The Travellers and Other Stories (17 page)

Her son the Prince gave Arthur a sharp look and Arthur hesitated.

‘Please, Mr. Pritt. A story.'

So Arthur told the Queen a story, and either because he wasn't an imaginative person, or because the Queen's grief had made him dwell more deeply than ever on his own, or because the time had come when he wanted to tell someone what had happened, he told her a true one, about his wife.

‘It was when we were in India,' he told the Queen, ‘in Calcutta.'

For the first time all day, a flicker of interest seemed to pass, like a gentle wind, across the Queen's melancholy face. She waved the crouching map-maker away with the point of her fan.

‘I left the house as usual one morning,' said Arthur, ‘and walked through the city down to the water where the company offices were. When I'd been there an hour, I discovered I'd left some papers behind and went home to fetch them.'

By now Mrs. Maudesely and her helpers had wheeled the gigantic cake into the middle of the platform; the Prince of Wales was leaning down a little towards his mother as if he might be about to ask her to pay attention, but the Queen's hooded eyes were on the balding alderman at her shoulder and without looking at the Prince she flicked her black glove in his direction, a smart reminder that she was the Queen and she would do what she liked.

Arthur explained how he'd expected, on entering the house, to hear the sound of the piano. It was eleven o'clock and at eleven o'clock his wife's piano teacher arrived and stayed till noon, when Arthur came home for lunch and a nap. But the house was quiet, there was no steady beating of fans, the only sound the movement of a broom across the tiles somewhere towards the back of the house or out in the garden. ‘Alice?' he called but there was no reply, only the silence of the fans and the distant scraping of the broom. He took off his hat and moved on through the house into the large parlour where his wife's piano stood. ‘The lid was open, her music was on the stand. The only thing missing was Alice.'

The Queen nodded. ‘Continue, Mr. Pritt.'

Arthur swallowed, his throat felt tight. His robes were hot and heavy. He paused, as if suddenly aware of the strangeness of his situation, but like Macbeth he seemed to have gone on too far now to retreat.

He'd looked into the morning room, he said, where Alice did her reading and planned her menus and wrote her letters and took her sewing but she wasn't there either.

The Queen seemed to be holding her breath, as if she knew now what was coming. Arthur paused, as he always did when he replayed everything in his own mind, picturing himself in his pale linen suit, a frightened sweating figure who seemed to understand by now that his life was coming to some sort of end.

At their bedroom door, he'd stopped. Beyond it he could hear the soft sounds of his wife's pleasure and when he'd bent down and looked in through the keyhole he'd seen her with her head thrown back, a look on her face he'd never seen before; a tangle of flushed white limbs; Miss Gordon, the piano teacher.

One fat hand had flown to the Queen's throat; her pouchy eyes were wide with wonder, as if Arthur had just pulled back a heavy curtain and revealed to her a unicorn, or a talking mirror, or proof of some other astonishing legend.

‘Good heavens, Mr Pritt,' she whispered.

Her blue eyes were fixed on Arthur's face, and for a moment Arthur wondered if she was going to try to console him or comfort him in some way. He was going to carry on, and tell her how Alice had told him afterwards that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with Miss Gordon—Elizabeth, as she now called her—instead of with him, and that he'd been mourning her loss ever since; he was going to tell the Queen that he no longer cared very much about his future, that he missed Alice every minute of every day, and that even this morning, even though he knew she was thousands of miles away in Calcutta still, he'd looked for her face in the crowd.

But the old Queen didn't seem to be interested in what had happened afterwards; she didn't seem to want to hear Arthur talk about his feelings. She seemed lost in a dream of her own; she was looking around at the crimson-draped platform and the walls of the buildings swathed in their yards and yards of flags and patriotic bunting, at the streamers and the barriers, the row upon row of greenhouse plants in their earthenware pots, at the crowds in their Sunday best, waving their white handkerchiefs, at the Corporation men like Arthur in their embroidered robes, at the people of her own household, at the Secretary of State, at her son the Prince of Wales.

Her mouth drooped and she shook her head.

‘Nobody tells me anything, Mr Pritt,' she murmured softly, and after that it was almost time for her to go, for her train to depart.

At the station Arthur stood with the Town Clerk and the Treasurer and the Mayor and the eleven other aldermen and watched the royal gifts being stowed away: Binns's map, Boucher's illustrated
History
in its purple Morocco binding, the enormous cake. He watched and he waved, and when she was gone he threaded his way through the dispersing crowds along the narrow streets of the town and in through the front door of his own empty house.

THE TRAVELLERS

THE LAST TIME
it happened, I packed my bags and left. I got on a train at Birmingham New Street and then on another and another and another and I didn't get off until I reached Siberia.

I liked Siberia.

I liked the snow, the quiet.

I opened an inn at the edge of a small town, and catered for the passing trade—a good kitchen with hot stew and boiled potatoes, a downstairs room with a fire and high-backed benches where people could warm themselves and eat their dinner. Upstairs there was a dormitory with six plain but sturdy bunks, and for those in search of a little privacy who were prepared to pay me the extra, two more rooms, each with its own carved and painted single bed. I found a local man, Pyotr, to help me with the heavy work, chopping wood for the stove and the fire and lugging it in from the shed, shovelling snow and seeing to people's horses, repairing their sledges, etc.

I prospered; I didn't miss Birmingham, I didn't miss any one from the office, and whenever I found myself thinking about Geoffrey, well, I just busied myself with something that needed doing, like peeling vegetables or polishing the samovar, or shaking out the big floppy mattresses on the beds upstairs.

My new life was calm.

It was uneventful, and even if I wasn't exactly happy I was at least doing okay. Pyotr was proving himself to be hardworking and reliable and I had settled into a routine; I was enjoying the cooking, my Russian was coming along nicely. I'd started learning the balalaika.

And then, one cold winter's night, very late, when I had washed down the tables and wiped the greasy remains of the meat from the wooden board in the kitchen, when everything was quiet—the six guests who'd come earlier were asleep in their bunks in the dormitory upstairs, the young lawyer who was on his way to Vladivostok was tucked up in one of the single beds, an elderly insurance salesman from Irkutsk in the other—I heard the sound of a sledge, drawing softly to a halt outside the front door.

Pyotr swore; he had just finished tying on his hat, ready to go home. ‘It's all right, Pyotr,' I said. ‘You go. I can do the fire.'

But Pyotr didn't move; he was staring at the door. I felt a blast of cold air in my back, snow spiralled into the warmth on the freezing wind, a shower of icy flakes landed on my neck and when I turned there he was, steam rising like smoke from his tall fur hat and his long frozen coat: a huge black-haired man, dark and wild like a Cossack, with a beard and a broken nose and narrow glaring eyes and a thin furious mouth—the meanest, most murderously bad-tempered looking person I had ever seen in my life. In one gloved hand he carried a large bone-handled knife with a curved blade that dangled almost to the floor; in the other—a piece of brown paper crumpled into a twisted cone, like a small flowerless bouquet, or the losing end of a Christmas cracker. He asked for vodka.

Pyotr and I began to scurry about, Pyotr going out to the shed for wood to build up the dying fire and back out again to see to the man's horse. I heated up what I had left of the stew and poured vodka into a brown jug and worried about how I was going to tell the terrifying Cossack that I was full for the night, that I had no beds left. Perhaps I could go up and ask the young lawyer if he wouldn't mind squeezing into the dormitory if I put a mattress on the floor and gave him back his money in the morning?

Perhaps—

But I got no further with sorting out the bed problem, because just then Pyotr came back into the kitchen and I knew at once that he had some news to tell me. He was a close, silent sort of man, Pyotr, someone who, though he swore quite a lot, actively seemed to dislike having to speak. On this occasion however I could see that there was something urgent and unavoidable he felt obliged to communicate.

He stood for a while, stamping his boots on the mat to get rid of the snow and untying the laces of his hat from around his chin so that the furry ear flaps hung loose on either side of his broad head.

‘What is it, Pyotr?' I said. ‘What's the matter?'

He nodded towards the other room, where the Cossack was, and over to the little window near the front door.

‘A woman.'

‘A woman?'

Pyotr nodded. ‘Outside. On his sledge.'

I looked. I craned my neck to see over the high backs of the benches in the other room. It was true. There was a shape on the sledge, I could see it through the misted window, hunched into a ball against the whipping of the snow, motionless as a pile of rags.

Over by the fire the Cossack had finished his stew and, by the look of it, the jug of vodka too. He was staring into the flames, brooding and cross. He had taken off his long coat and I could see the curved knife, hanging now from a leather loop attached to the coat's belt.

‘Is she dead?' I whispered.

Pyotr shrugged.

I tried to get a better view through the window by rising up on my tip-toes. It was a distance of about twenty feet from the threshold of the kitchen, where I was standing with Pyotr, over to the far wall of the front of the inn where the window was—a small, frost-feathered window with eight thick panes of glass just to the left of the solid front door. To our right, another twenty feet or so away, sat the Cossack, on one of the benches by the fire. Very softly, I took a step out of the kitchen into the room. There. I could see her more easily now. Although it was late, the light was good, the moon shone and the snow was bright, and as I looked, as I craned my neck again to see over the lintel of the window, I thought I saw the heap of rags move.

‘Pyotr,' I whispered and nodded towards the window.

This time there was no mistake. The bundle shifted and we saw her face, long and pale like an almond and wrapped tightly round in a dark fringed shawl. Just for a moment, she looked towards the inn; then turned away again and sat like before, motionless and staring straight ahead at some distant point in the snow.

Pyotr was shaking his head and looking uncomfortable.

He hated getting involved in the lives of others and had started tying on his hat again.

‘Don't go, Pyotr,' I said. ‘Please.'

He looked back over at the Cossack, at the knife hanging from his coat. Pyotr shook his head again and took off his hat. I wondered if there was something he wasn't telling me—if he understood these people better than I did and just didn't want to say. You could never quite tell with Pyotr. It was almost impossible to tell what he was thinking at any given moment; what he did or didn't know.

‘Do you think he's kidnapped her?' I whispered.

Pyotr shrugged like before. ‘Possible.'

I pictured the huge angry Cossack grabbing the woman by the hair while she was walking down the street and forcing her onto his sledge then bringing her here to my little way-side inn against her wishes. I wondered if he was some sort of mercenary—if he had stolen her to order perhaps, and planned to take her in the morning to a secret destination where he would be paid for her delivery. I wondered—

Pyotr nudged me with his elbow. I jumped.

The huge man was on his feet again. Behind him on the low table in front of the fire lay the crumpled piece of brown paper he'd been carrying when he'd first come storming in. He had smoothed it out. I wondered what it was. A letter perhaps? Some sort of contract? A set of instructions? Something, at least, that formed a connection of some sort between him and the woman?

He was standing now with his back to the fire. I could see his face. He had pushed his wild black hair back from his forehead and as we watched him through the open kitchen door, he rubbed his cheeks and forehead vigorously with his big hands, as if he were washing his face—the way people do when they are tired and want to revive themselves before beginning some new and necessary task. He let out a big sigh. Then he put on his coat, walked over to the door, and went back out into the snow.

It was falling more thickly now. The woman, in her shawl, had begun to resemble a big white stone. A black dog had come trotting out from the town and was sniffing around at the base of the sledge.

I opened the front door a crack behind the man. The wind had died away and when he spoke we heard him clearly.

‘You will freeze,' he was saying to her in a flat toneless voice. ‘In the morning I will come and you will be nothing but a block of ice. A frozen statue.'

I could see now that she was very beautiful, but also that she was as angry as he was. Both of them had exactly the same expression—sullen, furious, unyielding. She hated him and he hated her back. You could feel it, plain as anything, the poison between them—a bitter, resentful mutual loathing that seemed ready at any moment to turn into something much, much nastier.

The Cossack took a step forward, the dry snow squeaked beneath his boot. ‘You should come in now,' he said.