The Steppes of Paris (9 page)

“Oh gosh, I’m not sure,” said Edward.

“You want to keep your wits about you?” Mademoiselle Iskarov asked mischievously. “Why bother?”

Edward wasn’t sure whether the slight unsteadiness from the vodka downed too fast was responsible; in a remote but accessible region of his brain a figure from a strip cartoon, with inky hair standing on end, leapt to his feet crying, “Aaargh!” and fled.

“Well, are we waiting for other people?” he asked abruptly.

Mademoiselle Iskarov’s face collapsed into an expression of immeasurable offence. “I beg your pardon?”

“Are you expecting other people for dinner?” Edward repeated brutally. “I mean, if we’re waiting, yes, sure, I’ll have some more. But otherwise I think, on the whole, maybe I’d rather not.”

In the icy silence, Mademoiselle Iskarov drew herself upright. “What am I supposed to understand by that?”

“Only what I said,” Edward persisted uncomfortably. “This vodka’s pretty strong stuff. I don’t think I really ought to have another glass without a good reason.”

“I see,” Mademoiselle Iskarov commented haughtily. “And an enjoyable dinner with just the two of us presumably isn’t a good enough reason?”

To his embarrassment, Edward felt himself about to start giggling; her dignity was so ludicrously overdone. “Oh, come off it,” he pleaded. “You know I didn’t mean it like that.”

Mademoiselle Iskarov considered him for a moment. She was standing with the bottle at the ready. In Edward’s strip cartoon, which continued to flicker intermittently at the back
of his brain, she might at any moment swoop as a female fury brandishing a rolling-pin. But, against all the odds, she grinned.

“Are you famished?” she asked him. “I’ll go and get our first course ready.”

In the living-room doorway, she stopped and turned back to him. She pulled a teasingly reproachful face, culminating in a quick display of the tip of her pointed pink tongue.

The meal was superb. Whatever Edward might hold against Mademoiselle Iskarov on grounds of excessive touchiness, her culinary skills were flawless. They began with a deep red, peppery soup on which a clod of cream floated unashamedly. In Edward’s experience, women who were lavish cooks were usually not much to look at. In England, certainly, the best-looking girls weren’t interested in eating much more than salads. Mademoiselle Iskarov was the first woman he had come across whom you wouldn’t mind walking down the street with, who also evidently enjoyed a good spread. It was true there was just a little too much of Mademoiselle Iskarov, but she carried her surplus with undeniable style. In fact, without it, the pink dress would probably not have been nearly as eye-catching.

She had reappeared in the doorway after a good five minutes, during which Edward had wandered blurrily about the living-room, looking at the family mementoes. He had also, unwisely, taken an extra nip of the vodka after all, to stoke his courage. But when Mademoiselle Iskarov came back, her indignation seemed to have subsided. She gave a little mock bow in the doorway and said,
“Le
dîner
est
servi,
Monsieur.”

She led Edward into a small, very full dining-room: a large dark dining-table filled most of the room and into what was left there were squeezed a quantity of matching straight-backed dining-chairs and a sizeable serving trolley. It must have been the noise of the trolley which had made Edward giggle nervously a few minutes earlier. He had heard the steady horror-film creaking and imagined another even older and frailer relative being wheeled out of the way.

The preparations which Mademoiselle Iskarov had revealed already ought to have prepared him for the sight of the dinner-table. But he was still so taken aback by the silver candlesticks and the white cones of starched napkins that,
in combination with the talents revealed by the soup, he became too overwhelmed by the dimensions of the dinner to carry on a conversation. Mademoiselle Iskarov herself seemed, uncharacteristically, to have become rather inhibited. They drank their soup almost in silence. It was only when Edward offered to help clear the plates and Mademoiselle Iskarov protested, “No, no, you’re my guest; you just sit looking elegant and useless like an English lord,” and then added, “Listen, shall we drop this silly Madame-Monsieur business? My name is Irina. May I call you Edouard?” that, on the surface at least, things relaxed a little.

The main course was an incredibly complicated combination of roast meat wrapped around minced meat and rice and mushrooms and capers. Together with the accompanying heavy sauce and volume of vegetables, it created quite a challenge. Mademoiselle Iskarov, he knew it would be some time before he could think of her as Irina, kept his glass topped up from a bottle of excellent red wine which had been breathing on the trolley, and that helped. But it was as much as anything else to give himself a respite that he worked considerably harder at keeping up the conversation.

“Do you cook on this scale quite often?” he asked her. “Or am I the lucky one?”

Mademoiselle Iskarov went through a little rigmarole of fluttering her eyelashes at him. “I don’t entertain a great deal,” she said. “It’s difficult, you see, with Babushka. When Mama was alive, we used to have parties here quite often. But since –” she shrugged.

“Well, anyway, it’s wonderful,” Edward said hurriedly.

To his embarrassment, Mademoiselle Iskarov exclaimed, “Ach, you’re sweet.” She reached across the table as if she were about to pat him gratefully on the hand but at the last moment her hand halted a few inches above his and gave a symbolic pat to the air.

“Tell me something,” she asked. “Would you say you were a typical Englishman – of your generation?”

Edward gave her an amused smile. “Why d’you ask?”

“Well, I’ve never really known any Englishmen very well, apart from once, one very old one, and I just wondered. I mean, outwardly you seem, forgive me, very typically English
and I just wondered if what I’m going to discover within will also be traditionally English?”

“I see,” Edward said jokingly, although he was actually a little disconcerted to be appraised so matter-of-factly as a specimen of English manhood. “You’ve really only invited me here for research purposes, is that it?”

Mademoiselle Iskarov guffawed, as though he had said something genuinely funny. “Yes,” she agreed. “Strictly for research purposes.”

Edward chose not to pursue what it might be about her answer which made him feel obscurely uncomfortable. Muzzily, he considered the question of whether or not he was a typical Englishman of his generation. He came to the sobering conclusion that he probably was; even his longing for distant horizons followed a well-trodden tradition. He felt, uneasily, that Mademoiselle Iskarov was beginning to gain the upper hand; nobody could possibly call her a typical young Frenchwoman.

Over the cheese, he asked her some more about her family. It turned out he had already heard of almost all of them: her mother, her grandmother, her Great-Aunt Elena, Dyadya Volodya. There was no one else to speak of; they were, as Mademoiselle Iskarov put it, becoming extinct. They had been a big family once, a
Forsyte
Saga
she said, but somehow in the upheavals of history a lot of them seemed to have got lost. Mademoiselle Iskarov was the only member of her generation.

Edward, afflicted with what he had always considered a particularly second-rate collection of siblings and cousins, considered her situation with a mixture of envy and zoological fascination. She really was a rarity; the last surviving specimen of a vanishing breed. It gave her, he concluded, a mournful but not necessarily off-putting aura.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” asked Mademoiselle Iskarov.

Edward smiled self-consciously. “Sorry. I was just trying to imagine what it must be like to be in your position; you know, the last one left.”

“You were looking at me,” Mademoiselle Iskarov reproached him, “as though I were some unusual but not biting furry
animal stuffed in a museum.” She shuddered distastefully.

Edward laughed. “I’m sorry. I said I’m sorry. But you must see it’s rather fascinating for someone like me,” he added ingratiatingly, “coming from a typical English background.”

“Oh sure,” Mademoiselle Iskarov agreed bitterly. “It’s fascinating.” She propped her chin on one hand and contemplated her own predicament with what looked like gloomy pride.

Edward couldn’t help being impressed, though, by how swiftly she seemed to shake off her bad moods. A moment later, she jumped up, saying briskly, “Time for dessert,” whereupon Edward inadvertently groaned.

“I’m so full,” he explained. “Couldn’t we wait a bit?”

Mademoiselle Iskarov beamed with contented pride. “You mean my aim is achieved; I have overpowered you with my
cuisine
?”

Edward grinned. “You certainly have.”

Mademoiselle Iskarov rubbed her hands naughtily. “Now I have you in my clutches. I shall put you into a trance with some very special liqueur and you won’t even be fit to walk home. Shall we forget the dessert?”

Edward had managed to keep at bay for most of the meal the possibility that there might be a strand of seriousness behind Mademoiselle Iskarov’s parody of a Parisian seductress. The later it got, the more real the risk became.

He said firmly, “I certainly wouldn’t mind some coffee.”

He asked the way to the toilet while Mademoiselle Iskarov went to the kitchen to make the coffee. As he emerged from the bathroom, he saw outlined in the light coming from her room the blurry, round shape of the grandmother, whom he had assumed to be long tucked up in bed. He had to walk past her to get back to the living-room. She was obviously unsteady on her feet for she was holding onto the door jamb with both hands and it was impossible to tell whether the vivid concern in her eyes was caused by the sight of Edward still there so late in the apartment or by her own precariousness. He gave her a cheery “Hello” as he walked past and even though he knew it was unreasonable, he couldn’t help feeling rebuffed by her staring silence. He didn’t say anything to Mademoiselle Iskarov about having seen the grandmother; he reckoned it must be trying
enough having to live with your crazed grandmother at the age of thirty-six without being reminded of her presence at inopportune moments.

He couldn’t be sure but he thought Mademoiselle Iskarov had topped up her perfume while she was preparing the coffee. He caught a great gust of it as she bent to give him his gilt-edged cup and to offer him sugar and cream. Actually, it was not unpleasant; he just wasn’t used to such decibels of femininity.

He sat deliberately upright as he drank the coffee; opposite him, Mademoiselle Iskarov reclined in her armchair, her legs lengthily crossed. Against his better judgement, Edward had also accepted a glass of the special liqueur. He told himself every few sips it would be the only one.

Mademoiselle Iskarov’s matter-of-fact conclusion caught him unawares. “Well, I’m very glad I changed my mind and didn’t let Volodya’s flat to that Norwegian woman.”

“Sorry?” said Edward.

Mademoiselle Iskarov smiled smugly. “Yes, you don’t know, do you? You very nearly didn’t get Volodya’s flat. A couple of days before you came to look at it, we had somebody else interested, a Norwegian girl, and she seemed like a good tenant. We were going to let it to her. In fact, I’d completely forgotten you were coming to see it. We were just waiting for her bank reference. Only I preferred the look of you.”

Edward’s embarrassment was matched by his irritation; he didn’t at all like the thought that he had been an unwitting pawn in Mademoiselle Iskarov’s machinations.

“Well, I I only hope you won’t be disappointed in your judgement,” he said brusquely.

“Oh,” Mademoiselle Iskarov replied archly, “I doubt it.”

As soon as he had finished his coffee, Edward announced, almost in a rush, “Well, thank you very much. It’s been a lovely evening. I really must go.”

To his relief, and slight surprise also, Mademoiselle Iskarov didn’t try to detain him. She accompanied him to the hall cupboard to retrieve his coat and to the front door.

At the door, they both stopped uncertainly.

“Well, thank you very much,” Edward repeated. “I did enjoy this evening.”

“So did I,” said Mademoiselle Iskarov. She had one hand on the lock but she didn’t unlock it. She was waiting for something.

“It was very kind of you to go to so much trouble,” Edward ventured.

Mademoiselle Iskarov smiled tartly; he was heading in the wrong direction.

“And it was nice to meet your grandmother.”

Her smile became perceptibly sourer. Something in her attitude spelt it out; face upturned, she was waiting for him to kiss her good night. Promptly, almost in self-defence, his hand shot up to shake hers instead. Her smile vanished. As she extended one hand to meet his ungracious gesture, her other was already opening the front door. Before Edward could think up some propitiating goodbye line, which might make up for his churlishness, he found himself, by the sheer force of her displeasure, being propelled out into the liberating dark.

In a pulsing, Latin American night club, Edward found himself incongruously dressed in heavy winter clothes. It was stiflingly hot and he felt sweaty and even a little sick. Somewhere, in the explorative excitement of arriving in a new country, he had eaten a pretty dicey dinner. He thought he would be OK, if only no one asked him to stand up. But his outlandish clothes had begun to attract attention; he was dressed, to his profound embarrassment, in a pair of enormously baggy cords and a brightly lozenge-patterned Shetland pullover he hadn’t worn since he was at least fifteen. The people around him, all of whom were ultra-developed and deeply tanned and dressed in very little, started to point him out to one another, openly giving him incredulous looks and giggling. Obviously, the thing to do was to find the toilets and take off as many as possible of his embarrassing layers. Only he couldn’t get up. He tried to once, tentatively, but his head spun round or the room spun round, one or the other, and all the ultra-developed dancing couples flew up into impossible horizontal and upside-down positions like a flamboyant surrealist painting. He clamped himself to the seat of his chair with sweaty hands. The horizontal and upside-down smiles had been truly revolting. His main concern became to avoid a repetition. A woman who, even upright, had contrived to keep
her perpendicular smile, started to manoeuvre closer to him. She was dancing, nominally, with a short, dapper man but every time they turned in the right direction, her mascaraed eyes signalled vigorously to Edward over her partner’s low shoulder. Edward looked coldly – except how could he do anything coldly? – in another direction. Only he couldn’t have been looking hard enough because he could still see her. She was herself not tall but her body had compensated by thrusting out tremendously in various directions; she had large active breasts which were carrying on a command performance under her bright dress, and an energetic bottom of substantial proportions. Putting all this apparatus into play, she was closing in on Edward. He sweated even more. Inside his head now, the samba music was pounding relentlessly. The woman broke away from her partner and made for Edward, raising her dancing arms to reveal twin copses of dark, matted, underarm hair. It was an unmitigated relief to wake.

His head was still pounding and he had an overwhelmingly urgent thirst. As he stumbled to the bathroom, unable to find any of the light switches along the way, he realised that being sick was actually a possibility. He bent over the wash-basin, gulping water from the tap, and then stood there for a time, unsteadily, waiting for the possibility to recede. As he returned to bed, it filtered through to him dimly that in the morning he was going to have an all-time hangover.

He did, and as he lay in bed, wishing he could disown his body, memories of the evening before contributed to his overall queasiness. He thought he had total recall of the dinner but it seemed so improbable that he wondered if he didn’t still have to disentangle it from the nightmares of the intervening night. Mademoiselle Iskarov was after him; it seemed so extraordinarily unlikely. It filled him with a new and sweaty panic. He stayed in bed for most of the morning, only going once, carefully, to the kitchen to make a pot of tea. For any number of reasons, bed seemed an eminently safe place to be. As he lay there, weakly monitoring the state of his symptoms – reeling head, dry mouth, uncertain stomach – he replayed the evening anxiously again and again, hoping he would discover that he had got it wrong; that this wild idea was only the product of alcoholic paranoia. But it wasn’t, and
as, around midday, he timidly got up and restored himself a little further with a shower, he realised that he had to devise a strategy to deal with it.

The idea of lunch was repugnant but he thought a walk might do him good so he set out into an exceedingly wintry afternoon to breathe in a lot of fresh air and to walk off, if possible, some of his impotent exasperation.

He walked up to the Quai d’Orsay and followed the gloomy river round to the Quai Anatole France. The sky was bulging with low, deep-grey clouds and, across the river, the trees of the Tuileries looked, he thought, singularly stark and claw-like. Taking a perverse pleasure in his bad temper, he crossed the river by the Pont Solférino to walk under the depressing trees. One thing was clear, of course; he was not going to co-operate. Whether or not Mademoiselle Iskarov made a habit of going for men ten years her junior, he had certainly at no time had a taste for the older woman. In fact, far from thinking a taste for older women was a sign of sexual sophistication, as a number of his friends did, Edward had always considered it distinctly dubious. As far as he was concerned, older women meant your mother and he knew he was not that way inclined at all. He would have to adopt a policy of total avoidance, which naturally would not be easy. There were bound to be sulks and probably scenes along the way but he didn’t see what other alternative he had. It was, of course, highly unfortunate that Mademoiselle Iskarov should be his landlady; they were obliged to have a certain number of unavoidable dealings. And he must take care not to alienate her to such an extent that she started to take sharp, landlady’s reprisals. It seemed just too much bother to move again, after all that house-hunting, but he did briefly consider it. While he was considering it, and the welcome weight of arguments was stacking up against it – the bother, the awkwardness of explaining to Henry and Mai why it was he had decided to move again – a grey figure approached him out of the empty park and said something which he missed.

“Pardon?”
he asked automatically.

The figure, a deeply sad-faced man in a raincoat and a floppy brown hat, seemed to be trying to interest him in a small brown packet.

“Have a look,” he was saying. “It’ll cheer you up.
Ça
va
vous
remonter
le
moral
.”

“I don’t need cheering up,” Edward said huffily. He walked a little faster.

To his distaste, the man laid a hand on his sleeve. “No, look,” he said urgently. “They’re not the usual junk. Looking won’t cost you anything.” From the packet, he pulled a black and white postcard on which an unspeakably fat middle-aged man was doing unspeakable things to a small blond boy.

Edward pushed the man’s arm away. “Fuck off!” he bellowed, so loudly that the man took fright and scuttled away between the bare trees. Edward quickened his pace towards the sanctuary of the tourist buses parked around the Louvre. For several hundred yards, he detested Paris.

On his way back, reinvigorated by the freezing afternoon and by his indignation, he stopped in a café at Saint Germain for a coffee and an experimental omelette. His insides were ready for it. As he sat over a second coffee, flipping at speed through the pages of the boring Saturday papers, he put a lot of his panic down to the hangover. Now he was fully restored, he wondered a little how he had managed to get so worked up about it. Pursuit by Mademoiselle Iskarov wasn’t such a nightmarish prospect. In some murky corner of his brain, he was even passingly flattered that he was capable of arousing the desire of a worldly-wise Parisienne of thirty-six years of age. But, above all, he felt nonchalantly confident that he could cope. What had seemed earlier that day like the start of an appalling persecution now seemed more of a joke.

He passed a cinema where they were showing a film he hadn’t yet seen and, on the spur of the moment, he decided to go in and see it since there was a programme starting in fifteen minutes. As the auditorium lights went down on the icecream advertisements and the voice of the Duponts’ macaw was heard, he decided what his first move would be; he must make sure he was as busy as humanly possible, fix up lots of social engagements, so that when Mademoiselle Iskarov next rang, he would be either busy or, even better, out. Although the seats on either side of him were empty, he squirmed round at the last minute just to check there was no one at all dodgy in the row behind him.

He had not expected her, frankly, to make her next move so soon. She must, he thought grinning, when he heard her voice on the phone, be desperate. She telephoned him on the Monday night straight after the dinner and she called him “Edouard”. He had had no chance at all to fix up any social engagements, even if he had any means of doing so.

“Oh, hello, Mademoiselle Iskarov,” he replied warily.

“I thought I told you to call me Irina,” she said petulantly. “Are you always this proper?”

She had a great knack of casting Edward in roles he wanted to shed.

“Wait and see,” he said provocatively, knowing, of course, even as he said it, that it was just the kind of repartee he should refrain from if he didn’t want to encourage her.

She gurgled with laughter. “I was ringing to ask if you liked music?”

Edward hesitated; obviously a loaded question yet hardly one he could answer with a blanket “no”. “Any particular kind of music?” he asked, trying to maintain the same level of jokey detachment.

“Russian music,” said Irina, and there was something heartfelt in the way she said it, an endorsement, an emotional underlining, which made Edward answer quite spontaneously, “Well, yes, what I’ve heard.”

“Would you like to hear some more?” Irina asked enticingly, as though she were offering him to remove layers one by one.

“Who, how, what, when, where?” asked Edward.

Irina giggled. “Who: a Russian choir, how: beautifully, what: oh my God, I couldn’t tell you the names of composers of that kind of churchy music, when: Thursday night, where: the Russian cathedral, St Alexander Nevsky. And who with: me and my Great-Aunt Elena.”

“Gosh,” said Edward. It certainly didn’t sound like a second seduction bid. He wondered whether Irina had got over his rebuff at the front door and decided to pursue a purely Platonic friendship, or whether she was just biding her time. Certainly, not even Irina, with her ever-present panoply of eccentric elderly relatives, could conceivably invite him to come and sit in a church alongside her and her great-aunt if she had
any ulterior motives. “It sounds very interesting,” he said guardedly.

“But you’re not free on Thursday night,” Irina said unexpectedly bitterly. “
Enfin
, it was just an idea.”

“Hang on a minute,” Edward protested. “I
am
free on Thursday night. I would like to come actually, if you don’t mind.”

“You would?” Irina exclaimed. “Well, then, I don’t understand you at all. You seemed utterly unenthusiastic about continuing our acquaintance when we parted on Friday but now you agree to come and sit in a smelly church with a load of old fogies and listen to depressing religious music.”

Her trill of laughter broke Edward’s throttled silence. “Don’t worry, Edouard,” she said. “I’m only teasing you; I’m very pleased you want to come.”

She embarked on directions and Metro stations and street names. They arranged to meet on Thursday at eight o’clock at the ticket windows of Metro Courcelles. The concert didn’t start until nine but they would have to collect Great-Aunt Elena first from her apartment on the Boulevard de Courcelles and she was a slow walker.

Edward recovered from the telephone call over a large gin. He didn’t see quite how Irina had done it but she had led him cleverly into saying and doing at every turn the exact opposite of what he had intended. As for her devastating frankness, he felt it was more than anyone could be expected to put up with in the long run.

For the next three days, he contemplated what he had let himself in for. At work, the main focus of interest was a visiting freelancer just back from an assignment covering the refugee story in Vietnam and Kampuchea. He was using their office as a base from which to extract follow-up information from the respective embassies. Habitually someone who worked on the move, he was indifferent to the territorial boundaries of office life and roamed in and out of the rooms, regardless of their occupants. Marie-Yvette and Aurore, and most especially old Monsieur Marchais, found him rather a hindrance but Edward welcomed his intrusions. His name was Geoff Burr and he too seemed to enjoy impressing young Teddy, as he rather off-puttingly called him, with his anecdotes from the great
outdoors. Eventually, he so liked talking and Edward listening, that one early evening they went out drinking together.

It didn’t take long before Geoff’s anecdotes had roused Edward to a state of acute dissatisfaction. “God, if only you knew,” he ventured, “how incredibly pissed off I was about getting sent to Paris.”

Geoff looked at him from a huge distance comprised of genuinely different lifestyles and alcohol. “Ah, it’s not that bad, is it?” he said.

Edward spluttered. “It probably isn’t as a place to come back to after what you’ve just been telling me about. But imagine a year here. Or two.”

Geoff took an enormous swig at his
vin
rouge.
“Your time’ll come,” he said uncertainly.

To Edward’s concern, there seemed to be something in his uncertainty to do with Edward’s suitability for that life. To prove himself, there being no other way in a Parisian bar, Edward drank enormously and as the evening progressed, he was more and more affected by an upsetting vision of himself as a dreary, desk-bound hack, eagerly inhaling Geoff’s whiff of the great outdoors.

Later, they went in search of a restaurant Geoff remembered where, he said, you could eat the best
soupe
à
l’oignon
in the world. As they wandered unsuccessfully through the redeveloped Halles, it seemed to Edward that the distinction between the inside of bars and the street had disappeared; he was just as much indoors in these pedestrian precincts as at any of the numerous marble table-tops they had visited in the course of the evening. He tipped his head back to glance at the purplish-orange night sky which he now abruptly perceived as a ceiling.

“Hang on a sec,” he heard Geoff’s voice from an unexpected angle. “Are you feeling OK, Teddy, my boy?”

They never found Geoff’s restaurant but ended up instead in a rather seedy establishment where Geoff claimed to recognise a waitress. With the food, Edward’s emotions settled somewhat and his jealousy of Geoff now, unbearably, planning a trip to West Africa, subsided to a pressing impatience to follow suit.