to be back?”

Before he had thought through the consequences of his answer, he shrugged. “Not especially, frankly, no. I’d just had more than enough of home.”

Irina took it personally. She tossed her head and replied sullenly, “I see.”

She ran the tip of her finger round the rim of her glass and sulked into its shallow depths. Then she lifted her head
and announced truculently, “Well, Edouard,
I’m
glad you’re back.”