Ashburner stuck by Mr Karlovitch. They sat in easy chairs beside a rubber plant in a shadowy corner of the reception hall. Unlike Bernard, who could have been mistaken for a member of the committee, strutting up and down in plimsols and ridiculously narrow white trousers, Mr Karlovitch still wore his sombre city suit, though he had removed his knitted scarf.
‘Any idea what’s on the agenda?’ Ashburner called to Enid, but she was vivaciously communicating, by means of sign language and exaggerated facial expressions, with a young man in a panama hat and she didn’t hear him. Nobody appeared in a hurry to go anywhere. But for the absence of drinks it might have seemed that a cocktail party was in progress.
‘Who are all these people?’ demanded Ashburner. He couldn’t remember seeing any of them before, except possibly the tall fellow with the weak chin. Most of them were dressed up as gangsters in black cotton shirts and floppy white ties.
‘Artists,’ Mr Karlovitch told him. ‘Sculptors, poets, friends.’ He pointed along the hall. ‘You are wanted,’ he said.
‘Mr Douglas,’ shouted Olga Fiodorovna. ‘You are requested on the telephone.’
Ashburner ran in a dreadful state of agitation towards her; he thought it was a phone call from England. ‘Hurry,’ urged the interpreter. ‘It is Mrs St Clair for you. The connection is not good.’
‘Hallo, hallo,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Can you hear me?’
A voice, distorted by static interference, spoke in a foreign tongue.
‘Are you there?’ he cried.
Olga Fiodorovna was walking away. Everyone was flowing out of the hall to the front entrance.
‘Hallo, hallo,’ he shouted desperately. ‘Douglas Ashburner here.’ He felt in his bones the appalling distances that separated him from Nina. He was the telegraph wire itself, strung out across the steppes of Mother Russia, buried under rivers, affected by tropical rains and arctic storms. ‘Hallo, hallo,’ he repeated hopelessly, knowing she would never hear him. The line went dead.
In the car, wedged between total strangers, it seemed to him that his life had been sabotaged by unknown persons. He had no idea with whom he was travelling; cigarette smoke swirled about him like a fog.
They arrived at a newly built cinema erected in the middle of an industrial site.
‘This is something different, isn’t it?’ cried Bernard, delighted that he had got his own way, though in fact the place bore a resemblance to the no man’s land outside the hotel in Leningrad. Picking their way between slabs of concrete and abandoned machinery and kicking up clouds of white dust, they approached the entrance. Two ladies had mysteriously joined them. Both were extremely tall and well built, with broad foreheads decorated with kiss-curls. Clad in identical leather mini skirts they sashayed over the rubble, escorted by the President.
The cinema was empty and smelt of damp concrete. The walls hadn’t yet been painted. A number of cables dangled from the ceiling. Olga Fiodorovna sat next to Ashburner. The moment he had settled she seized hold of his arm and asked him in a low voice, ‘If such women came to your house in London, what would you say?’
‘Ah,’ he said, and stared discomfited ahead of him.
‘What are you tarts doing in my house,’ she whispered. ‘Isn’t that what you would say?’
‘Certainly not,’ he hissed. ‘What do you take me for?’
Looking about him he was surprised to see how diminished in numbers the party had become. The President wallah and his Amazon women were sitting on the back row with Enid and Mr Karlovitch. Bernard was alone, several rows forward, his feet propped up on the seat in front of him. The rest of the group had disappeared.
‘What do you think?’ persisted Olga Fiodorovna. ‘They wear too much make-up, yes? Overdone, you think? They are like something by Edward Burra, by George Gross?’
‘Perhaps a little,’ he conceded. He couldn’t understand what she was talking about.
‘What do you think of the skirts, Mr Douglas?’ She was pinching his arm quite severely.
‘A little old-fashioned, maybe,’ he said. The lights went out. They watched a film about a young girl who married a soldier. It was the old days. There was a villager who wasn’t quite an idiot, more of a poet, who wandered about the fields with children following him as though he were the Pied Piper. The young girl was in love with someone else. She met him several times in secret. Her mother-in-law knew what was going on. There were many shots of poppies blowing in cornfields.
In the interval the reels had to be changed. Mr Karlovitch himself was dispatched to the projection room. Ashburner went in search of a lavatory.
He was followed by the President who, when they came to the front entrance, indicated that he should come outside.
‘I need the lavatory,’ explained Ashburner, tapping himself discreetly.
The President tried to take hold of his arm, but he backed away, smiling.
‘I’m afraid it’s urgent,’ he said. ‘But I’d love to come for a stroll later.’
The President shrugged his shoulders and pointed at a door along the corridor.
Ashburner entered a room divided into cubicles. Bags of cement lay mouldering in a corner. The walls and ceiling appeared to be splashed with brown paint. Opening the door of the nearest cubicle, he was faced with a cone-shaped mound of concrete cut with rough foot-holds. Climbing as best he could he rose above the level of the cubicle door and relieved himself into a hole bored into the cone. It was only when sliding down again that he realised the brown paint was excrement. He couldn’t think how it had been managed. It was true that the lavatory was unnecessarily primitive in style, but even if it had been used by successive gangs of construction workers caught on the hop with upset tummies it was difficult to account for the smears on the ceiling. No wonder one picks up infections, he thought. Shaken, he went out into the passage. As he reached the front entrance a dog trotted in through the open doors and ran round his legs in a friendly fashion. He bent down and played with its ears; the dog was rather like his own, though livelier. It ran off almost immediately and he went after it to the door. It wasn’t quite dark, and he could see, beyond the concrete slabs and the bulldozers, the tall figure of the President in his luminous mackintosh, standing in the road beside the parked cars, talking to someone. Ashburner returned to his seat in the cinema. Bernard had fallen asleep.
‘Do you think such women as those understand what they are seeing?’ asked Olga Fiodorovna, stealing glances at the Amazons in the back row. ‘Do you think they have brains beneath those curls?’
‘I really don’t know those ladies,’ Ashburner protested.
‘I am merely trying to find out if you have preconceived ideas,’ whispered Olga Fiodorovna. ‘They are both professors.’
In the second half of the film the young girl was betrayed by her mother-in-law, but not before the poetic villager had sent some sort of note to the husband telling him of his wife’s assignations. At the very end the girl was dragged through the mud by neighbours and stoned to death on a hillside. When the lights came on Enid could be seen wiping her eyes with a handkerchief.
Arriving back at the hotel Ashburner was all for slipping off to bed, but surprisingly Olga Fiodorovna wouldn’t hear of it. She stood arm in arm with one of the Amazon women. The President hadn’t returned to the cinema after the interval and at some point before the end of the performance his other lady companion had disappeared. In the restaurant, seated by the picture window, Olga Fiodorovna still held on to the arm of her new-found friend. It seemed to Ashburner that she deliberately sat as close to her as possible, so that he would make comparisons between them. As it happened, he found the strange lady rather pleasant. Though larger than was usual, with arms like a stevedore, she was considerably less tiring to converse with than the interpreter and spoke English almost as well. She was obviously interested in him. She asked him what he did for a living.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m an Admiralty lawyer.’
‘Do you enjoy your work?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m good at it.’
‘Describe something of it to me,’ she said. ‘So that I will understand.’
He recounted to her the details of a case in which he had been involved for several years. A Greek American family had bought a ship which they had subsequently chartered out to an Iranian concern. The captain was a brother-in-law of the owners and took half shares in any cargo. He began to realise that pilfering was going on, on a vast scale. He was originally tipped off by the third mate, a Greek born and bred in Birmingham. ‘To make matters more confusing,’ Ashburner explained, ‘they all had the same name – the shipping firm, the captain and the third mate. You know how it is with Greeks. They’re a little like you lot with your Valentinas and Tatianas. The ship was impounded in American waters while the captain was in London. We finally took all the relevant papers to the Fraud Squad at Scotland Yard. To cut a long story short, they found there was no case.’ He stopped, worried lest he was boring her. Olga Fiodorovna had already moved away and was now sitting between Bernard and Enid.
‘Why?’ the woman asked.
For a moment he hesitated. He wasn’t sure if the name was one to bandy about in a communist country. ‘The fellow that ran the Iranian concern was brother-in-law to the Shah,’ he said. Now that he had got started he wanted to tell her about the trial, in particular the remark made by the third mate under cross-examination. It was perfectly suitable for an educated woman to hear. He had often told the same story at home and nobody had minded except possibly his wife. ‘Funny thing happened in court,’ he said. ‘The third mate was asked if he was surprised at what was going on. I think I mentioned that he was born in Birmingham. “Surprised?” cried the mate. “You could have buggered me through me raincoat.”’
The woman’s face remained impassive. She regarded him with alarmingly bright eyes outlined in black pencil. He tried to explain it to her, but he could tell she was disappointed in him. She began to discuss with Enid the meaning of the film they had watched earlier. Ashburner was taken aback to hear that the poetic villager hadn’t sent a damaging note to the husband after all. It was an elaborate pretence. It suddenly struck him that it needn’t have been Nina on the telephone. I have only Olga Fiodorovna’s word for it, he thought. I may have been duped.
17
On their third and final day in Tblisi, Ashburner woke with swollen glands in his neck. For a moment he just lay there thinking how ill he was, and then a feeling of such unease seized him that his physical discomfort was forgotten. He could pin nothing down. His mind, usually simple, was a confusion of dark and intangible thoughts. Staggering from his bed to go into the bathroom he became aware that he was actually looking over his shoulder. He telephoned Bernard’s room but received no reply. Recklessly, he rang Enid. ‘I’m not awfully well,’ he croaked. ‘My head hurts.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to get you anything?’
‘I rather wanted to speak to Bernard.’
‘Well, he’s not here,’ Enid said, a trace sharply. ‘I expect he’s gone drawing. He generally goes out before breakfast. Hang on and I’ll pass you some aspirins over the balcony.’
He drew back the curtains and unlocked the doors; it was another beautiful day. His eyes began to water in the sunlight. Enid’s hand appeared round the side of the concrete partition holding a packet of headache powders. ‘Did you lock yourself in again?’ she asked. ‘No wonder you feel awful.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, taking the powders from her. He had no intention of using them. In his weakened state he felt he needed a blood transfusion, not a few paltry grains of sodium bicarbonate.
Enid thought he was a peculiarly insecure man, always seeking attention one way or another. In that sense he was very like Nina, though usually she chose men who looked important. Whenever Nina came to receptions or gallery openings she was accompanied by someone special, someone high up in medicine or politics. Once, at a do at the Tate, she’d brought the Russian cultural attaché – at least she’d said he was the cultural attaché: he was certainly Russian. Douglas was a nice man, even lovable, but then Nina wasn’t the sort to like lovable men. Perhaps Douglas had hidden depths.
She began to laugh. ‘I’m not laughing at you,’ she called. ‘I’m thinking of you locking yourself in. Bernard told me what happened on the train. I hope you don’t think it was me?’
‘Good Lord, no,’ he cried, and hastily withdrew into his room.
He had locked the doors last night on account of the noise, and even then he had been unable to shut out the dull thuds and the high shivering vibrations, the footsteps that pounded along the corridor, the melancholy voices in the restaurant below droning like the wind flowing through a tunnel, raised in a Georgian chant. The singing had raged into the small hours. Once he thought he had heard Olga Fiodorovna outside his door, shouting for him to come out and play.
While Ashburner was shaving, Bernard telephoned. ‘I believe you were looking for me,’ he said. ‘What’s up now?’
‘I’ve got an awfully sore throat,’ Ashburner said.
‘Fascinating,’ said Bernard. ‘Thanks for telling me.’
‘I wondered if it was to be expected?’
‘Oh,’ said Bernard. ‘You’ve started taking the pills?’
‘Not yet,’ Ashburner admitted. ‘I didn’t think it wise. Not when we keep having all this drink flung at us.’
‘Then it’s probably a cold,’ said Bernard. ‘It’s the sudden change in temperature.’
‘But my glands are up,’ protested Ashburner. ‘And I feel odd . . . in my mind.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Bernard shouted. ‘It’s a mild infection. You’re not in the final stages of syphilis.’
At breakfast, however, seeing that Ashburner did indeed look ill, sitting by the picture window hardly touching his yoghourt and dejectedly shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun, he told Olga Fiodorovna that perhaps she should take him to a doctor.