Objects of Desire (6 page)

Rudi and Joe left Robert’s side to greet Anoushka. They gave her a kiss and presented her with gifts until her arms were full; they too were caught up in their friends’ mother’s departure. From her side they rushed away to greet their own mother and father. To anyone in the lobby of The Plaza, here was a happy family party. A birthday? An anniversary? Some mysterious and exciting rare occasion that was cause for a party? One would hardly have guessed a divorce. It was left only for Robert to join them.

He walked across the lobby and greeted Anoushka. ‘You look very chic. I always did like you in that hat.’ He took her lightly by the elbow, wanting to usher her through the lobby to the Oak Room. She pulled away as discreetly as she could without making a scene. He managed a whisper to her.

‘For the boys’ sake, please, no scene. Christ knows we have had our scenes!’

Anoushka’s reply was to walk quickly from his side, to join Mishka and Alexis and ask them, ‘How about helping me with all these terrific presents? What a lucky lady I am.’

‘Postcards, Mum, lots of postcards.’

‘And for me too please, Mrs Rivers,’ had been Rudi’s and Joe’s reply to that.

All through lunch Robert was at his most charming. He had planned her farewell magnificently, leaving not a thing undone so that it should seem the most happy of celebrations. Bitterly she thought, well, it is for him, but kept that thought to herself and suppressed the misery she was feeling every minute of that lunch, every second of her last day with her family and friends.

They had a large table by the window. In the bowl in the centre were white tulips, her favourite flower. They were served oysters Rockefeller, turtle soup, rock Cornish game hen, wild rice, baby peas, candied carrot and sweet potato, a green salad with Roquefort dressing, chocolate mousse. All the boys’ favourites made up the menu for the Rivers party.

The twins had been seated on either side of their mother and the Holland boys on either side of them. Robert had seated himself where he and Anoushka need not confront each other across the table. The boys’ youth and innocence, love, their enthusiasm for her new adventure and endless talk about where they would go, what they would do if they were the ones sailing into the unknown, charmed and melted Anoushka’s heart. It eased her pain and she lost herself for a few hours in their dreams.

Afterwards it was to be coffee and petit fours in the Palm Court of the hotel where tables had been arranged for them. There was yet another farewell
surprise too. Alexis and Mishka had vanished from the party for a few minutes only to reappear with guitar and flute.

The boys had been studying music since they were five years old and Alexis’s mastery of the classical guitar was something very special. The flute, played by Mishka, exquisite at the worst of times, was today ethereal, tender, so very sweet. Alexis took the chair placed in the centre of the court under a palm tree and Mishka stood ready to play next to him. They gave Anoushka a farewell concert, announcing first, ‘We have arranged this piece as a gift for our mother.’ The piece was composed by Joaquin Rodrigo, and the twins had adapted it so that they could play it together. Several times, as one played solo, the sound of the other’s instrument seemed to linger and ride for a few seconds on the notes of the other. In duet, they were equally impressive.

The surprise was almost Anoushka’s undoing. She had been saved from breaking down by a combination of feelings: rage, anger, love, pride and despair. Self-pity for her plight. Betsy, sitting next to her, reached out to take her hand, squeeze it, and whisper, ‘It was all their idea. You’re being terrific. When they are older, and understand, the boys will always remember you for this with admiration.’

Those words helped Anoushka to keep herself together. Never was she as proud of her boys as during their concert! They had heart and soul and genius with their music. How had she failed to realise that until
now? By the time they had played the last note the Palm Court was ringed with people. Alexis and Mishka took their applause with ease and a smile and blew a kiss to their mother before joining her. They needed no words to tell them how much she had enjoyed her surprise. It was hugs and kisses from her, and more from Betsy, and shakes of the hand from Robert and David, a pat on the back from Rudi and Joe. ‘You get it from my mother …’ Anoushka began. The boys broke in and finished her sentence with her ‘… she was a master on the balalaika as a child, famed in St Petersburg for her skill with the instrument.’ Everyone began to laugh, even Anoushka herself.

‘You always say that, Mom. Every time we finish playing something you like,’ said Mishka.

‘Do I?’

‘Every time,’ repeated Alexis and Robert in unison.

Robert should have kept quiet. It broke the spell, cast her back to the reality of her situation. But once more she was saved, this time by strangers who made it easier for Anoushka by breaking into the Riverses’ party to praise the boys.

Later, walking up the gangway of the luxury liner with her family and friends, there was a moment when Anoushka did falter and think she could no longer go on with the charade. To die right there and have it all end, this sham of a life she had led, how she wished it could be over right then and there! But death is not all that merciful, not so easily achieved when you want it.
Something made her reach way down into herself and, against her will, struggle on through the afternoon.

There came a moment when Betsy and the boys decided they would accept the captain’s invitation to have a look round the bridge of the ship and Anoushka was left alone in her cabin with Robert and David. Her immediate reaction was to head for the door. She had nothing to say to Robert. David looked uncomfortable. Robert asked in that same cold and indifferent voice he now reserved for her, ‘Anoushka, do you have everything you want?’

She swung round to face him. ‘What a very stupid, insensitive question. What do you think? You’re a smart man, supposedly a man of genius. Answer that one yourself.’

‘I meant, have you chosen what you want to take from the house? I’ll have it shipped wherever you like, whenever you like.’

‘Oh, that. Tie up the last detail, end it clean and neat, and then nothing left except civility between us for the rest of our lives. For the sake of the children.’

Anoushka caught the look of irritation with her on Robert’s face as he shot a glance across the stateroom to David. ‘Don’t worry, Robert, I made a deal, I’ll abide by it for the sake of my sons. Tie up the loose ends? They’re tied up, you hard, mean bastard! I’ve already taken a memento of my life with you.’

‘Don’t call me mean, Anoushka, you could have had more than one thing from the house. Hard, yes, I’ll confess to that – something I’ve had to be with you to
get on with my life. Learn a lesson from that.’

It was David who, sensing the ugliness behind what was happening and how it could escalate, stopped it with, ‘That’s enough. It’s all been said. There’s no point in your beating up on each other any more. It’s not worthy of either one of you. Now, just for the record, what have you taken, Anoushka?’

She seemed to pull herself up. Walking tall, she crossed the stateroom to look in a mirror. She adjusted her hat, ran the pads of her fingers over her face as if she were wiping away the stress, all her anxieties, then turned to face them. Adjusting the magnificently luscious lynx collar of her camelhair coat she looked David directly in the eyes and told him, a degree of hauteur in her voice, ‘The Greek and Roman coin collection.’ Then she looked past David to Robert and for the first time since their estrangement challenged
him
with a look of pure vindictiveness.

‘You’ve never shown any interest in the collection. You’ve rarely taken the time to look at the coins and know nothing about them except that I am a passionate collector who has traded up my grandfather’s collection since I was a child. You took the one thing you knew I could not bear losing. It never entered my mind you could be so vengeful.’

‘Now you know how it feels.’

Anoushka walked from the stateroom with Robert’s and David’s voices ringing in her ears.

‘You wanted your freedom, Robert, it seems the price is the coins. Having signed a paper declaring
Anoushka could have anything she wanted from the house, you’d better abide by that document and take this like a man.’

‘She knows nothing about them. She has no idea what she has there.’ He was protesting but there was resignation in Robert’s voice. And pain.

Anoushka had known very well that was the only loss that would pain Robert because for all his love of beauty and rare things, he was not a materialistic man. He could sustain the loss of anything else without too much distress. Things were things to Robert. Life was something other than things, and she had always admired him for that. But the coins had always been something else for him, representing the special passion and excitement that all collectors live for. He would suffer this loss, agonise over what she would do with them. The coin collection was a lifetime’s love and work. She had hit him a blow she knew he would never recover from, and not only because she took it, or didn’t care about it, but because she knew absolutely nothing about the coins. Robert despised ignorance. The collection had been his very private thing. He had always been as reserved and secretive about it as he had been about not loving her. Oh, yes. She had got him where it hurt and that raised her spirits considerably.

The farewells were dreadful, and not only for Anoushka. At that moment, on deck, just before they were about to take leave of the ship and go down the gangway with their father, mother and sons kissed
and hugged each other and made promises to write and for Anoushka to call once a week from wherever she was in the world. Tears welled up in the boys’ eyes and were fought back. There were smiles on trembling lips. It was Alexis who said it for them all: ‘We’re OK, Mom, it’s all just too new and a matter of getting used to.’

‘A new door opens and all that,’ chimed in Mishka, and placed an arm round his brother’s shoulder.

‘In a way you have to like the excitement of the drama Dad has created,’ said Alexis.

‘Well, maybe not
like
but play the role each of us has been cast in it,’ answered Anoushka.

That seemed to strike a chord in each of them and simultaneously they all laughed and tears vanished. Anoushka laughed too but asked herself, ‘Is this black humour?’ And then she was alone.

How had it happened? How could she have lost everything? Her boys? Her husband? Her lifestyle? Her home? How did she get to be last in line and so utterly alone? Good questions. Unanswerable. Maybe she was too bruised by events to find answers. Curious, but too crippled to seek any answers. And what, after all, did it matter now?

Feebly Anoushka waved from the rail on A deck to the boys and Robert down below on the dock. They looked so happy, so full of life and enthusiasm. And why not? They were going home. Robert had everything he wanted. She tried to paste a happy smile on her face for the boys’ sake and thought, How cruel
youth can be. How insensitive, selfish, self-centred. She kept reliving the last three days. How was it possible she was in this hell? Only a few days. It seemed a lifetime.

The boys were waving now with both arms, great arcs in front of themselves, throwing kisses as the ship was slipping its moorings and lumbering away from the dock. How she loved them. They were the only people on the dock except for the longshoremen pushing the covered gangways, working the massive hemp cables that helped launch the ship.

Her husband and sons were there because of Robert’s connections. Always Robert’s connections. Those little privileges that men of skill and renown are rewarded with were part and parcel of Robert’s life. She asked herself with some bitterness whether famous doctors’ ex-wives still got favours, whether the cachet of achievement by their ex-husbands still rubbed off on them. Tears appeared at the corners of her eyes and now she too waved with both arms and pretended enthusiasm as she bid farewell to life as she knew it.

A bitter cold wind was whipping off the river. Her family were dancing, hopping from one foot to the other to keep warm as the mighty Cunard liner backed into the Hudson River. The blast of her horn, a dramatic, romantic sound, echoed against the buildings on either side. Anoushka leaned out over the rail and watched Robert and her children recede: become smaller and smaller, mere dots, pin points of people
against the massive landscape of the terminal and Manhattan rising majestically behind them. A gust of wind whipped under her sable-crowned, wide-brimmed felt hat and blew it from her head. She grabbed for it but in vain. Anoushka watched it tumble and turn on the currents of air before it drifted down between the side of the ship and the terminal. A longshoreman watching the English liner make its grand exit chased after it. The elegant Adolfo headgear eluded him and drifted down further to the water.

The boys broke away from Robert and ran towards the end of the dock, trying to catch it. They missed and the river made its claim on Fifth Avenue, taking possession of the hat. It bobbed along on the waves created by the churning of the massive ships propellers and then, quite suddenly, drowned, disappeared, never to be seen again. The last indignity. She had even lost her hat.

Chapter 4

‘Clearly, this is not about a hat, though it was a very pretty one.’

Anoushka turned from the rail to look at the man, tears streaming down her face. She’d not been aware of him standing next to her. His words only added to her distress.

The man opened his coat and drew a clean white handkerchief from his trouser pocket. He pressed it in her hand. Anoushka covered her eyes with it and struggled to compose herself, but it was impossible. She was sinking under the weight of too much misery. She clung to the rail of the ship for support as her knees buckled. Wiping her eyes with his handkerchief and a trembling hand, she asked barely above a whisper, ‘Help me.’

The tall broad-shouldered man looked round him for a ship’s officer, a fellow passenger, anyone, to come to her aid. But they were virtually alone in the bow of the ship, the other passengers having sought shelter from the wind and cold in the enclosed section of the deck.

She saw him looking round and grabbed on to his arm. ‘No, please, discreetly. I don’t want to make a scene.’

He placed an arm round her and that did give her the physical support, the comfort she so desperately needed. The warmth and strength of his body seemed to energise her. She pulled herself up and tried to walk. Her steps were unsure, wobbly. ‘I’m so ashamed,’ she told him through her sobs and gasps for breath. ‘Embarrassing, this is so embarrassing.’

‘Let’s just get you out of here, and to some private place where you can cry and beat your chest, if that’s what you want.’

Anoushka wrenched her arm away and glared at him. ‘You think I’m enjoying this?’

He supported her once more, his hand on her elbow, and kept her walking. ‘It doesn’t matter what I think,’ he told her. With that he pulled open the doors to the glassed-in area and indicated to her that she should step over the threshold. Under his breath he mumbled, ‘Shit, how I hate women in distress.’

She struggled to release herself from him and told him, ‘Then just go away.’

‘What’s your stateroom number? I’ll see you there. That’s the best thing to do if you don’t want a scene. You look a mess, clearly not in control of yourself, and if I don’t help you someone else will have to.’

She told him the number of her stateroom. Then, all control lost, burst into tears again and leaned against the stranger.

⋆ ⋆ ⋆

Anoushka woke up in panic. She had a tremendous headache. The room was dark. Completely disorientated, it took her several seconds and the movement of the ship to remind her she was on the
QE2
crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Groping in the dark, she finally found the bedside lamp and switched it on.

The room had three portholes and was panelled with a warm honey-coloured wood. She was lying on an overly large bed. Her coat was draped over the arm of a wing chair. She swung her legs off the bed. The headache seemed to be concentrated in the back of her eyes. She covered them with her fingers and pressed gently then dropped her chin on to her chest. She sat there like that, head lowered, for some time and with the most peculiar feeling.

Emptiness, a profound sense of meaninglessness, had taken possession of her. Somewhere in the depths of sleep and despair her emotions had somehow petrified. Had they magically vanished, or were they merely deep frozen, to be resurrected at some future date? Who was to know? And what did it matter? Whatever had happened to them they were gone, and there sat the same Anoushka Usopova Rivers looking like herself but not at all the same person she had known herself to be. She had awakened as a woman with a past that no longer meant anything to her. Worse, she was aware that Robert, Alexis and Mishka were still in her life, to be dealt with more than loved. Emotional burn-out. Anoushka was aware of that but
could do nothing about it. The fact of the matter was she no longer cared.

She rose from the bed. She was barefoot. She looked round the room and spotted her shoes placed neatly together on the floor next to the wing chair. The man. She flushed pink with embarrassment and touched the side of her cheek. She half expected it to be sore where he had slapped her hard. He had been escorting her to her cabin, but rather than calming, her hysteria seemed to have intensified. Her sobs had been uncontrollable, and she had been hyperventilating so badly that her body had been shaking violently.

Once he had her in his stateroom he had actually to pull her up and brace her with one hand, then slap her hard across the face, saying, ‘Sorry ’bout this.’

It had worked. He shocked her sober and she had covered her face with her hands and cried softly as he led her to his bedroom and sat her down on the bed. He left her to return with some tablets and a tumbler of whisky, and ordered, ‘Drink this down.’ She had. He then pulled her up from the bed and removed her coat, then sat her down again and swung her legs up on to the bed. That was the last thing she remembered, except that the man had muttered as she was passing out, ‘Damn it, how I hate hysterical women.’

He had loosened her clothes. She went to the mirror to adjust them and was shocked by how pale she was, how messy. Her mascara had smudged in dark circles round her eyes and rivulets of tears had streaked her cheeks. In the bathroom she washed her face and tried
to make herself more presentable, at least as presentable as red and swollen eyes would allow. She had to get through the corridors of the ship to her own stateroom without attracting any attention. All she wanted was a hot bath and to go to sleep again.

There were signs of the man everywhere. Damp towels lying over the edge of the bath or dropped carelessly on the floor, shaving brush and razor, aftershave, scented soap, a leather sponge bag. Toothpaste with the cap off and squeezed from the top lay on the washstand. A dirty shirt in the laundry basket, a black sock draped over the basket’s edge. He had obviously bathed and changed while she had been asleep.

Anoushka rubbed her forehead, trying to remember what her good Samaritan had looked like. She couldn’t. Somehow not being able to put a face to him motivated her to hurry from the bathroom and slip into her shoes and coat. She looked for a handbag for several minutes until she realised she had left it in her stateroom when she had gone on deck with her family and friends.

Opening the stateroom door to leave, Anoushka was surprised to find that it was not the corridor she stepped into but a large beautifully appointed sitting room in creams and beiges among more polished wood panelling. A large vase of dark and fully blown long-stemmed red roses sat on a circular marble table in the centre of the room and a Persian carpet, dramatic for its subtlety of colour and pattern, was unexpected in a stateroom on what was after all a commercial ocean
liner. All the lamps were turned on and cast a warm, soft glow around the room. There were stacks of books piled on a desk, a sheaf of white paper, a typewriter and laptop computer, a mug with dozens of sharp-pointed lead pencils sticking up in it.

Old habits don’t die easily, not even when you are emotionally dead. An avid reader herself, any book was of interest to Anoushka. She looked at one title and was surprised to see that it was a Japanese edition, the one directly underneath the French edition of the same book, the next a Russian title, all of which she could read. All three book titles translated differently but the author was clearly the same – Hadon Calder. A name she knew well, in common with the rest of the world. Had her Good Samaritan been Hadon Calder? The very possibility sent Anoushka fleeing from the room.

To have imposed on someone she had admired for years and not even known who he was, if indeed that had been him, only proved to her what a state she had been, was still in.

It was two in the morning and the corridors were empty, a relief for Anoushka because she got lost and had to accept a cabin steward’s help in finding her way. The moment she stepped into the room, attractively appointed and with a small private balcony, the day and its events loomed up in front of her.

Anoushka spent the next three days in her stateroom taking only breaths of air on the balcony where she stared empty-minded across the cold Atlantic
waves. The events that had taken place on her arrival were completely blanked from her mind. She picked at the food served to her in her room. She neither read nor watched TV. All concentration gone, she did little but sleep and take long baths and drifted in time and space.

It wasn’t so much boredom as claustrophobia that finally, on the afternoon of the fourth day, drove Anoushka from the confines of her room. She needed the wind on her face, and space, and to walk. And walk she did, endlessly, like a lioness escaped from her cage.

A new face in first class, she was not the only one feeling the claustrophobia of a luxury ship’s crossing. Many a passenger was to lower a book or paper, thrilled to see a new face, a mystery woman. She ignored their smiles, the occasional friendly greeting.

Anoushka did not feel the adventuress she was supposed to be, more a wanderer with no place to go. In limbo. That was it. She was in a place of oblivion, and once she realised that, she came out of the living coma she had suspended herself in since the
QE2
had pulled away from the dock, leaving her life behind her. Where do wanderers go? More to the point, how do they work out where they want to go? Where was she going? Southampton to dock, London, and an open ticket to the world. Daunting. But something to contemplate.

She asked the deck steward for a chair out in the fresh air and the sun, somewhere sheltered from the wind. And there she sat, tucked under a blanket, and thought not about the future but the several days she
had locked herself away on the
QE2
, in mourning for the death of a marriage, her life as she had known it, her happiness. Lost days and nights of which she could remember nothing. Time,
her
lifetime, lost forever, wiped out of her share of existence. Suddenly she made the decision: Never again. No more lost days. She wanted to live every minute of every day, no matter what it was to bring.

She felt the warmth of the sun’s rays on her face. It made her skin tingle and she felt herself coming alive. A minute at a time, a day at a time, to live every aspect of life, and want nothing from it. How else would she be able to discover herself again, new, fresh, without carrying the heavy baggage of the past on her back? She sighed and felt as if a great weight had been lifted off her. The lid of her coffin? She couldn’t quite smile. Resurrection was one thing, happiness a great deal to ask for. To live again seemed quite enough. Another deep sigh, and she mumbled aloud, ‘Come on, Mr Sun, do your stuff, heal me.’

She enjoyed a cat nap, short and sweet and very comforting. And when Anoushka opened her eyes she felt if not a new then certainly a different woman, possibly one with a new sense of adventure. She could almost understand the enthusiasm her sons had felt for her voyage into the unknown.

The sun was very low in the sky when Anoushka abandoned the deck for her stateroom. The moment she opened the door she knew that it was not a happy choice. The walls seemed to close in on her. One more
night. You can live with that, she told herself. She had found some strength to fight off her demons and that realisation lifted her spirits enormously. She went to the wardrobe and chose the dress she would wear for dinner. A stone coloured crêpe-de-chine full-length evening dress, strapless and pencil straight with a slit up the back, worn with a three-quarter-length silk chiffon coat of the same colour and banded in the same crêpe-de-chine. Robert had bought it for her in Paris. She had only worn it once, and until now had considered it too young and glamorous for her.

She walked across the room holding it up against her and looked in the mirror over the chest of drawers. Anoushka was shocked at what she saw. She looked drawn, drugged with despair, like someone who had suffered a tremendous shock. It was all in the eyes: shock, pain, suffering. She touched her cheek with her hand; at least the sun had given her some colour. Anoushka ran her fingers through her hair. Still a pretty woman, but how had she allowed herself to become so – well, matronly, there was no other word for it. She had of course been right about the dress, it needed a vivacious woman. The woman Robert had wanted her to be or he would never have bought such a dress.

Clearly a visit to the beauty salon was in order. A tall order for Anoushka who detested the hairdresser’s and all those beauty treatments other women were so fond of. They had never been a part of her life. Clean hair, a little mascara, lipstick, and that was it. Her
good looks and Robert’s love had always been enough. Now that was gone. She fled from her stateroom to the first-class beauty salon.

She was the last to leave, but when she did she looked more glamorous than she had done for many years. That look of a well-to-do suburban matron and mother had been buffed away considerably. She received a few tips from the salon’s beautician, Denise: a touch of mocha-coloured shadow and more than a hint of dark brown mascara, a lip pencil outlining the sensuous lips coloured with the same soft shade of lipstick she favoured, a blusher of soft tawny beige, all added so much, masked to some extent the traumas she had suffered. Her shoulder-length hair looked more silvery-blonde. Layers had been cut into it by the endlessly chattering, and morale-boosting, hair stylist, Charmaine. It had more lift and body and a soft wave to it. Gone was the ten-year-old straight and sensible bob.

Walking back to her stateroom Anoushka noticed that the few people she saw were dressed for dinner – black tie or evening gowns – and all heading for the dining room. She was late, very late, and still in her wide white flannel culottes and white silk Armani shirt. She passed one of the cocktail lounges and went in for a glass of champagne. It was deserted except for the staff and one couple on the far side of the room. She felt no compulsion to rush, merely asked the waiter to call the dining room and say that she would be late for dinner.

That was Anoushka’s first realisation that she could do anything she wanted to do. There was no husband, there were no children, home or commitments to consider. Just herself. A fact of her new life, too strange even to dwell on. The waiter brought some cheese straws and refilled her glass.