Winter Garden (11 page)

Ashburner dropped the subject. His own sons, both over twenty-one and expensively educated, couldn’t be said to be interested in anything, certainly not in anything as advanced as computers.

To facilitate the burgeoning of new conversations, everybody swopped places in the middle of the meal – everyone except Bernard, who wouldn’t budge on account of his leg, and Mr Karlovitch who, blatantly cheating, jumped three spaces in order to sit beside Enid. The man given to whistling now sat at the right hand side of Olga Fiodorovna and opposite Ashburner. The interpreter said little; often she consulted her wristwatch and frowned.

Someone asked Ashburner if he was enjoying his visit. Was the Soviet Union all he had expected? Had it proved to be an eye-opener? Ashburner admitted that so far he had had very little sleep. ‘But,’ he added, ‘speaking for myself, I am enjoying it enormously.’ He was telling no more than the truth. His suitcase had been located and the mystery of Nina’s constant disappearances temporarily solved. He had stopped swimming against the tide. If the airport authorities had been in touch with his wife, then all was up with him. There was no point in rushing home to be assassinated. If they hadn’t, he might as well stay. It would require a mountain of paper and a special dispensation from the Kremlin to be sent back early to England; he had reached the point of no return. He couldn’t help noticing that Mr Karlovitch had his arm about Enid’s waist. She was on about the Polar Trek North. Ashburner wouldn’t have thought her the loose type, or Karlovitch for that matter, though these days that sort of thing was rife in every camp.

‘Captain Scott in his tent’, Enid was saying, ‘was far more concerned with pleasing his wife than conquering the Pole.’

Ashburner found this incredible. He hadn’t know that Mrs Scott had gone on the expedition. When he thought of how his own wife complained of draughts in the sitting room, he felt ashamed for her. Nina, as far as he could judge, wasn’t namby-pamby about home comforts. She had once told him she had sat up for three nights on a train to Istanbul. She wasn’t the sort to witness a street accident and faint. When she had been knocked from her bicycle as a child, she swore she hadn’t cried. Boris Shabelsky was wrong in thinking that the brutal account of sudden death in Petrov’s studio had made her sick. When I telephone her tonight, he thought, I shan’t hide my true feelings. It will need courage, but there is a way of getting through to her. He would, he told himself, have liked to know more about the country he was in, the politics, the man at the top, but he already understood that this was impossible. The man at the top, rumoured in the Western press to be dying, was merely a figurehead. One could sing for ever
Come out, come out, wherever you are
, and no one would answer. It was an idea that governed, not a person. ‘Did you know?’ he asked Olga Fiodorovna, ‘that when Colonel Fawcett went into the jungles of Bolivia, a particularly revolting form of river parasite abounded? It burrowed into the body and laid its eggs under the skin.’

Olga Fiodorovna raised her eyebrows; her companion whistled.

‘You’ve got it in one,’ shouted Ashburner. ‘Only way to catch sight of the buggers. A little whistle, out pops the grub, and Bob’s your uncle.’

At that instant the man dressed as a stockbroker stood up. The voices died away. Bernard, swearing atrociously, was the last to become silent.

‘I would like,’ the stockbroker said, ‘for us to remember our absent guest. We have each of us known her. And to know her, in the words of your English poet, is to love her. Gentlemen and ladies, let us drink to the rapid recovery of our dear friend, Mrs St Clair.’

The company struggled to its feet, some swaying, some holding on to one another for support. ‘Mrs St Clair,’ they chorused.

‘What does it mean?’ asked Ashburner of Enid. ‘How do they know her?’

‘Hush,’ said Enid, for the stockbroker was now taking a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolding it. ‘I will read this in Russian,’ he said. ‘Our interpreter will translate to you its original flavour.’ He commenced to recite what appeared to be a poem.

Ashburner hadn’t cared for the wording of the toast. It had been altogether too familiar. He wanted to make some protest, like sitting down, but he wasn’t sure if he was in the right and even if he had been he wasn’t brave enough to show active displeasure. Inwardly he growled like a tiger.

When the stockbroker had finished declaiming, there was laughter and applause.

‘I can’t stand poetry,’ grumbled Bernard. ‘It’s usually bloody rubbish.’

‘This is a work,’ announced Olga Fiodorovna, studying the scrap of exercise paper handed to her, ‘dedicated to Mrs St Clair. It begins,
Nina, Nina, your window is always open
. Then there is a pause. It goes on,
Oft have I waited in the hours that are small, waited for the light that will shine through the trees. Drawn through the darkness to that port of call in Holland Park—
’

‘My God,’ exclaimed Ashburner. ‘She has a studio there.’

‘
I have not been disappointed
,’ continued Olga Fiodorovna. ‘
I have not been let down. The heart’s warmth, like a candle flame, is not easily extinguished. For Nina, Nina, your window is always open
.’

‘See what I mean?’ said Bernard. ‘Candle flames go out all the bloody time.’

There were several more verses, but Ashburner didn’t hear them. There was no doubt in his mind that the stanzas so merrily received were totally suspect. What was being read aloud bore more relation to a rendering of Eskimo Nell than to an ode to a visiting dignitary. If I telephone her later, he thought, I will guard my true feelings. I mustn’t make an ass of myself.

When the luncheon was over, Enid, who earlier had expressed a wish to look more closely at a painting of Lenin inciting some shipyard workers to rebellion, was seen climbing the Gothic staircase to the gallery, supported by Mr Karlovitch. Olga Fiodorovna followed discreetly.

Ashburner and Bernard, without warning, were driven off in the official car to a palace to take tea with a metal worker. The glass dome in the banqueting hall that now served as a workshop had cracked under the weight of successive winter snows and the mouldings above the doors were stained with damp. Within minutes of arrival Bernard fell deeply asleep while studying a portfolio of preliminary drawings. Ashburner was obliged to enthuse, single-handed, over a series of raised reliefs of naked women with rippling hair. Later he was subjected to a demonstration of the artist’s skill. The metal worker, unable to speak English, performed his task in silence save for the muted blows of his hammer. Perched on a rickety stool Ashburner gazed intently at the surface of the work bench shimmering under a layer of zinc and copper filings, and reflected on the curious fate of the previous occupant of the studio beside the frozen lake. Unknown assailants had entered the premises in daylight and surprising the artist, a specialist in humorous cartoons, at his desk had clubbed him to death. Nothing had been stolen. Boris Shabelsky had vehemently denied the existence of hooliganism in the Soviet Union. It had been a
crime passionnel
. Ashburner was uncertain why he himself should feel so shocked by an incident that had become commonplace in England. He was after all used to eating his breakfast, without loss of appetite, to the accompaniment of that breezy voice on the radio listing arson and mugging and rape. He thought that perhaps his feeling of unease was due in part to Bernard’s dissertation on their first night in Moscow when, in response to a facetious remark of Enid’s regarding the poor quality of the service in the restaurant, he had referred to Mother Russia as a ‘concept above and beyond their experience’. They were visiting the first country to embrace Communism; sympathy or disagreement with the political theory was unimportant. The myth, right or wrong, had become reality. According to Bernard it was as if they were visiting a country in which the teachings of Jesus had been put into practice. He insisted he was the last person to have any truck with either Bolshevism or Christianity, but there was no denying the fact of the ‘reality’. At which point Ashburner had lost track of the argument – in any case he was too busy wondering whether or not Nina would allow him to her room – but it had something to do with bread queues and Enid having been rung up by the Press last year and asked how many pairs of knickers she owned, simply because the Tate Gallery had purchased one of her paintings. The discussion had continued at the home of Boris’s friend Tatiana, but there again Ashburner had been preoccupied, this time with the elderly husband, though he had heard Boris explaining that queues were caused because bread and other such things were subsidised by the State. Boris had also admitted that as an artist, and therefore a privileged and respected member of society, he had never had to queue for anything. Nor was it likely that
Pravda
would dream of enquiring about the number or colour of his underpants. The exact meaning behind this discourse had eluded Ashburner, but the general idea remained with him like a fishbone in the gullet.
The murder of an artist was an attack on the State
. Startled, he rocked on his stool. He realised that until this moment he had never been stimulated by abstract thought. He had always known, even before Nina put it into words, that his schooldays had crippled his development. Equally he had always understood that his strength of character, his honesty, the stability of his marriage and his acceptance of responsibility were a direct result of this emotional damage. In his case, the ends had more than justified the means. If the world hadn’t changed so drastically in the nineteen-sixties – he dated the onset of the permissive society as preceding the Profumo Affair and following the case of the Duchess of Argyll – he would never in the nineteen-seventies have gone off the rails. Unlike Nina, whose window was always open, he had been content with his enclosed existence. His involvement with her, furtive and inconclusive in the sense that he could never protect her, father her children, foot the bill for her private dental treatment, had left his attitude to life unaltered. She had bothered him, frustrated him in much the same fashion as his wife continued to bother and frustrate him, but he hadn’t been shaken to the core. Now, alone in a foreign country and inexplicably functioning more or less normally without the support of either wife or mistress – he hadn’t even missed his dog – he began dimly to rediscover that lost boy who, compelled at school to read certain set novels of Dostoyevsky, had for a brief twelve months feebly wrestled with the notion of divine justice and self-punishment. Can it be, he thought, smiling and nodding appreciatively at the metal worker, that Mother Russia is a catalyst?

At midnight, reunited with his suitcase, he was the most alert member of the small party that wearily boarded the night express to Leningrad.

13

In the morning, travelling from station to hotel, no one spoke. Olga Fiodorovna was too tired to deliver an historical lecture on the architectural splendours of the city. The hired car bounced over numerous bridges above canals edged with ancient houses washed in pastel shades of blue and pink. They drove through falling snow along cobbled streets and passed in silence the monumental columns of malachite and lapis lazuli that fronted St Isaac’s Cathedral. When the car halted, blocked by a barricade of thrown-up earth and concrete mixers, it was some moments before the interpreter realised that they had stopped. The ground in front of the Hotel Metropole was being dug up by lady road-menders. A woman in a crash helmet of acid yellow, grey hair netted in snowflakes and hanging limply to the shoulders of her quilted jacket, was manoeuvering a bulldozer backwards and forwards in the ruined street.

Mr Karlovitch suggested they should get out and walk the few remaining yards. Olga Fiodorovna wouldn’t hear of it; defying the raised fists and warning flags of the construction workers, she goaded the driver to mount the embankment of rubble. Lurching down the far side and dipping under the maw of the dirt-shifter, which at that very moment was lowering to grab and pulverise, the car rocked and juddered over the potholes to the smashed kerb at the entrance of the hotel.

The Metropole, smaller than the Peking and more luxurious, provided Ashburner with a hot bath. No matter that the water gushing from the hot taps was a brackish brown. There was even a bath plug. Refreshed, he opened his suitcase and found its contents in disarray. One of his waders was missing. The tops had gone both from his tube of shaving cream and from his Colgate toothpaste. The turn-ups of his old tweed trousers had been interfered with and the pockets pulled inside out.

He wished he had time to sit quietly in a corner and think everything over, but Olga Fiodorovna had said they must be downstairs in the lobby by nine-thirty sharp. They were going to the Hermitage to look closely at the Impressionists. The business of the suitcase is puzzling, he thought, adjusting his tie with hands that trembled from fatigue, but can’t be compared with the perplexing events on the midnight express. He had begun by sharing a sleeping compartment with Mr Karlovitch. The women occupied the one next door. Bernard had been installed in a single-berth cabin at the end of the corridor; after only a few moments he had reappeared, complaining that he couldn’t settle until the train had actually started. The men had remained fully clothed and upright, enjoying two bottles of wine provided by the Committee of the Artists’ Union. Presently Enid had emerged from her compartment barefooted and wearing a long white nightgown beneath something she referred to as a ‘happy’ coat. They had asked her to sit with them, but she was worried lest a ticket collector or guard should take exception to her state of undress. Instead she had loitered exotically in the doorway, drinking out of a paper cup – the voluminous sleeve of her coat, embroidered with gold and scarlet thread, falling back to expose an arm flecked to the elbow with green paint. Now and then she had exchanged glances with the Secretary of the Union. When an hour or so had passed and the train was at last clanking slowly through the suburbs of Moscow, Mr Karlovitch had asked Bernard if he would mind changing compartments with him. ‘I am a sickly sleeper,’ he had told him. ‘The least noise and I am jumping up. I am afraid I will disturb the good Mr Douglas.’