‘Say hallo to Douglas Ashburner,’ ordered Nina, as though Enid was a child at a tea-party.
‘Hallo Douglas Ashburner,’ said Enid, and she shook hands with the balding man.
Enid didn’t know Nina all that well. Over the years they’d met at various dinners and at exhibition openings but hadn’t ever been close. She knew Bernard very well. She wasn’t sure how well Bernard knew Nina. Neither Bernard nor Enid had met Douglas Ashburner before.
As guests of the Soviet Artists’ Union they had each been told they could bring a friend, at their own expense, or husbands and wives if they wished. Nina’s husband, the brain specialist, renowned for his remark that he’d never seen a painting yet that wasn’t improved by a decent frame, was far too busy and successful to travel, and Bernard never took his wife anywhere. Enid wasn’t married.
‘I feel rotten,’ said Nina suddenly. She swayed on her feet to prove it. Ashburner escorted her round the couch and sat her down beside Bernard. ‘She doesn’t look rotten, does she?’ he asked, appealing to Enid.
‘Not very,’ said Enid. But she was aware that Nina, who normally carried herself like Joan of Arc at the stake, chin tilted as though she smelled the straw beginning to burn, was now slumped against Bernard, her head resting on his shoulder. Nina was famed for her beauty. Enid couldn’t see it herself, but everyone else saw it at a glance. Nina had bold blue eyes, black hair that she sometimes plaited and legs like a principal boy. She had never been known to lose an argument.
After a few moments Ashburner went off to fetch a glass of water. There was no room for Enid on the couch, so she stood there looking anxious. ‘Is it her head or her stomach?’ she asked, speaking to Bernard as if Nina was already in a coma. Bernard didn’t reply. He sat there, pushed sideways by the weight of Nina, staring gloomily at the floor. He detested illness.
‘Should anything go wrong,’ said Nina faintly, ‘please be kind to Douglas. He’s a good man.’
‘Of course,’ whispered Enid, and gritted her teeth in case she laughed. Twenty years ago she and Nina had been at the same boarding school in Norfolk. It didn’t mean anything. Enid had been fifteen at the time, and Nina was two years younger. They had never been in the same class. Even in those days the thickness of Nina’s hair had distinguished her from others. In summer the mildest of breezes sent her panama hat sailing from the top of her head to bowl across the grass.
Ashburner returned with a cardboard cup full of water. Nina sipped and sighed. No one could make up their minds whether it was a good idea or not to send for the St John’s Ambulance Brigade.
‘Probably not,’ decided Bernard. ‘We might miss the bloody plane. Think of the arrangements at the other end.’
The thought was sufficient to revive Nina, who privately regarded herself as leader of their little group. After all, she had been to Russia twice before: once to Leningrad with a party of students from the Slade, and again when she had visited Moscow for three days in her capacity as wife of the brain specialist. When their flight was accounced she rose pluckily, though she clung to Bernard for support.
Ashburner, who had no hand luggage, was obliged to carry Bernard’s paper bags. He consoled himself with the knowledge that he would have looked dreadfully conspicuous supporting Nina. As it was, if he was spotted by anyone it might just appear he was alone. The fact that this was Heathrow, not Euston Station, could, if the unthinkable happened, be put down to amnesia.
From the moment of arrival at the airport he had found himself in a state of increasing nervousness. He had greeted Nina too coldly; he had uttered the words ‘Oh it’s you’, instead of clasping her in his arms. She hadn’t understood his predicament, his inability to collect his feelings in the midst of such activity and bustle. Inside he had felt anything but cold towards her, though he had been taken aback by the clothes she was wearing. Nina had punished him by going on for at least ten minutes about some friend she was dying to see again in Moscow, a regular humdinger of a man called Boris Aleksyeevich Shabelsky. Ashburner had been stunned by the fellow’s unpronounceable name and the realisation that she was dying to see anyone other than himself. Moreover she had bullied him into opening his suitcase. Several packets of nylon stockings slithered to the floor; he could have been mistaken for a commercial traveller. And now she was ill.
‘I don’t mind telling you,’ he confessed to Enid, ‘how worried I am. She’s not talking off the top of her hat, you know. She’s a very strong grasp of medical matters.’
‘Has she?’ said Enid. She had to stop herself from breaking into a run to catch up with Bernard, who was now striding through the hurrying crowds, one hand grasping Nina’s waist as he propelled her forward in the direction of the flight gate.
‘And she mentioned it earlier,’ Ashburner said. ‘At the luggage counter. She gave me some pills to put in my suitcase.’
‘What did she mention?’ asked Enid.
‘About being under the weather,’ explained Ashburner. ‘She hoped I wouldn’t catch it.’
‘That was kind,’ Enid said. Glancing at him she was momentarily shocked to discover that he seemed to have sprouted a quantity of glossy black hair.
Ashburner, searching the broadwalk ahead for a glimpse of Nina, was disconcerted to see that Bernard was dragging his left leg quite noticeably, obviously parodying his companion’s infirmity. Seen from this distance he resembled an inebriated tramp; but then Nina herself, for some extraordinary reason, was wrapped in a motheaten fur that was coming apart at the seams. Why on earth wasn’t she wearing the mink coat her husband the brain specialist had given her only last Christmas? Even as Ashburner watched, she reached up and pulled Bernard’s ear. Clutching each other at the waist they stumbled towards Gate 23. Such intimate tomfoolery accentuated the gap between Ashburner and Nina. If he had behaved in a similar manner, depend upon it, she would have shaken him from her like a louse from a blanket.
3
In the queue for seat allocation, Nina was pale but upright. She looked at Ashburner in his fur hat and smiled heroically.
‘Feeling better?’ he said.
‘A little,’ she conceded, and turned her back on him almost immediately.
Ashburner was alarmed by her indifference. He feared there was worse to come. ‘I do feel’, he said, anxious to show his authority, ‘that we ought to sit in the front of the plane.’
‘I want to smoke,’ snapped Bernard.
‘I was thinking of Nina,’ explained Ashburner. ‘Besides, should anything go wrong, the back end is always the first bit to fall off.’
‘In that case,’ Bernard said, ‘she’ll need a fag in her hand.’
No one bothered to ask Enid where she wanted to sit.
Hampered by his assortment of carrier bags, Ashburner had difficulty handing over his boarding pass. When eventually he entered the aircraft and struggled up the centre aisle to the rear of the plane, Nina was already seated, positioned between Bernard and a man in horn-rimmed spectacles with a briefcase on his knee.
‘Ah,’ breathed Ashburner and stood there, undecided.
‘Do get settled,’ pleaded Nina. ‘You’re causing a blockage.’
It took Ashburner some time to stow Bernard’s belongings satisfactorily in the overhead lockers. Pieces of charcoal and several tubes of oil paint spilled on to the lap of the man with the briefcase. Bernard stared impassively out of the starboard porthole as though it was no concern of his.
‘You’re in my seat,’ protested Ashburner, at last. Now that he was actually aboard, his rightful place was beside Nina.
‘Sorry, mate,’ said Bernard. ‘Once down, I stay down.’ And he slapped his leg obscurely.
Face mottled with annoyance, Ashburner joined Enid on the other side of the aisle. He had been warned about the man’s rudeness. Bernard’s first appearance on television, in a programme featuring his work, had been noteworthy. Standing in the back garden of his dark little house in Wandsworth, he had pointed graphically at an upstairs window and referred to his unseen wife as the first Mrs Rochester. He had called the interviewer a prick for confusing an etching with an engraving. He had answered every question with such evident overtones of commercial insanity, giving vent to a burst of insensitive laughter when describing the death of his cat, lost under the wheels of a corporation dust cart, that he had become an overnight celebrity. He was never off the box.
I can’t compete, thought Ashburner. A man in my position has to mind his
ps
and
qs
. He muttered audibly enough for Enid to hear: ‘What a nerve the man has!’
‘He can’t help it,’ said Enid. ‘He’s had a hip replacement. He’s got a steel ball-and-socket thing.’
Ashburner’s cheeks glowed redder than ever. He felt as though he’d been caught throwing stones at a cripple. He leaned forward in his seat to attract Nina’s attention.
The man with the briefcase nodded at him and smiled.
‘Don’t look now,’ muttered Ashburner, turning to Enid, ‘but that fellow seems to know us.’
‘He’s probably a member of the KGB,’ Enid said, and she studied the emergency exit procedures.
She was dismayed by the size of the aeroplane, having expected something larger. She wondered if perhaps they were being flown out on the cheap. She had travelled three times by air, twice to New York and once to Los Angeles. On each occasion she had enjoyed watching a film. Her head-phones had blocked out the noise of the engines and she had scarcely known she was flying.
‘I don’t like small planes,’ she told Ashburner. ‘I don’t think they’re as safe as big ones.’
‘On the contrary,’ Ashburner reassured her, ‘they’re safer. Think of all those fellows during the war, limping home on a wing and a prayer.’
He had just begun to tell her of the miraculous return of a Wellington bomber whose tail hung by a wire from the fuselage, a story he’d come across in
Reader’s Digest
while waiting for a dental examination, when the aircraft began to roll along the tarmac.
Enid bent over her knees and stuffed her fingers in her ears.
Nonplussed, Ashburner craned forward to look at Nina. The man in spectacles gave him a second, conspiratorial smile. Nina was talking to Bernard; sensing she was being watched she glanced over her shoulder. Ashburner was struck by the anxiety in her eyes. This woman loves me, he told himself, though many wouldn’t realise it.
Nina fluttered her fingers at him, a gesture so reminiscent of his wife’s dismissive wave of farewell that he was further cast down. Hurtling along the runway at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, he considered the probability that at this very moment his wife was unbolting the back door of their house to let the dog out to do its business. The sickening wrench he experienced when the plane left the ground and climbed into the sky made his heart pound in his breast. It wasn’t only the ground he was leaving. It came to him in one of those flashes so often described by Nina, that his wife saw him in much the same light as the dog, a creature so dependable and infirm as to be thought incapable of straying beyond the confines of the winter garden.
Ashburner ached to confide in someone and had to wait fifteen minutes before Enid removed her fingers from her ears.
‘Are we up?’ she asked. She refused to look out of the porthole.
‘Well up,’ said Ashburner. He ferreted in his mind for the right words. ‘I haven’t known Nina very long,’ he began. ‘I expect you know her better than I.’
‘Hardly,’ said Enid. ‘We’re not intimate.’ Now that Ashburner had taken off his fur hat she thought he looked like a troubled baby. It had something to do with the firmness of his pink cheeks, and his round, puzzled eyes.
‘But you’re in the same line . . . art and that sort of thing.’
‘Nina’s gone into lumps of metal,’ Enid said. ‘I work mainly in oils.’
‘But’, persisted Ashburner, ‘you do know her.’
Enid was often underestimated. Her pleasant smile and unremarkable features made her appear neutral. She had been made a prefect at school, and the subsequent discovery that she had cheated in the maths exam had caused astonishment. ‘I’ve never been to Nina’s house for dinner,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you mean. Or to her cottage in the country, or to her studio in Holland Park. But once I had a long chat with her husband about India. He’s keen on rugs.’
‘Ah,’ said Ashburner and fell uncomfortably silent.
He too had never been to Nina’s house for dinner. He had, however, visited it in his lunch hour without being offered a morsel of food. Instead, Nina had encouraged him to make love to her standing up in the kitchen. ‘Just get on tip-toe,’ she had urged, ‘and lean against the door.’ It was in case her husband the brain specialist came home unexpectedly. Buttocks perilously close to the brass knob of the door, his transports of love had been tinged with theatricality. It wasn’t quite the real thing. He found it terribly difficult to keep his balance, and his knees trembled violently. He wasn’t a fit man, being overweight, and the muscles in his calves seemed to have wasted away; if he had fallen on top of her the consequences could have been fatal. Nina was quite right of course, it would have been in bad taste to cavort in the marriage bed, and it was bad luck that the sofa in her living room was upholstered in velvet. There was a leather couch in one of the consulting rooms on the ground floor, but mostly the door was kept locked. Ashburner had suggested they line the sofa with a protective layer of newspapers, but the idea – and who could blame her? – hadn’t appealed to Nina. He was fearful, to the point of paralysis, of discovery. Nina usually stripped below the waist but insisted he retain his trousers. Such a welter of cloth and dangling braces rendered him helpless. Had Nina’s husband returned – apparently he was in the habit of rushing home quite gratuitously for a ham sandwich – Ashburner would have been hurled forward on to the scrubbed pine table, ready for carving. Nina herself pretended to require that added edge of danger. She told him a ridiculous story about D.H. Lawrence who, disguised as a character in one of his novels, actually made love to a lady called Clara on a railway line. ‘We should do it in all sorts of places,’ Nina had cried, remembering something else she had read. ‘In shop doorways and on the tops of buses.’ ‘Perhaps,’ Ashburner had replied doubtfully. He knew for a fact that Nina hadn’t used public transport for at least ten years. All
he
required was a decent mattress. If she had truly wanted him to give her pleasure she would have arranged things differently, he felt. He had come to this conclusion on the frantic occasion when, imagining she heard footsteps climbing the stairs, Nina had manhandled him into the lobby and thrust him inside a fitted cupboard near the door. As it happened, it had been a false alarm; but, cowering there, his bare knees pressed against the brain specialist’s summer overcoat, a faint smell of anaesthetic clinging to the fabric of the collar, Ashburner had been frightened enough to become introspective. In this sort of affair, he had realised, there was always someone who loved and someone who played the clown, and possibly they were the same person. She takes me for granted, he’d thought. It’s not a thing a man can tolerate.