A Glove Shop In Vienna (20 page)

‘All the same,’ he said, ‘you must get a proper locum for Mr Greenfield. At once.’

‘Yes,’ said Osmandine. ‘I know. Anyway, I must get back. I am,’ she said experimentally, ‘in mourning for my life.’

And as she looked at Dr Lee, grounded like a storm-tossed kestrel between the sponge-bags and the after-shave, she thought it was probably true. But she had long since understood that love and suffering are one, and pushing Cuthbert to one side she went forward bravely to her fate.

I suppose for everybody there is a country of the heart, a place where it all comes together: devotion and delight, intensity and awareness – the feeling of being the kind of person one was meant to be.

For the lucky ones it comes with marriage and parenthood: a sunlit pleasance, well-weeded, guarded from trespassers and those we trespass against. For others it is a dark place, a night country of station waiting-rooms, hotel bedrooms and the torture of the silent telephone, Some, I suppose, never find it-Brooke’s ‘wanderers in the middle mist’ – or cannot reach it, lost in a thicket of words like ‘honour’ and ‘duty’, which no one any longer understands, but which fasten themselves, nonetheless, like barbed wire round the spirit.

But what if there are two countries? What if there is no bridge?

I was twenty when I married John and straight away I knew it was going to be all right. Oh, it was rough sometimes on the surface; he was on a research grant at a west country university, working on animal behaviour, and when Vanessa was born and then Daniel two years later we were very hard up. But all through the sex-and-money rows, the battles to adjust my manic sociability with his need for solitude, we were all right, our roots steadily twisting together down beneath it all. John was gentle and considerate, yet in no way soft. He supported me, encouraged my work (I was just starting as a freelance writer) and laughed at me. As for our children – ah, glory, there were never children like ours! We lived in a flat in a shabby terrace of Georgian houses that faced south over the city. There was a wisteria snaking from the basement to support the narrow balcony where I sat on summer afternoons telling stories to my blonde and giggly daughter, my dreamy, green-eyed son. We had friends too, real ones who allowed us to walk in and out of their lives and whose dramas and crises became our own.

A good life, you see. No excuses for what happened. No alibi.

We had been married nearly seven years when a great-uncle of mine died and left me five hundred pounds. That September John had a conference in Vienna. My widowed mother was always glad to take the children, so I went abroad by myself and I went – I never thought of any other place – to Russia.

I had signed on with an Art Lovers’ Tour and I struck lucky. They were nice, the Art Lovers: amiable, outgoing Canadians festooned with cameras, north-country schoolteachers who
knew
things… We flew to Moscow and in the shabby Intourist bus assigned to us were conveyed to Prince Yussupoff’s palace at Archangel, gazed reverently at Pushkin’s portrait in the Tretyakorskaya gallery, marvelled at the icons in the Novo-devichy Convent.

Then, on the third day…

We had done a sprint through the Kremlin Armoury (the turquoise and tourmaline throne of Boris Godunov, the saddle of lapis lazuli that Catherine the Great gave to Potemkin… ) and were crossing Red Square, making for the row of buses parked by the Spassky Gate.

There were tourists everywhere. A party of Chinese businessmen hissed with despair as a fat German housewife walked - at the instant of camera-click - into their carefully posed group photograph; a gaggle of Swedish women gymnasts bayed for their courier and in the middle of the square, a tragic figure in a sea of cobbles - an elderly, blue-rinsed American -threw back her head and wailed: ‘Oh, gee, I’ve lost my tour!’

Pausing to comfort her, I all but lost my own. The Art Lovers had reached the row of buses and climbed aboard. And the bus was about the start.

I ran, jumped onto the steps and was pulled aboard by a man with arms of steel. Increasing speed, the bus lurched forward and I fell with a crash on to my rescuer.

It was one of my more ethnic periods. Disentangling him from my Aztec beads, my Peruvian saddle-bag, I found that my hair (long and thick and fair- my
only
beauty) was caught in the button of his jacket. I began simultaneously to apologise and tug.

‘Wait!’

He bent his head and began patiently to extricate the strands. High cheekbones, green eyes, brown hair already thinning a little. I noticed most his hands, which seemed to me very beautiful, and his concentration. He was doing this thing and this thing only.

‘There.’

I could look up now. The bus was full of dark-suited, serious men with a briefcase air. Not an Art Lover in sight.

‘You could, I suppose, be a hitherto undiscovered Bursting Disc Expert?’ His voice was amused and already far too tender. ‘On the other hand you
could
be on the wrong bus.’

They were a delegation of marine engineers on a trade mission, now on a day’s sightseeing trip to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s country estate three hours’ drive away from Moscow.

‘Oh!’ I was enchanted. Anything to do with Tolstoy was Shangri-la to me. ‘But I must get back to the Art Lovers. They’ll be worried.’

And his voice beside me, very quiet.

‘No!’

What rubbish they talk about love at first sight. Where is it, all that ecstasy, the singing and the gold? It’s terrifying when it happens — a kind of relentless, metallurgical process, some dark
thing
being forged at unimaginable temperatures in some subterranean furnace of the soul.

We exchanged names: Stefan Grant, Helen Gresham.

Neither of us smiled.

It was at Tula that we first saw the brides. It’s the provincial capital of the district, the city closest to Tolstoy’s estate and the brides were queuing up outside the town hall, rows of them, waiting to get married. The men, stocky with set faces, wore their ordinary, shabby suits but the brides – all of them – were dressed in white. And each one carried a bunch of shaggy, identical flowers – the only flowers to be had, it seemed, in this vast, impoverished land.

‘
Asters
,’ I said. ‘Look, they’re all carrying asters.’

Stefan turned, smiled.

‘And you,’ he said, touching too briefly the gold band on my left hand. ‘What did you carry on your wedding day?’

‘Oh, roses and stephanotis, much too stiffly wired. Then someone rushed up and said it was unlucky – the red and the white, I mean, and a kind lady gave me her pink carnation and we stuck it in the back. And it was all right, I
was
lucky.’

‘My wife didn’t carry anything,’ he said. ‘Me, nearly. I had a dreadful hangover.’

We had exchanged marriages. Happy ones. Feeling suddenly safe, we turned to each other and began to talk.

‘Yasnaya Polyana’ means ‘Luminous Meadows’ and it’s a good name. As we spilled out of the bus and began walking up the drive, the meadows really did shimmer with light; the poplars and asters trembled. And the birches… But I’ll come again to the birches.

‘I never thought I’d see it,’ I said. ‘I used… oh, to
be
Natasha for years and years and years.’

Stefan was beside me. Naturally. Already what I had learnt about him on the bus was ground into my bones. An Austrian mother, a Scottish father… a childhood in a white house by a white strand in the Hebrides. Then the shock of an English boarding-school… one of those maths-and-music brains shunted into engineering. He spoke of his wife, Claire, with pride: a practical, blessedly un-neurotic girl; of his daughter, Toussia, with sensuous delight like someone describing flowers or fruit.

We walked together through the great man’s house: the bentwood chairs, the samovar, the tiny study with
The Brothers Karamazov
open at the page he had been reading on the day he fled his house to die.

‘A guy who asked the right questions,’ said Stefan. ‘Maybe the answers were wrong, but the questions were right.’

‘He could never bear to wake anyone from sleep,’ I said.

The narrow iron bed, the peasant smock on the coat-stand… and outside now into the grounds to visit Tolstoy’s grave.

And now we came to the birches. In Russia birches are not the slender, inconsequential things they are with us; they’re as tall as redwoods and they grow packed together in shining forests, miles upon hundreds of miles of them, and the Russians are mad about them: crazy. So Tolstoy, naturally, had asked to be buried beneath his birches. A simple grassy mound; no headstone, no inscription.

To this grave, converging from the criss-crossing paths, there came other pilgrims: groups of foreigners with Intourist guides, Russian families on an outing from Moscow, Tatars from Samarkand…

And, then, in the midst of the sightseers, there they were again, white and grave and unmistakable, the Brides of Tula -dozens of them, walking beside their newly-wedded husbands and coming forward one by one to lay their tousled asters on the great man’s grave.

It really got me: the sunlight filtering through the birches, the devout girls, the flowers which we would not, at home, have bothered to pick off a rubbish heap.

‘My mother was drowned,’ said Stefan suddenly, ‘crewing for friends in the Bahamas. I used to think a grave would have helped. I’d have burned the things on it that she loved, as the Chinese do.’

The Chinese?’

He nodded. ‘One day a year. Their New Year. They have a feast on the grave of their dead. They burn… oh, paper money for a miser… toys for a child.’

‘What would you have burned for her?’

‘A bottle of Je Reviens… the score of a Mozart concerto… a Schiaparelli scarf.’

‘And for your wife?’

He grinned. ‘A packet of seeds… a hoe… a novel with a happy ending.’

We were silent, standing too close, looking down at the quiet mound of earth beneath its tousled flowers.

‘And you?’ said Stefan. ‘What about your husband? What would you burn for him?’

It was my turn to smile. ‘A year’s subscription to
Ecology;
a home-brewing kit: the spare parts of a vintage Riley…’

The Engineers had drifted back to the waiting bus. The brides had gone. Then: ‘On my grave,’ said Stefan very quietly, ‘they would have to make a pyre, I think, and burn…’

He paused, trying not to say it.
^:
If I had kept still; if I had only kept absolutely still. But I

moved towards him and he had to finish.

‘You,’ he said. ‘They shall burn you.’

So it began.

Moscow is an ugly city: no props for lovers – no intimate cafes, no cosy bars and at night the hotel corridors guarded by grim females sullenly handing out keys.

None of it mattered. We saw
Swan Lake
at the Bolshoi and the fat, middle-aged women in the audience held crumpled asters as the brides had done and threw them, at curtain call, on to the stage. We went to the circus and saw a dozen snow-white yaks dancing a saraband, and to a four-hour opera about the love life of an unidentifiable and deeply crazy czar. When Stefan had to join his delegation I waited, shivering like a kitten, in some public park and each time he walked towards me with his quick, predatory gait, I felt a happiness so violent, so idiotically
pure
that I could not speak but clung to his hand like someone saved from drowning.

On the fifth day after our meeting, the Art Lovers took off for Leningrad. There was no way Stefan could cut the red tape and follow me, but he followed me. It was with him that I stood breathless before the Scythian gold in the Hermitage, with him that I ran through the crazy fountains of Peter the Great’s Summer Palace, with his hand in mine that I heard the Cossacks singing at the Kirov.

Then we flew back to London. One more snatched day. We spent it mostly in the bedroom of a crummy hotel near King’s Gross, talking, talking… frantically garnering the most trivial piece of knowledge against the coming drought. (‘Did you have mumps when you were little? Do you like Dvorak? Modigliani? Gorgonzola cheese?’)

Then he took me to the station and put me on the train. There’s a sort of anaesthesia about a parting like that. One behaves well because it’s so obvious that it’s not going to happen.

Only it happened. We parted. I went home.

John was waiting, relaxed and loving. The children ran shrieking into my arms. My friends phoned and said: ‘Thank God you’re back.’ I took possession of my life, incredibly thankful that I had done no harm, that my hostages were safe. But… ‘Take it,’ said God. ‘Take it and pay for it.’

I began to pay.

We had decided not to call each other, not to write. It seemed to me that battles could be won, ships built with the force I expended on dragging myself past the telephone, on destroying the letters that I scrawled on the edges of shopping lists, the margins of newspapers, making them illegible almost on purpose so as to hide the naked words not from John but from myself.
i
It will pass, I said. Everyone knows that it passes. Hold on.

Grind it into the ground. You will forget. ; Only I didn’t.

It’s a lonely thing, a passionate love. Boring, too. If you want to know why Isolde killed herself, I’ll tell you. She killed herself because when she woke up on the three hundred and ninety-seventh morning of her life with Tristan’s name still on her lips, she said to herself, right this one I’ve
had
.

The months passed, half a year, more… Then one day there was a letter. In his clear, looped, unfamiliar hand. Stefan wrote of the dearth, the greyness, the sense of a spring running dry. ‘I will do anything you wish, Helen. I have no answers. Only, can it be right to live so joylessly in a world where, perhaps, joy is a kind of duty?’

It was the letter of a man frightened, as I was, by what had been done.

It was now, driven by longing, by guilt, faced once more with a choice, that I went to see Kirsty.

Kirsty was a painter who had a studio converted from an old chapel a few miles out of town. She worked all day but about five she surfaced, drank enormous quantities of tea, went to find her marvellously independent son and (if she had one at the time) her current lover and began to assemble, like a Braque still life, the ingredients for her evening meal. It was at this witching time that I found her, preparing a gigantic Salade Nicoise to the sound of Bartok on the hi-fi, the last of the evening light streaming through the huge windows on to her russet hair and beautifully faded smock.