The Steppes of Paris (15 page)

“He lived in Brighton, in a big pink house, two or three streets back from the sea. I had never seen streets like that before in France with all the houses painted pastel colours: pink and yellow and blue. To me, it was the most exquisite thing imaginable to live in a pink house; I love the colour pink. It seemed the perfect setting for my idyll with dear old Mr Blenkinsop. One day I told him what a beautiful colour I thought his house was and I remember he got terribly excited. He kept looking at me and exclaiming, ‘Good Lord! Well, isn’t that a remarkable thing?’ At first, he didn’t want to tell me why it was such a remarkable thing. I don’t know why he thought it might upset me. Apparently,
our
house was pink,
the Iskarov family house in what was then St Petersburg, and it had been a slightly unusual colour to paint it at the time, so it had caused a bit of comment and become a family motif. He couldn’t believe that two generations later such a strong penchant for pink would crop up again. I felt awfully proud of my allegiance. Even though it was a much louder, shriller pink, I bought lots of that rock back as a souvenir. I told my mother about the pink house and she nearly burst into tears. She told me it was all she could really remember of Russia; our pink house. She was only two or three when they had to leave. She said the colour of the house had stayed in her memory all through the years, in all the dark apartment houses she lived in later; a very innocent pink, she said, like icecream or a birthday cake, beckoning through the silver birch trees or over the snow. During the last war, she said it sometimes came back to her, like a frivolous wave, when there was no frivolity left anywhere in the world. Dear Mr Basil Blenkinsop; we sent pink flowers to his funeral.”

It had not previously occurred to Edward that Irina had at some stage been an adolescent, let alone once a child. She was so absolutely adult; she appeared to have come ready formed, complete with all her family’s accumulated weary experience. In fact, now he came to imagine her as a child, it was a small-scale woman he imagined; just the smallest size of those stacking Russian dolls, which was in shape and facial features and character no different from the biggest.

“Have you always lived in Paris?” he asked her.

Irina nodded. “Yes. Well, almost; we had an experimental year in Geneva and another in Nice. But we always seemed to come back here in the end, don’t ask me why. I don’t think any of us was particularly drawn to Paris. I certainly wasn’t.”

“It’s not the most hospitable of cities,” Edward ventured.

Irina nodded vehemently. “There are times I hate it,” she said. “Like now. I hate it now; so cold and dark and bare. It’s not the dark and the cold I mind so much, but walking past the apartment houses full of smug
Parisiens
and looking up at their lighted windows and feeling eternally shut out.”

“Hey,” Edward said. “That’s
my
fantasy.”

They laughed. Virtually without noticing, certainly without
making any impression on Edward’s appetite, they had eaten their
entrées
and the waiter brought the main course. Edward looked down at a small plump wedge of duck on which someone had painstakingly organised a floral arrangement of little slivers of carrot and leek. In the brown sauce, there was a single petal of cream. Wherever the evening might be heading, Edward hoped suddenly that he would finish it in his flat by himself if only so that he could fill up on pâté and bread.

“Yes, but it’s not so surprising for you to be an outsider,” Irina responded. “You’re new, you know you’re not going to be here for long, it’s even part of your professional competence, isn’t it? But I’ve lived here all my life, remember, I’ve got nowhere else in particular to go, and I still feel I don’t belong. That’s more brutal.”

“Have you never thought of going to live somewhere else?” Edward asked her. “Why don’t you get a job which would take you abroad?”

Irina looked at him resentfully. So fierce was her mascaraed hostility, Edward sensed she would be capable of emptying her dinner-plate over him.

“What am I supposed to do with Babushka?” she asked. “Put her in a home? And Great-Aunt Elena? She won’t stay this valiant forever. And the properties, the Cité Etienne Hubert and the rue Surcouf; what am I supposed to do about them?”

“Oh come,” said Edward. “You can’t let your life be dictated by elderly relatives and flats.”

Irina glared at him. Then she laughed and sat back. “You’re awfully young, Edouard.”

“Nothing I can do about that, I’m afraid,” Edward said brusquely. He sliced and forked up his duck in silence.

“I suppose I envy you,” Irina continued. “For the time being I have to confine my adventures close to home.”

While they were reading the dessert menu, whose names, Edward thought gloomily, probably took up more space than the dishes themselves, Irina suddenly volunteered, “Don’t be upset if I sometimes snap at you, Edouard. You do realise I’m just raging against the odds?”

Edward looked up at her. “The odds?”

Irina fingered the stem of her wine glass. “The odds against us being anything more than a joke which no one laughs at. You do realise I’ve been pining for you ever since we first met?”

“No,” Edward answered. “I didn’t. If you remember, our first meeting was a bit unfortunate.”

“Of course I remember,” Irina said. “How could I forget? Just my luck, I thought, to be favoured with such a colossal cold when somebody so absolutely charming walks in.”

Edward’s eyes escaped to the menu. Was she going to do it all herself? He supposed it was only natural that Irina should make the running. After all, left to his own devices he would never have come near her. She had offered the first invitation, she made the first admission. But was she going to decide everything?

“Don’t be embarrassed,” she told him.

Edward faced her for long enough to take in her practised yearning look and her right hand stretched far enough across the table for him to take it if he chose. He looked back to the menu. For the first time in what had probably been rather a happy-go-lucky sexual career, he envisaged a prospective sexual encounter as an act of subordination.

Irina chose the
Trois
Sorbets
nappés
à
la
sauce
Geneviève
and Edward a cake, which he felt was bound to have at least a certain mass.

In the longish pause before the sweets arrived, he teased Irina. “You don’t really mean all that, do you? You’re just having me on?”

She huffed gratifyingly. “Haven’t I made enough of a fool of myself already? What else do I have to do to convince you?”

“You’re not really interested in me,” Edward persisted. “I’m just a callow trainee journalist, remember. You could have your pick of Paris’s choicest specimens of Gallic manhood, Irina. I’m just your tenant.”

Irina sat exceedingly straight. “Make fun of me if you like, Edouard,” she said crisply. “But please, don’t insult me; I wouldn’t have anything to do with a Parisian male.” She smiled distinctly nastily. “As for being my tenant, Monsieur Wenwright, let me inform you, you are not my first.”

While Irina enjoyed the pink sauce poured over her icecream,
she pointed out to Edward a woman standing near the cash desk.

“That’s Geneviève, the
patron
’s girlfriend. Isn’t she beautiful?”

Edward saw a tall, aristocratically bony, black-haired woman, striking a lean, aloof pose. He looked back at Irina, whose enjoyment of good fare was now coming through her affectation of airier preferences. She was scooping and swallowing great gobbets with delight. Before he could answer anything, Irina said, “Look at her, so thin and smart and
narrow
; having sauces named after her to make women like me as fat as balloons,”

Her cheeks were flushed with indignation and, maybe quite unconsciously, she drew herself up again, putting into prominence her black and silver bosom. It was the realisation that if he wanted, he could go to bed with a woman whose breasts were streets ahead of any of her predecessors which caused Edward to relent.

“But Irina,” he said, “I don’t think she’s especially beautiful at all.”

The bill, which he rather determinedly paid, was approximately twice what he had anticipated. To make sure Irina noticed how little it mattered to him, he put down a wad of notes instead of his credit card and left a hefty tip. As he followed Irina, now swathed again in her Anna Karenina furs, out of the restaurant, he struck himself as a man whose role-playing was about to go seriously too far.

Irina instructed the taxi driver, whom she hailed again without any problem, to take them to the Cité Etienne Hubert. When he heard her give the address, the back of Edward’s neck prickled. Was this wise? No. Would it land him in more trouble than it was worth? Probably. Was it going to happen? Yes. They didn’t speak much on the way. just to express a preference, to show this was not simply happening to him, Edward reached out in the dark and took hold of Irina’s gloved and strangely unresponsive hand. The taxi turned into the Cité Etienne Hubert and came to a stop unnecessarily abruptly in front of Number Nine. Irina withdrew her hand.

“Well, Edouard,” she said, “it’s been a lovely evening. Thank you so much.”

A little stiffly, but he reckoned, churning it over later, this could well have been because of the taxi driver, she leant across and bestowed on him a cool, chaste kiss. She told the driver to continue to the rue Surcouf and she stepped out into the dark.

The names he used to describe Irina were short, uncomplimentary, and repeated in a chant for the rest of the weekend. The flat in the rue Surcouf seemed smartingly redolent of Irina when he was so summarily returned to it. Everything in it, from the new tablecloth to the armchair in which she had so luxuriantly snuggled, conspired to repeat her rejection, and he realised, lying in her bathtub on Sunday morning, helping himself to her milk and her butter from her fridge, that if that was as far as things were going to go between them, living in the flat would be one of the most humiliating experiences he had known.

He found pretty quickly that the character of Paris was also significantly altered by her trick. As he fumed over it from Monday to Friday of the following week, he became increasingly aware of a previously unrecognised aspect of the capital. It was a women’s city. He supposed that, without explicitly acknowledging this, he had seen it. Women had all along seemed to outnumber men in the street. Now he realised that this was just because they were more dominant, more rapacious than the men. The men were tiddlers dodging cautiously among the shoals of plump, snapping pike. He thought he had never been a misogynist, but now he found himself noticing irritably the overwhelming numerical superiority of hairdressers, dress shops and beauticians over more manly establishments. The smell of perfume which had caught in his throat on his first evening in Paris returned to taunt him. With every passing whiff, he was reminded of Irina, plump, snapping pike
extraordinaire,
who had been prepared to gobble him up for breakfast, but who at the last minute had disdainfully spat out the pieces. Operating within her female bastion, according to skilled submarine ploys, no wonder she was capable of turning on him like that and dropping him with a silver stiletto tail flick.

On Wednesday, on an errand, he had to pass the end of the Cité Etienne Hubert. As his taxi drove by, he cast
a casual but hostile look along the street. Naturally, the pavements were empty. He did wonder, just in passing, whether he would have any dealings with Irina, beyond the payment of his rent, ever again. At the bottom of the Avenue Duquesne, the taxi was stopped by traffic lights. He could not resist turning round to take another look back at the end of the street. He saw something which prodded him into uncomplicated poignant longing and made at least part of him admit that if Irina were to make a come-back, he would not necessarily reject her out of hand. From the rooftop corners of the apartment houses on either side of the street, two stone nipples stood up against the cold winter sky.

He really could not make out what had happened. The major question was, of course, whether the deed was cancelled or only postponed. But the lesser problem of what Irina was playing at, and what exactly she hoped to achieve by it, preoccupied him too. The most likely explanation, he decided, was cold feet, with a dash of sadism. But, he kept wondering, maybe there was something else; some major unidentified obstacle, which he had simply failed to see? With so little to go on, how could he work out a strategy for the unlikely event of Irina’s staging a come-back?

Which was why her telephone call caught him completely unprepared, stammering and embarrassed, when she finally got round to ringing him last thing on Friday night.

“So you let a whole week go by without telephoning me?” she asked aggressively. “Is that the sort of man you are?”

“Hang on a minute,” Edward objected. “I rather got the impression on Saturday …”

“Yes?” demanded Irina.

“Well, look, don’t get me wrong, but I got the distinct impression you wanted to call it a day.”

“Did you?” Irina asked mockingly. “Well, spare me the expressions of the cricket pitch please, Mister Wenwright, and do tell me whatever gave you that impression.”

“Is the phone the best place for this conversation?” asked Edward.

“Well, I don’t see where else we’re going to have it,” Irina answered in an aggrieved voice. “I certainly don’t see why
I should agree to meet you again before you’ve explained yourself.”

“Believe it or not,” Edward said hotly, “I feel rather the same myself.”

He listened to Irina’s stony silence. Into it, he eventually added, “If you remember, you did rather drop me from a great height outside your front door last Saturday night.”

“Ah,” Irina answered icily. “Is that it? How disgusting.”

The silence which followed threatened to break all records. At last, in the depths of it, Edward thought he heard a chuckle.

“What are you doing tomorrow night?” asked Irina.

This time, he deliberately didn’t take her hand in the taxi on the way back. He wasn’t going to give her the least pretext to recoil. Instead she reached over and took hold of his, squeezing it conspiratorially as their taxi driver, one of the garrulous school, held forth on the rampant evils of socialism currently clutching France in its tentacles. He was displeased with the size of Edward’s tip, which Edward made deliberately small as a reproof. When the taxi driver had reversed vindictively fast and noisily the length of the Cité Etienne Hubert, expressing his displeasure with a mighty revving, Edward started to explain his action to Irina, but she appeared to have something else on her mind.