The Steppes of Paris (25 page)

“Are we going to the Datcha?” Edward asked her. “Shall we take a taxi?”

Once Irina had summoned one, with her usual skill, out of the night, Edward felt reasonably confident that the evening was back on an even keel.

“You know what you need?” he said to her in the back of the taxi. “A couple of stiff vodkas.”

Irina snorted, in itself probably a sign of recovery. “Not that remedy,” she scoffed. “Not for me. Oh, I’ve seen it in practice often enough; one of our traditional Russian specialities. You drink to drown your sorrows but you end up drowning any chance of happiness along with them.”

In spite of which, no sooner were they installed at their rather rickety table in the Datcha, than she started to drink steadily. Edward did not point this out to her, however, since he thought it could only improve the prospects for the evening if Irina did get slightly drunk.

The Datcha was in the rue de l’Eperon, a dingy, not even properly lit lane off the rue Saint André des Arts. Irina had mentioned it to him many times – “And then afterwards Volodya used to take me to dinner at the Datcha”, “Lyova
went to the Datcha and he came face to face with his wife Anna and her horrible barbarian” – and Edward couldn’t think why it had taken them so long to get round to eating there.

It was not a particularly grand restaurant; that was a polite way of putting it. It consisted of one not very large, awkwardly L-shaped dining-room, so that the owner had the option of neglecting his customers in the back part of the L or not hurrying forward immediately to welcome new arrivals at the door. To alert him, a rather loud bell jangled when they came in and almost everyone looked up. After they had stood slightly uncertainly for a moment or two, waiting, and Irina had given a fluttery wave in the direction of one of the tables, the owner bustled forward out of the hidden part of the L and greeted them by flinging his hairy arms aloft and calling, “Irochka! It’s been ages!”

He was built on the same lines as Lyova, Edward noticed with dislike. He was a coarser, burlier version, but he shared the same excessively broad shoulders and mammoth legs, encased, presumably to fit the folksy decor of his restaurant, in immense boots. He looked down at Edward with the same amused query in his eyes.

‘Fuck you too,’ thought Edward.

Irina simpered at the colossus. “I’ve been unbelievably busy,” she said. “But I didn’t forget you, Sasha.” The next sentence was in Russian, after which she added, “This is Edouard.”

Edward and the colossus shook hands and the colossus said, “Listen, I’m afraid the only table I’ve got is this one right near the door. D’you mind that, Irochka?”

Irina shook her head but asked Edward with a pretty display of submissiveness, “Do
you
mind, Edouard?”

Once they were seated, the owner excused himself, tramping off to attend to the rest of the restaurant, and a pretty, visibly harassed waitress brought them two red tasselled but worn menus.

“First of all, vodka and
zakuski
,” Irina instructed her. “Since I know you would like that, Edouard. And then we’ll order in a little while.”

“Za
– what?” asked Edward.

“Za-kus-ki,”
pronounced Irina, the Russian teacher. “Say it after me.”

“I’ll
eat
it after you,” Edward answered guardedly. “What is it anyway?”

Although it had been his idea to come here in the first place, he swiftly regretted it. The Datcha was only too obviously another cell in the cosy network of collusion in which the Russians sustained their imaginary universe and he was as much a sore thumb here as he had been in the church, in the YMCA bookshop, in Lyova’s fiercely alien flat. It was short-sighted of him not to have thought of it. A combination of gastronomic curiosity and that weak wish to placate Irina on the telephone had made him suggest a meal he doubted he was going to enjoy.

The
zakuski,
which the waitress brought immediately on a little platter, together with an alarming amount of vodka, turned out to be assorted dollops of smoked fish, caviar, meat patties and salads. Their purpose, Irina explained, was to form a buttress against the vodka, a purpose which she began amply to illustrate. It annoyed Edward even further that although he, in spite of nearly six months of practice, still couldn’t down his glass of vodka as you were meant to, in one go, Irina stylishly did so. She munched happily on a bit of herring. Edward felt an unreasonable wish to get back at her.

“So this is the famous Datcha then,” he said patronisingly. “I must say, I did think it would be a bit smarter.”

Irina looked around vaguely at the modest restaurant, its walls decorated with varnished logs split lengthways, to create the effect of a log cabin. She shrugged and helped herself to a meat patty.

“I mean, this is one of your favourite old haunts, isn’t it?” he persisted meanly. “It looks a bit tacky to me, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

Irina focused reluctantly on some of the more sentimental touches, the rose-coloured views of Russian scenes, the
matrioshka
dolls turned into the bases of table lamps.

“Yes,” she agreed serenely, “this sort of
pastiche
Russia is ridiculous, isn’t it? But that’s not why we come here, of course. We come for the
ambiance,
for the familiar faces: for Sasha,” she nodded in the direction of the proprietor, “the Solovyovs
over there, say, those people I said hello to when we came in. And this place has pleasant memories attached to it too; I feel at home here.”

She was taking her second glass of vodka more slowly, with small pensive sips, but getting through it just the same. She gestured at the round-cheeked face of the table-lamp doll; “I despise this garbage,” she said calmly. “It’s what Lyova refers to as the debris of the Union of Sentimental and Retrospective Republics.” With just the slightest edge of antagonism in her voice, she concluded, “I thought you liked this sort of thing, though. I thought my old world heritage amused you. Otherwise I’d never have dreamt of bringing
you
in here.”

The emphasis on
you
annoyed him. “Why not?” he asked, with illogical indignation. “You’ve gone on about it often enough. It’s obvious it’s important to you.”

Irina gave him a slow look, which was either steeped in the sorrows of ages or the first blurring of alcohol.

“Everybody knows me here,” she explained. “Whoever I come in here with, the whole world will know about it before the week is out.”

Edward felt slightly sick. Before he could say anything, though, the owner materialised massively beside Irina and protested, “Irochka, nobody is looking after you! What would you like to order?”

As soon as they had chosen, and the owner had solicitously refilled both their glasses, Edward asked hastily, “Who is there here tonight to spread the word, then? D’you think anyone will realise?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Irina said soothingly. “It’s too late now anyway.”

For a short while, they drank sullenly, and neither said anything.

Then, goaded by the distinct impression that he had been rewarded for his good intentions with an underhand trick, Edward complained, “But what made you decide it was OK to come here now, if you knew we’d run the risk of being found out?”

Irina sighed.

Edward was terribly tempted to snap, ‘Stop bloody sighing, can’t you? Just tell me what the hell’s going on.’

Before he could work out a gentler way of saying the same thing – was the vodka getting to him too? – he noticed the earlier desolation had returned to Irina’s face. He was terrified that she might start weeping again in the middle of the restaurant, so he quickly said jokily, “Oi, don’t accidentally over-salt that pickled herring, will you? It’s bad enough as it is.”

Not a giggle in response, not a grin; they were in trouble.

“I mean,” he back-pedalled, “not that I’m not pleased you did bring me here. I’m just puzzled. If you felt it wasn’t a good idea before, what made you change your mind?”

Irina stared at him in what seemed to be amazement.
“Mais
enfin,
Edouard, isn’t it perfectly obvious?”

“Sorry, not to me.”

Irina reached for her refilled glass and started to sip at it just a little too fast for Edward’s liking.

“What does it matter now?” she burst out. “What does it matter? Who cares if we’re found out or not found out when you’re going away so soon anyway?”

Edward felt himself break into a sweat. He was aware that he must have gone extremely red in the face.

“I think it still matters,” he said as mildly as he could. “I mean, your family will be just as upset if they find out now as if they’d found out three months ago, won’t they?”

“My family –” Irina said bitterly.

She stared into a middle distance which seemed to be filled with nothing but barren despair. She opened her mouth to go on but she couldn’t; a sudden choking sob stopped her and she pressed her serviette to her lipsticked mouth with a white-knuckled force which alarmed Edward.

“Hey,” he whispered urgently. “Don’t, Irina, please. Please not in the restaurant.”

With a tremendous, visible effort, Irina restrained herself. Now, she frankly gulped at her vodka.

“What does anything matter?” she asked wildly. “I have wasted far too much of my life taking notice of things I thought mattered and, actually, I found out they don’t matter at all. Only one thing matters to me now, Edouard. Don’t you realise? It’s almost April. Soon the school Easter holidays will be starting. And after the holidays it will be the summer term. And in the summer you’re going away.”

Only a complete cretin would not have been moved by a statement of such devotion from a woman as striking as Irina looked at that moment. She had gone quite white, which made the dark rings show up beneath her eyes, and together with her plum purple lipstick, her dark eyes formed three deep pits in a chalky theatrical mask.

Edward was so confounded by guilt, he was temporarily incapable of offering any helpful platitudes in response.

The waitress brought their main courses at this opportune moment and the two large plates of steaming meat confronted them with a crude reminder of the obvious.

Although, uncharacteristically, the last thing Edward felt like was eating, he was relieved at first to see Irina take her knife and fork and begin on her Chicken Kiev. Only after a moment or two he noticed there was something seriously amiss in the way Irina was eating; apparently quite oblivious to the contents of her plate, she was mechanically slicing, forking up and chewing her dinner in rote, automatic despair. She was eating like Varvara Stepanovna.

He had to stop her. At the risk of triggering the scene to end all scenes, he reached across the table and took her hand.

“I know it’s true I’m probably leaving in the summer,” he said desperately. “But I want you to know you’ve been the best thing that’s happened to me in Paris.” Recklessly, he added, “I won’t forget you, you know.”

Irina shook off his hand fiercely enough for some drops of garlic butter to splash his cuff.

“Thank you, Edouard,” she said with icy hostility. “Perhaps I might have liked to be a little more than a thing which happened to you.”

Although his major reaction to that meal was to renew his policy of avoidance, he had to give Irina credit for a fine performance. For most of the meal she did control her tears, but she had grown steadily more drunkenly maudlin on the Georgian wine which succeeded the vodka, and he couldn’t help being grudgingly impressed by the authentic picture of a tragic heroine which she presented.

Even as she gestured censoriously at the shelves of assorted vodka bottles rising behind the till, she was starting to slur her words.

“Ah yes, we’re Russian, aren’t we? We have to have – to have vodka, don’t we? We can’t have a Russian restaurant without the where-where-thall to drink ourselves into oblivion.”

Edward was shocked but slightly titillated; he had never seen a woman he knew get that drunk before.

And when it was time to go, when Irina and Sasha had chirruped away at each other in Russian for long enough for Sasha to clap one spade-like hand on Irina’s shoulder, and confide to Edward in French, “Look after this lady. She is one among millions,” he couldn’t help but be turned on by the sophisticated figure she looked leaving the restaurant, walking very upright, a lady from Toulouse-Lautrec, he thought, balancing on the edge of an abyss of alcohol and despair.

It was true alcohol was supposed to affect performance but the effect it had that night Edward had never encountered before. Irina had obviously dismissed all idea of caution anymore. She spoke to him at the top of her voice in the hall of their flat and when a light came on behind the door of Babushka’s bedroom, she called a greeting nonchalantly in Russian and turned to give Edward a juicy wink.

In bed, it was another matter, though. Because of the fumbling uncertainty caused by the alcohol, they both had to concentrate rather hard on what they wanted to do, and they fell silent as they tried to focus on the ways and means. A silent Irina in this situation was a new and not entirely welcome experience. Without the encouragement of her volcanic gasps and moans, Edward felt slightly at a loss, working away in silence in the dark, and since everything took rather longer than usual because of the alcohol, he even had the bizarre impression for a while that Irina was no longer there. He would turn out, when this dream was over, to have been making love to a woman whom he had only imagined. Beneath him, there was really no one at all.

This bizarre sensation caused him to lose his stride and Irina’s hands emerged from the dark to reassure him that she was there with him after all. His head spinning with the motion and the vodka, he embarked once more. It seemed to him in the end that he and Irina had managed to break loose after all, that they were rocking across Europe, the immense international night spinning around them, rocking
across a nocturnal geography of the Arc de Triomphe and the Sacré-Coeur, of Central European fairy-tale wooden houses, and hallucinatory onion domes.

He did in the end show her to Roland. His reasoning was twofold: she looked so low, lying all white and wan and wretched when he left her early on Friday morning. He felt genuinely sorry for her. It seemed only fair, in the few months remaining, not to abandon her entirely. In Roland’s presence, it would be time spent quite innocuously too; there was no risk of Irina exerting her nefarious influence on him and his capitulating to anything more than the absolute minimum. His other motive was not altruistic at all; he wanted to show her off to Roland. For, thinking it over during Saturday, while he waited for Roland to arrive, he was confident old Roland would be pretty impressed by Irina, if only because she was so startlingly different from anyone who had preceded her.