‘Nina had two suitcases,’ Bernard reminded him. ‘She brought my coat in one of them.’ He seemed to be listening for something. Coming to a wrought-iron bench at the side of the path, he sat down abruptly and glanced backwards into the darkness. ‘If it was anybody’s suitcase,’ he said, ‘it was probably yours.’
‘That hadn’t occurred to me,’ admitted Ashburner. He felt stupidly crestfallen. A gust of wind blew through the trees, showering him with snow.
‘Look, mate,’ Bernard said. ‘Take it from me, nothing funny’s going on. Nina’s fine. She’s not been liquidated. She rang yesterday evening.’ He held his arm up in the moonlight and studied his wristwatch. ‘At this moment she’s on the midnight express from Moscow.’
‘That’s the other thing,’ said Ashburner. Carefully, because he wanted Bernard to believe him and he knew he must be lucid, he told of his experience on the train. Once or twice he expressed himself crudely so that Bernard wouldn’t lose interest. When he had finished he was mortified to find that Bernard was laughing, silently at first, doubled up over his knees on the bench as though in pain, and then out loud. The noise of his laughter rolled through the moonlit wastes of the glacial Summer Gardens.
‘I’m afraid,’ said Ashburner, ‘that I don’t take these things as lightly as you do. I didn’t enjoy it. I don’t want to preach, but personally speaking I have to feel some modicum of affection in order to gain any satisfaction.’
Bernard snorted uncontrollably.
‘Satisfaction apart,’ shouted Ashburner, ‘I now feel rather uncomfortable. One or two things are not quite ship-shape.’ Suddenly realising the absurdity of bellowing such intimate confidences in the middle of the night in a foreign land, he too began to snigger. Controlling himself, he lowered his voice and described the strange symptoms that had bothered him since the morning. ‘I’m probably imagining it,’ he said. ‘But I thought that you, being a man of the world, might advise me.’
Bernard had never known anyone like Ashburner – not to spend time with. The man looked and spoke like a civil servant; yet he was obviously insanely romantic. It wasn’t so extraordinary after all that Nina had taken up with him. She was basically a rather bossy girl who should have married somebody inadequate and produced a crop of children. Art didn’t do anything for her. She only mucked about with it because the brain specialist was a total egotist and she was left too much on her own. Perhaps Ashburner was made for her. If so, beyond getting all worked up emotionally, he’d be able to take the truth.
Clinically he explained to Ashburner that his little bit of leg-over on the train couldn’t be responsible for his present symptoms. He had probably become infected ten days ago. Drinking so heavily had probably aggravated the condition. He must take the pills Nina had put in his suitcase, one a day for five days. And he must cut out the drink. He patted Ashburner on the shoulder and told him not to worry. It wasn’t anything to write home about. His private parts weren’t about to drop off. Most of the people he knew either had it or were about to get it.
Ashburner said nothing for some time. He sat slumped on the bench, his chin sunk on his chest. He was both mystified and relieved by Bernard’s medical lecture.
‘Have I been infectious for ten days?’ he asked at last.
‘More or less,’ said Bernard.
‘How will I tell my wife?’ said Ashburner. He didn’t feel guilty or upset about her. She seemed to have receded into the past. He wondered how he would ever find his way back to her.
‘You don’t,’ Bernard said. ‘You nip round to your doctor when you go home, ask him for some more pills and pop them in her morning tea. And hide the booze from her.’
‘She doesn’t drink,’ said Ashburner, and he stood up. They began to walk along the path towards the gates. Keeping pace with them and somewhere to their right, footsteps crunched the snow beneath the linden trees.
‘It’s old Karlovitch,’ murmured Bernard. ‘Keeping tabs on us.’
Ashburner didn’t find it all that objectionable. Mother Russia sprawled eight million square miles across the surface of the earth, from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, from the borders of tropical Persia to the ice-floes of the North Pole. A few yards’ surveillance, he thought philosophically, was neither here nor there.
16
The aeroplane descended between mountain peaks into the valley of Tblisi. Mr Karlovitch pointed out an artificial sea to the north, but nobody looked. Flying to Georgia had proved a nightmare for Bernard; he hadn’t been allowed to smoke.
They stepped down from the grey aircraft into blinding sunlight. The President of the Artists’ Union of the Tblisi district, surrounded by a retinue of committee members, was there to greet them. Shimmering behind a heat haze the welcoming delegation rippled across the tarmac, holding tulips and smoking little fat cigars. The President was tall and imposing with a Hapsburg chin; he resembled, or so Enid thought, a police inspector in a French film. He wore, slung casually round his shoulders, a white mackintosh with epaulets.
They drove in convoy through the old quarter of the town to a Hilton-style hotel built on a plateau landscaped with oleanders and magnolias and were immediately taken up to the fifteenth floor for luncheon, though it was four o’clock in the afternoon. There, plied with glasses of champagne and urged to eat pieces of charcoal-flavoured mutton and unleavened bread stuffed with goat’s cheese, they listened to fulsome speeches, doggedly translated by a wilting Olga Fiodorovna. The sun beat against the picture window of the restaurant. Suffocating in their winter woollies, laps strewn with mutilated tulips, the fêted guests wiped the perspiration from their smiling faces and nibbled quantities of onion salad sprinkled with basil. Outside the window spread the roofs of ancient houses and the domes of Byzantine churches. In a small park lay a man and a dog, flopped out on the withered grass. High above the churches and houses and park dangled a cable car, its overhead wires catching the sunlight, strung in a glittering loop from the slopes of the town to the top of Mount Mtatsminda. Across the blue horizon, peaks buttered with snow, rolled the Caucasian Range.
The President wished his visitors to know that an exciting itinerary had been prepared. They would be anxious to see a collective farm and possibly a famous painter. In particular, Mrs St Clair had asked to meet the metal workers of Tblisi. At the mention of Nina’s name, Ashburner started violently. The committee regretted that Mrs St Clair was still unwell and hoped that she would soon fly, restored to health, into the arms of Mother Georgia.
Taking everyone by surprise, Ashburner lurched to his feet. Aware that he cut a dishevelled figure – his old school tie undone and hanging like a dormant snake from his collar – he none the less felt compelled to reply. ‘The warmth of our welcome,’ he began, ‘is typical of the Soviet Union. We are looking forward to seeing something of your beautiful countryside and your metal workers. Were my wife at my side, she too would assure you of our friendship and our gratitude.’ He had thought to say more. It had been in his mind, before he mentioned his wife, to liken the landscape to certain regions of Spain, though his visit to Santander had been brief and he wasn’t sure if the comparison was diplomatic, politically speaking. Confused, he sat down; he hadn’t been thinking of his wife at all, but of Nina.
Across the table, the President rested his elbow on Bernard’s shoulder. Already sinking under the heat, Bernard wagged a belligerent finger at Olga Fiodorovna, who was fanning herself with the hotel reservations. ‘No offence meant,’ he cried, ‘but I’m not going near a collective farm. I don’t care how you put it, but make that clear to them.’
‘You will not be forced to visit a collective farm, Mr Burns. I do not have to make it clear.’
‘Same goes for metal workers,’ Bernard warned her. ‘If I set eyes on one I’ll go for him with a blow torch.’
‘There are some interesting churches in Tblisi,’ Olga told him soothingly. ‘They are very old, very historical.’
‘No churches,’ snapped Bernard. ‘I want to see where Stalin was born, and I want to go to the pictures.’
The President looked enquiringly at Olga Fiodorovna but she pretended not to notice. ‘We are going perhaps tomorrow,’ she said. ‘There is a very famous painter living nearby in a very—’
‘Moving pictures,’ said Bernard. ‘The flicks, the movies, the cinema. Get it?’
Enid had overheard Bernard shouting out the word ‘Stalin’ and was alarmed at his outspokenness. None of them, until now, had brought up names. They hadn’t mentioned Solzhenitsyn or Nabokov or Trotsky, or even that ballet dancer. She herself, in a suitably concerned tone of voice – she hadn’t been giggling or anything like that – had asked Olga Fiodorovna how Mr Brezhnev was. She had thought it only polite. When they had left England the newspapers were reporting him as practically dead. Olga’s reply had made her feel like a scandal-monger and a liar; she’d said brusquely that Mr Brezhnev was as fit as a fiddle, or words to that effect. Altogether she gave the impression that it wasn’t done to talk about Mr Brezhnev, alive or dead. Nobody had told them it wouldn’t be tactful to bring up names. There really hadn’t been the opportunity; they’d been far too busy discussing Ashburner’s suitcase or his tangle with that dog in the bathroom, or his fainting fit at the hospital or his night at the opera. For someone so ordinary and boring, it was astonishing how much time they spent talking about Ashburner.
‘The others can do as they damn well please,’ said Bernard, lopsided under the weight of the President’s mighty arm. Both men were puffing on cigarettes, blowing clouds of smoke up to the ceiling and coughing.
‘He ought to lie down,’ Enid said. ‘We all need to lie down.’
But already Olga Fiodorovna was gathering her papers together and explaning to the Committee that her charges must rest.
They retired to their rooms on the nineteenth floor. Enid and Bernard lay on pillows on their balconies and soaked up the sun. Ashburner dozed on his divan bed. Though he was frightfully tired he found it difficult to sleep. He now had a sore throat, and he imagined he had a slight pain in his chest. He would have liked to telephone Bernard, but he didn’t know what room to call. Lying there, listening to the faint din of crockery and cutlery below, he suddenly heard Enid’s voice. ‘I haven’t sent any post cards,’ she said.
Startled, he got up and went out on to the balcony. Leaning over the rail and peering sideways, he saw a white brassière draped upon the adjacent balustrade.
‘Oh, you’re there,’ he cried heartily. He didn’t want her to suppose he’d been playing Peeping Tom.
‘Isn’t it glorious?’ called Enid. ‘Isn’t this the life?’
‘Rather,’ he said, staring out over the town; the sun had certainly put his hat on. He had always been known as a man who appreciated a beautiful view. Indeed on more than one occasion his wife had threatened to scream if he went on once more about this line of hillside or that stretch of coast. He had sat for hours in his sou’wester on the beach at Nevin, watching the sun sink into the sea and the moon float up over the headland, knowing that soon he would go indoors and light the fire and tell his wife of the beauties of that self-same sunset and moonrise. He realised it wasn’t just a question of his physical indisposition, this despondency of mood. It simply wasn’t the same, being on one’s own with no one to go home to. It was true that it all looked splendid out there; it was almost sublime, all those little crooked streets and that big mountain and the scent of magnolias drifting up from the plateau below. If this building collapses from shoddy workmanship, he thought, I won’t stand a chance. Somewhere to his left he heard Bernard’s voice, complaining that he had run out of matches.
‘Heavens,’ said Ashburner. ‘We’re like a tin of sardines.’ Fetching a chair from his room he clambered on to it and looked over the top of the concrete partition.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ snarled Bernard. ‘Go away and lie down.’ He was spread naked on the mosaic floor.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Ashburner said. ‘I just wanted a word.’ He stepped back off the chair and prowled about his room, sneaking glances at himself in the dressing-table mirror. He was sure he had put on weight. He pulled his stomach in as far as he could; the bulge shifted to his diaphragm. At this rate he wouldn’t be able to take his jacket off, let alone his shirt. Bernard didn’t appear to have an ounce of fat on him, though that was hardly an excuse for taking all his clothes off. He tried and failed to remember the last time he had lain naked anywhere, not to mention in broad daylight. The very last time had probably been forty-five years ago on the bathroom floor, and even then he’d most likely had his bottom slapped for it. Some men made awful fools of themselves. The sights he’d seen on the Lido last summer in Venice!
‘What sort of a word?’ called Bernard, but Ashburner refused to answer.
Enid was the first to go downstairs. She saw some postcards under a glass tray and would have bought them if anyone had been behind the counter. Disappointed, she sauntered through the cool reception hall in her pink summer dress with the sweetheart neck and emerged into the evening sunshine. She stood at the kerb looking down at the flight of steps banked by flowering shrubs and the road that wound beneath. On the far side of the street she could see a row of shops and people walking up and down carrying string bags and pushing prams. There didn’t appear to be any zebra crossings or belisha beacons, or any way of getting from one side of the road to the other without running the risk of being knocked down by the cars and lorries that rumbled in either direction. Even as she watched, a man stepped off the opposite pavement and ran zigzagging through the traffic. A dog followed him. Reaching the kerb the man sprinted up the slope towards the back of the hotel. At that moment a fleet of cars roared up the ramp, narrowly missing the dog who, streaking under the front fender of the leading vehicle, sprang up the bank to safety and bounded away through the oleander bushes. With a tremendous slamming of doors a dozen members of the Committee of the Artists’ Union left their cars and marshalled themselves behind the President. Athletically, white mackintosh swinging from his shoulders, he began to leap two at a time up the steps. Enid ran back inside the hotel.