‘When we took off,’ he observed sadly to Enid, ‘he held her hand.’ He looked sideways in the general direction of Bernard. The man with the briefcase, a miniature bottle of vodka at his elbow, raised his glass ingratiatingly.
‘It doesn’t mean much,’ said Enid, though she didn’t like to be told. ‘Neither of them likes flying.’ An hour ago she had cherished the illusion that it would be she who sat beside Bernard, shoulder to shoulder, as they were hauled upwards through the clouds.
‘His nails are filthy,’ Ashburner said. ‘Quite indescribable. He must have mended a puncture on the way.’
‘Inks,’ informed Enid. ‘You can’t avoid it if you’re etching.’ She would have liked to sleep, but people kept handing her trays of food and offering her drinks. It was like being in a hospital ward.
4
Ashburner had once been interviewed on the radio, from a prepared script, about an explosion in the North Sea and had felt throughout that his chin was welded to his chest. For the life of him he couldn’t look up. He’d been able to continue only by thinking that he would treat himself, later, to a pickled onion.
He was in the same agonising position now, head lowered as he read the duty-free list over and over, hemmed in by Enid, who was dozing, and the man on the other side of the aisle who, during the last quarter of an hour, had added winking to his repertoire of nodding and smiling.
When Nina had first suggested that Ashburner accompany her to Moscow, she had jokingly remarked that it might be better if he kept quiet about what he did for a living; he wouldn’t want the Russians to think he’d come to spy on their shipping fleets in the Baltic. If asked, she said, perhaps he ought to imply that he was an engineer or a banker. He hadn’t liked the idea. He wasn’t any good at lying, and besides, as he told her, the particulars of his profession were quite clearly stated on his passport. Moreover he suspected, from what he read in the newspapers, that his background had been thoroughly investigated without his knowing. He had nothing to hide from the Russians apart from the fact that he was a family man. They would surely not hold it against him; he gathered that the Communists had practically invented free love.
The chap on his right was far more dangerous than a member of the KGB. He was one of those hearty and gregarious men who, if left alone even for a short while, behaved as though they were drowning. He would cling to Ashburner as to the proverbial straw. Given the slightest opportunity he would strike up a conversation; within two minutes he’d be babbling for an exchange of telephone numbers.
Ashburner had just made up his mind to raise his head and, if spoken to, administer some form of snub, when the man, still clutching his briefcase, left his seat. His departure exposed a perturbed-looking Bernard and the back of Nina; she was holding on to his arm as though to restrain him. Ashburner distinctly heard Bernard exclaim ‘Bloody hell’, followed by the words, sarcastically spoken, ‘Thanks for telling me.’ Then he too rose to his feet and limped up the aisle.
Seizing his chance, Ashburner sat beside Nina. ‘I’m just on my way to the loo,’ he said, in case he wasn’t welcome.
‘Sweetheart,’ mumured Nina, ‘I’m sorry not to be with you. It’s your own fault. You spent so long faffing about.’
‘I wasn’t faffing,’ he protested. ‘I had all those wretched bags to carry.’
Nina called him a poor lamb, but he could tell she wasn’t concentrating. She had folded her coat across her knees and was fretfully tearing small holes in its already bedraggled lining. ‘Will I see anything of you?’ he asked. ‘I suppose you’ll be kept pretty busy looking at Art.’ He meant during the days ahead. He had such expectations of the nights that he couldn’t bring himself to speak of them.
‘You’ll be coming with us. You’ll have to,’ she said. ‘They won’t let you loose on your own.’
‘I don’t think you ought to do too much,’ Ashburner told her. ‘Not in the day. Not until you feel completely up to it. I don’t mind admitting that you looked more than a little seedy down below.’ Instantly he wondered whether he shouldn’t have chosen a different adjective to describe her appearance at the airport. She was easily offended.
‘Have you ever thought about illness?’ she asked. ‘Really thought. I mean, some people are ill and show it and others are ill and it’s not apparent. Not even to them. Do you see what I’m getting at?’
‘Not altogether,’ he said.
‘It’s almost, Douglas, as if one only knows one is ill when told so by a doctor.’
‘If one was run over,’ said Ashburner, ‘one wouldn’t need to be told.’ Nina herself at the age of ten had been knocked from her bicycle by a hit-and-run driver. She had a small, star-shaped scar on her forehead to prove it. He liked talking to her about medical things; she was extremely interesting when it came to brain tumours.
‘You mustn’t worry about my health,’ she said. She touched his face with the tips of her fingers. ‘I nearly wept when you fetched that water for me. It was so damned thoughtful.’
‘Shall I order champagne?’ cried Ashburner, dazzled by her big blue eyes seen at such close range, brimming with appreciative tears. If at that moment the aircraft had gone into a downward spiral he doubted he would have noticed anything out of the ordinary.
‘I mustn’t drink,’ said Nina quickly. ‘There’ll be plenty of time for that later. The Russians are tremendous drinkers. Anyway, Bernard’s consuming enough for all of us.’
‘I didn’t care for his swearing at you,’ confided Ashburner. ‘Even if he has got a gammy leg. I couldn’t help overhearing.’
‘It’s not what it seems,’ said Nina. She enquired how he was getting on with Enid.
He said Enid seemed awfully nice.
‘Don’t be taken in,’ warned Nina. ‘She’s not a hundred per cent honest.’ She didn’t pursue the subject. Instead she mentioned that Bernard thought Ashburner had a very strong head, that his bone structure was compelling. There was also something about the set of his ears and the height of his forehead. What a stone carving he would make!
‘Good Lord,’ smirked Ashburner, curiously pleased. He stared bashfully out of the porthole and saw nothing save a circle of blue sky and some wispy clouds. It was so spacious up here and so crowded below. These days it was no longer safe to cross the road. Several days before a cleaner in the office had been mown down by a bus. He realised suddenly that if in his absence a similar thing happened to his wife, there would be no means of contacting him. They would put out an SOS on the wireless, but he wouldn’t be available to hear it. At enormous cost to public expenditure country policemen in panda cars would motor the length of the Highlands. If she was injured tomorrow she could be dead and buried by the time he returned. He was so shaken at the thought that his lips trembled.
‘What’s wrong?’ demanded Nina. ‘Are you full of regrets?’
‘What a ridiculous question,’ he said evasively.
‘You are happy, Douglas? Really happy?’
‘Need you ask?’ he said. It was unlike her to bother about his state of mind, and saddening that he couldn’t match her mood. He would have given anything in the world not to feel responsible for his wife.
He had what was intended to be a friendly word with Bernard when he met him coming out of the lavatory. ‘Look here,’ he began, ‘earlier on you must have thought I was queer—’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,’ said Bernard, and he stumbled moodily past Ashburner and went back to his seat, his head wreathed in tobacco smoke.
Half an hour before they landed, Enid noticed something odd. The pilot announced over the tannoy that they were flying across the Soviet border; if the passengers cared to look below and a little to the left, land could be seen. Almost everyone peered out of the appropriate windows and uttered noises of astonishment – everyone, that is, except Enid, who was fearful of disturbing the balance of the plane, and the man on the other side of the aisle, who was leaning back in his seat, mouth open and eyes closed. The odd thing was that though he held his arms in a cradling position his briefcase had gone.
5
They climbed off the plane and into a yellow bus without seats. It was snowing outside. A soldier carrying a rifle marched up and down beyond the windows. Soon the glass steamed over and they couldn’t see him any more. Nina said at least three times: ‘We’re here. This is Mother Russia. We’re here.’
They stood pressed against each other for a long while before the bus began to move. Ashburner once more was laden with carrier bags; according to Nina, cold weather had a diabolical effect on Bernard’s hip. Ashburner resolved at the first opportunity to buy some sort of hold-all. If he was doomed to lug Bernard’s painting equipment across Mother Russia it would be done in a more organised fashion.
On arriving in the baggage reclamation area they were approached by a young woman wearing a green cloth coat and a headscarf. She was holding a sheaf of papers and spoke unerringly to Nina.
‘My name is Olga Fiodorovna. I am your interpreter. Welcome, Mrs St Clair.’
After a second’s hesitation, Nina embraced her.
‘I know you,’ said Olga Fiodorovna, warmly. Releasing Nina she turned to Ashburner. ‘Mr St Clair, we are delighted to have so eminent a man return to us.’
‘Ah,’ said Ashburner, appalled.
‘This,’ explained Nina, ‘is a colleague of mine, Douglas Ashburner, and the gentleman in the mackintosh is Bernard Douglas.’
‘I’m Enid Dwyer,’ said Enid, backing away. She didn’t want to be kissed by a stranger. Seeing her suitcase appearing at the end of the conveyor belt, she gave a little whoop of recognition and darted away to retrieve it.
Olga Fiodorovna declared that Mr Karlovitch was waiting beyond passport control to greet them; he was Secretary of the Artist’s Union and a very nice man.
‘How lovely, how lovely,’ cried Nina.
She and the interpreter began a vivacious conversation. There was much gesticulating and outbursts of merry laughter. Nina’s hair leapt on the shoulders of her fur coat as she tossed her head from side to side.
How dark and animated she is, thought Ashburner, who, until meeting her two years before on the deck of the Cutty Sark, had imagined his preference was for fair women with placid dispositions; he strolled away so that he could admire her from a distance.
Bernard was lolling against a pillar and staring impassively at the luggage platform.
‘What colour is your baggage?’ asked Ashburner. He supposed Bernard couldn’t be expected to haul it from the conveyor, not without collapsing.
‘Shit brown and flake white,’ said Bernard. ‘You’re carrying most of it. I don’t bother with anything else.’
At that instant Ashburner’s fishing rod, closely followed by Nina’s scarlet suitcases, slid down the ramp. A porter with a trolley was summoned. Olga Fiodorovna consulted her documents and prepared to shepherd the little group through passport control.
‘My case,’ Ashburner said. ‘It hasn’t come yet.’ He pointed in some agitation at all the suitcases that weren’t his.
The interpreter told him to have patience. She laid a steadying hand on his arm and they stood for several minutes keenly studying the conveyor belt.
‘Perhaps,’ she admitted at last, ‘it has been left on the aircraft. Stay here.’ And she ran energetically towards an enquiry desk.
‘This is a fine how-do-you-do,’ observed Ashburner. He turned to Nina for comfort.
She was unable to give him any and instead called him a fusspot. Being so friendly to the interpreter had exhausted her and she was beginning to feel ill again. She sank on to the edge of the trolley and fanned herself with a pink scarf.
Bernard remembered a friend of his who had lost an entire cabin trunk of new clothes on a flight to Karachi. When they eventually turned up two years later the crotches of all his trousers had been devoured by ants.
‘How extraordinary,’ said Ashburner. Privately he doubted that any friend of Bernard’s had the price of a bus ticket, let alone of a journey across the globe. He couldn’t bear to look at Nina who, in his moment of disaster, was openly yawning; nor could he help comparing her with his wife who, in a similar situation, though possibly berating him for imagined carelessness, would be standing at his side, a tower of strength. Daily, he had only to mention the uncanny disappearance of his gloves, an important telephone number or the keys to the car, and she could be relied upon to spring into action. Her powers of deduction were remarkable; he had often referred to her as his ‘little Sherlock Holmes.’
It dawned on him that if his suitcase couldn’t be found at once it was imperative it should remain lost. ‘Tell that Fedora woman not to get in touch with Heathrow,’ he begged. ‘They might contact my home.’
‘Tell her yourself,’ said Nina.
‘But she’s a friend of yours,’ he pleaded.
‘I’ve never seen her before in my life.’
‘She said she knew you,’ shouted Ashburner, distracted. He looked at Bernard for confirmation.
‘She meant in the wider sense,’ said Bernard and, suddenly weary, he lowered himself to the floor and lay there, boots crossed at the ankle, arms folded beneath his head. Almost immediately three or four men, shouting brutally, converged upon him.
Ashburner, pursued by Enid who wanted to be helpful, approached the enquiry desk and cunningly tried to make light of his situation. ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ he told the interpreter. ‘Surely we can call back another time or even let sleeping dogs lie until we’re ready to fly home again. I can manage perfectly well without my suitcase.’ He laughed in a reckless fashion as though he was the sort of man who regularly travelled like a hobo.
‘Please be sensible,’ said the interpreter severely.
She sat him down and instructed him to fill in various forms in triplicate.
Ashburner kept repeating that it was all a waste of time, that he could easily buy a toothbrush and so forth when they reached an hotel. ‘I really couldn’t care less,’ he cried, but he had grown pale and his hand shook as he unscrewed the cap of his fountain pen.