Winter Garden (19 page)

‘I never sent any post-cards,’ fretted Enid.

Bernard began to hum something from the opera they had seen in Leningrad, some melody sung by Faustus after he had sold his soul to the Devil.

I don’t have to sell anything, thought Ashburner. I have simply to go into the street.

He walked to the stacked suitcases and picked up his fishing rod. He had the idea that if Olga Fiodorovna called out to him he would pretend he was taking luggage to the car. He went out of the door into the frozen street.

The cab driver who stopped for him studied the scrap of paper and seemed not to understand.

‘Dzerzhinsky Square,’ said Ashburner desperately, trying his best to pronounce the name correctly. Remembering the money Olga Fiodorovna had pressed upon him, he took out the envelope containing a hundred roubles and thrust it into the driver’s hand.

Ten minutes later, his fishing rod under his arm, he was walking up and down a prosperous street. He couldn’t find No. 827. He stood well back in the gutter and looked up at the secretive houses. He had no notion of what he should do next. He had half expected Nina to be waiting for him – in the flesh or in the spirit. A hundred panes of shut glass reflected the whiteness of the road. Just then a window opened on the top floor of an office block. Remembering the first lines of the shameful poem dedicated to Nina, he ran up the appropriate steps and hammered on the door. He heard a dog frantically barking.

A man in horn-rimmed spectacles unzipped the canvas case and extricating the fishing rod removed the sheets of paper wrapped about its stem. The drawings of ships and docks and palaces were dampened and mounted on cardboard to be examined by experts. Meanwhile in another room another man told Ashburner to empty the contents of his pockets. He then left, locking the door behind him.

Ashburner stood beside a mahogany desk. Someone had confiscated his boots. There was no doubt in his mind that he was the victim of a monstrous conspiracy. He was being used to expiate some misdemenour, some crime perpetrated against the State. He took out his wallet, his travellers cheques, Nina’s letter and the pink scarf and arranged them neatly on the desk. Olga Fiodorovna had his passport. He realised that if Bernard had been in his shoes – always supposing they hadn’t been taken from him – he would have found his situation credible. He would merely put it down to an error in the computer. It was strange that Bernard, whose profession it was to arrange lumps of paint into recognisable shapes and patterns, had been unable to discern this particular composition. Ashburner himself saw the completed picture quite clearly. Unlike Nina’s husband the brain specialist, he found a frame unnecessary. He perceived a man and a woman in a bleak landscape, frozen in their tracks.

Stepping to the barred window he looked down into a sunken patch of yard under snow. He still held a creased snapshot of his wife and her Uncle Robert, arm in arm in the winter garden. His wife was smiling.

Even the man who is sensible and composed, he thought, must pale before life’s contradictions.