Winter Garden (12 page)

‘I don’t care where I doss down,’ Bernard had said. ‘I can sleep on the edge of a cliff.’

There had been some horseplay with Ashburner’s fishing rod. Bernard had mentioned that its canvas cylinder was the ideal container for transporting drawings. He had insisted on fitting the rod together so that it buckled against the roof. After wrestling with Bernard for possession of his rod, Ashburner had gone to the lavatory and then for a stroll along the corridors. In his estimation the view from the windows had been much the same as from any train going through the outskirts of any city in the small hours; a few fitful lights, a stretch of darkness, the green and livid glow of an industrial complex working through the night. He had pressed his cheek to the cold glass – the heat inside the train was oppressive – and had felt for a brief moment a sense of loneliness or adventure, which in his case he thought was probably the same thing. On his return he had found both men lying on their respective bunks, fully clothed and inert. Mr Karlovitch was clutching an empty bottle of wine to his chest and had evidently been guilty of exaggeration. Shaken quite roughly, he hadn’t stirred. Switching off the meagre light, Ashburner had made his way to the single berth cabin.

At first he had been unable to sleep. Earlier in the evening, when he had reminded Olga Fiodorovna of her promise that he should speak to Nina at the sanatorium, she had fobbed him off with a preposterous story of peak-hour telephones and unobtainable numbers. He hadn’t been in a fit state to argue with her. He was childishly deflected at the sight of his suitcase in the lobby, and neither Bernard nor Enid had backed him up. The moment had passed and he had realised he would have to wait the four hundred miles until they arrived in Leningrad. Lying on his bunk he had thought he couldn’t wait and he did remember worrying about his lack of backbone. Then, he supposed, he had dropped asleep, because the next minute he was dreaming he had fallen out of a hammock; he could see the black strings trembling and criss-crossing above his head. At the same time he had become aware that his wife was caressing him in a violent manner. In his dream he had rolled on top of her, penetrated her, and it had all been over in the flick of a cow’s tail. He imagined it had something to do with the motion of the train on the track. He had only known he was awake when he distinctly heard the door sliding shut and found himself lying on the floor of the compartment with his vest rolled up to his navel. For at least three hours after the incident he had knelt on his bunk, staring out at the flying night.

He could be forgiven for thinking the whole matter had been a dream. In twenty-three years his wife hadn’t made the slightest attempt to arouse him, not since returning from that New Year’s Eve party at the Hammerskills when she had accused him of lasciviously eyeing Marjorie Hammerskill. Stung by the injustice of her insinuation, he hadn’t a thought in his head but to get his own little wife between the sheets – seeing that he paid for the food she ate and the clothes she wore – he had slapped her cruelly across the face. Before the cry of remorse had left his lips she had responded in a manner both wanton and surprising. He tried slapping her again, a month later, but on that occasion the result had been her refusal to speak to him for several weeks.

He still had no idea of the identity of the woman who had so abruptly seduced him. Was it Olga Fiodorovna or Enid? He wasn’t prudish, but he did like to know with whom he was being intimate – and then again a man preferred to do some of the running. It was in his nature. It wasn’t as if he was a nocturnal animal, doomed like a hamster to couple in darkness. To be accurate, he realised he hadn’t often coupled in daylight – beyond a few countable summer evenings before the children were born and those unsatisfactory noon-times spent with Nina.

When he went downstairs he found the others assembled at the booking desk. He apologised for keeping them waiting. ‘Someone’s been messing about with my case,’ he said. ‘They’ve taken one of my wellies.’

‘You haven’t kept us waiting,’ said Bernard. ‘Olga doesn’t like her room.’

‘I love beauty,’ explained Olga Fiodorovna. ‘I cannot bear the commonplace. I will not sleep a wink unless my room is well proportioned and furnished with taste.’ She had changed into an elegant black trouser suit and was wearing ankle boots of scarlet leather.

‘About phoning Nina,’ began Ashburner, but already she had turned away from him.

Enid told Ashburner he looked dreadful. ‘You’ve got great black circles under your eyes,’ she said.

He didn’t think she was hinting at anything. She wasn’t winking at him or leaning against him in a familiar manner. ‘I’m all right, my dear,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I’m not yet in my stride.’

He was convinced it hadn’t been Enid who had come to his compartment. She was looking at him with genuine concern. But then neither did it seem likely that Olga Fiodorovna, with her love of beauty, would roll about on the dusty floor of an express train. Was it possible that he had been ravished by a random traveller? He wondered if he should confide in Bernard. Bernard would obviously have more experience of this sort of thing. If in fact he had been pestered by a complete stranger, oughtn’t he perhaps to wash himself in disinfectant?

Olga Fiodorovna went upstairs to inspect her new accommodation and returned smiling. She had managed to procure a suite overlooking the Summer Gardens. It would of course cost a great many extra roubles, but that was unimportant. She led them through the hotel to the tradesmen’s entrance at the rear where the car was waiting. Directing Bernard to sit in the back with Ashburner and Enid, she sat beside the driver. She was now wearing a long sable coat which she spread out on either side of her and stroked continually. Everyone assumed that Mr Karlovitch was either asleep or attending to his paperwork.

Before going to the Hermitage Museum they were driven to a cobbled street beside a canal to gaze at the house in which Pushkin had died. Olga Fiodorovna made them all get out, though she herself remained in the car. She wound down the window and shouted instructions at them. They must walk on to the middle of the bridge to feel the atmosphere of the place. The street was deserted and the canal frozen over. A black barge was caught in the ice.

‘The duel was enacted over there,’ she called, pointing into the distance. ‘He was carried over the bridge and expired in the house.’

‘Bugger Pushkin,’ said Bernard.

‘She must be awfully well off,’ murmured Enid, looking enviously at Olga Fiodorovna’s hand stabbing the air in its black leather glove. Enid was wearing woollen mittens. After only a few seconds she and Bernard hurried back to the car.

Ashburner lingered on the bridge. No longer conscious of the cold, he had the oddest feeling that he was all head, that his body had floated somewhere further off. Chin held at a curious angle, eyes shut, he stood in the attitude of a man straining to detect the enemy that stalked him. Snow collected on the shoulders of his overcoat. Then out of the silence in which he was so peculiarly suspended he heard the faint, high ring of steel on steel and louder, closer, the half-choked cry of a man run through.

Coming to himself, he fully understood that he had conjured up these sounds out of his mind. Nothing like it had ever happened to him before. In his case, he thought, lack of sleep was having a reverse effect. He had never felt so wide awake. Shaking the snow from his collar he leant against the parapet and looked down at an old newspaper flapping on the surface of the canal. In that instant, caught in a gust of wind, the paper shifted, exposing the blackened leaves of a rotting cabbage. For some reason he was reminded of the white rug on the floor of the illustrator’s studio, placed neither in front of the fireplace nor in the centre of the room.

‘Mr Douglas,’ called Olga Fiodorovna, ‘we are waiting.’

The rug was necessary, thought Ashburner, retracing his steps. It was to cover some mark, some stain not yet removed.

He was silent in the car. They talked about him as if he wasn’t there.

‘I have a surprise for him in a little while,’ said Olga Fiodorovna. ‘Something of great importance. I feel he is not interested in paintings.’

‘As long as it’s not another visit to a metal worker,’ Bernard said. ‘He’s up to here with metal workers.’

‘He’ll go down with pneumonia,’ said Enid. ‘He needs something for his head.’

The car stopped outside a palace. A soldier with a gun on his back walked up and down in front of a flight of monumental steps.

About to leave the car, Ashburner was told by Olga Fiodorovna to stay where he was. ‘You are going somewhere else,’ she said. She spoke to the driver who grunted and nodded his head. ‘You are expected, Mr Douglas,’ said Olga Fiodorovna. ‘Professor Valentina Sochnikova will meet you at the door. There will be no need of an interpreter.’

‘But where am I going?’ asked Ashburner. He looked helplessly at the others and kept his hand on the door as if he might yet make a break for it.

‘Search me,’ said Bernard. ‘It’s supposed to be a surprise.’

Ashburner, whose whole existence since arriving on foreign soil had been a series of surprises, was dismayed at the news. He couldn’t bring himself to wave as he was driven away down the street.

The journey was short and ended outside a multi-storeyed building within an enclosed wall. The driver stayed at the wheel and indicated that Ashburner should get out. There were several cars and a white van parked in front of the entrance. Some slogan on the roof, insecurely battened, swung to and fro in the wind.

As soon as he set foot in the building, Ashburner knew he was in a hospital. There was no mistaking the tick from the clock on the gleaming wall, and the smells of ether and fear, surgical spirit and beeswax that filled the air he breathed. He was convinced he was going to see Nina. A small woman in white tennis shoes and a young man with a stethoscope dangling about his neck greeted him with affection; he was embraced by each in turn and kissed on both cheeks. Reluctantly removing his overcoat – the cleanliness of his surroundings made him conscious of his crumpled suit and his torn sleeve – he was led along a succession of tiled passages. It was only when he was ascending in the lift that it occurred to him that Nina couldn’t possibly be here. They were four hundred miles from Moscow. He was still trying to work out what day it was and how many nights ago Nina had been spirited away when he found himself in a small ante-room, where he was handed a white coat and a cotton skull cap. Startled, he put them on and feeling like a pastry chef in a restaurant was directed through a green door with a red bulb burning above it.

He was in a dimly lit cubicle, alone, with a glass panel let into one wall. There were two television monitors in a corner, both screens blank, and in front of them an upright chair and a low tubular table on which was set an enamel basin and a paper towel. When he approached the glass panel and stared down, he saw that he was overlooking an operating theatre. A group of people, masked like terrorists, were hovering above a naked figure spreadeagled on a raised black couch. Even as he watched, the angle of the couch altered and an attendant, steadying himself by placing his finger on the figure’s cheekbone and his thumb on the peak of its shaved head, drew with a marking pen a freehand line in purple ink, bisecting the skull from ear to ear. The figure was so tormented with tubes and catheters, limbs so mangled with surgical apparatus, buttocks supported on a copper plate, flesh daubed with chemical dyes of livid green and yellow, that it was impossible to tell whether it was a man or a woman. Trembling with disgust and excitement, Ashburner retreated into a corner. Plainly he had been mistaken for Nina’s husband, the brain specialist. The appalling prospect of being asked for his opinion, or worse, his assistance in the abattoir below, unmanned him.

He had no idea how long he stood there, cowering against the wall. The extreme silence in the sound-proofed room was in some way interfering with his breathing. He was just gathering his strength to wipe away the sweat that trickled into his eyes when the twin monitors flashed into colour and with the images on the screens came the frightful noise of a high-speed drill.

After a while, considerably calmer, for the piglet whine of the drill had shocked him into filling his lungs with air, Ashburner sat down and wiped his face with the paper towel. In close-up he viewed a hand in a glistening plastic glove wielding a scalpel. He couldn’t see any gory fragments, or blood in tones of technicolor red, merely a pinkish pulp like the inside of a peach, palpitating beneath a strip of transparent gauze. Now that the barbarous reality beyond the glass panel had been transferred to that familiar, reassuring box, he watched the proceedings with interest.

In time, the gauze was removed and numerous pairs of slender silver scissors were inserted into the tissues and lifted and replaced with such rapidity that Ashburner was reminded of a display of lace-making he had witnessed in Venice, given by an old woman in a doorway, the bobbins leaping like fish between her fingers. He could hear the magnified beat of a pulse and voices speaking in Russian and an unidentifiable crackling and rustling. Once he was shown, suspended from a steel armature, a pleated bladder sagging in and out like an accordion. The images on both screens were identical. He was in the middle of studying the probing of some tropical fruit, oyster grey and pink at the core, when quite suddenly the picture on the left-hand monitor wavered and slipped, to be replaced by a recognisably human chin and a mouth pegged cruelly open. Zooming in from above, the camera recorded a nose from whose nostril dangled a thin tube resembling a string of snot, and above it two eyes mercifully shut with white tape, and above the eyes a swollen band of forehead stained apricot yellow, in the centre of which and close to the hairline, if the head had not been shaved, was the distinct impression of a star-shaped scar.

14

Following his collapse at the hospital – he was found lying in the passage outside the viewing cubicle – Ashburner was transported, wrapped in a cosy blanket, to his hotel. There he was helped to bed and slept for almost eighteen hours. Once or twice he imagined that he was visited by his wife and her Uncle Robert. Both of them reeked of chloroform.