Winter Garden (13 page)

When he finally awoke he saw Enid tiptoeing about the room. She told him everyone had been most concerned at his fainting like that. Mr Karlovitch had sent up a lavish bunch of tulips, but Olga Fiodorovna had given them to the chambermaid because she said they’d use up the oxygen. Bernard had popped in several times. Last night they had gone to a dinner given by the Artist’s Union of Leningrad. They had come home early in order to keep an eye on him.

‘I was just exhausted,’ said Ashburner. ‘All I needed was to get my head down.’

‘Nina telephoned last night,’ Enid said.

‘You spoke to her, did you?’ asked Ashburner.

‘Olga did,’ said Enid. ‘Nina sent you her love.’

‘How kind,’ said Ashburner, and he lay back on the pillows.

At midday he dressed and was fetched downstairs by Bernard and taken to the restaurant. He drank a bowl of soup and ordered a large steak. ‘Did you enjoy the Hermitage?’ he asked politely.

‘It was a bloody knockout,’ said Bernard. ‘I’m going back there this afternoon. We were just hanging around to see how you were.’

‘There was no need,’ Ashburner said, but he was touched.

‘Olga took me to the Botanical Gardens,’ said Bernard. ‘She insisted on showing me some plant with bloody big thorns all over it. She slipped up on her English, though – she said she wanted to show me the biggest prick in the Soviet Union. And you missed a good do last night. It was well up to standard. Karlovitch fell over. I even did some work this morning. I gave the guards the slip and nipped out for an hour before breakfast. I did a drawing of the Peter-Paul Fortress.’

‘Jolly good,’ said Ashburner. He couldn’t think why Bernard was so keen on fortresses, particularly after his experience in Red Square.

‘It’s on the Neva,’ explained Bernard. ‘It was built to guard Russia’s access to the Baltic.’

‘I should have come with you,’ said Ashburner. He thought his voice sounded uninterested. He tried to smile.

‘You’re sure you’re all right now?’ asked Bernard.

‘Perfectly all right,’ said Ashburner.

‘You haven’t got a dicky heart or anything, have you?’ persisted Bernard.

‘There’s nothing wrong with my heart,’ Ashburner said. He shifted uncomfortably on his chair. There was something else bothering him but he kept it to himself.

Olga Fiodorovna came into the restaurant and told Bernard she wanted a quiet word with Mr Douglas. ‘Fire away,’ said Bernard. ‘I’ll pretend I’m not here.’

She reminded him that they were going out in one hour. Perhaps he would be so good as to run along and see if Miss Dwyer was preparing herself. ‘She is without means of telling the time,’ she said.

Muttering, Bernard took his cup of coffee to another table and sat with his back to them.

‘You will understand,’ began Olga Fiodorovna, ‘that I am responsible for your welfare. I do not wish to sound like a schoolmistress with a recalcitrant pupil. I speak from the heart and not from malice. I think you understand what I mean.’

‘Quite,’ said Ashburner, though he was totally foxed.

‘I will tell you a little parable, Mr Douglas. You may have noticed that I am not myself. I have had problems, domestic matters that have affected me.’ She moved a plate irritatingly around the tablecloth. ‘I am very sensitive, too sensitive perhaps. You had a mother?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Ashburner.

‘Then you will understand. My mother is very Russian, very beautiful, very impulsive. When I was a small girl she would hug me so passionately that I would cry out. If I did not eat up my food she would shake me. It was for my own good, you understand. She wanted me to have my vitamins.’

Ashburner was a little out of his depth. He had been sent away to school when he was seven and his own mother was something of a stranger. Her hugs, such as they were, could be described as lukewarm.

Suddenly Olga Fiodorovna leaned across the table and seizing hold of his upper jaw between thumb and forefinger, painfully squeezed it. ‘Eat, eat, eat,’ she cried, increasing the pressure cruelly. Abruptly she released him. ‘But now,’ she continued, ‘it is I who am in charge of my little Mamotchka. She is very old and refuses to swallow her food. Things have swung full circle.’ Holding an imaginary fork, she stabbed it in the direction of Ashburner’s mouth.

Alarmed, he pushed his chair further back from the table. She was certainly very like her mother, he thought.

‘We are all responsible for one another,’ said Olga Fiodorovna. ‘I think you have a strongly developed sense of duty. Am I right?’

‘Absolutely,’ he agreed. He knew she was humouring him.

‘I think you are sensitive like me, Mr Douglas. For people with an artistic temperament, life is not easy. You recognise more than most your duty to yourself, your dependents, your country.’

‘You may be right,’ he said. He thought she was overdoing the patriotic bit. He wondered whether, in slyly mentioning his dependents, she was alluding to his wife. He felt ashamed, and then he remembered that she was always mistaking him for someone else.

‘Though of course,’ said Olga Fiodorovna, ‘duty shouldn’t preclude a sense of fun.’

‘Fun!’ he said.

‘It is advisable, however, to keep one’s high spirits within bounds, particularly in a country other than one’s own.’

‘I don’t quite follow you,’ said Ashburner stiffly. ‘In what way have I been high-spirited?’

The interpreter looked him firmly in the eye. ‘There have been reports,’ she said, ‘of pranks at the home of Mr Shabelsky’s friends.’

‘I was savaged by a dog,’ he contested. ‘It was hardly an occasion for high spirits.’

‘The manager of the Peking hotel,’ Olga Fiodorovna told him, ‘received a complaint from a woman guest on the same floor as yourself.’

‘I admit it,’ Ashburner cried triumphantly. ‘But the reasons for such a step were beyond reproach.’

He thought she was being very unreasonable. Though pale, he no longer looked like a man on the run. The plaster had gone from the bridge of his nose and the scratch had almost healed. He had at last changed his clothes and was now wearing a tweed jacket and a pair of crumpled flannel trousers. About to argue with her, pull her down a peg or two, he recollected that he was obligated both to the interpreter and to her employers and it would be a breach of good manners to justify himself. If nothing else, he thought, he still had a fair idea of what’s what.

It was only when Enid came downstairs that Olga Fiodorovna sprang it on them that they were scheduled to visit the Piskarevsky cemetery, built to commemorate the six hundred thousand Russians who had perished in the Siege of Leningrad.

‘That’s all very well,’ protested Bernard, ‘but I’m supposed to be an artist, not a bloody vicar. I don’t want to see any graves.’ He was disgusted and flatly refused to go. He had, he said, every intention of returning to the Hermitage Museum. ‘I’ve only looked at one tenth of the paintings,’ he complained. ‘It’s potty to come all this way and not spend more time there.’

‘Who worked out where we should go?’ asked Enid. ‘Does everyone visit the cemetery?’

‘Not everybody,’ admitted Olga Fiodorovna. ‘Dignitaries from the armed forces, statesmen.’ She was on the point of adding that in this particular instance it had been Mrs St Clair who had expressed a wish to go there, when she remembered how the mention of her name seemed peculiarly to distress Mr Douglas. He was badly affected by his separation from her.

‘I’d love to go to the cemetery,’ said Ashburner. He didn’t want to crawl, but he thought Bernard had gone a little too far. It was like somebody speaking scathingly of the cenotaph in Whitehall.

Olga Fiodorovna was in a dilemma. It wasn’t possible that Mr Douglas should wander about on his own, but then neither could she allow Mr Burns out of her sight. The fact that Mr Douglas was apparently the more extrovert of the two didn’t prove anything. It was early days.

‘I think I’d like to go to the cemetery,’ said Enid. ‘I often go to the one at Highgate.’ She had once wandered into a churchyard, by mistake, on the island of Crete, in which the bodies had been left lying in open pits, under sacking. Tacked to pieces of driftwood were passport photographs of the deceased in life, all of them staring as though surprised by ghosts. She hadn’t seen much, just the odd boot sticking out, but the sea was quite near and it was very hot and she was wearing shorts, and it was a disturbing thing to stumble upon under a blazing sky.

‘I will ask for another interpreter,’ said Olga Fiodorovna, making a decision. ‘She is quite a nice lady, called Valentina, who will explain to you the facts of the cemetery. I will accompany Mr Burns to the Hermitage.’ She went away to make her arrangements.

Ashburner apologised to Bernard for landing him with Olga. ‘But as you may have guessed,’ he said, ‘I’m not terribly keen on Art. And it would be better for me if I was in the open air.’

He longed to have a man’s talk with Bernard, but it wasn’t the right moment. In the circumstances it would be easier if they were alone.

Bernard told him not to worry, he could handle Olga. She wasn’t only stunning to look at but bright into the bargain. ‘You just have to keep her off the subject of her Mum,’ he said. He didn’t know if it was all that wise, Ashburner being taken off to gaze at a load of tombstones. It was pretty morbid, carting him from hospital to grave.

Valentina, the hired help, wasn’t as good at her job as Olga Fiodorovna. Twice Enid pointed at buildings and enquired what they were and both times Valentina said she didn’t know. She seemed nervous and she wasn’t suitably dressed for the weather. Her coat was thin and she wore high-heeled court shoes over woollen ankle socks. She kept repeating that they mustn’t stay long at the cemetery. Miss Fiodorovna had ordered her to be brisk; in the evening the English visitors were going to the Opera.

After half an hour’s driving the car stopped. Ashburner had expected a church, but all he saw was a concrete blockhouse and a turnstile and, beyond, a flat white landscape cut with symmetrical paths swept clear of snow and edged with withered shrubs encased in envelopes of polythene to protect them from the frost. Between the paths jutted squares of polished granite, identical in size and each one no larger than a box of chocolates, planted row upon row, stretching endlessly to the horizon. Under glass cloches lay cardboard scrolls, printed with names and numbers, tilted to the sky. The place had the appearance of a garden centre closed for the winter. It was bitterly cold.

Enid told Ashburner he should tie Nina’s pink scarf round his head, turban fashion, to cover his ears.

He said it wasn’t necessary, but then almost immediately he took it from his pocket and did as she suggested.

‘It makes you rather Indian,’ said Enid, but she was being kind; she thought he looked like a brutal housewife.

Valentina, shuddering in the icy wind, garbled a melancholy account of death by torture, bombardment, hypothermia and starvation. Orchestral music, relayed from loudspeakers, regulated their steps to a funeral pace as they marched along the path.

‘The music helps,’ said Enid. ‘It makes it sadder.’

‘They’ve got piped music in my local supermarket now,’ Ashburner told her. ‘I don’t find it altogether helpful.’

There was nothing really to see, nothing dramatic to catch the eye.

‘They should have marble angels,’ said Enid, close to tears. ‘And crosses and ornamental urns.’ She would have liked to have taken her time, wept, let her mind form pictures of the dead and the manner of their dying, but Valentina was racing ahead, her stout legs whipped purple, desperate to get it over with.

‘Nina would have wanted to come here,’ said Ashburner. ‘I suppose being an artist she’s more capable of appreciating this sort of thing.’

‘I’m not being bitchy,’ said Enid, ‘but Nina’s not all that good, you know. I mean, she hasn’t progressed. Not since she started fiddling about with metal.’

‘I’m not much of a judge,’ Ashburner said. ‘But I saw one or two still-lifes in her drawing room. I thought they were charming.’

‘She did those when she was a student,’ said Enid.

‘Still,’ persisted Ashburner, ‘it proves it’s in her. And she’s remarkably astute about people, about situations.’

‘I don’t see her like you do,’ said Enid. ‘But then I’m a woman.’

They had reached the end of the path and were ready to turn right to approach the second avenue when they realised that Valentina was already hurrying back along the way they had come.

‘I don’t want to go yet,’ said Enid mutinously. ‘We haven’t seen anything.’

Ashburner said the poor girl was obviously freezing to death – and besides, one path was very like another. He took hold of Enid’s arm and trotted her unwillingly in pursuit. He wondered if all artistic women were strong-minded.

They found Valentina cowering in the doorway of the blockhouse. Enid asked her whether there was a plaque anywhere that stated who had killed all these people. Valentina told her that there was a stone obelisk at the far end of the cemetery which gave the dates and details of the Siege.

‘Yes, but does it mention the Germans?’ said Enid.

‘We Russians,’ Valentina asserted, ‘do not like to keep old wounds alive.’

‘My God,’ cried Enid, ‘you should do. You can’t keep all this going and then pretend you don’t remember who caused it.’

Valentina looked uncomfortable. Ashburner was about to whisper tactfully the words ‘East Germany’ into Enid’s ear when he saw a woman in a fur coat, who until that moment had been walking in the company of an old man and a child, leave the central cinder path and begin to pick her way between the memorial tables in the snow. She wore a small pill-box hat perched on the top of her head from which escaped a quantity of thick black hair. The child set up a loud wailing.

Ashburner ran down the path, waving his arms and shouting. The woman didn’t turn round but she too began to run, leaping over the stones and holding on to her hat. The pink scarf blew from Ashburner’s head and rolled across the snow. Retrieving it, he looked up and found that the woman had disappeared. The old man and the child were walking hand in hand into the distance.